Portal:Liberalism

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Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various and often mutually warring views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion, constitutional government and privacy rights. Liberalism is frequently cited as the dominant ideology of modern history.

Liberalism became a distinct movement in the Age of Enlightenment, gaining popularity among Western philosophers and economists. Liberalism sought to replace the norms of hereditary privilege, state religion, absolute monarchy, the divine right of kings and traditional conservatism with representative democracy, rule of law, and equality under the law. Liberals also ended mercantilist policies, royal monopolies, and other trade barriers, instead promoting free trade and marketization. Philosopher John Locke is often credited with founding liberalism as a distinct tradition based on the social contract, arguing that each man has a natural right to life, liberty and property, and governments must not violate these rights. While the British liberal tradition has emphasized expanding democracy, French liberalism has emphasized rejecting authoritarianism and is linked to nation-building. (Full article...)

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Universal suffrage or universal franchise ensures the right to vote for as many people bound by a government's laws as possible, as supported by the "one person, one vote" principle. For many, the term universal suffrage assumes the exclusion of the young and non-citizens (among others). At the same time, some insist that more inclusion is needed before suffrage can be truly universal. Democratic theorists, especially those hoping to achieve more universal suffrage, support presumptive inclusion, where the legal system would protect the voting rights of all subjects unless the government can clearly prove that disenfranchisement is necessary. Universal full suffrage includes both the right to vote, also called active suffrage, and the right to be elected, also called passive suffrage. (Full article...)

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1873 portrait by George Frederic Watts

John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 7 May 1873) was an English philosopher, political economist, politician and civil servant. One of the most influential thinkers in the history of liberalism, he contributed widely to social theory, political theory, and political economy. Dubbed "the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century" by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he conceived of liberty as justifying the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state and social control.

Mill was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by his predecessor Jeremy Bentham. He contributed to the investigation of scientific methodology, though his knowledge of the topic was based on the writings of others, notably William Whewell, John Herschel, and Auguste Comte, and research carried out for Mill by Alexander Bain. He engaged in written debate with Whewell. (Full article...)

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John Locke T. H. Green John Dewey Norberto Bobbio John Rawls Isaiah Berlin David Lloyd George Jeremy Bentham

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What made the protection of individual liberty so sacred to Mill? In his famous essay he declares that, unless men are left to live as they wish 'in the path which merely concerns themselves', civilization cannot advance; the truth will not, for lack of a free market in ideas come to light; there will be no scope for spontaneity, originality, genius, for the mental energy, for moral courage. Society will be crushed by the weight of 'collective mediocrity'. Whatever is rich and diversified will be crushed by the weight of custom, by men's constant tendency to conformity, which breeds only 'withered capacities', 'pinched and hidebound', 'cramped and warped' human beings. 'Pagan self-assertion is a worthy as Christian self-denial'. 'All the errors which a man is likely to commit against advice and warning are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem is good.’ The defense of liberty consists in the ‘negative’ goal of warding off interference. To threaten a man with persecution unless he submits to a life in which he exercises no choices of his goals; to block before him every door but one, no matter how noble the prospect upon which it opens, or how benevolent the motives of those who arrange this, is to sin against the truth that he is a man, a being with a life of his own to live. This is liberty as it has been conceived by liberals in the modern world from the days of Erasmus (some would say of Occam) to our own. Every plea for civil liberties and individual rights, every protest against exploitation and humiliation, against the encroachment of public authority, or the mass hypnosis of custom or organized propaganda, springs from this individualistic, and much disputed, conception of man.

The other is that men should seek to discover the truth, or to develop a certain type of character of which Mill approved - critical, original, imaginative, independent, non-conforming to the point of eccentricity, and so on - and that truth can be found, and such character can be bred, only in conditions of freedom. Both these are liberal views, but they are not identical, and the connection between them is, at best, empirical. No one would argue that truth or freedom of self-expression could flourish where dogma crushes all thought. But the evidence of history tends to show (as, indeed, was argued by James Stephen in his formidable attack on Mill in his Liberty, Equality, Fraternity) that integrity, love of truth, and fiery individualism grow at least as often in severely disciplined communities among, for example, the puritan Calvinists of Scotland or New England, or under military discipline, as in more tolerant or indifferent societies; and if this is so, Mill's argument for liberty as a necessary condition for the growth of human genius falls to the ground. If his two goals proved incompatible, Mill would be faced with a cruel dilemma, quite apart from the further difficulties created by the inconsistency of his doctrines with strict utilitarianism, even in his own humane version of it.

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— Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, 1958.

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General images

The following are images from various liberalism-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1Mary Wollstonecraft, widely regarded as the pioneer of liberal feminism (from Liberalism)
Image 2As a liberal nationalist, K. J. Ståhlberg (1865–1952), the President of Finland, anchored the state in liberal democracy, guarded the fragile germ of the rule of law, and embarked on internal reforms. (from Liberalism)
Image 3Noam Chomsky's 1999 book Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order is an open critique of neoliberalism and the American economic structure (from Neoliberalism)
Image 4Friedrich Hayek (from Neoliberalism)
Image 5The European Union–Mercosur free trade agreement, which would form one of the world's largest free trade areas, has been denounced by environmental activists and indigenous rights campaigners. (from Neoliberalism)
Image 6John Locke was the first to develop a liberal philosophy, including the right to private property and the consent of the governed. (from Liberalism)
Image 7Per capita income during the Great Depression (from Neoliberalism)
Image 8Benjamin Constant, a Franco-Swiss political activist and theorist (from Liberalism)
Image 9Sismondi, who wrote the first critique of the free market from a liberal perspective in 1819 (from Liberalism)
Image 10Monument to the liberals of the 19th century in Agra del Orzán neighborhood, La Coruña, Galicia, (Spain) (from Liberalism)
Image 11Chilean (orange) and average Latin American (blue) rates of growth of GDP (1971–2007) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 12United States incarceration rate per 100,000 population, 1925–2014 (from Neoliberalism)
Image 13Julius Faucher (from Liberalism)
Image 14T. H. Green, an influential liberal philosopher who established in Prolegomena to Ethics (1884) the first major foundations for what later became known as positive liberty and in a few years, his ideas became the official policy of the Liberal Party in Britain, precipitating the rise of social liberalism and the modern welfare state (from Liberalism)
Image 15Raif Badawi, a Saudi Arabian writer and the creator of the website Free Saudi Liberals, who was sentenced to ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes for "insulting Islam" in 2014 (from Liberalism)
Image 16Builders in West Berlin, 1952 (from Neoliberalism)
Image 17Franklin D. Roosevelt (from Liberalism)
Image 18The Great Depression, with its periods of worldwide economic hardship, formed the backdrop against which the Keynesian Revolution took place (the image is Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother depiction of destitute pea-pickers in California, taken in March 1936). (from Liberalism)
Image 19Member nations of the International Monetary Fund (from Neoliberalism)
Image 20Ludwig Erhard (from Neoliberalism)
Image 21John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of modern times and whose ideas, which are still widely felt, formalized modern liberal economic policy. (from Liberalism)
Image 22The iconic painting Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix, a tableau of the July Revolution in 1830 (from Liberalism)
Image 23Montesquieu, who argued for the separation of the powers of government (from Liberalism)
Image 24Unemployment in Chile and South America (1980–1990) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 25Execution of José María de Torrijos y Uriarte and his men in 1831 as Spanish King Ferdinand VII took repressive measures against the liberal forces in his country (from Liberalism)
Image 26The 2017–2018 Russian protests were organized by Russia's liberal opposition. (from Liberalism)
Image 27Gustave de Molinari (from Liberalism)
Image 28Wealth inequality in the United States increased from 1989 to 2013. (from Neoliberalism)
Image 29GDP per capita in Chile and Latin America 1950–2010 (time under Pinochet highlighted) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 30U.S. President Bush, Canadian PM Mulroney, and Mexican President Salinas participate in the ceremonies to sign the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). (from Neoliberalism)
Image 31Madame de Staël (from Liberalism)
Image 32John Milton's Areopagitica (1644) argued for the importance of freedom of speech. (from Liberalism)
Image 33Pamphlet calling for a protest of economic policy in 1983 following the economic crisis (from Neoliberalism)
Image 34John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty greatly influenced 19th-century liberalism (from Liberalism)