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To What Extent Has Modern Liberalism Departed from Classical Liberalism

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Liberalism is a political ideology based on the principle of liberality and equality. It is an ideology that came about during the age of enlightenment and was popular among political philosophers and economists, John Locke being one of them. Locke is a man who is often accredited with founding Liberalism, he argued that “each man has a natural right to life, liberty and property” while adding that governments “must not violate these rights based on the social contract”. Revolutions such as the Glorious Revolution in the UK or the French revolution used liberalist ideas to justify overthrowing what they considered to be tyrannical governments. The main core themes of liberalism are individualism, freedom, justice, tolerance and reason.
Individualism is the social theory favouring freedom of action for individuals over collective or state control. In classical liberalism it is valued as one of the most important core themes of liberalism.
Classical liberals believe in egoistical individualism, this is to say that they believe humans to be ‘rationally self-interested’ creatures. This therefore means that society should be considered as atomistic; that it is composed of a lot of individuals rather than it being one whole. Classical liberals also believe in negative freedom. This means that they believe in allowing people to be free be simply leaving them alone, which opposes positive freedom in which the government enables people to be free by giving them the means to do so. A third belief that liberals have regarding the individual is that the state is regarded as a ‘necessary evil’. This means that classical liberals believe the state should only exist in order to lay down the law and keep order, every other form of intervention should be kept to a minimum so as to keep individual freedom at a maximum.
Modern liberals differ greatly on this view of individualism.

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