ABSTRACT
So much has been written about liberalism that a thoroughgoing definition would be tedious to attempt, and would be a pedantic way to treat any reader stout enough to journey this far. Nonetheless, a few words of clarification may be useful. The word liberalism here means what it commonly does in political theory: the tradition of thought, customarily begun with Hobbes, that has attempted to address philosophy’s failure to reach consensus on the nature of the good (most convincingly demonstrated by the religious wars that followed the Protestant Reformation, including the English Revolution) with a system based on contract. At this level of abstraction, virtually all political discourse in the City of Gold is liberal. Consequently, liberalism as used here indicates no particular partisan bent. Liberal is not here used in the sense of American political discourse, to identify people who suspect the market and therefore support a strong state with redistributive tendencies, although, as discussed below, liberalism entails certain beliefs about the state. Nor is liberal meant in the sense commonly encountered in Europe, to denominate people who believe in a limited state and a strong market.
