ABSTRACT
The one tradition, much older than the name ‘liberalism’, traces back to classical antiquity and took its modern form during the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries as the political doctrines of the English Whigs. The basic principles from which the Old Whigs fashioned their evolutionary liberalism have a long pre-history. The Greek ideals of liberty were transmitted to the moderns chiefly through the writings of Roman authors. The early moderns could draw also on a tradition of liberty under the law which had been preserved through the Middle Ages and was extinguished on the Continent only at the beginning of the modern era by the rise of absolute monarchy. The beginnings of a liberal movement in Britain were soon interrupted by a reaction against the French Revolution and a distrust of its admirers in England, who endeavoured to import to England the ideas of Continental or constructivist liberalism.
