Classical liberalism

Era: Enlightenment – 19th c.
Key figures: John Locke · Adam Smith · John Stuart Mill · Benjamin Constant

The individual, with rights that precede the state, is the basic political unit; government is limited, answerable to the governed, and exists to protect liberty. Freedom under the rule of law, not any single vision of the good life, is the organising value.

Signature commitments

Individuals have rights — to life, liberty, and property — that governments exist to protect, not to grant.
Legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed and is limited by law and by those rights.
The harm principle: your liberty may be constrained only to prevent harm to others, not for your 'own good.'

Where it stands on the axes

The nature of reality: Takes no fixed position. A political philosophy, metaphysically neutral — Locke had his own empiricist metaphysics, but liberalism as a doctrine doesn't require it.
How we knowcontested: Empiricist. A fallibilist, empiricist temperament — Lockean empiricism, and Mill's defence of free discussion as the way error is corrected in a 'marketplace of ideas.'
What makes an action rightcontested: Takes no fixed position. Split at the root: a natural-rights (duty-based) wing (Locke) and a utilitarian (consequentialist) wing (Bentham, Mill) both count as liberal.
Where meaning comes from: Takes no fixed position. Deliberately neutral about the good life: the state stays silent on life's meaning and leaves each person to choose their own ends.
What people are like underneathcontested: Constrained. Sowell's 'constrained vision': human nature is fixed enough that institutions (checks and balances, the invisible hand) must channel self-interest rather than perfect it.
Free will: Takes no fixed position. Concerns political liberty, not the metaphysics of the will — its real commitments live on the society and authority axes, not here.
The individual and the group: Individualist. The paradigm: the individual as the basic unit, bearer of rights, served by (not subordinate to) the group.
How power should be arrangedcontested: Egalitarian. Equality before the law, consent of the governed, anti-absolutism — though it tolerates the economic hierarchies a free market produces.
How change should happencontested: Reform. Constitutional, gradual, rule-of-law reform by temperament — with revolutionary founding moments (1688, 1776) in its lineage.

Marked readings are ones serious scholars dispute; the note says how. Traditions are living arguments, not fixed doctrines.

Common misreadings

That 'classical liberalism' is the same as contemporary American 'liberal' politics — historically it's closer to the limited-government tradition that both modern liberals and libertarians draw on.
That it means atomised, selfish individualism — Smith, who wrote the 'invisible hand,' also wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments on sympathy as the basis of society.

Where a reader might diverge

If you think the community or nation, not the individual, is the basic unit whose good comes first, you diverge from liberal individualism.
If you'd have the state actively promote a particular vision of the good life, you part with liberal neutrality.

A challenge to it

The communitarian critic (Sandel, MacIntyre): The 'unencumbered self' that chooses its ends from nowhere is a fiction: real people are constituted by communities, histories, and attachments they never chose — so a politics built on that abstract individual misdescribes us and corrodes the very bonds it depends on.

In their own words

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), ch. IMill's 'harm principle,' the founding statement of liberal limits on coercion.

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