War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century

Chapter 1: Two Centuries Under Discussion – Historical Revisionism

Domenico Losurdo opens War and Revolution with a trenchant critique of the ideological reframing of modern history. In particular, he scrutinizes the post-World War II and post-Cold War trend in Western historiography to reinterpret revolutionary movements—particularly the French and Russian Revolutions—as the origins of totalitarian violence. This trend, which Losurdo calls “historical revisionism,” is not merely academic. It is deeply political, serving the interests of a triumphalist liberal capitalism that seeks to erase the emancipatory content of revolutions by conflating them with fascist barbarism.

1.1 The Meaning of Revisionism

Revisionism, as defined by Losurdo, is not just about reinterpreting facts or applying new methodologies. Rather, it is an ideological weapon that turns critical historiography into a legitimization of liberal capitalist hegemony. Revisionist thinkers do not treat the French or Russian Revolutions as flawed yet meaningful steps toward liberation, but as the breeding grounds of terror, despotism, and totalitarianism. This movement attempts to position liberalism not as a system with its own historical crimes, but as the only political model free of ideological sin.

1.2 Ernst Nolte: Communism as the “Original Sin”

German historian Ernst Nolte plays a central role in this narrative shift. In his controversial thesis, Nolte argues that Nazism was not an autonomous evil, but rather a reaction to the perceived threat posed by Bolshevism. He suggests that the Nazis learned from Soviet methods of repression, particularly from the early Bolshevik use of terror and the concentration camp. By claiming that the Holocaust was in part a response to the horrors of the Gulag, Nolte essentially shifts the moral center of gravity: communism becomes the original sin of the 20th century, and fascism its tragic consequence. This argument was widely criticized but also influential, especially among Cold War intellectuals.

1.3 François Furet and the French Revolution

While Nolte focuses on the 20th century, François Furet turns his gaze back to the French Revolution. Furet argues that the Jacobin dictatorship and the Terror were early forms of the totalitarian logic that would culminate in Stalinism. He draws a direct ideological line from Robespierre to Lenin and Stalin, suggesting that the very impulse for radical equality leads inevitably to dictatorship. In doing so, Furet severs the French Revolution from its Enlightenment heritage and casts it as a precursor to 20th-century horrors, rather than the birth of modern democracy. This reinterpretation found favor in both liberal and conservative circles eager to cast doubt on revolutionary aspirations.

1.4 Heidegger, Schmitt, and the Anti-Universalist Tradition

Losurdo identifies deeper philosophical roots of this revisionist turn in the work of Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt. Both thinkers rejected the Enlightenment ideals of universal human rights and egalitarianism. Heidegger, an avowed Nazi, viewed modernity as a fall into technological nihilism, and he saw rootedness in national identity as an antidote. Schmitt, a legal theorist who also supported the Nazis, defined politics as the distinction between friend and enemy, and argued against liberal proceduralism. These anti-universalist thinkers provided an intellectual foundation for the idea that revolutions based on Enlightenment values were inherently violent and self-destructive.

1.5 The Revisionist Strategy: Collapsing Distinctions

A central mechanism of revisionist historiography is the collapsing of distinctions between different kinds of violence. By equating Stalinist purges with the Holocaust, revisionists obscure key differences in intention, structure, and ideology. While both regimes committed atrocities, fascism aimed at extermination and racial hierarchy as ends in themselves, whereas communist regimes—even in their most repressive moments—professed emancipatory goals. Losurdo does not excuse communist violence, but he argues that equating it wholesale with fascism results in a flattening of historical understanding and erases the possibility of meaningful political alternatives.

1.6 The Blind Spot: Colonial and Imperial Violence

Perhaps the most damning critique Losurdo levels at revisionism is its silence on the violence of liberal democracies in the colonial world. While revisionist historians dwell on Stalin’s crimes and the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, they often ignore or justify the genocidal violence of Western colonialism. From the Congo Free State under Leopold II to the British-engineered famines in India, liberal regimes oversaw the deaths of tens of millions. These crimes, committed in the name of civilization and commerce, are rarely treated with the same moral gravity. The result is a distorted moral economy where the sins of anti-liberal regimes are foregrounded, and those of liberalism are minimized or ignored.

1.7 What Is a Valid Comparison?

Losurdo is not against comparative history. In fact, he insists that comparison is necessary for understanding the complexity of the past. However, he draws a critical distinction between comparison and equivalence. To compare is to analyze; to equate is to reduce. When revisionists present the Gulag and Auschwitz as fundamentally the same, they not only misunderstand their specific logics but also undermine any effort to evaluate them critically. Losurdo calls for a methodology that preserves nuance, that recognizes the particularity of each historical experience, and that resists ideological simplification.

1.8 Rethinking the “Short” Twentieth Century

The revisionist reading of history is also shaped by the temporal framework through which events are interpreted. Losurdo critiques Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of the “short 20th century,” which spans from 1914 to 1991. While useful in some respects, this framing risks detaching the 20th century from the Enlightenment and revolutionary movements that preceded it. Losurdo argues for a broader historical arc that stretches from the late 18th-century revolutions through the decolonization movements of the 20th century. In this light, the Russian and Chinese revolutions appear not as anomalies or perversions, but as part of a long struggle for emancipation.

1.9 The Fall of the USSR and the Rise of Triumphalism

The collapse of the Soviet Union marked a turning point not only geopolitically but also intellectually. With the ideological rivalry of the Cold War over, liberal capitalism declared victory and sought to rewrite history to affirm its supremacy. This post-Soviet triumphalism provided fertile ground for revisionism to flourish. By recasting revolutions as catastrophic mistakes, this narrative justified neoliberal policies, military interventions, and the suppression of radical movements. Losurdo warns that this triumphalism feeds into historical amnesia and moral complacency.

1.10 The Political Stakes of Memory

Finally, Losurdo emphasizes that memory is not neutral. How societies remember revolutions affects how they imagine the future. If revolutions are remembered solely as episodes of mass murder, then the very idea of systemic change becomes suspect. Conversely, if liberal democracies are remembered only as bastions of freedom, their histories of exploitation and violence are obscured. Historical memory becomes a battleground over values, legitimacy, and political possibility. Losurdo urges historians and readers alike to resist the seductive clarity of revisionist narratives and to embrace the complexity and contradictions of revolutionary history.

Chapter 2: The West and Its Double Standards

In this chapter, Domenico Losurdo continues his critique of liberal historiography and its selective moralism by focusing on the West’s persistent use of double standards in evaluating political regimes and historical violence. He argues that liberal democratic states have developed a narrative framework in which their own history of violence—particularly colonialism, slavery, and systemic racism—is minimized or rationalized, while the crimes of communist regimes are amplified and held as paradigmatic e…

2.1 Liberalism’s Two Faces: Freedom and Domination

Losurdo opens the chapter by problematizing the self-image of Western liberalism. While liberal ideology extols liberty, rights, and democracy, its historical practice has often involved violence, exclusion, and domination, particularly in the colonies and among subjugated populations. The United States, the UK, and France are praised for their democratic institutions, yet simultaneously built empires on slavery, genocide, and colonial exploitation.

He identifies a fundamental contradiction within classical liberalism: it universalizes freedom for certain groups (property-owning white men) while denying or delaying it for others. The American Founding Fathers spoke eloquently about liberty while owning slaves. French revolutionaries proclaimed the Rights of Man while continuing to administer brutal colonies.

Losurdo calls this the “exclusion clause” embedded in the liberal tradition: a structural feature that allows liberalism to coexist with hierarchy, racism, and imperialism.

2.2 The Liberal Apology for Colonialism

A major theme of this chapter is how Western liberalism has historically justified colonial violence. Citing thinkers from John Stuart Mill to Alexis de Tocqueville, Losurdo shows how liberal philosophers and statesmen often defended imperial domination as a civilizing mission. Colonialism was not viewed as a contradiction of liberal values, but as their extension—albeit among peoples presumed too “backward” to self-govern.

The case of British India is emblematic: under the guise of bringing law, order, and free trade, British policy facilitated massive famines and economic extraction. Liberal thought constructed a racial hierarchy of civilizations, positioning Western nations as guardians of order and progress, and colonized peoples as unfit for autonomy.

This reveals how liberalism, far from being universally emancipatory, often functioned as an ideological tool of empire.

2.3 Liberalism and Slavery: A Forgotten History

Losurdo emphasizes that slavery was not an anachronistic remnant, but integral to the rise of liberal capitalist economies. He challenges the notion that liberalism was inherently anti-slavery, noting that key liberal nations were among the last to abolish the institution—and often did so reluctantly.

In the United States, slavery was constitutionally protected and defended by liberal jurists. The same democratic society that celebrated freedom also enshrined racial apartheid through laws and institutions. Even after abolition, the logic of racial exclusion persisted in Jim Crow laws, disenfranchisement, and state-sanctioned terror.

Losurdo criticizes the historical amnesia that erases this violent legacy from the liberal narrative. He underscores that the freedom enjoyed in liberal societies was often built upon the unfreedom of others—particularly racialized others.

2.4 Anti-Communism and the Moral Hierarchy of Violence

A core argument of the chapter is that liberal anti-communism constructs a moral hierarchy of violence, in which crimes committed in the name of socialism are held to an absolute standard, while liberal or capitalist violence is judged contextually, relativized, or outright ignored.

He compares the Gulag to Western colonial prisons, the massacres during Stalin’s collectivization to famines caused by imperialist extraction in India or Africa. Yet only one side of this history—the violence associated with communist regimes—is deemed a universal symbol of evil.

This asymmetry allows Western liberalism to appropriate the mantle of moral superiority. The Soviet Union and Maoist China are painted as regimes of unprecedented horror, while the systemic, centuries-long violence of Western liberal states is either sanitized or omitted from public memory.

2.5 The Cold War: Double Standards as Doctrine

The Cold War is perhaps the clearest period where double standards became doctrine. Losurdo notes that the United States supported brutal dictatorships across the Global South—from Suharto in Indonesia to Pinochet in Chile—while condemning socialist regimes for human rights abuses.

These authoritarian allies were often trained, armed, and funded by liberal democracies, yet their crimes rarely featured in Western media with the same intensity as those of the Soviet bloc. The victims of anti-communist purges—millions in Indonesia, Latin America, and Africa—have no equivalent to the Holocaust memorials or Gulag museums.

This selective memory is not accidental, Losurdo argues. It is a political technology—a way of regulating which histories are worth mourning and which can be erased.

2.6 The Myth of Nonviolence in Liberal Transition

Another target of Losurdo’s critique is the idea that liberal democracies transitioned peacefully into modernity, unlike the violent upheavals of communist revolutions. He dismantles the myth that liberal orders emerged through reform, not revolution or war.

In fact, the transition to liberal democracy in countries like England, France, and the US was deeply violent: civil wars, colonization, slavery, and systemic repression shaped the political order. Even the European welfare state—celebrated today as a liberal achievement—was in part a concession made to stave off the appeal of communism.

Thus, Losurdo argues that liberalism’s path to modernity was no less stained by blood than its revolutionary competitors.

2.7 The Role of Historical Forgetting

The chapter closes with a meditation on historical forgetting as an act of power. Losurdo shows how Western historiography has systematically removed or minimized the crimes of liberal societies, creating a distorted vision of history that casts liberalism as peaceful, lawful, and inherently democratic.

He draws attention to how commemorative practices, school curricula, and media narratives reproduce this partial memory. The victims of liberalism’s global expansion—slaves, colonized peoples, Indigenous nations—are marginalized in national narratives. Meanwhile, communist regimes are remembered almost exclusively through their failures and atrocities.

For Losurdo, this is not just a problem of fairness but of historical truth. Without acknowledging the full spectrum of violence and domination in liberal history, we cannot properly assess the moral and political claims of liberalism today.

Chapter 3: The Critique of Revolution between History and Philosophy

In this rich and critical chapter, Losurdo dissects the philosophical and historical critiques levied against the revolutionary tradition—from the Enlightenment to the Russian Revolution—and examines how they converge in the contemporary historiographical revisionism that aims to morally and intellectually discredit revolutionary thought and action.

He begins by identifying a recurring pattern in how revolutions are condemned not just for their outcomes but for their very ideological premises. Historical revisionists portray revolutionaries not as flawed political actors responding to crisis, but as dangerous ideologues, intoxicated by abstract philosophy and utopian dreams. Their ideological blindness, say critics, paved the way for totalitarianism.

3.1 The Birth of the “Revolutionary Virus”

Losurdo traces this diagnosis back to the 18th and 19th centuries. Counter-revolutionary thinkers like Burke, Tocqueville, and Taine characterized the French Revolution as a pathological event driven by deluded intellectuals—philosophes who mistook ideological visions for political reality. Revolution was not a response to oppression but a madness, a disease, a product of overactive minds.

This notion of “ideological intoxication” becomes the root metaphor for explaining revolutionary violence. Losurdo cites Furet’s use of terms like “frenzy,” “delirium,” and “collective intoxication” to characterize the actions of Jacobins and later Bolsheviks. A long tradition emerges that equates revolution with irrationality, fanaticism, and mental imbalance.

3.2 Intellectuals as the Scapegoats of History

Losurdo notes that intellectuals are central targets of this critique. From Cochin to Furet, the revolution is portrayed as a dangerous experiment run by irresponsible theorists disconnected from the people. Marx, Lenin, Robespierre, and Rousseau are accused of sacrificing the real and tangible in favor of a philosophical ideal.

This attack takes the form of a broader rejection of abstract, systematic thought. For revisionists, it is not just that revolutions failed—they failed because they attempted to impose a rationalist schema on a complex, organic social reality. Hayek and Talmon will later frame this as the essence of totalitarianism: the desire to “engineer” society from above.

3.3 A Philosophical Genealogy: From Rousseau to the Gulag?

A key revisionist move is to trace a genealogical line from Rousseau and Robespierre to Lenin and Stalin. The revolutionary tradition, they argue, is tainted from the start by its willingness to suppress individual liberty in favor of a collective or universal ideal. Rousseau’s concept of the “general will” is recast as a justification for terror.

But Losurdo challenges this reduction. He notes, for example, Rousseau’s personal abhorrence of bloodshed—famously declaring that “the blood of one man is worth more than the liberty of the whole human race.” Far from being a proto-totalitarian, Rousseau was intensely moral and deeply skeptical of state violence.

3.4 The American Exception and the “Good Revolution”

An important contrast is drawn between the “bad” revolutions (French, Russian) and the “good” American Revolution, which is spared the same scrutiny. Revisionists like Arendt, Hayek, and Furet selectively preserve the American Revolution as a moderate, liberty-affirming event.

Losurdo criticizes this double standard. He notes that while American revolutionaries claimed freedom, they also enshrined slavery and racial exclusion. Intellectuals who dismiss the “fanaticism” of abolitionists, Jacobins, or Bolsheviks often ignore the violence and repression of early American democracy, including genocide against Native peoples and the codification of racial inequality.

3.5 Bourgeois Revolution and the Liquidation of History

Revisionists increasingly reject the Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution, instead presenting it as an irrational rupture. This allows them to cut the link between 1789 and 1917, and to deny the idea that revolutions unfold in historical continuity.

Losurdo responds that denying the material foundations of the French Revolution makes it incomprehensible. The ancien régime was not a stable or declining relic—it was a brutal and repressive system. The revolution was not a whim, but a response to real contradictions in society. Similarly, Bolshevism cannot be understood outside the long crisis of the Russian Empire and global capitalism.

3.6 The Specter of “Social Engineering”

At the core of the revisionist attack is the fear of “social engineering”: the belief that society can be reshaped through political intervention. For Hayek, Talmon, and others, this is the seed of totalitarianism. The state’s attempt to impose equality or justice is seen as inherently coercive and destructive.

Losurdo turns the critique around. If the desire to abolish slavery, racial discrimination, or class exploitation is “engineering,” then so too is the maintenance of those systems. What revisionists brand as utopian tyranny may in fact be the only path to justice. Abolitionism, civil rights, and social reform—all were decried in their time as dangerous fantasies.

3.7 Historical Critique vs. Historical Amnesia

The philosophical critique of revolution, Losurdo argues, often becomes an ideological defense of the status quo. By turning revolutionaries into scapegoats, it allows liberal societies to avoid responsibility for their own forms of violence and exclusion.

The horrors of Stalinism are undeniable, but they are not the whole of the revolutionary tradition. To erase the role of revolution in ending slavery, colonialism, or feudalism is to engage in a moral and historical fraud. Critique must be balanced with acknowledgment of what revolutions actually accomplished.

3.8 Toward a Materialist Philosophy of History

Losurdo insists that we cannot understand the outcomes of revolutions solely through their intentions or ideologies. Revolutionary processes, like all historical processes, are shaped by contradictions, resistance, and unintended consequences.

He draws on Engels’ insight that the bourgeois revolutions went further than their leaders intended because the contradictions of society demanded it. The same is true of the October Revolution. The violence, failures, and utopias must be judged not in isolation but in relation to the broader epochal crisis they emerged from.

Chapter 4: Bourgeois Revolution, Proletarian Revolution and Historical Revisionism

This chapter addresses the evolving ways the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions have been framed in historiography, and how modern revisionism has worked to sever their connection in order to delegitimize the revolutionary tradition as a whole. Losurdo argues that there has been a concerted intellectual effort to “liquidate” the revolutionary tradition extending from 1789 through 1917, with special attention to how the French and Russian revolutions have been politically reinterpreted to serve contemporary ideological agendas.

4.1 From Continuity to Rupture: The Broken Link

Losurdo begins by emphasizing how 19th- and early 20th-century Marxist thought viewed revolutions—especially the French and Russian—as stages of a historical continuum: the French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution that laid the groundwork for the socialist revolution to come. The idea of historical progression from one class-based upheaval to the next—from feudalism to capitalism to socialism—was central to Marxist historiography.

However, post-Cold War revisionism disrupts this trajectory. Figures like Alfred Cobban and François Furet argue that the French Revolution was not a necessary historical step, but an ideological derailment from what could have been a peaceful, reformist liberalism. By challenging the idea that the French Revolution was even bourgeois, they seek to deny its material basis, suspending it in ideological abstraction and effectively disconnecting it from the October Revolution.

4.2 The “Good” and “Bad” Revolutions

A major polemical structure in revisionist historiography is the binary between “good” revolutions—especially the American Revolution, sometimes the Glorious Revolution in England—and “bad” revolutions, namely the French, Russian, and decolonial uprisings. The American Revolution is presented as rational, moderate, and liberty-producing; the French and Russian as irrational, violent, and totalitarian in tendency.

Losurdo shows how this dichotomy has been used to cast Western liberal democracies as bearers of legitimate revolutionary change, while portraying socialist and anti-colonial revolutions as illegitimate expressions of ideological pathology. This not only rewrites revolutionary history—it provides moral justification for present-day liberal hegemony.

4.3 The Fate of Jacobinism

Losurdo then analyzes the specific attack on Jacobinism, which served as a link between the French and Russian Revolutions. While earlier historians may have viewed Robespierre as a tragic figure or the product of historical necessity, revisionists now portray him as the ideological ancestor of Stalin.

This process has intensified over time. In earlier 20th-century accounts—such as Cobban’s 1939 Dictatorship—Robespierre was sometimes treated with sympathy, or at least understood as responding to wartime pressures. But in later accounts, such as Furet’s, Jacobinism is flattened into ideological madness, disconnected from its social context. It is no longer a plebeian response to counter-revolutionary threats—it is a prototype of ideological terrorism.

4.4 The Second Thirty Years’ War and Revisionist Memory

The chapter places these historiographical shifts in the context of what Losurdo calls the “Second Thirty Years’ War”—the period from 1914 to 1945. During this era, both world wars were often framed as democratic crusades against reaction, with liberal democracies aligning themselves with the revolutionary tradition—especially Jacobin France.

However, after 1945, and more drastically after 1989, this alignment shifted. The revolutionary tradition from 1789 to 1917 became associated with totalitarianism. Ironically, this shift rehabilitated reactionary powers like the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, while delegitimizing the anti-fascist and anti-colonial movements that had drawn inspiration from the revolutionary past.

This revisionist narrative ends up retroactively sympathizing with forces once deemed reactionary—those that had resisted the French Revolution, Bolshevism, or anti-colonial uprisings—because they were now seen as protectors against revolutionary chaos.

4.5 From Revolution to War: Redefining the Axis of Evil

Losurdo critiques how revisionists, including Furet, attempt to reframe 20th-century world wars as democratic revolutions, while simultaneously casting the Bolshevik Revolution as a coup or civil war.

The irony is that thinkers who denounce revolutionary terror often praise the “educational despotism” of liberal democratic victories—especially those of World War I and II. These were accompanied by wartime tribunals, ideological reeducation, and total mobilization—but these measures are not condemned as totalitarian, unlike those of revolutionary regimes.

4.6 Utopianism and Violence

Losurdo acknowledges the ideological flaws and utopian excesses of revolutionary movements. He examines how Jacobinism attempted to recreate a lost ancient polis, and how Bolshevism envisioned a society free of the state, religion, markets, and national identity. These projects resulted in violent overreach, particularly when applied in hostile or emergency conditions.

However, he argues that this “surplus of violence” must be contextualized. Both Robespierre and Lenin acted within a “state of exception”—under siege from within and without. Historical revisionism, by ignoring this context, turns revolutions into psychopathologies rather than political responses to social crises.

4.7 Counter-Revolutionary Violence: The Invisible Other

Losurdo highlights the asymmetry of historical memory. While the excesses of revolutionary violence are heavily studied and moralized, the brutality of counter-revolutionary violence is minimized or ignored.

The white terror in Hungary, fascist massacres in Italy, Nazi genocide, and colonial repression—all these acts are rarely framed as ideological or systemic. This creates a one-sided narrative, where only the violence of the oppressed is seen as ideological, while the violence of the dominant classes is viewed as pragmatic or necessary.

4.8 The Disappearing Social Question

One of the consequences of revisionist historiography is the eclipse of the “social question”—the material inequality and oppression that revolutions arose to address. When revolutions are reduced to ideologies or mental illnesses, the conditions they fought against are rendered invisible.

Losurdo insists that to understand the French and Russian Revolutions, one must also understand the ancien régime, the czarist autocracy, and the colonial empires they opposed. Without this balance, the revolution becomes a crime, and the old order becomes the victim.

Chapter 5: Bourgeois Revolution, Colonialism and the Defence of Slavery

In this chapter, Losurdo deepens his investigation into the contradictions of the bourgeois revolutionary tradition, especially how it intersected with and often sustained systems of colonialism and slavery. Far from representing a unified march toward freedom, he shows that the liberal revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries often coexisted with, or even defended, racial and imperial domination. He targets both the celebratory myths of liberal modernity and the revisionist erasures of its dark sides.

5.1 The “Western Revolution” and the Colonial Divide

Losurdo opens with the critique of historians like Robert Palmer who divide global revolutionary history into two distinct realms: a legitimate “Western Revolution” centered on liberty and democracy (e.g., America and France), and a chaotic, alien “non-Western revolution” (e.g., Bolshevism, Maoism, anti-colonial uprisings). This dichotomy, Losurdo argues, conceals the colonial and racial exclusions embedded within the very revolutions being celebrated.

He revisits the San Domingo Revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, which was inspired by Jacobin ideals. However, white French colonists, especially in the Americas, rejected this revolutionary Black republic, appealing instead to the American slaveholding model. The split between liberty and racial equality was already profound in the age of Enlightenment: “freedom” was redefined to mean freedom for whites, often built on the enslavement of others.

5.2 Liberalism and Slavery in the American Revolution

Losurdo exposes how the American Revolution was profoundly tied to the defense of slavery and expansionism. Far from being a revolt for universal rights, the American war for independence enabled settler-colonial elites to resist British limitations on westward expansion and preserve their slave economy.

He compares it to 20th-century colonial secessions, such as those in Algeria or Rhodesia, where settler communities broke from the metropolitan government to block decolonization. In all these cases, the rhetoric of freedom masked a drive to expand racial domination and land seizure.

The Constitution of the United States, Losurdo reminds us, was a contradictory text: it proclaimed natural rights but also enshrined the legality of slavery, setting the stage for the Civil War. Southern elites, from Calhoun to Tucker, explicitly threatened disunion if abolition were attempted, tying liberal constitutionalism to the perpetuation of racial caste.

5.3 Haiti and the Global Impact of Black Emancipation

The Haitian Revolution, led by formerly enslaved people, is presented as a radical rupture in world history. Despite its internal difficulties and later instability, Losurdo emphasizes its global emancipatory effect: it catalyzed the abolition of slavery across Latin America, inspired French abolitionists, and prefigured anti-colonial revolutions.

Yet, in revisionist and liberal historiography, the Haitian Revolution is often ignored or dismissed as a “failure”, because it did not conform to the model of Western capitalist development. Losurdo insists this reflects a racial and ideological bias, one that measures historical success solely by liberal-capitalist outcomes.

5.4 The Rehabilitation of Pro-Slavery Thinkers

One of the more provocative sections critiques the rehabilitation of pro-slavery thinkers like John C. Calhoun, who is often presented in liberal literature as a “defender of minority rights” or a theorist of checks and balances. Losurdo dismantles this myth, reminding us that Calhoun’s “minority” was the white slave-owning class, and his “liberty” was the liberty to dominate.

Such rhetorical inversions, Losurdo argues, show how liberalism’s core vocabulary—liberty, rights, moderation—has been historically wielded in defense of racial hierarchy and exclusion. Revisionism, by celebrating figures like Calhoun, participates in a whitewashing of liberalism’s historical entanglement with slavery.

5.5 Colonialism, Fascism, and the Repressed Continuum

Losurdo then draws a controversial but well-argued continuity between colonialism and fascism, particularly in terms of ideological logic and racial justification. He recalls how Hitler explicitly referenced the United States’ conquest of the West—and its treatment of Native Americans—as a model for his Lebensraum policy in Eastern Europe.

In this light, Nazism becomes not an aberration, but a colonial ideology turned inward upon Europe. Losurdo also critiques Carl Schmitt’s defense of Italy’s war in Ethiopia as a just “civilizing” mission, one that justified poison gas and mass killings on the basis that Abyssinia was not a “real state” deserving of international rights.

This logic—extermination justified by civilizational inferiority—was core to both colonialism and fascism. By repressing this link, revisionist historiography erases the colonial roots of modern totalitarian violence.

5.6 Liberal War and the Erasure of the Social Question

Losurdo continues to criticize how liberal democracies and their historians celebrate their wars (especially WWII) as clean struggles for democracy, while simultaneously condemning all revolutionary violence. In doing so, they erase the material and racial dimensions of those wars: the use of colonial soldiers, the aim of preserving empire, and the systemic denial of rights to large portions of the global population.

Moreover, revisionism’s focus on revolutionary utopianism distracts from the violence of the liberal order: structural poverty, colonial massacres, social exclusion. The “social question”—that is, the critique of inequality and exploitation—is written out of the historical narrative.

5.7 China, Cuba, and the Global South

Bringing the discussion into the 20th century, Losurdo considers how anti-colonial revolutions like those in China and Cuba follow in the emancipatory tradition of the French and Haitian Revolutions. Despite Cold War hostility, these movements challenged Western imperialism, inspiring national liberation struggles across the globe.

He takes aim at Niall Ferguson and other revisionists who dismiss such revolutions as failures or trivialize Western efforts to overthrow them. The Bay of Pigs invasion and other US interventions are presented not as imperialism but as reactions to “extremism,” a rhetorical sleight-of-hand that justifies neocolonial aggression.

Yet, Losurdo argues, the global transformation of the 20th century—including the end of European empire and rise of independent nations—owes much to the revolutionary dynamic initiated by Marxism and its global legacy.

Chapter 6: Marx, Liberalism and the Critique of Colonialism

This chapter explores the contrasting ways in which liberalism and Marxism interpreted colonialism, and how these positions shaped their political and historical trajectories. While liberalism often embraced or justified imperial conquest under the guise of progress and civilization, Marxism developed an increasingly sharp critique of colonial domination—though not without its own internal contradictions. Losurdo examines both the moral failings of liberal thought and **the evolution of Marxist ana…

6.1 Liberalism and the Civilizing Mission

Losurdo begins by confronting the liberal apologetics for empire, particularly among iconic figures like John Stuart Mill, Ludwig von Mises, and more recently, Niall Ferguson. He documents how liberal thinkers repeatedly justified imperialism as a necessary step in civilizing “barbaric” peoples. Mises, for instance, went so far as to describe colonized peoples as “dangerous animals,” whose subjugation by Western powers was seen as part of a higher historical mission​

6.2 Marx’s Contradictions and Evolution

Turning to Marx, Losurdo acknowledges the ambivalence in early Marxist writings on colonialism. At times, Marx described British rule in India as brutal and destructive—but also as a necessary precondition for progress, breaking down feudal and caste-based hierarchies. This duality reflected his attempt to apply dialectical materialism to the global spread of capitalism.

However, Losurdo shows that this early position evolved. By the time of Capital and especially in later correspondence, Marx and Engels moved toward a more radical denunciation of colonial violence, highlighting the plunder, racism, and labor exploitation that underpinned the process of primitive accumulation. Lenin later extended this critique, linking colonialism explicitly to imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism.

This evolution matters: unlike liberal thinkers who rarely broke with colonial ideology, Marxism developed a self-correcting trajectory, intensifying its solidarity with anti-colonial struggles.

6.3 The Philosophical Stakes: History and Progress

The chapter critically engages with the philosophy of history underpinning both liberal and Marxist traditions. Losurdo contrasts the linear, triumphalist vision found in liberal historiography with the contradictory, dialectical approach of historical materialism.

Liberalism, he argues, views modernity as an upward movement led by the West, with others trailing behind. Marxism, despite early missteps, sees history as shaped by class struggle, domination, and resistance—not by innate racial or civilizational superiority.

Losurdo emphasizes that while Marx acknowledged some developmental effects of imperialism (e.g., infrastructure), he did so only to condemn the price paid in human lives and dignity. He famously likened progress under colonialism to a pagan idol that “drinks nectar from the skulls of the slain.”

6.4 Revisionism and the Defense of Empire

A major part of the chapter critiques contemporary historical revisionists like Paul Johnson, Ludwig von Mises, and especially Niall Ferguson, for defending colonialism by portraying it as a stabilizing and civilizing force. These thinkers, Losurdo argues, offer a neo-imperial ideology disguised as realism. Ferguson’s celebration of empire ignores the genocides, famines, and systemic dispossession that accompanied British and American expansion.

6.4 Revisionism and the Defense of Empire

A major part of the chapter critiques contemporary historical revisionists like Paul Johnson, Ludwig von Mises, and especially Niall Ferguson, for defending colonialism by portraying it as a stabilizing and civilizing force. These thinkers, Losurdo argues, offer a neo-imperial ideology disguised as realism. Ferguson’s celebration of empire ignores the genocides, famines, and systemic dispossession that accompanied British and American expansion.

Johnson and others even portray anti-colonial leaders—Mao, Castro, Gandhi, Ho Chi Minh—as dangerous fanatics, equating them with the “totalitarian” revolutionary tradition. Gandhi, astonishingly, is compared to Hitler, not for his ideology but for his supposed “fanaticism.” Such views reveal the racist undertones of liberal-conservative revisionism.

6.5 Marxist Anti-Colonialism and Global Emancipation

Losurdo defends the Marxist legacy as essential to the global decolonization movement. It was under the banner of socialism that many formerly colonized nations achieved independence. From India’s Congress left wing to Vietnam, Cuba, and Angola, socialist rhetoric and organizational structures helped overturn centuries of Western domination.

He stresses the link between revolutionary movements and demands for economic justice: land reform, literacy, public health, and collective ownership. These goals were often dismissed by liberal critics as unrealistic or authoritarian, yet they constituted real alternatives to the global order upheld by empire.

Marxist theory, by grounding its critique in economic exploitation rather than cultural backwardness, provided a framework for solidarity among colonized peoples—what Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.”

6.6 Liberal Hypocrisy and the Erosion of Rights

The chapter also examines the internal contradictions of liberal democracies, which promote civil and political rights at home while denying economic and social rights both domestically and abroad. Hayek, for example, condemned social rights (like universal healthcare or labor protections) as the seeds of “totalitarian democracy.”

This hostility to redistribution and state intervention, Losurdo argues, dovetails with the defense of colonial hierarchies. It is no coincidence that liberal defenders of empire also oppose the welfare state and seek to roll back the achievements of social democracy.

6.7 Historical Memory and the Ethics of Comparison

In conclusion, Losurdo reiterates that liberalism’s sanitized memory of itself obscures the violent foundations of modern capitalism and its global order. He insists that comparing communism and colonialism is not only valid—it is necessary. But such comparisons must be honest, contextualized, and critical of all forms of domination.

To equate the Gulag with the plantation while ignoring their historical roles is to misread both. Marxism, for all its flaws, developed as a movement against exploitation—liberalism, despite its rhetoric, often functioned as an ideology of conquest.

Chapter 7: The Black Book, the Communist Movement and the Struggle Against the Three Major Forms of Discrimination

In this powerful concluding chapter, Losurdo turns to confront one of the most influential and controversial texts of post-Cold War anti-communism: The Black Book of Communism. He unpacks its political implications and historical omissions, and defends the communist tradition—not by denying its violent episodes, but by situating it within a global and comparative framework. Central to this chapter is Losurdo’s assertion that communism, for all its crimes, played a decisive role in combating three major forms of oppression that liberal democracies long tolerated or supported: racism, colonialism, and class exploitation.

7.1 The Black Book and the Reckoning with the Past

Losurdo begins by analyzing the aims of The Black Book of Communism, which seeks to tally the victims of communist regimes across the globe. While he does not contest the need for historical reckoning, he critiques the book’s ahistorical methodology, its moral absolutism, and above all, its refusal to contextualize.

The Black Book creates a framework in which communist violence is uniquely evil, while the systemic violence of liberal regimes—slavery, colonialism, structural inequality—is either relativized or ignored altogether. Worse, Losurdo argues, the book effectively erases the victims of capitalism and colonialism from modern memory.

7.2 Rehabilitating Colonialism and the New Double Standard

Losurdo outlines how The Black Book and similar works are part of a broader effort to rehabilitate colonialism. This revisionist move reinterprets the imperial past as a benign or even noble project: a civilizing mission. In contrast, communism is judged purely by its most violent outcomes.

This double standard distorts the historical record. The West’s genocidal practices in the colonies—from the Congo to India, from the Philippines to Algeria—disappear in this narrative, while every act of repression under communist regimes is magnified and decontextualized.

In this light, Losurdo argues, The Black Book becomes less a work of historiography and more a political weapon—a text that “demonizes communism” in order to legitimize neoliberal capitalism and Western dominance.

7.3 Communism and the Fight Against Racism

A key contribution of the communist movement, Losurdo argues, was its early and consistent support for racial equality, long before liberal democracies committed to such principles. The Soviet Union condemned racial segregation in the United States at a time when Jim Crow laws were still in effect and when liberal thinkers like Tocqueville or even Mill defended race-based exclusion.

Figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and even Martin Luther King Jr. recognized that communist rhetoric about racial justice resonated deeply with Black struggles, particularly in the U.S. South. The link between anti-racism and socialism is not incidental, Losurdo insists—it reflects the commitment of Marxist ideology to universal human emancipation.

Revisionist histories that attribute racial equality solely to liberal evolution ignore the pressure applied by the Cold War and the international communist movement, which embarrassed the U.S. on the world stage and contributed to civil rights reforms.

7.4 Communism and Anti-Colonialism

Losurdo turns next to the second axis: anti-colonialism. From Lenin to Mao to Fidel Castro, communist leaders supported the global decolonization movement, often materially and ideologically. Communism appealed to colonized peoples not just because of its revolutionary energy, but because liberal powers were deeply compromised by their imperialist legacies.

He discusses how the Vietnamese, Algerian, and Cuban revolutions were supported by international communists and opposed by Western liberal democracies, which backed colonial or authoritarian regimes. The Black Book, by omitting this context, transforms the oppressed into aggressors and the imperial powers into passive victims.

Losurdo stresses that without the support of the Soviet Union and the mobilizing power of communist ideology, many anti-colonial revolutions might have failed or been crushed. Thus, the communist movement, despite its authoritarian deviations, played a crucial emancipatory role on the global stage.

7.5 Communism and the Struggle Against Class Exploitation

The third form of discrimination addressed by communism is class oppression. Losurdo points out that liberal societies long tolerated deep economic inequalities, suppressing labor movements, criminalizing unions, and violently repressing strikes.

In contrast, communist regimes—especially in their early phases—abolished feudal systems, redistributed land, expanded literacy, healthcare, and women’s rights. While these gains were often accompanied by brutal repression, Losurdo insists that they must be assessed alongside the social advances they enabled, particularly in the Global South.

This perspective does not excuse Stalinist or Maoist purges. Rather, it places them within a wider historical and political framework, one that includes not just violence, but development, equality, and sovereignty.

7.6 The Ethics of Comparison

Losurdo argues that historical comparison is essential but must be carried out rigorously and without hidden ideological agendas. To compare does not mean to equate. For example, both Nazism and communism engaged in mass repression—but they did so with radically different motivations, contexts, and results.

He warns against a pharisaic morality—one that condemns the crimes of others while absolving one’s own. Western liberalism, by ignoring its own history of slavery, genocide, and empire, practices a morality of selective outrage. Only by comparing systems honestly—acknowledging both emancipatory efforts and crimes—can we understand the 20th century in its full complexity.

7.7 History as Political Battlefield

The chapter concludes by returning to the idea that historiography is itself a political field. The Black Book is not neutral: it is part of a campaign to ensure that the collapse of communism is seen not just as a political failure but as a moral collapse of any alternative to capitalism.

Losurdo affirms the need to remember the victims of communist violence, but insists this must be balanced by memory of those who suffered under capitalism, colonialism, and racism—systems which liberal democracies tolerated, justified, and even celebrated for centuries.

He ends with a plea not for ideological vindication, but for historical justice—a way of understanding the revolutionary tradition in all its contradictions, horrors, and hopes.

Conclusion: Revolution, History, and the Struggle for Emancipation

In the final pages of War and Revolution, Domenico Losurdo delivers a sweeping indictment of the ideological constructs that shape contemporary memory of revolutions. He reiterates that modern historiography has become deeply entangled in the ideological battle between liberalism and its alternatives, especially communism. The revolutionary tradition—French, Russian, anti-colonial—is not only delegitimized by the revisionist wave, but is often reduced to a pathology or a moral deviation, devoid o…

1. The Double Standard Reaffirmed

Losurdo underscores the pervasive hypocrisy that runs through Western historical narratives. While the West celebrates the American and Glorious Revolutions as rational and restrained, it demonizes the French and Russian Revolutions for their excesses—even though the former were built on slavery, dispossession, and systemic exclusion.

The idea that “Western modernity equals freedom” is a central ideological fiction. It rests on a deeply sanitized memory of the colonial, racial, and class-based violence that accompanied Western expansion. In contrast, revolutionary efforts to overturn these systems are relentlessly judged by their failures and violence, without any account of the structures they opposed.

2. On the Myth of Moral Superiority

The West’s belief in its moral and civilizational superiority—promoted by figures like Niall Ferguson—is, in Losurdo’s view, based on flawed and selective reasoning. Ferguson attempts to defend British imperialism by contrasting it with more “barbaric” empires (like the Japanese), but this amounts to a ranking of violence, not its rejection.

Moreover, Ferguson’s nostalgic glorification of empire ignores that even the most “enlightened” empires engaged in genocide, forced labor, concentration camps, and economic strangulation. Losurdo reminds us that no amount of infrastructure, legalism, or parliamentary procedure can wash away this legacy.

3. Emancipatory Revolutions and Historical Complexity

While acknowledging that revolutions have produced immense suffering, Losurdo argues that their emancipatory role cannot be dismissed. The abolition of slavery, the end of colonial rule, the liberation of women, and the recognition of racial and national dignity were all historically tied to revolutionary upheaval. These transformations were not granted by liberalism alone—they were won through struggle, often led by those outside the liberal fold.

Communism, for all its crimes, represented an alternative vision of modernity—one that sought to expand the scope of equality and democracy beyond the narrow confines of bourgeois society. It is this aspiration, not just its failures, that revisionist historiography seeks to erase.

4. Revolution, Violence, and Moral Philosophy

Losurdo does not romanticize violence. On the contrary, he returns to Rousseau’s warning: “The blood of one man is worth more than the liberty of the whole human race.” This sentiment, which Losurdo relates to Kantian ethics, affirms the intrinsic value of the individual and the moral tragedy of instrumentalizing human life for any goal, however noble.

Yet, he argues, liberal societies have failed this very principle repeatedly. Whether in colonial repression, racialized capitalism, or wartime atrocities, liberalism too has sacrificed individuals for national, imperial, or economic ends. The critique of revolutionary violence, therefore, must not be a one-sided moral liturgy but part of a comprehensive reckoning with modernity.

5. Towards a Dialectical Understanding of History

In closing, Losurdo calls for a dialectical philosophy of history—one that sees revolution and counter-revolution, progress and regression, liberation and domination not as separate epochs, but as interlinked phenomena. Historical analysis must consider contradictions, geopolitical pressures, class interests, and the lived experience of the oppressed.

Instead of a Manichaean opposition between “freedom” and “totalitarianism,” he urges readers to see the interplay of emancipation and repression within all political systems. The past century was not the story of freedom triumphing over tyranny—it was a global conflict over the meaning of freedom itself.