Christian democrat parties on the right and socialist parties on the
left. The Liberal International is a formal expression of this and
includes the US (mainly New York) Liberal Party and the UK Liberal
Democrats. An intermediate use of the term is common in the United
States, where people on the left of the two main parties are frequently
described as liberals with the expectation that they favour such causes
as internationalism, civil rights and increased government inter-
vention and spending for social welfare. Many of these ideas are
similar to those of the British Liberal Democrats. Most Liberal parties
would be viewed on the centre–left of the political spectrum, but
some, such as the Liberal Party of Australia, are considered to inhabit
the centre–right.
A helpful simplification may be to distinguish three phases in the
development of liberal ideas. The earliest phase is the establishment
of the idea of constitutional government based upon individual
rights. The United States constitution is a good expression of this. It
incorporates ideas such as government being based on the consent of
the governed, the constitution as a government of laws not of men,
and the entrenchment of individual rights in the constitution. These
are all a systematic expression of the American colonies’ inheritance
of the British parliamentary constitutional tradition, and the
Founding Fathers explicitly referred to the writings of Locke and to
Montesquieu’s [1688–1755] interpretation of the British constitution
(the Separation of Powers) (see Chapter 7, pp. 182–183).
In the second phase, nineteenth-century liberal writers like
Bentham and the Mills (James and his son John Stuart) developed the
democratic implications of earlier statements and the experiences of
earlier generations. The link with capitalism was also made explicit in
a defence of doctrines of free trade and the desirability of a minimal
state, building upon the writings of economists such as Adam Smith
[1723–1790] and Ricardo [1772–1823]. In Britain, and on the Con-
tinent, liberals increasingly were seen as the party of the new
modernising manufacturing elite opposed to the more conservative, if
not ‘feudal’, landed gentry. In both Europe and North America
liberals increasingly were the party of political reform and universal
suffrage.
A distinctive feature of liberalism has been an emphasis on poli-
tical freedom, both in the sense of a support of national self-
determination and, particularly, in the sense of the freedom of the90 IDEOLOGIES