This is an excerpt from a manuscript on individualism. The word “liberalism” stems from the Latin liber, which means both “free” and “generous,” and liberalis, which means “befitting a free-born person” (Rosenblatt 2018, p. 9). To the ancient Romans, the noun liberalitas, which corresponds to liber and liberalis, referred to “a noble and generous way of thinking and acting toward one’s fellow citizens,” as opposed to “selfishness” or “slavishness,” which was to think and act with regard only to oneself and one’s pleasures (ibid). Liberalitas was a moral attitude that the Romans thought of as essential to a free society. The great Roman political thinker Cicero described it as “the bond of human society” (p. 10). Roman historian Jed W. Atkins writes that liberalitas, together with justice, promoted “social cohesion…