ABSTRACT
The aristocratic liberals stress three things in their response to nineteenth-century culture, namely: liberty, individuality, and diversity. Humanism is a term that requires considerable description to be meaningful. One of the things that distinguished the aristocratic liberals and made them modern humanists was their rejection of the commensurability of the present and the classical past. Starting from the Archimedean point of human nature, modern humanism articulated itself through chosen aspects of humanist language—the sociology of liberty, the value of participation, the evils of the commercial spirit and philistine bourgeois society. At the same time it differentiated itself from older humanisms by adopting a number of modern attitudes and ideas, derived largely from the Enlightenment. Modern humanism was the basis of the aristocratic liberals' perspective. The aristocratic liberals valued ancient literature and philosophy because it embodied crucial elements of their own ideals. The aristocratic liberals' understanding of diversity can be related to their historicism.
