The Relationship between Conservatism and Liberalism: It's Complicated!

Submitted by Martin J. Malliet (Belgium), Aug 11, 2018 at 09:03

I would recommend this article by Frank van Dun on Liberalism's Hidden History (abstract):

"Liberalism is rooted historically in the stateless civilization of the Middle Ages and its opposition to the rise of the modern State in 16th century. Although its principal theoreticians (e.g Locke, Rousseau, Mill) opposed the "modern" Hobbesian theory of the Leviathan State, they all too uncritically accepted the anthropological and theological premises of the Renaissance (with its adulation of the Roman Empire, a civilization built on conquest), the Reformation (with its reduction of the human conscience to a politically irrelevant "private" conviction) and the Enlightenment (with its unreasoned contempt for all things medieval). Forgetting the medieval institutions that made a stateless civilization possible, liberals became intellectual hostages to the belief that faith in force needs to be institutionalized in the State, if the world is to be held together. They fell prey to the illusion that they could preserve liberty by taming the State or even control and use it to liberate and empower individuals."

http://revue-arguments.com/articles/index.php?id=31

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