Abstract

In this paper I offer a non-ideal analysis of a series of theoretical problems affecting liberalism, which have bearing on liberal discourses in today’s concrete political practices with de-democratizing consequences, including the instrumentalization of liberalism by neoconservative actors. I use Benjamin Constant’s attitude towards slavery as case study to show that liberalism is culpably ignorant of many structural injustices, and that this is so because of its basic thesis that the main oppression is the one the state and the political community exert of the individual. The centrality of this oppression makes liberalism unable to give oppressions exerted within the web of social relations a proper place in its own theory.