Classical liberalism
Peak influence 1776–1870
Core claim
Individuals are the authors of their own ends, and a government's only warrant is to protect that authorship — chiefly through property, contract and equality before the law.
What it wants the state to do
Wants courts, police, defence, enforceable contracts and a stable currency. Wants the state out of prices, guilds, established churches, censorship and the licensing of trades. Taxation is legitimate but should be low, general and not designed to level outcomes.
Historical success case
Britain's 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws and the free-trade era that followed, which broke an aristocratic rent on food prices and coincided with a sustained rise in real wages.
Historical failure mode
The same period's factory conditions and the Irish famine response, where a doctrinal refusal to interfere in markets left a formally free population without recourse — the origin of the charge that formal liberty without material floor is thin.
Nearby traditions
Minarchism takes the same premises further; social liberalism keeps the premises and concludes the state must underwrite capability, not just protect liberty.
Common mix-up
It is not a synonym for present-day conservatism or for laissez-faire absolutism. Smith argued for public works, public schooling and banking regulation; Mill for inheritance taxation. Treating the tradition as anti-state by definition edits its founders.
Coordinates
| Axis | Value | Reads as |
|---|---|---|
| Identity | +0.05 | balanced |
| Pace | +0.00 | balanced |
| Economic | +0.72 | 0.72 toward Individual / market |
| Authority | -0.62 | 0.62 toward Liberty |
| Nation | -0.30 | 0.30 toward Cosmopolitan |
| Democracy | -0.45 | 0.45 toward Democratic |
| Religion | -0.50 | 0.50 toward Secular |
| Technology | +0.35 | 0.35 toward Transhumanist |
| Ecology | -0.50 | 0.50 toward Growth |
| Military | -0.35 | 0.35 toward Non-intervention |
| Class | -0.50 | 0.50 toward Harmony |
| Rationalism | -0.30 | 0.30 toward Sceptical |