he has values consistent with classical liberalism
this statement is next to meaningless
or the Enlightenment
this statement is for sure meaningless. At any rate, you need to substantiate/unpack what you mean by these loaded terms. Who, specifically, and if possible, which texts, do you have in mind here by “classical liberal” or “enlightenment”? Both terms are post hoc (for the most part) classifications for a range of thinkers/writers that were anything but univocal in what they were committed to. Further, they’ve shifted meaning and extension throughout their histories. Mandarks point about Mill having no compunctions about participating in the Raj despite being considered the paradigmatic ‘classical liberal’ is a judicious one, and shows up a complicated dialogue within the liberal tradition about empire and subaltern peoples, among other things.
That said, ultimately it just stems from a basic idea: the freedom of the individual. As obviously 'liber' simply mean 'free'. Free man. That's all it is.
this obscures two points about the development of liberalism:
i) the meaning of ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ are exactly what get contested when people try to push their particular liberalisms. What you probably have in mind is negative liberty but it’s not obvious that this is the only tenable view and the history of liberalism is littered with people with a different conception of ‘liberty’.
This sep article is helpful.
ii) The liberal tradition, through to the start of the First World War, isn’t particularly interested in emphasizing the ‘individual’ as the locus of ‘rights’, at least not over against a larger body of people like ‘society’, or whatever. The distinction between ‘individualism’ and ‘collectivism’ is largely a vestige of 20th century liberals rewriting the historiography of ‘liberalism’ to combat not just fascism and soviet communism but also the laissez faire 19th century liberals whose ‘liberalism’ was seen to have failed to prevent the former systems from rising to power.
There are additional points I’d make here, like how liberals like Bentham, the Mills, Dewey are more than sanguine on the states role in moulding a liberal* citizenry through e.g. public education (which id hope would give the lie to liberalism being allergic to state coercion), or how there are structural/kuhnian losses when we try to prioritize certain ‘liberties’ that we view as safeguarding the individual such that we unintentionally/indirectly infringe ‘individual’s liberties’ somewhere else (a diabolically Hegelian point
).
*this use of the term ‘liberal’ is where we still find it resonate with its premodern sense. It’s such an old term that it’s difficult to disentangle without invoking it’s entire history, which is about as old as our recorded political tradition.
