CHAPTER TWENTY
LIBERALISM
I
§ 177.
LIBERALISM as a historical and philosophical trend and political system arose in opposition to theocracy. Characteristically, the name "liberal." originated in the land of the inquisition.
As an opposition to theocracy, liberalism strives to secure the secularisation of churches and of all institutions. To this extent it has in practice always supported an extension of the powers of the state, despite its opposition to state absolutism. Liberalism was a struggle against two evils. Regarding the state and its omnipotence as the lesser evil of the two, liberalism upheld the state. This peculiar duplex attitude has often been momentous for the liberals.
Liberalism manifested itself as rationalism; deism, the philosophy of enlightenment, freethinking, are of the essence of liberalism. Liberalism was an attempt, with the aid of authorship and journalism, to organise the so-called sound human reason as a public authority. Locke may be regarded as the first interpreter and systematiser of liberalism; during the eighteenth century, Voltaire and the encyclopaedists were the representatives of liberalism in the philosophic field.
To a considerable extent, even the churches adopted liberalism. With Protestantism, came the epoch of rationalist theology; upon the Catholic side, Febronianism originated, gallicanism was strengthened, and above all the dissolution of the Jesuit order by the pope in the year 1773 was of the greatest symptomatic significance.
Ethically, eighteenth century liberalism was guided by the humanitarian ideal. In this connection we think of Rousseau and Voltaire, of Lessing and Herder, of most of the noted belletristic writers of the day, and of the moral
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