ABSTRACT
In its fitful development after 1776, such a "liberalism," from a liberalitas long understood by the slave-holding ancients as "the leading characteristic of a non-slavish person," came to mean the theory of a society consisting entirely of free people. In desperate summary for you Americans, Liberalism 1.0 is Democratic in social policy and Republican in economic policy and non-interventionist in foreign policy. To use a surprising word, we liberals, whether plain 1.0 or humane, rely chiefly on a much-misunderstood "rhetoric," despised by the hard men of the seventeenth century such as Bacon and Hobbes and Spinoza, but a practice anciently fitted to a democratic society. In northwestern Europe a century or so after Rumbold, the idea that no man was born marked of God above another was becoming a commonplace, at any rate among Old Whigs and radicals. The hubris of industrial planning is a very old story. An instance was the Europe-wide mercantilism that Adam Smith deprecated.
