Freedom for whom?

Liberalism presents itself as a secular philosophy of individual rights, equality under law and government by consent. Its ideals shaped the American Declaration of Independence, with its claim that “all men are created equal”, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Yet the same countries ruled colonial empires and denied women the vote, property rights and higher education. This paper asks how liberalism squared its universal language with these exclusions.

The authors read key liberal texts closely. John Locke held that people come to own what they mix their labour with. By contrasting the English farmer who improves the land with the “wild Indian” who only gathers fruit and game, the paper argues, his theory denied Indigenous peoples lasting rights to their land and gave a moral cover for taking it. John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty that despotism was a legitimate way to govern “barbarians” if it aimed at improving them, and argued that India was not yet ready for representative government. Drawing on historians such as Uday Singh Mehta and Jennifer Pitts, the authors call this “conditional universalism”: rights for everyone, but only once a people met standards set by the coloniser.

Women were left out in a similar way. James Mill argued that women's interests were already represented by their fathers and husbands, so they did not need the vote. The political theorist Carole Pateman argues that the liberal social contract rested on an earlier “sexual contract” that placed women under male heads of household. Feminists turned liberal language back on itself: Olympe de Gouges wrote a Declaration of the Rights of Woman in 1791, and the 1848 Seneca Falls declaration rewrote the American one to say that “all men and women are created equal”.

The paper concludes that these exclusions were built into liberalism rather than accidental. Rights were extended to colonised peoples and women, the authors argue, mainly because those excluded kept pressing for them through anticolonial movements and suffrage campaigns, not because liberalism corrected itself. They see the pattern continuing in today's debates on race, migration and inequality, and argue that a truly universal idea of freedom has to reckon with this history.