THE CONTRADICTIONS BETWEEN LIBERALISM'S RHETORIC AND LIBERALISM'S APPLICATIONS.

Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1999) ("In its theoretical vision, liberalism, from the seventeenth century to the present, has prided itself on its universality and politically inclusionary character. And yet, when viewed as a historical phenomenon, the period of liberal history is unmistakably marked by the systematic and sustained political exclusion of various groups and 'types' of people. The universality of freedom and derivative political institutions identified with the provenance of liberalism is denied in the protracted history with which liberalism is similarly linked. Perhaps liberal theory and liberal history are ships passing in the night, spurred on by unrelated imperatives and destinations. Perhaps reality--and, as such, history-- always betrays the pristine motives of theory. Putting aside such possibilities, something about the inclusionary pretensions of liberal theory and the exclusionary effects of liberal practices needs to be explained." "One needs to account for how a set of ideas that professed, at a fundamental level, to include as its political referent a universal constituency nevertheless spawned practices that were either predicated on or directed at the political marginalization of various people. More specially, one must consider whether the exclusionary thrust of liberal history stems from the misapprehension of the generative basis of liberal universalism or whether, in contrast, liberal history projects with greater focus and onto a larger canvas the theoretically veiled and qualified truth of liberal universalism. Despite the enormous contrariety between the profession of political universality and the history of political exclusion, the later may in fact elaborate the truth and ambivalence of the former." Id. at 46-47. In short, liberalism's ideals and rhetoric may have been bigger than liberalism's reality and actions. Certainly food for thought in reconsidering liberal thought in America.).