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 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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In United States politics, modern liberalism is a form of social liberalism that is one of two current major political factions in the United States. It combines ideas of civil liberty and equality with support for social justice. Economically, modern liberalism supports government regulation on private industry and opposes corporate monopolies. It opposes cuts to the social safety net, while simultaneously promoting income-proportional tax reform policies to reduce deficits. It supports a role for government in reducing economic inequality, increasing diversity, providing access to education, ensuring healthcare, regulating economic activity, and protecting the natural environment. This form of liberalism took shape in the 20th century as the voting franchise and other civil rights were extended to a larger class of citizens, most notably among African Americans and women. Major examples of modern liberal policy programs include the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society, the Affordable Care Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

In the first half of the 20th century, both major American parties had a conservative and a liberal wing. The conservative northern Republicans and Southern Democrats formed the conservative coalition which dominated the Congress in the pre-Civil Rights era. As northern Democrats began to support civil rights and organized labor, white voters and politicians in the formerly "Solid South" became more Republican. Since the 1960s, the Democratic Party has been considered liberal and the Republican Party has been considered conservative. As a group, "liberals" are referred to as left or center-left and "conservatives" as right or center-right. Starting in the 21st century, there has also been a sharp division between liberals who tend to live in denser, more heterogeneous urban areas and conservatives who tend to live in less dense, more homogeneous rural communities, with suburban areas largely split between the two. Since the 2000 election, blue and red have been the party colors of the Democrats and Republicans respectively, in contrast to the use of blue for conservatism and red for socialism in the rest of the Western world. (Full article...)

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Rawls in 1971

John Bordley Rawls (/rɔːlz/; February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American moral, legal and political philosopher in the liberal tradition. Rawls has been described as one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20th century.

In 1990, Will Kymlicka wrote in his introduction to the field that "it is generally accepted that the recent rebirth of normative political philosophy began with the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice in 1971". Rawls's theory of "justice as fairness" recommends equal basic liberties, equality of opportunity, and facilitating the maximum benefit to the least advantaged members of society in any case where inequalities may occur. Rawls's argument for these principles of social justice uses a thought experiment called the "original position", in which people deliberately select what kind of society they would choose to live in if they did not know which social position they would personally occupy. In his later work Political Liberalism (1993), Rawls turned to the question of how political power could be made legitimate given reasonable disagreement about the nature of the good life. (Full article...)

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

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There is one respect, however, in which there is justification for saying that the liberal occupies a position midway between the socialist and the conservative: he is as far from the crude rationalism of the socialist, who wants to reconstruct all social institutions according to a pattern prescribed by his individual reason, as from the mysticism to which the conservative so frequently has to resort. What I have described as the liberal position shares with conservatism a distrust of reason to the extent that the liberal is very much aware that we do not know all the answers and that he is not sure that the answers he has are certainly the right ones or even that we can find all the answers. He also does not disdain to seek assistance from whatever non-rational institutions or habits have proved their worth. The liberal differs from the conservative in his willingness to face this ignorance and to admit how little we know, without claiming the authority of supernatural sources of knowledge where his reason fails him. It has to be admitted that in some respects the liberal is fundamentally a skeptic—but it seems to require a certain degree of diffidence to let others seek their happiness in their own fashion and to adhere consistently to that tolerance which is an essential characteristic of liberalism.

There is no reason why this need mean an absence of religious belief on the part of the liberal. Unlike the rationalism of the French Revolution, true liberalism has no quarrel with religion, and I can only deplore the militant and essentially illiberal antireligionism which animated so much of nineteenth-century Continental liberalism. That this is not essential to liberalism is clearly shown by its English ancestors, the Old Whigs, who, if anything, were much too closely allied with a particular religious belief. What distinguishes the liberal from the conservative here is that, however profound his own spiritual beliefs, he will never regard himself as entitled to impose them on others and that for him the spiritual and the temporal are different spheres which ought not to be confused.

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— Friedrich von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 1960.

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General images

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

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