Blind Spots of Liberal Thought: Thomas Paine, USA and the Unsaid History of Racism

Thomas Paine's Rights of Man is filled with exuberance and joy at the founding of two republics: the USA and Revolutionary France. Among the two, the USA was already a decade old when Paine published his treatise. Paine considered the founding of the American Republic as an epoch-making event, one that signaled the arrival of a new age in history, politics, and society. That migrants and settlers from all over Europe transcended their religious, linguistic and national identities and built a nationality around common interests, and fought against Britain, one of the mightiest imperial powers, was an inspiring testimony to the people's love of liberty. It was also evidence of people's capacity to avoid anarchy and establish society even in the absence of a government and live together in peace and security. For Paine, it proved the natural principle of human society: cooperation based on common interest. Therefore, democracy, or, the rule of the people, was the best way to exercise the peace of natural society.

Howard Zinn (1922-2010)
Source: howardzinn.org

For many European thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries America invoked the image of the Garden of Eden, an abundantly rich and virgin land, where men and women flocked to begin anew. Except that it was not. Although sparsely populated compared to the European nations, America was already home to the Native ‘Indian' tribes. The democratic peace and progress that settlers achieved were on the back of the expropriation of native lands. The founding of the American republic only exacerbated the process and the tragedy was compounded when the new nation started ‘importing' African men and women as slaves into the continent, to work their farms and plantations. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States evocatively narrates this neglected side of history; so does Charles Mills' criticism (based on the the history of racism in America) of John Rawls' definition of society.

The biggest criticism leveled against liberal thinkers is that their analysis and philosophy tend to be ‘blind' towards the innate asymmetry of power and the injustices it spawns in the society. These blind spots of liberal theories include gender, class, race, caste, etc. By either ignoring or building upon these asymmetrical relationships, liberal theories and liberal politics have perpetuated these injustices and and helped institutionalize these in the daily life of our polities.

Paine included, the liberal impulse for human freedom and human rights is worthy of respect but the complexities of the real world are such that it demands scrutiny into the asymmetries of power and dismantling of it even as we build a world of human rights.