“Abolition Revolution”: Losurdo, Abolitionism, and the Critique of European Philosophy

To date, nearly all the scholarship on Domenico Losurdo focuses on his critical attitudes towards nineteenth century classical German philosophy, towards Western Marxism, or towards the liberal tradition. Much of this scholarship fails to acknowledge the significance of two related traditions, which constitute the foundations of Losurdo’s anti-imperialist thought: the twentieth century anticolonial tradition (including Maoism) and the nineteenth century abolitionist tradition. This article will focus on the latter tradition, as it is a dimension of Losurdo entirely unexplored. This article, written from the standpoint of a historian of abolitionism, will reveal the rather deep knowledge of abolitionism which lay at the heart of Losurdo’s entire philosophical project. Abolitionism, this article argues, shaped Losurdo’s methodology, shaped his critique of Western critical theory and liberalism, and finally, shaped his historical-materialist understanding of the place of anti-imperialism within the global class struggle. By showing Losurdo’s debt to abolitionist thinkers (whom he read with unusual thoroughness), this article will reveal Losurdo’s very close alignments with an array of anticolonial thinkers, such as Du Bois, Eric Williams, and Kwame Nkrumah (among others), who all took deep inspiration from abolitionism.