Words such as liberal, liberty, libertarian and libertine all trace their history to the Latin liber, which means "free". One of the first recorded instances of the word liberal occurs in 1375, when it was used to describe the

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Liberalism—both as a political current and an intellectual tradition—is mostly a modern phenomenon that started in the 17th century, although some liberal philosophical ideas had

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Liberalism has drawn both criticism and support in its history from various ideological groups. Less friendly to the goals of liberalism has

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• The American Prospect, an American political magazine that backs social liberal policies
• Constitutional liberalism

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Isolated strands of liberal thought had existed in Western philosophy since the Ancient Greeks and in Eastern philosophy since the Song and Ming period. These ideas were first drawn together and systematized as a distinct ideology, by the English philosopher

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