Reviving the Full Spirit of Classical Liberalism: Individual Liberty Plus Community Building In recent years, there has been an apparent revival in popularity of 'classical liberalism'. The ideology of great 18th and 19th century thinkers like John Locke, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill appears to have become fashionable once again. However, it also appears that there is no clear consensus on what 'classical liberal' means in the context of the 21st century. The term has been adopted by minarchist libertarians, moderate conservatives, and old-school JFKstyle (i.e. pre-1968) liberals alike, people who clearly have very different political views on certain important matters. It is clear that there is no unified definition of 'classical liberalism' in the 21st century.
And to a large extent, that's only to be expected. Political and economic conditions today are very different from back in the 19th century, and it's practically impossible to put the ideas of thinkers like Smith or Mill directly into practice in today's context. What people are doing in each case is basically extracting what they see as the most important elements of classical liberal thinking, and applying those elements in contemporary political practice. And it's just natural that different people would see different parts of the classical liberal heritage as more (or less) important than the other parts, which would cause great differences in how they 36
