Description: Although the term "liberalism" is widely used to describe a variety of social and political ideas, it has been an especially difficult concept for historians to define. In this trailbreaking study in the history of European political thought, Kahan makes significant progress toward a general definition, and illustrates a strategic type of liberalism by linking three great nineteenth-century thinkers in a single intellectual and ideological tradition. Ignoring the national boundaries that often confine intellectual history, Kahan ranges widely through the works of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville, and discovers similarities in their thought. Kahan demonstrates their distaste for the masses and the middle class, opposition to the commercial spirit, fear and contempt of mediocrity, suspicion of the centralized state, and their limited hopes for saving European culture from militarism and barbarism through education. Their "liberalism" is an aristocratic one, based on an elevated idea of the human personality. Kahan establishes that Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville shared a unique set of values, and a common political language that combined traditional humanist elements with an affirmation of modernity. He concludes with a correction to the prevalent misconceptions about nineteenth-century liberalism, and with a discussion of a typology of liberalism that will undoubtedly spark much scholarly debate.

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