Liberalism

Liberalism is a political ideology centred on protecting individual freedom and limiting the powers of government, spanning both political and economic dimensions of public life. Its legitimacy claim is that government is rightful only insofar as it rests on the consent of the governed, exercised through representative institutions and constrained by law, protecting a private sphere of individual rights that political authority may not properly invade. On property, classical liberalism favours private ownership and free exchange as extensions of the same individual rights that ground its politics, though liberal traditions have differed sharply since the early twentieth century over how far government may regulate markets or redistribute income without violating those rights, a division that produced social liberalism and, later, libertarianism as distinct currents within the broader tradition. Its intellectual roots are often traced to thinkers such as John Locke and Adam Smith, and the term itself took on a specifically political meaning in the early nineteenth century. The atlas records no single honest founding year for liberalism, since its ideas developed independently across multiple thinkers and countries over more than a century rather than being founded at one moment or in one text.