The
history of liberalism, I believe, makes it clear that liberalism's underlying spirit is commitment to improving the lives of people through social action.
Scholarship on the
history of liberalism is thriving, especially inquiries into the theoretical foundations of the modern liberal order.
One of his major claims in this work is that the
history of liberalism and that of the city are one and the same because the city, as a space of self-determined--and self-limited--flows, was both the precondition for the constitution of liberal subjectivity and its most characteristic expression.
Making sense of the
history of liberalism has become as much a part of liberal thought as the more substantive analyses of power and institutions with which it traditionally has been occupied.
So it seemed to me that a radicalism, a materialism, a Marxism, that was elaborated on a weak and polemical reading of the complex and rich
history of liberalism was not a radicalism worth having much truck with.
In An Intellectual
History of Liberalism (1994), Manent emphasizes the fact that the "theological-political problem" in Europe did not arise in a homogeneous city-state or empire but rather out of the tension between universal Christian churches and particular absolutist monarchies.
Following in the footsteps of Robert Wiebe, Ellis Hawley, and Louis Galambos, Stone traces the
history of liberalism through the New Deal.
Edmund Fawcett, who wrote for The Economist for more than three decades, serves up a scholarly study of the
history of liberalism. He traces the idea and its politics from its beginnings in the 1830s with Karl Marx in Germany, Ralph Waldo Emerson in the U.S., and Alexis deTocqueville in France, driven by the pressure of industrialization and social change, to the present.