the first people to call themselves "liberals" were the "cortes of catiz" (1810-1814), a spanish parliament which rebelled against their napoleonic occupation, and of whom created a constitution in 1812, limiting the monarch by the decree of parliamentary sovereignty by rightful legitimacy, with a division of powers between legislative, judiciary and execitive branches, like in france and the united states (which both officiated their constitutions in 1789); this tripartite system was formalised by montesquieu (1748). according to emil kirchner (1988), the term "liberalism" came to be circulated in english after the napoleonic wars (1815), although no direct source for this claim appears to be substantiated anywhere (he draws me down a rabbit hole of klaus von beyme's work, yet it cannot be confirmed). from what i can verify, the term "liberalism" appears in english in english with the translation and publishing of andré vieusseux's "essay on liberalism" (1823), in which andré warns of the scourge of "universal liberalism". he says that the new split of parties is between "stability" and "innovation". he says that the innovators are "generally known" as "liberals", which we have traced back to 1810 in spain. andré describes differeny groups; "constitutionalism" "jacobinism", "girondonism", "bonapartism", "illuminism" and "carbonarism". he claims that liberalism is not a sect, but is a unity of different sects for a common end. he claims that its leaders seek republicanism, and that liberalism has its exclusive origins in france (an ignorant view of its prehistory and enlightenment motive). are even the americans not themselves a republican people? where he is at least fair is in the following chapter, where he says that an issue of liberalism is that it is not a system unto itself, but is a undefined rebellion. thus was and is the task of various philosophers; of applying a positive concept to "freedom" (liberty), as we see in kant (1797) and hegel (1817). first is kant:
>The freedom of the act of volitional choice is its independence of being determined by sensuous impulses or stimuli. This forms the negative conception of the free-will. The positive conception of freedom is given by the fact that the will is the capability of pure reason to be practical of itself.https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/morals/ch03.htmthe positive concept resolves itself into the notorious "categorical imperative", or the unity of freedom and necessity in the synthesis of "duty" (the unconditional which thereby acts as an "end in itself"). hegel also perceives the relation of freedom and necessity:
<Necessity is blind only so long as it is not understood […] The truth of necessity is, therefore, Freedom…https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slactual.htmhegel further sees the absolute idea as a unity mediated by self-relating negativity between its constituents, the same as his concept of sovereignty (1820), which is the unity of the state, as it accords from the separation of powers. here, the concept is only a medium, not a self-positing substance, such as it is in marx's humanist communism (1843-1875) where the unity of man and nature sublates into a single self-determination, rather than preserving its constitutive attributes as internally contradictory. hegel's unity of the state occurs executively (i.e. constitutional monarchy) while kant as a republican gave special emphasis to "law" as the basis of freedom, and so can be seen to hold faith in the legislative branch of the tripartite system (montesquieu, 1748). kant also suggests a global government structure (1795) to mediate between conflicts for the sake of "perpetual peace". kant then can be seen to be the grandfather of the united nations, which itself mirrored the 1789 declaration of human rights with its 1948 declaration of universal human rights, shifting the scope of the nation to an international body. so then, the "law" appears inescapable, but as yet, kant was not simply an authoritarian, as someone like ayn rand may imagine (1971), but saw enlightenment as a stage of maturity which required rational self-possession (1784):
>Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority. Minority is inability to make use of one’s own understanding without direction from another.https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/enlightenment.htmand thus why he says each man must find his own law:
<The laws of freedom, as distinguished from the laws of nature, are moral laws […] A person is a subject who is capable of having his actions imputed to him. Moral personality is, therefore, nothing but the freedom of a rational being under moral laws; and it is to be distinguished from psychological freedom as the mere faculty by which we become conscious of ourselves in different states of the identity of our existence. Hence it follows that a person is properly subject to no other laws than those he lays down for himself, either alone or in conjunction with others.https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/morals/ch03.htmthus, to be moral, one must be free to establish the subjective necessity of moral law, as it may be rationally comprehended, and without this, a man is not even a person, for they are inherently unfree (irrational):
>A thing (object) is what is incapable of being the subject of imputation. Every object of the free activity of the will, which is itself void of freedom, is therefore called a thing (res corporealis).https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/morals/ch03.htmthis appears to be an identical reasoning to that of aristotle; that if one cannot be self-possessed of reason (free-will), then he becomes the object of another, and so may be held as a "natural slave" by his master(s). this relates closely to locke's classical liberalism, as i have stated previously:
>>2511621and so kant is indeed a liberal, the same as hegel - and both have theories of positive and negative freedom, a counter-point to andré vieusseaux's point that liberalism is without any concept of itself. it has no single system, but still possesses its own systems of thinking, in accordance with realising universal freedom for all men.