According to the political philosophy known as liberalism, government ideally is established in order to secure freedom, by defending men and women from aggressions of others. Although this viewpoint is sometimes called "classical liberalism," the qualifier "classical" is really redundant, since the other ideologies that are occasionally and mistakenly identified as "liberal" differ fundamentally in kind from true liberalism and therefore cannot be integrated with it into a well-formed concept (cf. p. 4.11:126, including the "Details" box). In order better to understand liberal philosophy, it will be helpful to review its historical context here.

The term "liberal," deriving etymologically from the word "liberty," was not used until the time of the Napoleonic empire, when it was first adopted by certain opponents of that régime on the European continent. The ideas subsumed under liberalism, however, are older, rooted in the philosophical explorations of Enlightenment thinkers of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For our purposes, therefore, we can consider these predecessors to constitute the advanced wing of the liberal movement.     

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