A libertine is one devoid of any restraints, especially one who ignores or even spurns accepted morals and forms of behavior sanctioned by the larger society. The philosophy gained new-found adherents in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, particularly in France and Britain. Notable among these were John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, and the Marquis de Sade. “Libertine”, like many words, is an evolving one, defined today as “a dissolute person; usually a person who is morally unrestrained”
Classical liberalism is a political ideology that developed in the 19th century in England, Western Europe, and the Americas. It is committed to the ideal of limited government and liberty of individuals including freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly, and free markets.
Classical liberalism places a particular emphasis on the sovereignty of the individual, with private property rights being seen as essential to individual liberty. This forms the philosophical basis for laissez-faire public policy. The ideology of the original classical liberals argued against direct democracy “for there is nothing in the bare idea of majority rule to show that majorities will always respect the rights of property or maintain rule of law.”
Friedrich Hayek identified two different traditions within classical liberalism: the “British tradition” and the “French tradition”. Hayek saw the British philosophers David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Josiah Tucker, Edmund Burke and William Paley as representative of a tradition that articulated beliefs in empiricism, the common law, and in traditions and institutions which had spontaneously evolved but were imperfectly understood.
Libertarians see themselves as sharing many philosophical, political, and economic undertones with classical liberalism, such as the ideas of laissez-faire government, free markets, and individual freedom.
Classical liberalism was revived in the 20th century by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick, Loren Lomasky, and Jan Narveson.
Notable individuals who have contributed to classical liberalism include Jean-Baptiste Say, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo.
It seems to be clear that Libertarianism developed from Classical Liberalism. Its modern form developed in the United States, where it drew on rights theory, free-market economics, the romantic individualist ideas set out in works such as those of Ayn Rand, for instance, and the American tradition of non-interventionism in foreign policy.
A division eventually developed between those Libertarians who wanted to get rid of the state or government altogether and those who were uneasy about the state, but thought that it should be severely limited. The former group are called the Anarco-Capitalist Libertarians, while the latter group are called either just Libertarians.
Anarcho-capitalism is an individualist anarchist political philosophy that advocates the elimination of the state and the elevation of the sovereign individual in a free market. In an anarcho-capitalist society, law enforcement, courts, and all other security services are provided by voluntarily-funded competitors such as private defense agencies rather than through compulsory taxation.
Murray Rothbard and other natural rights theorists hold strongly to the central non-aggression axiom, while other free-market anarchists such as David D. Friedman utilize consequentialist theories such as utilitarianism
Libertarianism links Adam Smith’s ideas about markets and coordination and John Locke’s ideas about human rights. In a market setting, individual interaction is consensual, voluntary, and motivated by gain. For this to take place, the participants need a moral and legal framework and this is provided by Locke’s ideas about moral rights. Voluntary transactions in markets and elsewhere are to be contrasted with coercion, which Libertarians associate with the state. Generally speaking, Libertarians prefer that the private sector develop codes of conduct and regulations regarding the marketplace of goods and ideas.
As you quote Hayek's fourth chapter of The Constitution of Liberty in analyzing the two enlightenment strands (English/Scottish vs. French) it is important to point out that as you mention, the former was based upon a empiricist imprecise slowly evolving system of 'what worked, and what didn't.' Hayek notes the French system was formed in imitation of the Liberty they saw in the British system and in attempting to formalize it they chose a rationalistic and metaphysical solution.
My big problem with much of the libertarian answers for today is that they continually use a rationalistic solution -- the French answer -- for most of the questions facing us. They ignore or dismiss the settled empirical solutions adopted over time.
Russel Kirk in the Errors of Ideology says:
The word ideology was coined in Napoleonic times. Destutt de Tracy, the author of Les éléments d’idéologie (five volumes, 1801-15), was an abstract intellectual of the sort since grown familiar on the Left Bank of the Seine, the haunt of all budding ideologues, among them in recent decades the famous liberator of Democratic Kampuchea, Pol Pot. Tracy and his disciples intended a widespread reform of education, to be founded upon an alleged science of ideas; they drew heavily upon the psychology of Condillac and more remotely upon that of John Locke.While conservatives and small "l" libertarians find much to agree on in small government, they often diverge over these rationalistic ideological solutions that use J. S. Mill type "one simple principle" methods to determine complex political questions that can never be settled by ignoring historical foundations.Rejecting religion and metaphysics, these original ideologues believed that they could discover a system of natural laws—which system, if conformed to, could become the foundation of universal harmony and contentment. Doctrines of selfinterest, economic productivity, and personal liberty were bound up with these notions. Late-born children of the dying Enlightenment, the Ideologues assumed that systematized knowledge derived from sensation could perfect society through ethical and educational methods and by well-organized political direction.
Napoleon dismissed the Ideologues with the remark that the world is governed not by abstract ideas, but by imagination.
John Adams called this new-fangled ideology “the science of idiocy.” Nevertheless, during the nineteenth century ideologues sprang up as if someone, like Jason, had sown dragons’ teeth that turned into armed men. These ideologues generally have been enemies to religion, tradition, custom, convention, prescription, and old constitutions.
The concept of ideology was altered considerably in the middle of the nineteenth century, by Karl Marx and his school. Ideas, Marx argued, are nothing better than expressions of class interests, as related to economic production.
Ideology, the alleged science of ideas, thus becomes a systematic apology for the claims of a class—nothing more.
Or, to put this argument in Marx’s own blunt and malicious terms, what has been called political philosophy is merely a mask for the economic self-seeking of oppressors—so the Marxists declared. Ruling ideas and norms constitute a delusive mask upon the face of the dominant class, shown to the exploited “as a standard of conduct, partly to varnish, partly to provide moral support for, domination.” So Marx wrote to Engels.
Yet the exploited too, Marx says, develop systems of ideas to advance their revolutionary designs. So what we call Marxism is an ideology intended to achieve revolution, the triumph of the proletariat, and eventually communism. To the consistent Marxist, ideas have no value in themselves: they, like all art, are worthwhile only as a means to achieve equality of condition and economic satisfaction. While deriding the ideologies of all other persuasions, the Marxist builds with patient cunning his own ideology. Although it has been the most powerful of ideologies, Marxism—very recently diminished in strength—has competitors: various forms of nationalism, negritude, feminism, fascism (a quasi-ideology never fully fleshed out in Italy), nazism (an ideology in embryo, Hannah Arendt wrote), syndicalism, anarchism, social democracy, and Lord knows what all. Doubtless yet more forms of ideology will be concocted during the twenty-first century.
Kenneth Minogue, in his recent book Alien Powers: the Pure Theory of Ideology, uses the word “to denote any doctrine which presents the hidden and saving truth about the world in the form of social analysis. It is a feature of all such doctrines to incorporate a general theory of the mistakes of everybody else.”
That “hidden and saving truth” is a fraud—a complex of contrived falsifying “myths”, disguised as history, about the society we have inherited.
Raymond Aron, in The Opium of the Intellectuals, analyzes the three myths that have seduced Parisian intellectuals: the myths of the Left, of the Revolution, of the Proletariat.
To summarize the analysis of ideology undertaken by such scholars as Minogue, Aron, J. L. Talmon, Thomas Molnar, Lewis Feuer, and Hans Barth, this word ideology, since the Second World War, usually has signified a dogmatic political theory which is an endeavor to substitute secular goals and doctrines for religious goals and doctrines; and which promises to overthrow present dominations so that the oppressed may be liberated. Ideology’s promises are what Talmon calls “political messianism”. The ideologue promises salvation in this world, hotly declaring that there exists no other realm of being. Eric Voegelin, Gerhart Niemeyer, and other writers have emphasized that ideologues “immanentize the symbols of transcendence”—that is, corrupt the vision of salvation through grace in death into false promises of complete happiness in this mundane realm.
Ideology, in short, is a political formula that promises mankind an earthly paradise; but in cruel fact what ideology has created is a series of terrestrial hells. I set down below some of the vices of ideology.
1) Ideology is inverted religion, denying the Christian doctrine of salvation through grace in death, and substituting collective salvation here on earth through violent revolution. Ideology inherits the fanaticism that sometimes has afflicted religious faith, and applies that intolerant belief to concerns secular.
2) Ideology makes political compromise impossible: the ideologue will accept no deviation from the Absolute Truth of his secular revelation. This narrow vision brings about civil war, extirpation of “reactionaries”, and the destruction of beneficial functioning social institutions.
3) Ideologues vie one with another in fancied fidelity to their Absolute Truth; and they are quick to denounce deviationists or defectors from their party orthodoxy. Thus fierce factions are raised up among the ideologues themselves, and they war mercilessly and endlessly upon one another, as did Trotskyites and Stalinists.The evidence of ideological ruin lies all about us. How then can it be that the allurements of ideology retain great power in much of the world?