Where does Liberalism come from?

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

[ this post was originally published on a weblog called What Is Liberalism ]

Liberalism, as a written intellectual tradition, begins with John Locke in the late 1600s. The interesting thing about Locke is that he does not start his career as a liberal. Rather, like England itself, he grows more liberal over the period from 1660 to 1688. His growing appreciation of tolerance grew from witnessing the harm that intolerance did to his country. Before 1660, like many middle class British citizens, he was tired of what he felt was the religious chaos of the English Revolution, and he initially welcomed the Restoration of the King in 1660, and he initially seemed to think that it was good for the government to try to enforce a uniformity of religious views. But he saw that the use of force did nothing to win the religious dissenters over to the Anglican church, yet the use of force to suppress religious dissent brought horrible consequences in terms of civil strife. He, and so many others of his generation, saw many good people arrested and tortured and sometimes killed because of their religious views. What seemed to him like a good idea in 1660 (the government enforcing religious uniformity) was outlawed in 1688, with Locke’s active support. By then, Locke had come round to the view that all men were born free, and joined together into societies for mutual benefit, and held with them, after they joined societies, certain inalienable rights, which no government could ever take away or abridge. And among these rights was freedom of thought in religious matters.

I’ve been reading over John Locke’s “Second Treatise of Government”, edited by C. B. Macpherson, and I came across this passaged, which strikes as the starting point for the whole liberal tradition (page 52):

Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of his estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent. The only way whereby any one divests himself of his natural liberty, and puts on the bonds of civil society, is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties, and a greater security against any, that are not of it. This any number of men may do, because it injures not the freedom of the rest; they are let as they were in the liberty of the state of nature. When any number of men have so consented to make one community or government, they are thereby presently incorporated, and make one body politic, wherein the majority have a right to act and conclude the rest.

Source