The Good and The Right. Modern Liberalism, founded on the thought of Immanuel Kant, which held that the individual is an autonomous being, who despite living in a deterministic world of phenomena, still has an existence in the world of noumena, or things in themselves, and thus have some sort of free will. According to this conception of the person, what makes an individual valuable is not the choices that individual makes, but merely the fact that the individual is making his or her own choice. Thus the government should do nothing more than preserve individual liberty against others. The modern contrast to Liberalism is Communitarianism, a doctrine which hearkens back to Aristotle's idea that the role of the government is to cultivate virtue among its citizens.