OTOH they are closer to the old progressives
How so?
Remember that "closer" doesn't automatically imply close. My comment is more about the distance between "liberal" meaning social democrat, and "liberal" in the sense that Ludwig von Mises, David Ricardo, Thomas Jefferson, or John Locke might have used the term.
Hmm this is sort of interesting -
"Friedrich Hayek identified two different traditions within classical liberalism: the "British tradition" and the "French tradition". Hayek saw the British philosophers David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Josiah Tucker, Edmund Burke and William Paley as representative of a tradition that articulated beliefs in empiricism, the common law, and in traditions and institutions which had spontaneously evolved but were imperfectly understood. The French tradition included Rousseau, Condorcet, the Encyclopedists and the Physiocrats. This tradition believed in rationalism and the unlimited powers of reason, and sometimes showed hostility to tradition and religion. Hayek conceded that the national labels did not exactly correspond to those belonging to each tradition: Hayek saw the Frenchmen Montesquieu, Constant and Tocqueville as belonging to the "British tradition" and the British Thomas Hobbes, Godwin, Priestley, Richard Price and Thomas Paine as belonging to the "French tradition".[28] Hayek also rejected the label "laissez faire" as originating from the French tradition and alien to the beliefs of Hume, Smith and Burke."
en.wikipedia.org
Current liberals are not really close to "the French tradition", but its "the British tradition" I was thinking of when I was describing how far modern American "liberals" are from people who used to be considered liberals. |
