"modern" doesn't mean present day. "Contemporary" means present day. "modern" is either a grand social movement (modernism - break from tradition, urbanization, industrialization, technologically infused, experimental) or it's a time period (1500 - ?1970s?)
Modern Liberalism is not "present day liberalism" it's a form of liberalism that emerges in industrial societies, as opposed to, say Jeffersonian liberalism which was entirely about the freedom to buy, sell, breed, rape, and kill people you owned for the purpose of getting rich from cash cropping farms you owned on land you got by genociding subhuman natives.