HY 106 Lecture Notes - Lecture 32: Montesquieu, Classical Liberalism, Toleration
Chapter 21: The Revolution in Politics (1775 – 1815)
Liberty
1. Introduction
1. Two ideas fueled the revolutionary period in the world: liberty and
equality
2. The call for liberty was first of all a call for individual human rights and
liberals of the revolutionary era protested the way the most enlightened
monarchs regulated what people wrote and believed (demanded an end
to censorship, written and spoken)
1. Called for a new government and believed that the people were
sovereign and alone had the authority to make laws limiting the
individual’s freedom of action
2. Liberals believed that every nation, every ethnic group, had this right
of self-determination and thus a right to form a free nation
3. Liberals argued, in theory, all citizens should have identical rights and
civil liberties and above all, the nobility had no right to special privileges
based on birth
4. Most eighteenth-century liberals were men and generally shared with
other men the belief that equality between men and women was neither
practical nor desirable
1. Men of the French Revolution limited formal political rights of
women, the right to vote, to run for office, to participate in
government
2. Liberals never believed that everyone should be equal economically
3. The essential point was that everyone should legally have an equal
chance
5. The economic inequality based on artificial legal distinctions were
criticized by liberals, not economic inequality itself
2.
3. The Roots of Liberalism
1. The ideas of liberty and equality had deep roots in Western history; the
ancient Greeks and the Judeo-Christian tradition had affirmed for
hundreds of years the sanctity and value of the individual human being
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