In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Western world, specifically, the English Revolution of
the seventeenth century. Brought birth to a radical libertarian movement, even though only partially successful in its birthplace, Great Britain, it was able to usher in the Industrial Revolution, thereby freeing industry and production from the strangling restrictions of State control and urban government-supported guilds.
The classical liberal movement was, throughout the Western world, a mighty libertarian “revolution” against
what we might call the Old Order—the ancien régime which had dominated its subjects for centuries. This regime had, in
the early modern period beginning in the sixteenth century, imposed an absolute central State and a king ruling by divine right on top of an older, restrictive web of feudal land monopolies and urban guild controls and restrictions.
The result was a Europe stagnating under a crippling web of controls, taxes, and monopoly privileges to produce and sell conferred by central (and local) governments upon their favorite producers. This alliance of the new bureaucratic, war-making central State with privileged merchants—an alliance to be called "mercantilism" by later historians—and with a class of ruling feudal landlords constituted the Old Order against which the new movement of classical liberals and radicals arose and rebelled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
-- For a New Liberty / by Murray N. Rothbard
Today we have a much worse alliance of government and privileged monopolies, corporatism. The few have decided that the companies are "responsible" for doing the decisions for us. Effectively removing any personal freedom the people might have, freedoms that most countries had in their constitutions for centuries are today being removed by government-backed corporations, as-if they don't need to exist at all.