There's a distinction between an enemy and an adversary. I'd like to argue that Baxter and I prefer chivalry, and then the Romans with their iron discipline and blank wall mindset came along. All the same, even if it's just holes in our bones that chivalry fills with the strawberry cream of decency Baxter and I like to think we go big time for honor, courtesy, gallantry and protecting the weak. Otherwise we too would become prone to the fatheaded-ness currently devouring what remains of the Republican Party, large numbers of males obsessed with warrior look alike games and much of the Democratic Party here in the USA.
Cicero would have called our strawberry cream filling, a Magnanimous Filling. It's a filling that would include disdain to the point of contempt of wealth, pain, death and trivialities. For Cicero a magnanimous spirit focused on the glory of Rome, the moral fiber of stable, resolute and unwavering will. It's a soul too large to be constrained by self interest. And I think, to cheer him up, I recently reminded Baxter that Mark Anthony had Cicero killed for being too liberal in his thinking about the value of the Roman Republic to the well-being of the Roman Citizens, rich and poor.
Ask any Latin Teacher, even girl Latin Teachers, and they'll tell you that John Locke of the Enlightenment, got most of his ideas for his understanding of liberal from Cicero. So No! It's not at all ridiculous to think of Marcus Tullius Cicero as Liberal. Or Cato the Elder for that matter.
What is a Liberal?
Cicero, who died in 43 BC when he was 63 years old, would have given you a number of possible signposts to the meanings in the word Liberal. Cicero believed in the balance between the Rule of Law and Liberty. He was a big fan of Private Property, he believed in what was called a balanced government. For him that meant Consuls, Senators, Assemblymen. His ideal state leaned heavily on giving power to Consuls and Senators who were mostly members of established family landowning hierarchies and military heroes. Roman Assemblymen were less reputable, often property-less citizen members of Roman society, they saw to the rule of law, they were often organized by traditional tribes, each with slightly different ways of doing things. And then there was the Council of the Plebs for the common people, or what the US Constitution still calls "We the People." But Cicero, like Cato the Elder heartily distrusted the Plebs. Both Cicero and Cato, despite their shared understanding of magnanimity in the word Statesman would have considered something like Democracy, as briefly practiced by Athens, a recipe for a Mob Rule by We the People, a guaranteed loss of property, slaves and possibly even Senators would have to wash their own dishes.
A new bright spark in the word liberal emerged during the Enlightenment. John Locke, an odd looking young man, who amongst other things was a physician who wanted to be a writer, did a lot of thinking for the First Earl of Shaftesbury, a man called Anthony Ashley Cooper who became the Leader of the English Whig Party. As a physician Locke had saved Shaftesbury's life. It was to become a close bond between brains and a member of a land owning Hierarchy who had political ambitions which is the polite way of saying Anthony Ashley Cooper wanted power and didn't much care how he got it.
Worth getting behind Anthony Cooper, understanding him as devious, politically slippery and destined to go far on his way up the greasy pole. He'd been a kings man at the beginning of the 1642 to 1651 attempt by the middle class to take monarchy down a peg or two. An attempt called The Great Rebellion (1642 to 1651) or The English Civil War. When the English King, Charles the First, was beheaded in 1649, Anthony Ashley Cooper, sidled up and found a place amongst Oliver Cromwell's supporters. Then when Cromwell died of natural causes and his son wasn't up to the job of Lord Protector, England decided they wanted their King back. Anthony Ashley Cooper moved on quickly, he probably read a lot into the Royalists' disinterment and beheading of Oliver Cromwell's corpse. Cooper became a Whig as opposed to a Tory.
Whigs wanted the King to have less power. The Tories clung to the idea that Kings had been chosen by god to rule The English in an unlimited and traditional way. The Whig preference of limiting the power of kings put the Whigs in the Liberal Camp on such subjects as Rule of Law, Limited Government, Liberty and Yes, private property because you can't have Liberty if the King's Toadies are allowed to take stuff away from you when it suits them, that's what Warlords do.
And Lo, John Locke, who, to quote the Icelandic Proverb was a man with a book in his belly, and even if John Locke might have been a little bit too progressive to be popular, he was just the right chap for the job of advising Anthony Ashley Cooper who in 1677 was titled Lord Ashley, he was Whig Chancellor of the Exchequer, in charge of the nations money.
What did John Locke add to the word Liberal other than the content his often rejected book, Treatise on Human Understanding? Well, in essence, he added the authority of The Enlightenment to the ingredients of meaning which are included in the idea of "A Legitimate Other" and which in many ways are summarized by the words of hope and passion "We the People" as enshrined in the Constitution of the United States.
So when you go to bed at night, best not to forget Locke's contribution to a Liberal Hegemony's approach to slavery and child labor, a grasp of the sentience in animals, religious tolerance, as well as his opinions on the accumulation of wealth, along with his positive views of allowing supply and demand for money to determine the value of money which he wrote about in his 1691 "Considerations on the consequences of the Lowering of Interest and the Raising of the Value of Money."
