ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to relate aristocratic liberalism to European liberalism as a whole, and makes suggestions about the types, meanings, and boundary lines of European liberalism in between 1830–1870. Liberalism, a movement that united a wide diversity of values and social analyses and encompassed numerous rhetorics and discourses, is best grasped as a coherent and identifiable entity in the domain of politics. A good deal of the liberal minimum program in the period 1830–1870 is not, strictly speaking, political. Indeed, for some types of liberal discourse political participation is very much a secondary aspiration compared to such legal and economic goals as equality before the law and the free use of private property. Liberalism in the period 1830–1870 is separated from democracy and socialism on the one hand and conservatism on the other by its rejection of universal suffrage and by its insistence on a minimum program that includes a government responsible to public opinion, among other things.
