Finally, liberalism is flawed. It has been capacious enough both to advance universal human rights and to accommodate slavery and the denial of women’s right to vote. The technological progress valued by liberals has given humanity horrible weapons of war and the power to annihilate itself. Yet liberalism also inducted an era of co-operation among democracies after the second world war, including the relatively free movement of goods, capital and people across borders.
There is no one starting point in the history of liberalism. But England, in 1688, at the beginning of the (bloodless but) Glorious Revolution, is as good a place and time as any. The flight of James II gave Parliament the opportunity to set a new relationship with the monarchy in offering the throne to William III and Mary II: constraining the king’s power and enshrining political rights in an English Bill of Rights. It was not the beginning of modern constitutional democracy. That would come a century later, in America (spoiler alert). But it was a forerunner of it.