The question of liberalism and its relationship with imperial practices has captured the interest of political theorists, with most identifying an anthropological category (rationality) as the basis for exclusion. In this thinking, liberal imperialism emerges as a pedagogical tool, intervening in non-European spaces in order to produce a certain kind of liberal subject. In this paper, I outline another liberal mode by which the space for imperialism is opened, one not concerned with the actualization of reason but with making human life and material things productive. I argue that the concepts of liberal political economy, and specifically Lockean theories of property and the labor theory of value, are critical to understanding how a discourse on individual freedom can justify practices of domination. As such, this paper explores liberal political economists – Smith, Ricardo, Locke – to stake a critique of liberalism, one that refuses contemporary boundaries between politics and economics.
