# What is the history of term "Liberal Democracy"

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-history-of-term-liberal-democracy/736214>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [October 30, 2015, 11:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-history-of-term-liberal-democracy/736214 "2015-10-30T23:16:20Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\
**Post date:** [October 30, 2015, 11:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-history-of-term-liberal-democracy/736214/1 "2015-10-30T23:16:20Z")

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Either my Google-foo is weak or this is surprisingly hard to find on the internets.

The modern definition is [trivial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_democracy)to find. But I have totally failed to find a history of the term itself (rather than the concept). Who coined it, and when? Is it a modern term or something the US founding fathers would have recognised?

This is somewhat triggered by the fact that the conservative leaning side of my FB feed has blown up recently with “the US was founded as a republic not a democracy!” memes of late. But don’t want to get into that argument.

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**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\
**Post date:** [October 31, 2015, 6:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-history-of-term-liberal-democracy/736214/2 "2015-10-31T18:40:23Z")

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[Google n-gram can be a help](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=liberal+democracy&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cliberal%20democracy%3B%2Cc0) for this kind of research. Looks like the earliest references are [from the 1800s, American](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22liberal+democracy%22&num=30&lr=lang_en&safe=off&biw=1366&bih=563&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1800,cd_max:1943,lr:lang_1en,sbd:1&tbm=bks&ei=_go1Vq7XLISqab-qtrAI&start=90&sa=N&dpr=1) but things only really kick off in the 20s/30s…

No, wait, I chose a bad default start time, looks like there’s a patch[just pre-1800s](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22liberal+democracy%22&num=30&lr=lang_en&safe=off&biw=1366&bih=563&source=lnt&tbs=lr%3Alang_1en%2Csbd%3A1%2Ccdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F1700%2Ccd_max%3A12%2F31%2F1800&tbm=bks), John Adams uses the term. So yes, recognizable to at least one Founding Father