Portal:Liberalism

The Liberalism portal

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various and sometimes conflicting 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. 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. The 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 emphasized expanding democracy, French liberalism emphasized rejecting authoritarianism and is linked to nation-building. (Full article...)

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Individual contributors to classical liberalism and political liberalism are associated with philosophers of the Enlightenment. Liberalism as a specifically named ideology begins in the late 18th century as a movement towards self-government and away from aristocracy. It included the ideas of self-determination, the primacy of the individual and the nation as opposed to the state and religion as being the fundamental units of law, politics and economy.

Since then liberalism broadened to include a wide range of approaches from Americans Ronald Dworkin, Richard Rorty, John Rawls and Francis Fukuyama as well as the Indian Amartya Sen and the Peruvian Hernando de Soto. Some of these people moved away from liberalism while others espoused other ideologies before turning to liberalism. There are many different views of what constitutes liberalism, and some liberals would feel that some of the people on this list were not true liberals. It is intended to be suggestive rather than exhaustive. Theorists whose ideas were mainly typical for one country should be listed in that country's section of liberalism worldwide. Generally only thinkers are listed whereas politicians are only listed when they also made substantial contributions to liberal theory beside their active political work. (Full article...)

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Mill, c. 1870

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 and social 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. He advocated political and social reforms such as proportional representation, the emancipation of women, and the development of labour organisations and farm cooperatives.

The Columbia Encyclopedia describes Mill as occasionally coming "close to socialism, a theory repugnant to his predecessors". He 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. A member of the Liberal Party and author of the early feminist work The Subjection of Women, Mill was also the second Member of Parliament to call for women's suffrage after Henry Hunt in 1832. (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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There is a close connection between the assertion of natural rights and the theory of the social contract, or contract theory. The idea that the exercise of political power is legitimate only if it is founded on the consent of those who are subject to it (another of Locke’s theses), and thus that it is based on an agreement among those who decide to subject themselves to a higher power and with those to whom the exercise of power is entrusted, derives from the postulate that individuals possess rights not dependent on the institution of sovereignty and that the chief function of that institution is to allow the fullest possible realization of those rights compatible with secure social life. The connecting link between the doctrine of the rights of man and contract theory is the individualistic conception of society they hold in common: a conception according to which the particular individual, with his interests and needs, which take the form of rights in virtue of the acceptance of hypothetical law of nature, comes first and precedes the establishment of society. This contrasts with the organicist conception, in all its various guises, which takes the opposite view, seeing society as prior to the individual, or the social whole as taking precedence over its parts (in the Aristotelian formulation which had so enduring and influence). Modern contract theory is a real turning-point in the history of political thought, dominated as it had been by the organic idea, insofar as the contract theorists reversed the relationship between individual and society, and no longer saw society as a natural fact existing independently of the will of individuals, but as an artificial body, created by individuals in their own image and likeness to promote the satisfaction of their own interests and needs and the fullest exercise of their rights. The agreement which gives birth to the state is in turn viewed as possible, according to the theory of natural right, in virtue of the law of nature which attributes to all individuals certain natural rights that can be enjoyed only in the context of the free and ordered form of coexistence secured through such a voluntary accord-an accord requiring a mutual and reciprocal renunciation of certain rights on the part all the individuals concerned.

Without this Copernican revolution, which allowed the problem of the state to be viewed for the first time through the eyes of its subjects rather than its sovereign, the doctrine of the liberal sate, which is first and foremost the doctrine of juridical limits to state power, would have been impossible. Without individualism, there can be no liberalism.

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— Norberto Bobbio, Liberalism and Democracy, 1985.

General images

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

Image 1Builders in West Berlin, 1952 (from Neoliberalism)
Image 2Benjamin Constant, a Franco-Swiss political activist and theorist (from Liberalism)
Image 3Raif 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 4The 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 5Execution 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 6Montesquieu, who argued for the separation of the powers of government (from Liberalism)
Image 7Julius Faucher (from Liberalism)
Image 8Monument to the liberals of the 19th century in Agra del Orzán neighborhood, La Coruña, Galicia (Spain) (from Liberalism)
Image 9The 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 10Gustave de Molinari (from Liberalism)
Image 11United States incarceration rate per 100,000 population, 1925–2014 (from Neoliberalism)
Image 12Chilean (orange) and average Latin American (blue) rates of growth of GDP (1971–2007) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 13US federal minimum wage if it had kept pace with productivity. Also, the real minimum wage. (from Neoliberalism)
Image 14John 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 15John Milton's Areopagitica (1644) argued for the importance of freedom of speech. (from Liberalism)
Image 16The 2017–2018 Russian protests were organized by Russia's liberal opposition. (from Liberalism)
Image 17Per capita income during the Great Depression (from Neoliberalism)
Image 18Friedrich Hayek (from Neoliberalism)
Image 19T. 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 20As 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 21Wealth inequality in the United States increased from 1989 to 2013. (from Neoliberalism)
Image 22The iconic painting Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix, a tableau of the July Revolution in 1830 (from Liberalism)
Image 23John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty greatly influenced 19th-century liberalism (from Liberalism)
Image 24U.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 25Member nations of the International Monetary Fund (from Neoliberalism)
Image 26Franklin D. Roosevelt (from Liberalism)
Image 27Mary Wollstonecraft, widely regarded as the pioneer of liberal feminism (from Liberalism)
Image 28Ludwig Erhard (from Neoliberalism)
Image 29Noam 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 30John Locke was the first to develop a liberal philosophy, including the right to private property and the consent of the governed. (from Liberalism)
Image 31Madame de Staël (from Liberalism)
Image 32Pamphlet calling for a protest of economic policy in 1983 following the economic crisis (from Neoliberalism)
Image 33Unemployment in Chile and South America (1980–1990) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 34GDP per capita in Chile and Latin America 1950–2010 (time under Pinochet highlighted) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 35Sismondi, who wrote the first critique of the free market from a liberal perspective in 1819 (from Liberalism)