Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy:

/p.7 I use the term 'liberal humanism' to denote the ruling assumptions, values and meanings of the modern epoch. Liberal humanism, laying claim to be both natural and universal, was produced in the interests of the bourgeois class which came to power in the second half of the seventeenth century. There are, of course, dangers in collapsing the historical specifities and the ideological differences of three centuries into a single term. Liberal humanism is not an unchanging, homogeneneous, unified essence, and the development, often contradictory, of the discourses and institutions which sustain it, deserves detailed analysis. But there are alternative dangers in a specificity which never risks generalization.....To find in Locke, for instance ... a liberalism and a humanism with still recognizable constitute elements of twentieth-century common sense is not to deny the importance of the specific location of Locke's texts in the 1690s on the one hand, or the subsequent and continuing debates and divisions within liberal humanism on the other....
/p.8 The common feature of liberal humanism, justifying the use of the single phrase, is a commitment to man , whose essence is freedom . Liberal humanism proposes that the subject is the free, unconstrained author of meaning and action, the origin of history. Unified, knowing, and autonomous, the human being seeks a political system which guarantees freedom of choice. Western liberal democracy, it claims, freely chosen, and thus evidently the unconstrained expression of human nature, was born in the seventeenth century with the emergence of the individual and the victory of constitutionalism in the consecutive English revolutions of the 1640s and 1688. But in the century since these views were established as self-evident, doubts have arisen concerning this reading of the past as the triumphant march of progress towards the moment when history levels off into the present. And from the new perspectives which have given rise to these doubts, both liberal humanism and the subject it produces appear to be an effect of a continuing history, rather than its culmination. The individual, it now seems, was not released at last from the heads of the people who had waited only for the peace and leisure to cultivate what lay ineluctably within them and within all of us. On the contrary, the liberal-humanism subject, /p.9 the product of a specific epoch and a specific class, was constructed in conflict and contradiction --with conflicting and contradictory consequences.
One of these contradictions is the inequality of freedom. While in theory all men are equal, men and women are not symmetrically defined. Man, the centre and hero of liberal humanism, was produced in contradistinction to the objects of his knowledge, and in terms of the relations of power in the economy and the state. Woman was produced contradistinction to man, and in terms of the relations of power in the family.