Reply #13: Does libertarian equate to Libertarian? No. [View All]

The Constitution was based on ideas taken from several realms, most notably the Greeks, the Iroquois Confederacy, John Locke, Kant, Republicanism, classical liberalism, and Charles de Secondat (Montesquieu). Nowhere will you find "libertarian ideals" in the Constitution or the thoughts of Jefferson, Madison, Adams, et. al. because libertarianism was a later philosophy. In fact, the word 'libertarian' wasn't even coined until 1857 when Joseph Déjacque used it criticizing Proudhon. Déjacque was an anarcho-communist, a far cry from the modern day right-libertarianism of the Libertarian party. While it's fashionable to use libertarian as a one-for-one stand-in for classical liberalism, one still can't claim that the Constitution was "based on libertarian ideals", no matter how much the Libertarian partty wants you to believe that, because of all the other ideas that went into its construction.