This chapter puts into question a widely held belief that the liberal script in countries of (former) state socialism was simply transferred from West to the East after the end of the Cold War. It introduces the term “peripheral liberalism” for a range of ideas on a market- and individual rights-based transformation that emerged in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and East Asia as early as the 1970s. While political dissent and human rights activism of the informal opposition have long dominated Western perceptions of the transformation of socialist states, recent scholarship suggests that elites of late state socialism themselves paved the way for economic reforms and political change. Such local intellectual traditions and domestic powerplay were eventually also more influential than Western advisory and political pressure after 1989, although the latter have become a major target of current contestations of the liberal script especially in Eastern Europe.