Historically, political use of the term referred exclusively to a form of progressive electoral reformism, known as Radicalism, that had developed in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries.
[2] The Encyclopædia Britannica records the first political usage of 'radical' as ascribed to Charles James Fox, a British Whig Party parliamentarian who in 1797 proposed a 'radical reform' of the electoral system to provide universal manhood suffrage, thereby idiomatically establishing the term 'Radicals' as a label denoting supporters of the reformation of British Parliament.
[citation needed] As open advocacy of republicanism was illegal in France following the Napoleonic Wars, Radicals emerged under similar reformist ideals as their British counterparts, though they later branched out to form the Radical-Socialist movement with a focus on proletarian solidarity.
Such radical leaders included Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in Russia, Mao Zedong in China, Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran, Adolf Hitler in Germany, as well as more mainstream radicals such as Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom.
[1][7] The common feature to all radical political forms is a view that some fundamental change is required of the status quo.