Swedish origins of ‘liberal’ as a political label
"...the Spanish liberales got the word, just like the Swedish liberals, from their Scottish hero [Adam Smith]."
[This article is a lightly revised version of Johan Norberg's chapter in Leube (2025). Norberg also wrote about the topic (in Swedish) in Norberg (1998).]
Spain is credited with the first use of “liberal” as a political noun and the name of a party or movement, starting in the early 1810s. Actually, Sweden preceded Spain by a year or two. The man behind the Swedish revolution of 1809, Georg Adlersparre, inspired a self-described “liberal party.” And Adlersparre was the first Swede to translate Adam Smith!
When I first got interested in intellectual history, I learned that the word “liberal” used in a political context came to us from the Spanish language. Almost every book on liberalism that I read had a passage like: “The first to be called liberals, or liberales, were members of the Spanish Cortes of 1810-11” (Manning 1976, 9). You find the same in other sources (Neill 1953, 7; Schapiro 1958, 9; Bramsted and Melhuish 1978, 3; Merquior 1991, 2). And looking at sources of the past 15 years, we hear the same: ““[’Liberal’] only assumed a specifically political meaning in the early nineteenth century. Borrowed from the Spanish Liberales of the 1812 Constitution, the term was first employed in a derogatory manner by Tories to malign their Whig opponents” (Bell 2014, 693; see also Smith 2014, 14; Fawcett 2018, 6; Wikipedia, 2024).
However, they are mistaken. Sweden beat Spain to it, by at least a year. During the most dramatic circumstances possible.
The first liberal party
In March 1809 Sweden experienced an armed revolution. Resentment against the increasingly despotic king Gustav IV Adolf had grown steadily. He had imposed censorship and stopped parliament from convening. Now his ambition to play a leading role against Napoleon led Sweden into disastrous wars against Russia and Denmark, and he had just lost the eastern part of the kingdom, Finland, to Russian invaders. The army rebelled, and the king was deposed and exiled.
Parliament therefore met in 1809 and 1810 to decide on the new constitution and an heir to the throne. Fairly soon, two parties emerged. One side tried to keep as much of l’ancien regime as possible, even trying to stage a coup to restore the old monarchy. The other side wanted to limit the personal powers of the king, reduce hereditary privilege, and establish freedom of the press and the economy.
Around November 1809, these two sides took on a more organized form, with meetings in separate clubs where they coordinated tactics and votes. The conservative party became known as the “Gustavian” party, after the deposed king, or the “Scanian” party after the southern region of its most prominent members.
The reform-oriented party was sometimes referred to as the Mannerheim party after its unofficial leader, Lars August Mannerheim, but we also have evidence, in the form of a transcript of a speech at their club in early December 1809, that they referred to themselves as “the liberal side” and “the liberal party” (Brusewitz 1917, 89f). We can also witness the transition from adjective to noun, as they also talked about themselves as “the liberals” (Thomson 1926, 181) and, in the diary of one of its members in January 1810, “the liberalists” (Brusewitz 1913, 115).
This appears to be the first group to use the liberal label in a political context. A look at the speeches and pamphlets during this era reveals that its members also used the word to describe the policies they promoted. As early as May 1809, one of the party’s most influential spokesmen, G A Silverstolpe (1809), wrote an influential pamphlet about a new constitution, describing the ideal of equality before the law as “a thoroughly liberal disposition.”
What an astonishing coincidence that two parties in two different countries and language families started using the same word to describe their constitutional beliefs at the same time! Who were these Swedes and where did they get this vocabulary?
Helena Rosenblatt (2018, 61f) mentions them, but only briefly: “Not much is known about its members except that they were influenced by French revolutionary ideas and advocated principles such as equality before the law, constitutional and representative government, and freedom of the press, conscience, and trade.” This seems like a way for Rosenblatt to support her debatable assumption that “liberalism owed its very origins to the French Revolution” (97).
In fact, much more can be found about this group in the original Swedish sources, and one thing they reveal is that they were not specifically influenced by French revolutionary ideas. They explicitly rejected unconstitutional political authority and the Rousseauan ideals of the radical revolutionaries. They were not republicans but constitutional monarchists. They preferred piecemeal, gradual change to radical blueprints. In an important article, one of the party’s guiding forces (Adlersparre 1797) argued that Jacobinism is synonymous with despotism.
The Swedish revolutionaries were influenced by classical liberals in many countries, not the least from Britain. When they referred to French thinkers it was mostly Montesquieu and Benjamin Constant. The liberalism they championed was a constitutional program of separation of powers, rule of law and economic freedom. (The word “liberalism” took a bit longer, making its Swedish appearance in the early 1820s.). In a pioneering 1926 study of the use of the word liberal in the Swedish parliament in 1809 and 1810, Arthur Thomson summarized its original meaning:
Politically, this [the word “liberal”] meant a constitutional form of government, built on public opinion and with a separation of powers as a guarantee for civil liberty, as well as a representation on other bases than the various estates. Socially, this view entailed demands for the leveling of the hereditary privileges, and economically, it meant the principle of free enterprise or free competition. Thus, liberal ideology was at once economic liberalism and constitutionalism, ideas that ultimately stemmed from a natural rights perspective. (Thomson 1926, 185f)
A pretty formidable and consistent ideology!
It can’t have sprung, fully formed, from the head of a single parliamentarian. There is a missing link.
Sweden’s revolutionary hero
What Arthur Thomson did not mention and perhaps did not know, was that the real instigator of the revolution of 1809, the officer and writer Georg Adlersparre (1760-1835), had already made liberal use of the word “liberal” in his writings. And Adlersparre had done more than anyone to lay the ideological foundations for the revolutionary political program.
Many people had plotted against the Swedish king in 1808 and 1809, in the civil service, academia and military. But the man who finally took the initiative was Adlersparre himself, who had a military career but had spent the last decade publishing Enlightenment periodicals and trying to form an opposition against the king’s personal rule. After the authorities had stopped his publications, he had been re-assigned to the military in the spring of 1808, as commander of the right flank of the western army, stationed in Värmland, in west-central Sweden.
It was there, on March 7, 1809, that Adlersparre and his officers raised the banner of revolt, issuing a proclamation about how Sweden was being destroyed by war, oppression and “draining taxes”, and that the army had to lead the people against the king to restore peace and parliament’s powers. Two days later, they set out on their revolutionary march towards Stockholm.
The kings’ regional representatives were arrested, and the king threatened Adlersparre with the death penalty, but there were no battles and no bloodshed. A growing number of soldiers and civilians joined the march. A wonderful anecdote reveals how far the liberal revolutionaries were from raucous Jacobins: When Adlersparre’s men confiscated resources from regional bailiffs and administrators, they issued reciepts declaring that money had been taken by “military force” so that no individual would get into trouble for handing it over (Isaksson 2009, 190).
On March 13, the king decided to flee south and fight back with the more loyal southern army, but then a group of court nobles decided to arrest him, blurring the line between revolution and coup d’etat. This circle tried to take control of the revolt, and ordered Adlersparre to stand down, and to arrive in Stockholm with only a smaller part of the army. However, Adlersparre and his men suspected that this was a way for the Stockholm elite to avoid reform and to install the crown prince as the new king, so they marched on. The army entered the capital on March 22, welcomed by cheering crowds, and Adlersparre installed himself in a central building, guarded by two cannons and 50 soldiers. In effect, he occupied Stockholm, until parliament had convened and appointed a new successor to the throne.
Through an unexpected turn of events, Sweden ended up with a French Marshal on the throne: Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (who would govern as Karl XIV Johan). Thanks to a new separation of powers, his ability to rule arbitrarily was limited. Freedom of the press was restored, and some economic reforms were undertaken. (By the way, the Bernadotte family remains the royal family in Sweden to this day.)
Most interestingly for our purposes, this revolution was initiated by the individual who was probably the first Swede to describe his philosophy as liberal. In a speech for the Royal Academy of the Sciences on July 25, 1804, on free markets and economic development, Georg Adlersparre described his ideas as “liberal” again and again. He wrote about “a higher and more liberal economic maxim” in contrast to monopolies and tariffs, described economic openness as the result of “refined and liberal economic principles” and argued that wealth is created by “a lively liberal and active economic spirit” of hard work and freedom of enterprise (Adlersparre 1804).
In this remarkable speech, which Adlersparre concludes by asserting that if governments just removed barriers, “the most powerful economic creative capacity” would follow, he used the adjective “liberal” no fewer than five times, suggesting that this was not just a one off. Indeed, we find precedents in his periodical Läsning i blandade ämnen (Readings on mixed subjects), published between 1797 and 1801. Its liberal Enlightenment perspective on everything from religion to trade was so controversial that it became known in court circles as “Readings on inflammable subjects.” And there we find that word again: In Adlersparre’s introduction to the last edition, published in August 1801, he declares that over these years, he had made use of “freedom of the press, which is guaranteed by the law, according to a liberal but true interpretation” (Adlersparre 1801).
In 1800, in the second to last edition of Läsning, Adlersparre’s associate Hans Järta (1800) (another leading 1809 revolutionary) wrote in support of “the more liberal economic principles of the era.” It seems like Adlersparre and his group were the first Swedes to use “liberal” in a political context, so it is not difficult to understand why the party that upheld the principles of their revolution become known as the liberal party. In fact, A G Silverstolpe, the previously mentioned influential representative of that party, was one of the most frequent writers of Läsning, with 24 contributions.
They built on an advanced classical liberal tradition in Sweden, originating with the Ostrobothnian priest and member of parliament Anders Chydenius (1729-1803), who introduced early theories of economic freedom and gave Sweden the world’s first freedom of the press act in 1766. But this does not explain why they used the word liberal. Where might they have found the inspiration? Certainly not from the Spanish Liberales, who started using the word a decade later.
The Smithian connection
The Austrian thinker Friedrich A. von Hayek promoted another theory of the etymology of liberalism. In The Constitution of Liberty, he writes:
It is often suggested that the term ’liberal’ derives from the early nineteenth-century Spanish party of the liberales. I am more inclined to believe that it derives from the use of the term by Adam Smith in such passages as W.o.N., II, 41: ‘the liberal system of free exportation and free importation’ and p. 216: ‘allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice.’ (Hayek 1960, 530)
As Eric Schliesser (2023a) explains the transition, “Smith appropriated the older use of the term ‘liberal,’ which evokes an aristocratic, even Aristotelian generosity, and applied it to his own system as a political project and … opposed it to the ‘illiberal’ project of mercantilism.”
It was a short leap from liberality to liberalism, since it is not unreasonable to argue that the most generous and tolerant system is the one that gives individuals as much freedom (Latin, Liber, free) as possible. The connections between the older, non-political adjective ‘liberal’ and new political meaning are well explored by Erik Matson (2022), “What’s Liberal about Adam Smith’s ‘Liberal Plan’?”
Daniel Klein (2014a; 2014b; 2024) has provided evidence for this theory through a Google Books Ngram analysis. It shows that the use of the adjective liberal exploded in the English language in the 1770s and 1780s, especially in unambiguous political versions, like “liberal principles”, “liberal policy”, “liberal system” and “liberal ideas”. Klein shows that this happened in Spanish, French, Italian and German as well, but only some 25 years after the same development in English. Far from being a late import to English, the adjective “liberal” got its early start there – Klein (2024) calls it its “christening” as a political term—and was later exported around Europe.
As Klein points out, this was not all Smith’s doing. Other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers participated in the christening, most notably the Scottish Whig writer William Robertson in his 1769 historical work on the time of emperor Charles V. But the label was popularized by Adam Smith who used it repeatedly to refer to his political and economic principles in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations of 1776.
Is there a connection between Georg Adlersparre and Adam Smith? There is, indeed. The great revolutionary was also the first person to translate Smith into Swedish! Between 1799 and 1800, Läsning i blandade ämnen published a series of selections from seven different chapters of The Wealth of Nations, constituting around a tenth of the whole work. Revealing his personal interest in Smith’s ideas, Adlersparre often added footnotes, explaining how these principles could be applied in a Swedish context.
So, here is a direct, significant link between Adam Smith and Adlersparre. Incidentally, one of the chapters translated by Adlersparre in 1799 contains Smith’s use of the word “liberal”. It is the section where Smith writes that the French economists’ embrace of “perfect liberty” as the only means to national wealth make their doctrine “as just as it is generous and liberal” (Smith 1799).
In other words, the first time Adlersparre used the word “liberal” in a political context was in a translation of Adam Smith—and he did this just before he started using it himself to describe his own views, especially on economics. That, I think, is as close to a smoking gun supporting Hayek’s case as we can possibly hope for. It was not the first time Adlersparre put the word on paper, though. In an earlier periodical in 1795, he translated an article about education by the Danish writer Gottsche Hans Olsen (1795), who uses the word twice, though seemingly closer to the earlier meaning of broad-minded.
That article was lifted from Minerva, a Danish Enlightenment publication where the Scottish economist was so well-known that he was referred to as “the famous Adam Smith” as early as 1786 (Hennings 1786). Olsen (1825) would go on to translate the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say to Danish, and in his introduction, showed his familiarity with the great Scot by talking about the “Smithian” system.
Incidentally, in 1806, the Swedish customs officer Erik Erland Bodell writes about “more liberal tenets” in economics, in opposition to tariffs and prohibitions. Bodell just so happens to be the second Swede to translate sections of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, in 1800 and 1804 (Knutsson 2022; Schliesser 2023b).
What about the liberales?
Where does all this leave the second group to use the liberal label in a political context, the Spanish liberales? I have not found anything indicating that they were inspired by the early Swedish liberals, but what if they share a common source of inspiration?
Indeed, recent scholarship points to this possibility. Research into Adam Smith’s early influence in Spain has been pioneered by Pedro Schwartz (2000). Among other things, he has written about how the Inquisition stifled early attempts to publish The Wealth of Nations in Spanish, claiming that “by means of an insidious and obscure style, it promotes religious toleration and is inductive to naturalism”. However, in 1794, a translation where the most offending passages had been cut got the go ahead and “circulated quite widely in the Spanish-speaking world” in the first decade of the 1800s (Schwartz 2000, 118–122).
Eric Schliesser has brought to my attention that among the prominent Spaniards influenced by Smith’s work were the usual suspects: those early liberales of the famous Cortez in Cadiz 1810–1813. In a study of the debates around the 1812 constitution, Javier Usoz documents that the Spanish liberales’ arguments for broad economic liberalization were often supported by Smithian principles about the reconciliation of individual and common interest without government interference. Indeed, the liberals did not just argue for it by appealing to “political economy” and “the liberal principles of the English economy”, but specifically and repeatedly to Adam Smith, in phrases like: “Good economists, in particular Smith”, “this sainted father of political economy”, “the best economist we know”, “Smith, a father in these matters”, “one whom I recognize as being of superior merit in public economics”, whom one cannot quote “without veneration and respect” (all quoted in Usoz 2022).
Therefore, the only reasonable explanation is that the Spanish liberales got the word, just like the Swedish liberals, from their Scottish hero. So here we find ourselves, at the end of this essay, Spanish and Swedish liberals, who thought ourselves highly original and true pioneers, only to realize, like so many classical liberals have on so many other issues before us, that we got the best stuff from Adam Smith.
Johan Norberg is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, with an M A in the history of ideas from the University of Stockholm. He has written books on history and global economics, translated into more than 30 languages. In Den svenska liberalismens historia (only in Swedish) he explored Sweden’s classical liberal tradition. His most recent book is The Capitalist Manifesto, a “book of the year” in the Financial Times.
This essay is part of the AdamSmithWorks series Just Sentiments curated by Daniel B. Klein and Erik Matson. New essays will be published on the fourth Wednesday of most months. You can read more about the series in this Speaking of Smith post, "Just Sentiments- Welcome!". Klein and Matson lead the Adam Smith Program in the Department of Economics at George Mason University, in association with the Mercatus Center. In the program, they study big ideas in jurisprudence, politics, ethics, and economics as they were pursued during the original arc of liberalism, especially in the 18th century in Britain.
References
Johan Norberg is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, with an M A in the history of ideas from the University of Stockholm. He has written books on history and global economics, translated into more than 30 languages. In Den svenska liberalismens historia (only in Swedish) he explored Sweden’s classical liberal tradition. His most recent book is The Capitalist Manifesto, a “book of the year” in the Financial Times.
This essay is part of the AdamSmithWorks series Just Sentiments curated by Daniel B. Klein and Erik Matson. New essays will be published on the fourth Wednesday of most months. You can read more about the series in this Speaking of Smith post, "Just Sentiments- Welcome!". Klein and Matson lead the Adam Smith Program in the Department of Economics at George Mason University, in association with the Mercatus Center. In the program, they study big ideas in jurisprudence, politics, ethics, and economics as they were pursued during the original arc of liberalism, especially in the 18th century in Britain.
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