In contrast, classical liberalism in the tradition of great thinkers like Locke, Montesquieu and Jefferson is based on the ideas that governments exist to protect the inalienable rights of the people and that governments must be effectively limited by constitutions and laws in order to keep the state from becoming the biggest threat to the rights of its citizens.

Francis Fukuyama of Stanford recently argued the following:

·         "...ideas do not become powerful unless they speak to the concerns of large numbers of ordinary people."

·         "Almost all powerful ideas that shaped human societies up until the past 300 years were religious in nature..."

·         Except for Confucianism in China, classical liberalism is the "first major secular ideology to have a lasting worldwide effect..."

·         Such liberalism is "a doctrine associated with the rise of first a commercial and then an industrial middle class..."