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), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, private property and a market economy.

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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The Demands of Liberal Education is a 1999 political philosophy book by Meira Levinson that establishes a liberal political theory of children's education that fits the mutual needs of the state and its diverse citizenry. She writes that the intent of a liberal education—an education that follows from a liberal society's values—is to maximize the autonomy of individual children through increasing their capacity for liberty. Levinson argues autonomy as a right to children. The book, published by Oxford University Press, aims to address a lacuna between educational policy and liberal political theory.

Levinson advocates for a weak perfectionist state that can promote thick autonomy while accepting citizens who do not agree. She argues for public schools "common" to all citizens and "detached" from individual citizen or community values, and argues for a constitutional mandate to this end. (Full article...)

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Portrait by Henry William Pickersgill

Jeremy Bentham (/ˈbɛnθəm/; 15 February 1748 [O.S. 4 February 1747] – 6 June 1832) was an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism.

Bentham defined as the "fundamental axiom" of his philosophy the principle that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong." He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism. He advocated individual and economic freedoms, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and (in an unpublished essay) the decriminalising of homosexual acts. He called for the abolition of slavery, capital punishment and physical punishment, including that of children. He has also become known as an early advocate of animal rights. Though strongly in favour of the extension of individual legal rights, he opposed the idea of natural law and natural rights (both of which are considered "divine" or "God-given" in origin), calling them "nonsense upon stilts." Bentham was also a sharp critic of legal fictions. (Full article...)

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

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Liberalism is the philosophy for our time, because it does not try to conserve every tradition of the past, because it does not apply to new problems the old doctrinaire solutions, because it is prepared to experiment and innovate and because it knows that the past is less important than the future.

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— Pierre Trudeau, Defining liberalism at the 1968 Liberal leadership convention.

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General images

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

Image 1The 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 2Raif 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 3John Milton's Areopagitica (1644) argued for the importance of freedom of speech (from Liberalism)
Image 4John 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 5Mary Wollstonecraft, widely regarded as the pioneer of liberal feminism (from Liberalism)
Image 6GDP per capita in Chile and Latin America 1950–2010 (time under Pinochet highlighted) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 7Gustave de Molinari (from Liberalism)
Image 8Julius Faucher (from Liberalism)
Image 92017 Russian protests were organized by Russia's liberal opposition (from Liberalism)
Image 10United States incarceration rate per 100,000 population, 1925–2013 (from Neoliberalism)
Image 11Pamphlet calling for a protest of economic policy in 1983 following the economic crisis (from Neoliberalism)
Image 12Unemployment in Chile and South America (1980–1990) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 13Builders in West Berlin, 1952 (from Neoliberalism)
Image 14Madame de Staël (from Liberalism)
Image 15Member nations of the International Monetary Fund (from Neoliberalism)
Image 16Per capita income during the Great Depression (from Neoliberalism)
Image 17John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty greatly influenced the course of 19th century liberalism (from Liberalism)
Image 18The iconic painting Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix, a tableau of the July Revolution in 1830 (from Liberalism)
Image 19Wealth inequality in the United States increased from 1989 to 2013. (from Neoliberalism)
Image 20The 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 21January 1933 color photo of Franklin D. Roosevelt as the Man of the Year of Time (from Liberalism)
Image 22Thomas 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 23Benjamin Constant, a Franco-Swiss political activist and theorist (from Liberalism)
Image 24Execution 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 25Ludwig Erhard (from Neoliberalism)
Image 26Montesquieu, who argued for the government's separation of powers (from Liberalism)
Image 27Sismondi, who wrote the first critique of the free market from a liberal perspective in 1819 (from Liberalism)
Image 28Friedrich Hayek (from Neoliberalism)
Image 29Chilean (orange) and average Latin American (blue) rates of growth of GDP (1971–2007) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 30As 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 31John 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)