This kind of thinking makes me happy.

“To begin with, we need to ask why the ideologies arose when they did and what are the preconditions for their coming into existence.  First, we must be aware of the long tradition of political theorizing that stands in back of the ideologies, which can be said to recycle much of the material of these ancient theories.  For example, it is sometimes thought that liberal individualism is an unprecedented philosophy that would have been unthinkable prior to the Enlightenment or perhaps the Renaissance.  In its modern form this is certainly true.  Yet if we look back to the post-Aristotelian philosophy of Epicureanism, we are struck by the similarities between this philosophy and that of, say, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who lived two millennia later.  Individualism, as it turns out, is not so new after all.  The modern ideologies have thus received much of their content from these older theories.  The writer of Ecclesiastes tells us that there is nothing new under the sun.  Not surprisingly, then, the inventors of an ideology rarely create ex nihilo its intellectual ingredients; they have simply recycled them from earlier ideologies and political theories.” (Political Visions and Illusions p.23)