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Notes -
Classical Liberalism was doomed from the start. It’s basically unilateral disarmament in the face of opposition and therefore fails in the face of resistance. The ideology is that everyone lays down together and has debates, but don’t try to take power to claim victory. This just means you aren’t seeking power, and says nothing about your enemies. To the contrary, they will seek power, and they will use that power once they have it.
The kinds of liberalism we’ve been used to in the past only worked on gentleman’s agreements, and that only works as long as both gentlemen are in broad agreement on the issues. Once it becomes clear they disagree on substance, the power game begins in earnest.
I'm wondering why it got off the ground then. Few remember but it was very explicitly a banned ideology in continental Europe before it won.
The argument I usually see, including from some defenders of liberalism, is that it's due to the Thirty Years' War. Specifically, that the Peace of Westphalia was a pragmatic decision, rather than a principled one, motivated by the massive bloodshed and destruction producing only stalemate. Further, cuius regio, eius religio only ended the religious wars as external, interstate conflicts. There was still plenty of religious conflict within many states — albeit less bloody, due to smaller scale; and much shorter, due to the (increasingly centralized) state being on one side. These conflicts, in turn, became a problem due to the economic changes Europe was undergoing, with mercantilism evolving toward capitalism (intolerance of Catholic or Protestant minorities is bad for business).
When it comes to choosing or building ideologies, people tend to find ways to justify and rationalize the things they're already doing. Thus, the need to find an ideology that justified not invading your heretic neighbors to impose the true faith, not oppressing minority denominations too hard; as well as all the changes in the structure of government (driven in turn by changes in military technology — the end of castles was the end of feudalism proper, and states with labor-intensive militaries are generally more democratic than those with more capital-intensive ones) and economics. Liberalism provided just that. (Limited) religious tolerance went from an unprincipled, pragmatic accommodation with the realities on the ground to a clear application of moral and political principles.
(Of course, it then turns out that the kind of religious pluralism envisioned has ultimately proved unworkable in more than one way.)
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Classical liberalism emerged out of centuries of vicious religious conflict as a truce between warring parties that had just beaten each other to a bloody pulp and were too tired to continue, and functioned so long as a cultural memory of that struggle endured that was strong enough to put down any would-be challengers. Now that those lessons have been forgotten (because [the other side] violated the truce first, everyone says) they will have to be re-learned the hard way.
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