When reoccurring problems sprout up as weeds do with constant maintenance and pruning necessary, a subset of society will grow resentful to the established order. Only a complete reorienting of the tree of life can assuage the masses at their core. The efficacy of divine right, the unilaterality of state religion, and stratification due to heredity were all longstanding pillars of society leading up to the 18th Century. While having the soundest foundation, being the culmination of long lines of legitimacy and tradition, it did not satisfy human desires to the degree sought by the masses. In its shadow, a new movement calling itself the Enlightenment spawned a new political order declaring itself Liberalism which sought to address and refute these monolithic entities governing society by making all men equal before the law and empower every man with the rights to prosper in the way they sought fit. Liberalism too had distilled its legitimacy from divine right, but unlike the old order of the Church and the Crown, the new philosophy is that every man was endowed with a natural sovereignty, in the form of rights, by nature of simply being alive. This philosophy’s adoption was neither immediate nor widespread. It initially manifested only in a handful of ways from the English Glorious Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution of 1776, and the French Revolution of 1789. Its eclectic appearances also attested to timidness surrounding its adoption. Nonetheless, the zeal from the populous was universal, culminating in the global Pax Britannica, the colonizing of a continent through Manifest Destiny, and the near conquest of all of Europe during the Napoleonic Wars. Yet, Liberalism was still viewed as a century long experiment during this time with the British success attributed to developing a hybrid model between the old and the new, the American Civil War seen as Liberalism cannibalizing itself, and the French Revolution seen as terror and inducing reversion to the old order under Napoleon III. Even as a new philosophy, Liberalism based its legitimacy by taking its lineage and inspiration from the ancient cornerstones of the West being Greece and Rome. In aiming to legitimize itself, it did so amongst the old order’s urban fabric by mimicking and modeling itself from the old while still making itself distinct. Even then, the old order coopted Liberalism’s best traits just as Britain had done. The old order, thus, cannot be said to be thoroughly routed and rejected until the end of the First World War. Only then were the shame and anguish of monarchs and their people laid bare for the world to see and Liberalism could finally develop as the premier political philosophy. Unfettered, the many nuances of what a truly liberal world order would be became apparent. From it were movements searching for ever improved versions of Liberalism in an attempt to correct inherent fallacies in earlier versions of its design. The disparate political theories of laissez-faire economics on the political right and laissez-faire sexuality on the political left with two centuries between their inceptions can both trace their origin to this once unified political theory. With each attempt came new desires to literally wipe the slate clean of the mistakes of old.

The fundamental tenant of Liberalism that every person knows best what they want has completely upended the fabric of human settlement through successively redefining what it means to develop cities around Liberalism.