Liberal universalism developed historically alongside imperialism and slavery.

Evidence

In particular, the fact that liberalism, imperialism, and slavery historically developed together, that Locke was involved in American colonial enterprise, that he defends the priority of European agrarian cultivation, are grounds for indictment of him as an ideologist of the expropriation or enslavement of native peoples. This postcolonial critique has been the loudest. Post-liberal feminists, meanwhile, hold that Locke confines women to the private sphere, and that the Lockean state is limited to consenting men in public. These attacks, which followed in the wake of the Marxian unmasking of Locke as a theorist of ‘possessive individualism’, who served ‘bourgeois capitalism’, commonly take the form of elevating Locke into a surrogate of ‘the Enlightenment project’, doubtful though such a construct is. — , Second Treatise of Government and A…, 57

Categorization

• QUESTION: Is ‘the Enlightenment project’ itself a coherent object, or a construct retrofitted by both its defenders and its postcolonial critics?
• XREF: connects to: Liberal universalism has long coexisted with justifying empire; Western universalism functions as imperialism from the perspective of non-Western societies — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 489; Imperialism is the necessary logical consequence of cultural universalism. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 860 (+16 more)

Broader Connections

• Liberal universalism has long coexisted with justifying empire #corroborates (0.95)
• Cultural universalism logically demands imperial imposition to be realized #expands (0.90)
• Liberal rights discourse has historically been used to justify imperial domination and war. #corroborates (0.90)
• Liberal rights discourse has historically justified rather than opposed empire #corroborates (0.88) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 72
• Western imperial particularism was disguised as universal civilization #expands (0.88) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 372
• Western universalism functions as imperialism from the perspective of non-Western societies #corroborates (0.85) — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 489
• Nineteenth-century Europe traded Enlightenment universalism for imperialist superiority #corroborates (0.85) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 119
• Liberal universalism requires violence against the unredeemed outside world #corroborates (0.85) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 293
• Liberalism historically promoted racial reasoning and racist exclusions as central to state formation. #expands (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1654
• Imperialism is the necessary logical consequence of cultural universalism. #complicates (0.80) — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 860
• Non-Western peoples read Western universalism as imperialism and threat #corroborates (0.80)
• Colonial difference can license liberality while liberal sympathy can license repression #complicates (0.80) — Julia Stephens, The Phantom Wahhabi, 202
• Colonization and slavery produced the unified black and Asian racial categories #complicates (0.75)
• Imperialism normalized unprecedented hybrid and race-based arrangements. #complicates (0.75)
• Liberalism historically frames empire as benevolent uplift #complicates (0.70)