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 and equality before the law. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but they generally support individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), democracy, secularism, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and a market economy. Yellow is the political colour most commonly associated with liberalism.

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 and the rule of law. Liberals also ended mercantilist policies, royal monopolies and other barriers to trade, 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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David Lloyd George was one of the 'New Liberals' who passed welfare legislation

The Liberal welfare reforms (1906–1914) were a series of acts of social legislation passed by the Liberal Party after the 1906 general election. They represent the emergence of the modern welfare state in the United Kingdom. The reforms demonstrate the split that had emerged within liberalism, between emerging social liberalism and classical liberalism, and a change in direction for the Liberal Party from laissez-faire traditional liberalism to a party advocating a larger, more active government protecting the welfare of its citizens.

The historian G. R. Searle argued that the reforms had multiple causes, including "the need to fend off the challenge of Labour; pure humanitarianism; the search for electoral popularity; considerations of National Efficiency; and a commitment to a modernised version of welfare capitalism." By implementing the reforms outside the English Poor Laws, the stigma attached to claiming relief was also removed. (Full article...)

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Portrait of Locke in 1697 by Godfrey Kneller

John Locke FRS (/lɒk/; 29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704) was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "Father of Liberalism". Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Sir Francis Bacon, Locke is equally important to social contract theory. His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American Revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence. Internationally, Locke’s political-legal principles continue to have a profound influence on the theory and practice of limited representative government and the protection of basic rights and freedoms under the rule of law.

Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He postulated that, at birth, the mind was a blank slate, or tabula rasa. Contrary to Cartesian philosophy based on pre-existing concepts, he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception, a concept now known as empiricism. Demonstrating the ideology of science in his observations, whereby something must be capable of being tested repeatedly and that nothing is exempt from being disproved, Locke stated that "whatever I write, as soon as I discover it not to be true, my hand shall be the forwardest to throw it into the fire". Such is one example of Locke's belief in empiricism. (Full article...)

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

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Sect. 6. But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence: though man in that state have an uncontroulable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature in his possession, but where some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for it. The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions: for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker; all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order, and about his business; they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another's pleasure: and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us, that may authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another's uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for our's. Every one, as he is bound to preserve himself, and not to quit his station wilfully, so by the like reason, when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind, and may not, unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another.

Sect. 7. And that all men may be restrained from invading others rights, and from doing hurt to one another, and the law of nature be observed, which willeth the peace and preservation of all mankind, the execution of the law of nature is, in that state, put into every man's hands, whereby every one has a right to punish the transgressors of that law to such a degree, as may hinder its violation: for the law of nature would, as all other laws that concern men in this world 'be in vain, if there were no body that in the state of nature had a power to execute that law, and thereby preserve the innocent and restrain offenders. And if any one in the state of nature may punish another for any evil he has done, every one may do so: for in that state of perfect equality, where naturally there is no superiority or jurisdiction of one over another, what any may do in prosecution of that law, every one must needs have a right to do.

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— John Locke, Two Treatises on Government, 1690.

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General images

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

Image 1Execution 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 2Friedrich Hayek (from Neoliberalism)
Image 3John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty greatly influenced the course of 19th century liberalism (from Liberalism)
Image 4As 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 5Benjamin Constant, a Franco-Swiss political activist and theorist (from Liberalism)
Image 6The 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 7Thomas Hill 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 8Raif 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 9Chilean (orange) and average Latin American (blue) rates of growth of GDP (1971–2007) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 10Builders in West Berlin, 1952 (from Neoliberalism)
Image 11GDP per capita in Chile and Latin America 1950–2010 (time under Pinochet highlighted) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 12Wealth inequality in the United States increased from 1989 to 2013. (from Neoliberalism)
Image 13John Milton's Areopagitica (1644) argued for the importance of freedom of speech (from Liberalism)
Image 14Per capita income during the Great Depression (from Neoliberalism)
Image 15January 1933 color photo of Franklin D. Roosevelt as the Man of the Year of Time (from Liberalism)
Image 16Pamphlet calling for a protest of economic policy in 1983 following the economic crisis (from Neoliberalism)
Image 17Mary Wollstonecraft, widely regarded as the pioneer of liberal feminism (from Liberalism)
Image 18John Locke, who was the first to develop a liberal philosophy, including the right to private property and the consent of the governed (from Liberalism)
Image 192017 Russian protests were organized by Russia's liberal opposition (from Liberalism)
Image 20The iconic painting Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix, a tableau of the July Revolution in 1830 (from Liberalism)
Image 21Montesquieu, who argued for the government's separation of powers (from Liberalism)
Image 22Madame de Staël (from Liberalism)
Image 23Member nations of the International Monetary Fund (from Neoliberalism)
Image 24United States incarceration rate per 100,000 population, 1925–2013 (from Neoliberalism)
Image 25Unemployment in Chile and South America (1980–1990) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 26Ludwig Erhard (from Neoliberalism)
Image 27The Great Depression with its periods of worldwide economic hardship formed the backdrop against which 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 28John 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 29Sismondi, who wrote the first critique of the free market from a liberal perspective in 1819 (from Liberalism)
Image 30Julius Faucher (from Liberalism)
Image 31Gustave de Molinari (from Liberalism)