While none of these thinkers was a liberal, given their respective reservations regarding popular rule, their revolutionary reconception of politics, society, science, and nature laid the foundation of modern liberalism. A succession of thinkers in subsequent decades and centuries were to build upon these three basic revolutions of thought, redefining liberty as the liberation of humans from established authority, emancipation from arbitrary culture and tradition, and the expansion of human power and dominion over nature through advancing scientific discovery and economic prosperity.
