Benjamin Constant, The Road to Bonapartism, some Cromwell and some Marx

As regular readers know I think it’s a mistake to treat Locke as the founder of liberalism. To do so, however, is to devalue toleration as originating and intrinsic to liberalism. I have started to promote Adam Smith (alongside William Robertson) as the first to use ‘liberal’ in a modern sense and this allows one to emphasize liberalism as an ameliorati…