Liberalism
It’s much, much older than we thought. It doesn’t date to our own FDR nearly 100 years ago, nor to Rousseau, Voltaire and the other liberal thinkers of the French Enlightenment in the 18th. century, nor to John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and his three Letters on Toleration, published between 1689 and 1692. In fact, it’s as old as… well, agriculture. See here the Prospect Magazine article by Paul Seabright.
“How old is political liberalism? Here is a surprising answer: it is not a few hundred years old, but 10,000 years old…..Its roots are to be found not in capitalism but in agriculture, in that remarkable 10,000-year-old revolution that led modern man, independently in many different parts of the world, to give up the hunting and gathering life and to found farms, villages and eventually cities. That change had a radical consequence: human beings had to learn to live and to trade with strangers for the first time. By an intriguing paradox, globalisation began when man became sedentary – for settled communities cannot hope to avoid all contact with outsiders by melting into the forest.“
