Progressivism is a species of liberalism. It, and modern liberalism, have as much a claim to the term as libertarianism does. It is a different development of the principles and ideas of liberalism; which are in essence a combination of Enlightenment philosophy and religious dissenters. We represent an extreme propertarianism, which is (rhetoric aside) not committed to ‘freedom’ in the abstract but to the particular legal sense of liberty which is more Germanic than liberal. The mainline of liberals and Progressives (two related, but different, groups with their own sub-factions) developed along the more Humanistic, radical republican lines inherent in classical liberalism. By the late 19th century it has become clear that liberals and libertarians are not the same thing anymore; Herbert Spencer was correct to point that modern liberals had become infatuated with power and reversed many gains for the classical liberals; but what he ought to have seen is that a quasi-anarchist hypercapitalist like himself had just as little in common with classical liberals as he did with Pietistic liberalism of his day.