Portal:Liberalism

Portal topics: Activities; Culture; Geography; Health; History; Mathematics; Nature; People; Philosophy; Religion; Society; Technology; Random portal

The Liberalism portal

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...)

Refresh with new selections below (purge)

Selected article - show another

Logo of the PNȚ used in 1933, featuring a circle (the main electoral symbol) with an icon of a peasant and oxen ploughing a field

The National Peasants' Party (also known as the National Peasant Party or National Farmers' Party; Romanian: Partidul Național Țărănesc, or Partidul Național-Țărănist, PNȚ) was an agrarian political party in the Kingdom of Romania. It was formed in 1926 through the fusion of the Romanian National Party (PNR), a conservative-regionalist group centred on Transylvania, and the Peasants' Party (PȚ), which had coalesced the left-leaning agrarian movement in the Old Kingdom and Bessarabia. The definitive PNR–PȚ merger came after a decade-long rapprochement, producing a credible contender to the dominant National Liberal Party (PNL). National Peasantists agreed on the concept of a "peasant state", which defended smallholding against state capitalism or state socialism, proposing voluntary cooperative farming as the basis for economic policy. Peasants were seen as the first defence of Romanian nationalism and of the country's monarchic regime, sometimes within a system of social corporatism. Regionally, the party expressed sympathy for Balkan federalism and rallied with the International Agrarian Bureau; internally, it championed administrative decentralization and respect for minority rights, as well as, briefly, republicanism. It remained factionalized on mainly ideological grounds, leading to a series of defections.

With its attacks on the PNL establishment, the PNȚ came to endorse an authoritarian monarchy, mounting no resistance to a conspiracy which brought Carol II on the Romanian throne in 1930. Over the following five years, Carol manoeuvred against the PNȚ, which opposed his attempts to subvert liberal democracy. PNȚ governments were in power for most of the time between 1928 and 1933, with the leader Iuliu Maniu as its longest-serving Prime Minister. Supported by the Romanian Social Democrats, they expanded Romania's welfare state, but failed to tackle the Great Depression, and organized clampdowns against radicalized workers at Lupeni and Grivița. This issue brought Maniu into conflict with the outlawed Romanian Communist Party, though the PNȚ, and in particular its left, favored a Romanian popular front. From 1935, most of the centrist wing embraced anti-fascism, outvoting the PNȚ's far-right, which split of as a Romanian Front, under Alexandru Vaida-Voevod; in that interval, the PNȚ set up pro-democratic paramilitary units, or Peasant Guards. However, the party signed a temporary cooperation agreement with the fascist Iron Guard ahead of national elections in 1937, sparking much controversy among its own voters. (Full article...)

List of selected articles

Selected biography - show another

Portrait of Locke, 1697

John Locke (/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 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. (Full article...)

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

Selected quote

General images

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

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