Classical

Classical liberalism is a term used to describe the following: more...

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• the philosophy developed by early liberals from the Enlightenment until John Stuart Mill
• the philosophy developed by early liberals from the Age of Enlightenment until John Stuart Mill and then revived in the 20th century by Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman.
• libertarianism, which libertarians regard as being in accordance with the views of early liberals.

This entry is about the political philosophy termed "classical liberalism."

Classical liberalism is a political philosophy that supports individual rights as pre-existing the state, a government that exists to protect those moral rights, ensured by a constitution that protects individual autonomy from other individuals and governmental power, private property, and a laissez-faire economic policy. Many elements of this ideology developed in the 17th and 18th centuries. As such, it is often seen as being the natural ideology of the industrial revolution and its subsequent capitalist system. The early liberal figures that libertarians now describe as their fellow "classical liberals" rejected many foundational assumptions which dominated most earlier theories of government, such as the Divine Right of Kings, hereditary status, and established religion, and focuses on individual freedom, reason, justice and tolerance.. Such thinkers and their ideas helped to inspire the American Revolution and French Revolution.

Overview

Classical liberals place a particular emphasis on the sovereignty of the individual, with private property rights being seen as essential to individual liberty. This forms the philosophical basis for laissez-faire public policy. The ideology of classical liberals is "not necessarily a democratic doctrine, for there is nothing in the bare idea of majority rule to show that majorities will always respect the rights of property or maintain rule of law."For example, James Madison argued for a constitutional republic, with protections for individual liberty, over a pure democracy reasoning that in a pure democracy, a "common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party."

Classical liberals are strong supporters of universal publicly-funded education.} For instance Thomas Jefferson introduced a Bill For Universal Education at the Public Expense and a Bill for a more general diffusion of learning. Thomas Paine, probably the most influential liberal writer of his era, argued that public education had many benefits: "not only the poverty of the parents will be relieved, but ignorance will be banished from the rising generation, and the number of poor will hereafter become less, because their abilities, by the aid of education, will be greater."

Read more at Wikipedia.org