Liberalism
By definition, a liberal is one who believes in liberty, but because different people at different times have meant different things by liberty, "liberalism" is correspondingly ambiguous. The word was first heard in a political sense in England in the early nineteenth century, when "liberals" were thus named by their Tory opponents. Indeed, they were first called liberales, and the Spanish form was used "with the intention of suggesting that the principles of those politicians were un-English" (see Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). This was ironical, since the word liberal had been adopted by the Spaniards for policies they regarded as essentially English—that is, the Lockean principles of constitutional monarchy, parliamentary government, and the rights of man. In any event, the Englishmen who were called liberals (though as late as 1816 Robert Southey was still calling them liberales) rejoiced in the name, and what was intended to be a pejorative quickly proved to have a distinctly pleasing flavor, perhaps partly because its other significance, the Shakespearean sense of liberal as "gross" or "licentious," had given way to the modern sense of liberal as "bountiful," "generous," or "open-hearted."
English Liberalism
Traditional English liberalism has rested on a fairly simple concept of liberty—namely, that of freedom from the constraints of the state.
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