We must thank the Liberal Thinkers, classical and modern, for our ideas on Liberalism and propelling individualism. I'm going to summarise them here and write other pieces at some point on selected influencers :
John Locke (1632-1704) on natural rights: life, liberty, and property.
Adam Smith (1723-1790) on free markets and the invisible hand.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) on popular sovereignty and the social contract.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) utilitarianism and individual liberty.
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) for civil society and political liberty.
Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) negative and positive liberty, pluralism and individual choice.
Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) free-market capitalism v. Socialism, warned against totalitarianism.
John Rawls (1921-2002) justice as fairness.
These liberal values condition our self-development projects.
Classic Liberalism is a bottom-up view of society, ie individuals make the group not the other way around. Today, Liberalism is about human rights, positive liberty, "freedom to...", originally Liberalism was about "freedom from", the fundamental rights or natural freedom that individuals inherently possess in "the state of nature".
Remember where we came from and the primitive instinctive "Call of the Savannah" we all know, but our elites seem unable to resist.
Wildlife films show us how "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" is that State of Nature and why individuals might agree to give up some of their freedoms to a strong and sovereign state with absolute power to ensure order and stability, in exchange for protection.
Note: A totalitarian Hobbesian state guaranteeing security in exchange for your freedom is not part of Liberal thinking, but he was the first to see that Society is composed of individuals who come together for mutual interests in a "social contract".
Hobbes was an early liberal in the sense that he believed individuals had fundamental inalienable natural rights, and because he introduced the idea of a social contract between indidividual and state, but he is not a liberal because he believed people valued security over freedom (which I happen to think they mostly do) and because he believed in an all powerful state (you would call it "big state" today, as opposed to the "night watchman state" that a true liberal wants).
Basically, Hobbes had a pretty pessimistic view of human nature, which is not can-do Liberal thinking, but that humanity has not much evolved since we lived in the jungle (agreed?) and that we are all basically selfish killers on the make for territory food and mates (primitive animal behaviour...agreed?).
... I digress...