here from Michael Knox Beran is a beautiful educational paper on the descent of liberalism in the United States from the classical liberalism of Jefferson and Jackson to the social liberalism of Comte and other 19th Century philosophers.
Rulers skilled in the social sciences would translate the new knowledge into codes of behavior that would organize man’s activities in a more efficient and coordinated way than had hitherto been possible. (The classical liberal believes that however much the lawgiver knows of the innumerable factors that create desirable patterns of social order, he never knows enough to undertake an extensive renovation of society with any hope of success.) The new social technic, it was thought, would produce more equitable forms of social order than those created by the “invisible hand” of voluntary, spontaneous cooperation. A new communal life would overcome what Comte called the “perennial Western malady, the revolt of the individual against the species.” Man would be liberated from the biological or class-inspired rapacity that too often made him an “asocial” being. Yet although they dreamt of a more perfect human union, the social reformers made a fetish of the very distinctions they sought to overcome. The wolf will eventually lie down with the lamb, but in the meantime there is enmity between the rich man and the poor man, the white-collar worker and the blue-collar worker, the bourgeois and the proletarian.
This paper is a very important “one stop shop” for the explanation of some very important concepts that animate our current political discourse. Please give it a thorough read. While we are on the topic, have you bought the book yet?
(i am an Amazon partner, so if you buy the book with that link then I get a pittance. However, that isn’t the most important thing. Go buy a used copy from Half Price Books or off of Craigslist. Just get it and read it.)