LIBERAL MODERNIZATION is defined as the process that ultimately produced the liberal, parliamentary-democratic, capitalist societies of western Europe and North America. Both Barrington Moore and Leonid Ignatieff in the selections from their work that follow this essay posit the importance of a feudal experience in laying the foundations for the concept of contractual rights vis a vis the state. Moore adds to this the importance of a bourgeois revolution against that experience. Although the bourgeoisie, once in power, rigorously rooted out privilege based on medieval rights, they retained the concept of rights guaranteed by contract, albeit for a modern bourgeois society in which privilege was justified by natural rather than feudal law. Thus the bourgeoisie, triumphant over the feudal order, retained the unique, western emphasis on the importance of mutual, individual rights guaranteed by contract. The principle of contract, which the nascent bourgeoisie had adapted from the feudal law to apply to their commercial dealings, was now applied to the politics as a means of defining the relationship of human beings to each other and to their state.

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Only in a few, western societies did there exist a strong enough bourgeois class to have created broad enough support to mobilize liberal revolutions on behalf of a concept of rights secured by law. In this context, liberal meant liberation--liberation of the individual from the inequality of the remnants of medieval law rooted in aristocratic privilege, liberation from the arbitrary control of absolute political rule and liberation from laws that dictated religious practices and curtailed freedom of expression through the press and speech. In short, liberals believed in a universal, natural law in which all men were bound together by a tacit social contract that guaranteed them inalienable rights, but also required of them social obligations by virtue of their membership in society. The strength of the feudal tradition is strongly evidenced in these revolutionary ideals.