Losurdo vs. Liberalism: Slavery, extermination, and the true history of the “Community of the Free”

Losurdo’s method is historical vivisection. He takes liberalism’s canonical thinkers—not the caricatures handed out in high school civics, but the actual men in their time—and cuts into the living contradiction between their universalist language and their exclusionary practice. Locke, the “father of liberalism,” who penned paeans to natural rights while drafting the constitution of the Carolina colony to protect hereditary slavery. Jefferson, apostle of liberty, who measured freedom by the acreage of stolen Indigenous land and the number of enslaved Africans he owned. Mill, the great champion of liberty, who insisted that despotism was the appropriate government for “barbarians” so long as it led them toward “civilization.” In Losurdo’s account, these are not tragic hypocrisies or personal failings. They are the architecture of liberalism itself—an order built to deliver political liberty and economic opportunity to a bounded community of settlers, colonizers, and masters, while excluding the vast majority of humanity to preserve the privileges of the few.

The genius of liberalism, as Losurdo lays it bare, is that it learned to speak the language of freedom while institutionalizing new forms of unfreedom. The liberal revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not global declarations of human emancipation; they were the founding charters of “exclusion clauses” that defined who counted as part of “the people.” Citizenship in the United States was born shackled to race, property, and gender; the French Revolution’s Rights of Man coexisted seamlessly with colonial massacres in the Caribbean and North Africa. The liberal order did not fail to live up to its ideals—it realized them fully within the fenced-in gardens of the white, propertied citizenry. The rest of the world was rendered an open field for exploitation, dispossession, and extermination.

This is why Losurdo insists we must strip liberalism of its Sunday clothes and see it for what it is: not the natural antithesis of tyranny, but a system of double bookkeeping—freedom in the metropole, despotism in the colony; rights for the citizen, chains for the subject. It was, from its inception, a political technology of the settler colonial order. The so-called “freedom” it enshrined was always premised on the violent control of labor—whether through slavery, indenture, or wage servitude—and the seizure of land from those deemed outside the circle of humanity. Liberalism’s proudest achievements—parliamentary government, freedom of the press, civil equality—were never extended as gifts to the world; they were rationed privileges for those inside the citadel, paid for by the suffering of the colonized.

Losurdo’s counter-history demolishes the fairy tale that liberalism’s global expansion was a civilizing mission. What expanded was not the franchise of rights, but the reach of the “white man’s republic” in all its variations. Every colonial frontier was a laboratory where liberal states tested the limits of their own hypocrisy. In India, the British Empire honed its techniques of legal segregation and economic plunder under the banner of improvement. In the Americas, genocide against Indigenous nations was justified as the march of progress. In Africa, the “civilizing mission” meant forced labor, stolen resources, and the suppression of any political autonomy. Liberalism’s liberty was never meant to be universal—it was a property right, guarded at gunpoint.

For those of us trapped inside the ideological bubble of the imperial core, Losurdo’s work is not just history—it is an act of political defection. It demands that we stop treating liberalism as a neutral terrain we can occupy or a set of ideals we can “redeem.” The structure is rotten because it was built to be rotten. The double standard is not a flaw—it’s the foundation. To imagine liberation through liberalism is to imagine a plantation without slavery, a colony without conquest. It is to imagine an empire that rules without domination. And history, in Losurdo’s telling, leaves no room for such fantasies.

If we take his lesson seriously, then the task before us is not to rescue liberalism from itself, but to confront it as a class project of the settler bourgeoisie—a project that has adapted over centuries to protect the privileges of the few against the demands of the many. That means recognizing that every gain made within the liberal order has been wrenched from it through struggle—often bloody, often led by those it sought to exclude entirely. It means understanding that the “universal” rights enshrined in its charters were won by the revolts of the enslaved, the strikes of the exploited, the uprisings of the colonized—and that these rights will always be clawed back unless the system that created their exclusions is dismantled.

Losurdo leaves us with no illusions. Liberalism is not a neutral inheritance we can put to better use; it is a weapon forged in the workshops of empire, still sharp, still aimed at the throats of the world’s majority. Our task is not to polish it, but to break it—and to build, in its place, a political order rooted not in the exclusions of the past, but in the revolutionary universalism of the oppressed. That is not a project for seminar rooms. It is a project for movements, for barricades, for the very people whom liberalism has spent centuries excluding from its false promises. And that is exactly where Losurdo points us: away from the myth of liberal salvation, and toward the reality of revolutionary liberation.

The “Unique Twin Birth”: Liberalism and Racial Slavery

Liberalism loves to narrate its own birth as a miracle of human freedom—parchment constitutions inked in the bloodless language of “rights,” enlightened gentlemen raising toasts to liberty under candlelight. Domenico Losurdo drags this fairy tale into the daylight and makes us look at the other half of the birth: the auction block. The plantation. The iron collar. The whip. For every clause extolling the rights of man, there was a matching clause defending the absolute dominion of one human being over another. This is the “unique twin birth” of the modern West: the rise of liberal political forms inseparably bound to the consolidation of racial chattel slavery.

John Locke, often canonized as the philosopher of liberty, wrote the Carolina Constitution in 1669, a document that gave masters “absolute power and authority” over enslaved Africans. Thomas Jefferson could draft the Declaration’s soaring claim that “all men are created equal” while personally holding hundreds of Black people in bondage and dispatching troops to dispossess Indigenous nations. These aren’t embarrassing contradictions for liberalism—they are the operating instructions. The “rights” of the free citizen were defined, expanded, and enforced through the simultaneous codification of the enslaved as property.

The United States’ self-anointed “Founding Fathers” were not outliers but the vanguard of a transatlantic order in which liberal legality and slaveholding aristocracy merged seamlessly. In Britain’s imperial core, Parliamentarians thundered against the tyranny of the Crown while profiting from the Royal African Company’s human cargo. In France, the champions of 1789’s “Rights of Man” sat in the Massiac Club, lobbying to preserve slavery in the Caribbean as the economic lifeblood of the Republic. Across the Atlantic world, property rights were the sacred altar—and the human beings reduced to property were the burnt offerings.

John C. Calhoun, arch-defender of slavery in the U.S., made the logic explicit: slavery was not an unfortunate deviation from liberty, but a “positive good” that stabilized democracy for the white citizenry. His jurisprudence didn’t stand outside the liberal tradition—it grew from its very soil. By protecting the sanctity of property above all, liberalism produced a political system where democracy for some was built on the permanent unfreedom of others.

Losurdo’s point lands like a hammer: liberalism’s golden age was also the golden age of the transatlantic slave trade. Its celebrated theorists and statesmen were architects not only of parliaments and constitutions, but of slave codes and manhunts. The “community of the free” was never a universal project—it was a gated community, ringed with chains and patrolled by overseers. The political liberty of the West did not grow in opposition to slavery; it grew because of it.

The Architecture of Exclusion

If the “unique twin birth” of liberalism tied its fortunes to slavery, the next stage was to build an architecture sturdy enough to keep the enslaved, the colonized, and the dispossessed permanently outside the gates. Domenico Losurdo names the blueprint clearly: a spatial and legal segregation between the “sacred space” of rights and the “profane space” of unfreedom. In the sacred space—the metropolitan core—citizens enjoyed the protections of law, property, and political voice. In the profane space—the colonies, plantations, and reservations—those protections evaporated, replaced by naked domination. The boundary between the two was not a flaw in the system; it was the system.

This was liberalism as a Herrenvolk democracy: full rights for the settler-citizenry, disenfranchisement and terror for those on the wrong side of the color line. In the United States, Indigenous nations were treated as obstacles to expansion, their treaties shredded the moment they interfered with settler appetites. Even freed Black people in the North found their rights suspended by “Black Codes” that ensured liberty was a conditional privilege, not a guaranteed inheritance. The same logic ran through the British Empire, where colonial subjects in India, Africa, and the Caribbean were governed not by the rights Parliament boasted of at home, but by martial law, curfews, and the whip.

The case studies are damning. In revolutionary France, the Massiac Club—an alliance of colonial planters and their metropolitan allies—organized to protect slavery in Saint-Domingue, terrified that the language of liberty might seep into the sugar fields. In the United States, Indigenous sovereignty was dismissed with the stroke of Andrew Jackson’s pen, as the Trail of Tears carved death into the landscape. In Britain’s colonies, millions lived and died under ordinances that gave governors dictatorial powers, all while London congratulated itself on being the world’s beacon of freedom.

Losurdo forces us to see that this exclusionary architecture wasn’t a temporary oversight waiting for moral enlightenment to fix. It was a structural necessity. The wealth that sustained the sacred space—the coffee houses of London, the salons of Philadelphia, the boulevards of Paris—was siphoned from the profane space through exploitation, expropriation, and extermination. Liberalism’s moral vocabulary depended on this geography: rights could be exalted precisely because their boundaries were enforced with brutality.

This is where the liberal myth dies. The system did not slowly expand its circle of rights out of an innate moral progress. It expanded only when the excluded forced it open—through slave rebellions, anticolonial revolts, general strikes, and wars of liberation. And each expansion was met with new mechanisms to redraw the boundary, to reestablish the exclusion under fresh names. The architecture remains, even if the façade changes. In the so-called liberal order, someone must always live outside the gates for those inside to feel free.

Master Race Democracy on a Planetary Scale

By the nineteenth century, the liberal “community of the free” had perfected its internal architecture of exclusion. The next logical step was to globalize it. What Domenico Losurdo calls “master race democracy” was not a rhetorical flourish—it was a political formula: democracy for the in-group, domination for the rest. Liberalism’s trick was to fuse popular sovereignty with racial supremacy, to make the ballot box and the bayonet work in tandem. Inside the core, white citizens could debate tax rates and tariffs; outside, entire continents were carved up in drawing rooms and “pacified” with gunboats.

This was not hypocrisy. It was design. The same Britain that celebrated the Reform Acts was torching villages in India, starving Bengal through famine policies, and machine-gunning Sudanese fighters at Omdurman. The United States, self-anointed cradle of liberty, waged wars of extermination against Indigenous nations, then exported the template overseas in the Philippines, where “benevolent assimilation” came with waterboarding and concentration camps. France, home of “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité,” bathed Algeria in blood for over a century, perfecting counterinsurgency techniques later exported to Vietnam.

This planetary apartheid was sustained by a moral vocabulary that cast colonial slaughter as civilization’s advance. The “civilizing mission” became the liberal alibi for every atrocity: the burning of villages, the seizure of land, the forced labor regimes that underwrote Europe’s industrial takeoff. In the liberal imagination, the world was divided between those mature enough for self-government and those condemned to political childhood—a childhood policed by Maxim guns and imperial edicts. And always, the criteria for maturity aligned neatly with the skin tones and cultural markers of the colonizers.

Losurdo’s concept slices through the liberal self-image like a hot knife. Master race democracy was not a perversion of the ideal—it was the ideal’s condition of possibility. The flourishing of rights at the core required the negation of rights in the periphery. The citizen-soldier in London or Boston could feel secure in his liberties precisely because those liberties were subsidized by the unfreedom of others, whether in the cane fields of the Caribbean, the mines of Southern Africa, or the railroads of India.

This is the throughline from the age of sail to the age of drones. The racialized division of humanity remains the skeleton of the liberal order. Today’s NATO interventions, IMF “structural adjustments,” and tech-driven surveillance regimes are updated versions of the same logic: freedom for the metropole, discipline for the rest. The master race democracy has traded the gunboat for the sanctions list, the missionary for the human rights NGO, but the planetary hierarchy is intact. Losurdo’s warning is clear—this is not a system that can be persuaded to include everyone. It is a system that exists to exclude, and it will adapt every tool of modernity to keep it that way.

Crisis, Radicalism, and Containment

Every so often, history delivers a shock powerful enough to rupture the liberal order’s smug façade. The Haitian Revolution was one such earthquake. Enslaved Africans—dismissed by Enlightenment Europe as subhuman—rose up, armed themselves, shattered Napoleon’s army, and declared the first Black republic. They did more than abolish slavery; they proved that the Enlightenment’s “universal” rights could be made truly universal, if wrested by force from the hands of their hypocritical authors. For the liberal elite, this was not a triumph of their ideals—it was a nightmare made flesh.

Liberalism’s response was immediate and vicious. The Haitian state was blockaded, isolated, and saddled with a crippling indemnity to France—a ransom for daring to exist. In the United States, the Founding Fathers tightened the chains, passing laws to smother any whisper of revolt. Across the Atlantic, British and French liberals recast their rhetoric, retreating from universality to guarded particularism: rights for “our” people, order for everyone else. Haiti had exposed the contradiction too clearly; liberalism’s survival depended on re-drawing the boundaries of who counted as human.

This cycle repeated itself across centuries. Reconstruction in the United States briefly promised equality for the formerly enslaved, only to be strangled by terror, disenfranchisement, and the codification of Jim Crow. The decolonization wave after World War II—fueled by anti-fascist struggle and socialist revolutions—forced the liberal powers to grant formal independence to colonies they could no longer hold by brute force. But independence came with strings: coups orchestrated by the CIA and MI6, assassinations of leaders from Lumumba to Allende, and economic chains forged in the boardrooms of the IMF and World Bank.

In each case, liberalism adapted to crisis not by expanding freedom, but by perfecting containment. Rights could be conceded—temporarily, strategically—if doing so preserved the deeper architecture of racial capitalism. The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in the U.S., for example, were real victories won by mass struggle, but they came alongside the expansion of the prison-industrial complex and a bipartisan war on the Black working class. In the Global South, postcolonial democracies were tolerated only so long as they embraced “free markets” and aligned with Western strategic interests. Step out of line, and the full machinery of regime change whirred into motion.

Losurdo’s lesson is that liberalism’s crises do not produce its transcendence—they produce its refinement. Each rupture is followed by a counter-offensive that recaptures the emancipatory language of the oppressed, empties it of revolutionary content, and repackages it as proof of liberalism’s moral leadership. The Haitian rebels are recast as abolitionist mascots; Martin Luther King Jr. is embalmed in nonviolent sainthood while his anti-imperialist politics are erased; Nelson Mandela’s armed struggle is reduced to a morality tale about forgiveness. The message is always the same: you may fight for freedom, but only on terms set by the “community of the free.”

This is why the left’s flirtation with “reclaiming” liberalism is a dead end. The system has centuries of practice in absorbing insurgency and turning it into an instrument of rule. The point is not to reclaim it, but to rupture it entirely—to build a political order that does not require periodic massacres and exclusions to function. For Losurdo, and for us, the true inheritance of every emancipatory crisis lies not in the concessions wrung from the ruling class, but in the moments when the oppressed seized power for themselves and refused to give it back.

The Twentieth Century Catastrophe

If the nineteenth century was the age when liberalism perfected its machinery of exclusion, the twentieth was the age when that machinery spun out of control. Two world wars, the rise of fascism, and the extermination of millions were not the negation of liberal ideals—they were their logical culmination under the pressure of global crisis. Losurdo strips away the sentimental lie that fascism was a total break from the liberal tradition. In truth, the so-called “catastrophe of the twentieth century” was prepared, enabled, and in many cases openly applauded by liberal states—so long as it served their colonial and class interests.

From Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia to Hitler’s war in Eastern Europe, the ruling circles of Britain, France, and the United States calculated not in moral absolutes but in imperial advantage. Liberal Britain maintained cordial relations with fascist Italy until the Duce’s colonial ambitions threatened British holdings. The U.S. extended no real aid to the Spanish Republic against Franco, while American corporations like Ford and IBM continued doing business with Nazi Germany well into the war. These were not “failures to act” born of naivety—they were deliberate choices to tolerate fascism when it protected private property and colonial order.

The colonies themselves were laboratories for the very technologies of domination later deployed in Europe. The concentration camp—celebrated as a Nazi innovation—had already been tested by the British in South Africa and the Spanish in Cuba. Aerial bombardment of civilians was pioneered by the liberal powers in Iraq and India long before Dresden or Guernica. Even the racial pseudoscience that undergirded fascism’s genocidal policies found its roots in the immigration laws, segregation codes, and eugenics movements of liberal democracies. Hitler himself praised America’s race laws as a model.

After the Allied victory in 1945, the liberal order emerged with its image burnished as the savior of civilization. But the old exclusion clauses remained firmly in place—only updated for the postwar era. The same powers that condemned Nazi occupation clung to their colonies in Africa and Asia, crushing independence movements with massacres from Madagascar to Malaya. France’s “Fourth Republic” slaughtered Algerians; Britain drowned the Mau Mau revolt in blood; the United States replaced European colonialism with its own military bases and client regimes. Liberalism’s anti-fascist credentials were never extended to the colonized.

In the metropole, the welfare state was expanded as a bulwark against socialist revolution—social democracy as a kind of prophylactic against communism. But in the Global South, liberalism offered no Marshall Plan. Instead, it enforced structural underdevelopment through the Bretton Woods institutions, ensuring that “independent” nations remained dependent on Western markets and finance. The Cold War became the new pretext for interventions, coups, and counterinsurgencies, from Iran to Indonesia to Chile, all justified in the language of “freedom” and “democracy” while drenched in the blood of their supposed beneficiaries.

Losurdo’s counter-history makes plain that the horrors of the twentieth century were not deviations from the liberal path—they were the price of its survival. Fascism was liberalism’s unruly cousin, disciplined when necessary but never wholly disowned. Colonial slaughter was not an embarrassment, but a necessity for maintaining the metropolitan standard of living. And when the ideological winds shifted, the same powers that had tolerated dictatorship rebranded themselves as champions of human rights—weaponizing the memory of fascism to justify new wars of domination.

The catastrophe, then, is not just the sum of the century’s crimes—it is the ongoing capacity of liberalism to commit them while posing as humanity’s moral compass. The lesson for our time is brutal but clear: so long as liberalism defines the political horizon, catastrophe is not the exception. It is the rule.

VII. Strategic Relevance for 2025: Liberalism in Its Technofascist Form

Losurdo’s counter-history is not an academic indulgence—it’s a weapon for exactly this kind of moment. In August 2025, the United States is again under Donald Trump, not as an accident of history or a grotesque deviation from the “liberal democratic order,” but as the culmination of its trajectory. The empire has not been hijacked—it has chosen its pilot. Trump is not the antithesis of liberalism; he is its distilled essence in the age of crisis, its executor in the transition from neoliberalism’s polite decay to the openly repressive architecture of technofascism.

What Losurdo shows us is that the “community of the free” has always been built on systems of unfreedom—slavery, colonialism, apartheid, genocide—preserved by the violent exclusion of those who would claim its promises for themselves. What we face now is not a new morality, but a new technology of control. The same white supremacist, settler-colonial order that gave John Locke the language to justify slavery now gives Mark Zuckerberg the algorithms to engineer consent. The same imperial hubris that let Jefferson draft liberty into existence while owning human beings now empowers corporate war cabinets to draft climate catastrophe and economic strangulation into the policy blueprint of the twenty-first century.

Trump presides over this with the shamelessness of someone who doesn’t need to pretend. Under him, the state and the capitalist class have fused their operations into a seamless war machine: border fortresses that stretch into the digital ether; “free markets” run by monopolies large enough to dictate global policy; social media weaponized into a psychological battlefield; and austerity imposed with the same calculated cruelty as colonial famine. The liberal state once justified its violence under the banner of “progress” and “civilization.” Trump’s America dispenses with such pretense. It offers domination in its purest form: unapologetic, unvarnished, and algorithmically optimized.

This is why the nostalgia for “pre-Trump liberal democracy” is not just naive—it’s suicidal. The bipartisan imperial class that now feigns horror at Trump’s excesses are the same architects of the system that made him inevitable. The Clintonian dismantling of welfare, the Obama-era expansion of the surveillance state, the Bush wars of conquest—all laid the groundwork for this moment. Trump’s ascendance is not a hostile takeover; it is the homecoming of a political tradition whose democratic vocabulary was always paired with the grammar of extermination.

In Losurdo’s historical frame, what we call “technofascism” today is simply the latest upgrade to what he calls “master race democracy.” Where the nineteenth-century model relied on physical conquest, industrial supremacy, and racial slavery, the twenty-first-century model relies on digital conquest, financial supremacy, and data slavery. It is settler-colonialism in the cloud: territory mapped in server farms, populations governed by predictive analytics, and dissent neutralized through the choke points of corporate platforms. And under Trump 2.0, this system is being hardened into permanence, not rolled back.

For Weaponized Information, this means our strategic task is not to rehabilitate liberalism’s corpse, but to bury it. The same liberal order that once waged war on Haiti for daring to be free is now waging hybrid war on every nation that resists its dictates—from Caracas to Gaza, from Beijing to Bamako. It is doing so with a political face that the ruling class finds useful precisely because it can dispense with the old hypocrisies. Trump’s technofascism is not a rupture from the liberal project—it is its full and final translation into the political economy of the digital age.

If Losurdo’s counter-history teaches anything, it is that the choice before us has never been between “good” liberalism and “bad” illiberalism. It has always been between the continuation of a global system of domination—now wrapped in the circuitry of technofascism—or the revolutionary overthrow of that system in all its forms. The liberal order, in Trump’s hands, is simply done pretending. That clarity is a gift, if we have the discipline to use it.