ABSTRACT
An ideology, which differs in significant ways from the liberalism known to Americans in the twentieth-first century, is customarily called classical liberalism. With the success of the American and French Revolutions, the political ideas of classical liberalism came to be more and more widely discussed by educated Europeans. The fundamental economic ideas of classical liberalism derive from the work of Adam Smith. As more and more parts of Europe came under the sway of market economies and as the tide of industrialization swept across Europe and North America, the economic ideas of classical liberalism gained more adherents among the business and professional classes outside Britain. Smith's description of free trade as the system of perfect liberty highlights the close connection between the political and economic ideas of classical liberalism. The harmony of the political and economic ideas of classical liberalism is most evident in the person of economist and political philosopher John Stuart Mill.
