The Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Enlightenment bequeathed to the Western world two basic springs of political thought. Both emerged from a common source: the rejection of divine-right monarchy, feudal hierarchy, and the suffocating weight of hereditary authority.

Both, in their ways, extolled the dignity of the individual and the promise of human freedom. Yet from this same source, the waters quickly diverged. One stream ran toward the principles we now associate with classical liberalism: limited government, secure property rights, voluntary exchange, and the conviction that liberty was best preserved by restricting the reach of political power. The other flowed toward what became progressive liberalism: the conviction that liberty required state action to equalize conditions, engineer social outcomes, and provide positive entitlements.

For a time, it was not clear which current would dominate. Enlightenment debates were lively and unresolved, ranging from John Locke’s defense of property against arbitrary rule to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s unbridled celebration of the general will. But by the dawn of the twentieth century, the die was cast. While the rhetoric of freedom persisted, the institutional triumph was unmistakable: the liberal tradition bent not toward laissez-faire individualism, but toward interventionist, redistributive, and militarized statism. The warfare-welfare state, propped up by fiat money and central banking, became the hallmark of the modern age.

The defining mark of classical liberalism was its defense of property rights against arbitrary state power. Property, in Locke’s famous phrase, was the reason men entered political society at all. Without it, liberty was a phantom. Major works in this tradition include:

• John Locke’s above quoted Second Treatise (1689), which grounded legitimate government in the protection of life, liberty, and estate.
• Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), which drawing on the work of the mid-century French thinkers demonstrated how free exchange, under the impartial enforcement of contracts, created prosperity without design.
• Benjamin Constant, in The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns (1819), distinguished modern liberty as secure enjoyment of property and private pursuits against the encroachments of state sovereignty.
• Frédéric Bastiat, in The Law (1850), denounced the transformation of government into an engine of “legal plunder”—the use of law to transfer wealth by force.
• Herbert Spencer, in The Man versus the State (1884), warned that every concession to paternalism eroded the principle of equal freedom.

In all of these figures, liberty meant the right to dispose of one’s person and property free from coercion. Government existed to defend these rights, not to distribute or redefine them. The state was enemy as much as guardian and its power had to be tightly constrained lest it become an engine of arbitrary expropriation.

It is common to group John Stuart Mill among the classical liberals, but in truth Mill represents a turning point. His great concern in On Liberty (1859) is not the old classical liberal preoccupation with protecting property from the state. Instead, Mill worried about the “tyranny of the majority,” and the suffocating weight of social convention and peer opinion.

This shifted the center of so-called “liberal” concern. Property and state power moved to the periphery. Liberty was no longer primarily about securing one’s estate against confiscation or one’s contracts against interference. It became about protecting individuality, eccentricity, and self-expression from social pressures. Mill’s defense of freedom of speech and lifestyle choices may be stirring, but to no impartial observer is it of the same tradition as the propertarianism of Locke, Smith, and Bastiat.

Moreover, Mill’s later writings opened the door to positive liberty—the notion that the state might need to intervene to ensure individuals had the “means” to develop their capacities. This was the seed from which the “new liberalism” of T.H. Green and L.T. Hobhouse would grow. In short, Mill pointed liberalism away from property and toward personality, away from fear of state power and toward fear of social conformity. In doing so, he serves as a convenient marker, signifying a divergence in the liberal tradition among those who claimed the label.

From Mill forward, a new definition of liberty, one very convenient to the ruling class and statist intellectuals, took hold. T.H. Green, a fellow Englishmen, would go on to argue that real freedom meant not just the absence of restraint but the presence of enabling conditions—education, health, economic security—that only the state could provide (1886). L.T. Hobhouse, in Liberalism (1911), argued that laissez-faire was inadequate for modern society; redistribution and regulation were necessary for the “new” freedom demanded by the progressive liberals.

In America, this ethos found champions in the Progressive Era, in John Dewey’s vision of education and democracy, in Wilsonianism, and in the New Deal reforms. The state was recast not as a night watchman but as a tutor, provider, and engineer of social outcomes. Liberty itself was redefined from the protection of property to the empowerment of citizens through welfare and regulation.

The twentieth century sealed the victory of the so-called progressive liberals. The creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 institutionalized central banking and fiat currency, enabling perpetual fiscal expansion. Two world wars entrenched the military-industrial complex. Welfare programs multiplied, bureaucracy expanded, and taxation soared.

Politicians still spoke of freedom, but it was freedom in a new sense—the freedom to receive entitlements, to be shielded from risk, to depend on government for sustenance. The original liberal concern with property and state power was abandoned. By century’s end, “liberalism” in common usage meant the precise opposite of Locke’s vision; it meant intervention, redistribution, and centralization.

The path of authentic classical liberalism, abandoned by the political mainstream, is now preserved only in the thought of marginal but tenacious Austro-libertarians. In this, they draw upon the vital twentieth century work of such luminaries as:

• Ludwig von Mises, who in Socialism (1922) and Human Action (1949) demolished the case for central planning and defended the spontaneous order of the market.
• Murray Rothbard, who in Man, Economy, and State (1962) and For a New Liberty (1973) showed the bankruptcy of the old constitutionalism and introduced anarcho-capitalism, rejecting the state altogether as a violator of property rights.
• Ralph Raico, who in his voluminous historical work chronicled both the grandeur of the classical liberal tradition and the tragedy of its betrayal.

Here lies the remnant, the Austro-libertarians, heirs of the road not taken, the last defenders of the idea that liberty means secure property against the grasping hand of the state.

The “two springs” of liberalism illustrate how a single intellectual movement could generate such divergent legacies. From a single source flowed both the creed of limited government and the creed of expansive statism. Jefferson and Hamilton, Locke and Rousseau, Bastiat and Hobhouse—each drew from the same well but followed different currents downstream.

By the early twentieth century, progressive liberalism had triumphed, reshaping liberalism into something unrecognizable to its earliest advocates. What remains of the classical liberal tradition now survives on the intellectual periphery, in the works of Rothbard, Raico, and their heirs, who refuse to let the first spring run dry.

The question that lingers is whether the waters of that neglected stream might yet swell again—whether the road not taken might still be found. For as long as men and women desire freedom from arbitrary power, the first spring will beckon, inviting us to drink deeply of the liberty forsaken by the mainstream but never fully lost.

It is fitting that tomorrow, exactly 393 years since John Locke’s birth, that we recall to mind the tradition he was so instrumental in shaping.