lopments that are often considered together under the heading "modernization." Actually, Sheehan sees liberalism as an attempt to understand the changes that constituted modernization. Thus, Sheehan's approach is to examine the social changes that liberalism first tries to explain and later tries to shape. One of the initial problems of interpretation faced by Sheehan is the problem of defining liberalism, a problem that has been attacked in different ways. Sheehan finds the problem particularly vexing for the first half of the nineteenth century because of imprecise and inconsistent terminology. In the first section of the book, consisting of three chapters, Sheehan considers how the early liberals defined themselves and their ideology.
It is evident that Sheehan, like these early liberals, sees the development of liberalism as a consequence of social and economic change leading to a conception of political action to effect such change. Sheehan always re
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