Modern American liberalism departed in important ways from the minimalstate, market-oriented liberalism that arose in Europe and the United States in the late eighteenth century. From its origins, liberalism placed individual liberty at the center of the purposes of political organization. It tended to measure liberty, moreover, in terms of access to economic opportunity and the expansion of private property rights. It reversed the ancient rule that required individuals to serve the community, the king, or the state, or some transcendent moral order embodied in the king or the state. It substituted “citizen” for “subject,” thereby stressing legal equality among members of society rather than hierarchy and subordination. In Europe even after the toppling of the monarchies, a relatively autonomous state remained strong in the hands of a professional bureaucracy or civil service. Liberalism in Europe thus continued to vie with long-standing tory or noblesse traditions of government that in many respects subordinated private economic ambition to grander notions of commonweal. In other words, outside the United States, liberalism remained understood as a system of social organization identified with a minimalist state that permitted the maximum pursuit of private personal opportunity and corporate business prosperity in a market economy; whereas, in general, older, traditionalist notions of statecraft vied with liberalism for control of policy.

In the United States, different historical circumstances and traditions called for different strategies. There was little that resembled a professional, independent civil service or bureaucracy in America. Grand notions of commonweal were few and usually were strongly contested. Except in wartime, the business of the private sector trumped most particular purposes of the state. The business of America, as Calvin Coolidge put it, was business.