Items21The creator’s order
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John LockeBorn 29 Aug 1632Locke's Second Treatise (1689) grounded government in the consent of people with natural rights to life, liberty and property, and justified resistance when rulers break that trust. His Letter Concerning Toleration argued for religious freedom, yet excluded Catholics and atheists, a limit critics…0i - 2
MontesquieuBorn 18 Jan 1689The Spirit of the Laws (1748) argued that liberty depends on dividing power between legislative, executive and judicial branches so that "power checks power". Rather than natural rights, Montesquieu stressed institutions and social conditions, a different route to freedom that shaped the US…0i - 3
Thomas PaineBorn 9 Feb 1737Paine's Rights of Man (1791) answered Burke by insisting each generation has the right to remake its government, and its second part proposed old-age pensions and child allowances funded by taxation. That made him an early bridge between rights talk and welfare provision.0i - 4
Mary WollstonecraftBorn 27 Apr 1759Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) turned the revolutionary language of rights and reason against those who denied them to women, arguing that apparent female inferiority came from denied education. It forced liberalism to ask who counted as a rights-bearer.0i - 5
Immanuel KantBorn 22 Apr 1724Kant held that persons must be treated as ends, never merely as means, and that a just state secures the equal freedom of each under universal law. That idea of dignity runs through later human rights documents and Rawls's theory, though Kant himself reserved active citizenship for economically…0i - 6
Benjamin ConstantBorn 25 Oct 1767Constant's 1819 lecture on "the liberty of the ancients compared with that of the moderns" distinguished taking part in collective decisions from enjoying a protected private life, warning that the French revolutionaries sacrificed the second to the first. Berlin's later two concepts of liberty…0i - 7
Alexis de TocquevilleBorn 29 Jul 1805Democracy in America (1835 and 1840) admired American self-government and associations but warned of a "tyranny of the majority" and a soft despotism in which a caring state makes citizens passive. Tocqueville gives liberals a reason to fear equality's side effects as well as its enemies.0i - 8
John Stuart MillBorn 20 May 1806On Liberty (1859) set out the harm principle: the state and society may restrict a person only to prevent harm to others, not for their own good, and free speech matters because suppressed opinions may be true. The Subjection of Women (1869), shaped with Harriet Taylor, extended the argument to…0i - 9
T. H. GreenBorn 7 Apr 1836The Oxford idealist argued that freedom is a positive power to do things worth doing, not merely the absence of restraint, so the state may act on education, housing and drink to make freedom real. Green's lectures turned British liberalism towards social reform.0i - 10
Leonard HobhouseBorn 8 Sept 1864Hobhouse's Liberalism (1911) gave the New Liberal case for old-age pensions, national insurance and progressive taxation as conditions of genuine liberty, written as the Asquith government introduced them. It shows where "liberal" in Britain and "liberal" in the United States began to mean similar…0i
