You might remember reading this passage earlier this year:

John Hood, president of the John Locke Foundation, a free-market-loving conservative think tank, wouldn’t mind being called the dreaded L-word — liberal.

That sentence helped open Jim Nesbitt’s May News & Observer story about political labels.

That discussion rattled around my brain as I read the entries on “liberalism” and “liberalism, classical” in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia (ISI Books, 2006).

Peter Augustine Lawler’s discussion of liberalism focuses on Locke’s liberal theories:

[T]he foundation of all human obedience is consent; the individual agrees to be ruled in order to have his rights protected better than he could protect them on his own.

The individual is the basis of liberal or limited government. The purpose of such government is the protection of rights, no more and no less. The individual consents to that government not as a member of a race, class, gender, or religion; the government views him as being free from all such oppressive attachments. Government protects the economic, religious, and intellectual liberty of this individual.

Later, Lawler writes:

Franklin Roosevelt successfully renamed laissez-faire liberals — those who opposed the New Deal regulations of the economy on behalf of the unfortunate — conservatives. Nineteenth-century liberalism then became, in large measure, twentieth-century conservatism.

I’ve oversimplified his argument by quoting that paragraph alone, but you get the sense that the terms “liberal” and “conservative” have had changing meanings.

Meanwhile, Ralph Raico writes in a separate entry:

“Classical liberalism” is the term used to designate an ideology advocating private property, an unhampered market economy, the rule of law, constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and of the press, and international peace based on free trade.

One can see from this description similarities (but not total agreement) between classical liberalism and the most common forms of present-day conservatism.