Classical Liberalism is a set of ideas about the way people should live together, and the role of government, which were articulated from the 17 th century through the 19 th century. These concepts have their roots in earlier centuries and still reverberate today. Affecting everything from revolution to evolution, and wage controls to welfare, classical liberalism, and its critique, has helped to shape society in the UK, the Commonwealth countries, and the USA. Classical liberalism differed from previous views of the world in that it de-emphasized the unquestioned absolute control of human affairs by the Catholic Church, and/or the monarchy with supposed divine right, and/or aristocratic oligarchy. The nature of humans was described, as E.K. Hunt asserts, as “egoistic, coldly calculating, essentially inert and atomistic” (wikipedia, 2011) quoting E.K. Hunt (Hunt, 2003, p. 44) Instead, thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Baron Charles de Montesquieu, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and David Ricardo all assented to the necessity for the rule of law. This substitution of a legal code or system for the uncontrolled power of the monarch was expected to protect the individual’s rights, which themselves were a novel idea. These philosophers also believed that the right to own, profit from, and dispose of private property rather than living as serfs, tied to the land without owning it, would contribute to the health and wealth of the nation. Further, these rights, they began to assert, needed to be exercised in a context of economic freedoms, such as freedom to trade, and to compete. The origins of these ideas can be discerned in developments in Europe starting perhaps as early as the Crusades. These adventures exposed the Europeans to other religions, and other ways of living, as well as ancient Greek and Roman philosophical and scientific texts and knowledge that had survived in Arab libraries and traditions (p. 69) (e.g. De Rerum Natura , by Lucretius, lost, and re-discovered by a 15 th century Florentine (National Public Radio, 2011)). The human-centered, rational focus of the Renaissance can be said to have benefitted from such rediscoveries of lost knowledge (p. 68). Factors such as the Black Death, and trends away from an exclusive dependence on agriculture all contributed to increasing the value of serfs’ labor and thereby increasing their options. This contributed to the detaching of serfs from the land and creating an urban merchant society (Hunt, 2003, p. 22). The Industrial Revolution made a definite break with agriculture, and brought with it many new problems as well as great wealth for some. This led thinkers to reconsider the previously accepted relationship between government and the governed, workers and the products of their work, and many other important issues. John Locke proposed that humans enter the world as blank slates without evil, which was not necessarily in line with the Catholic Church’s view, and that our impulses tend to be positive towards each other. In his view, as reasonable entities of basic goodness, humans deserve basic rights to live, to do what they wish, and to own property (p. 109). Government, in a social contract with the gover