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 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...)

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Top left: The TVA Act signed into law in 1933
Top right: President Franklin D. Roosevelt led the New Dealers;
Bottom: A public mural from the arts program

The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1938. Major federal programs and agencies, including the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA) and the Social Security Administration (SSA), provided support for farmers, the unemployed, youth, and the elderly. The New Deal included new constraints and safeguards on the banking industry and efforts to re-inflate the economy after prices had fallen sharply. New Deal programs included both laws passed by Congress as well as presidential executive orders during the first term of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The programs focused on what historians refer to as the "3 R's": relief for the unemployed and for the poor, recovery of the economy back to normal levels, and reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression. The New Deal produced a political realignment, making the Democratic Party the majority (as well as the party that held the White House for seven out of the nine presidential terms from 1933 to 1969) with its base in progressive ideas, the South, big city machines and the newly empowered labor unions, and various ethnic groups. The Republicans were split, with progressive Republicans in support but conservatives opposing the entire New Deal as hostile to business and economic growth. The realignment crystallized into the New Deal coalition that dominated presidential elections into the 1960s and the opposing conservative coalition largely controlled Congress in domestic affairs from 1937 to 1964. (Full article...)

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Jeremy Bentham (/ˈbɛnθəm/; 4 February 1747/8 O.S. [15 February 1748 N.S.] – 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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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.

General images

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

Image 1Franklin D. Roosevelt (from Liberalism)
Image 2Madame de Staël (from Liberalism)
Image 3United States incarceration rate per 100,000 population, 1925–2014 (from Neoliberalism)
Image 4Per capita income during the Great Depression (from Neoliberalism)
Image 5John 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 6Execution 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 7John Milton's Areopagitica (1644) argued for the importance of freedom of speech. (from Liberalism)
Image 8Chilean (orange) and average Latin American (blue) rates of growth of GDP (1971–2007) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 9Raif 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 10U.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 11The 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 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 13As 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 14The 2017–2018 Russian protests were organized by Russia's liberal opposition. (from Liberalism)
Image 15Builders in West Berlin, 1952 (from Neoliberalism)
Image 16The iconic painting Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix, a tableau of the July Revolution in 1830 (from Liberalism)
Image 17Noam 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 18Member nations of the International Monetary Fund (from Neoliberalism)
Image 19Monument to the liberals of the 19th century in Agra del Orzán neighborhood, La Coruña, Galicia, (Spain) (from Liberalism)
Image 20Julius Faucher (from Liberalism)
Image 21Sismondi, who wrote the first critique of the free market from a liberal perspective in 1819 (from Liberalism)
Image 22Pamphlet calling for a protest of economic policy in 1983 following the economic crisis (from Neoliberalism)
Image 23Unemployment in Chile and South America (1980–1990) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 24Benjamin Constant, a Franco-Swiss political activist and theorist (from Liberalism)
Image 25Ludwig Erhard (from Neoliberalism)
Image 26GDP per capita in Chile and Latin America 1950–2010 (time under Pinochet highlighted) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 27John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty greatly influenced 19th-century liberalism (from Liberalism)
Image 28The 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 29Montesquieu, who argued for the separation of the powers of government (from Liberalism)
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 31Gustave de Molinari (from Liberalism)
Image 32Friedrich Hayek (from Neoliberalism)
Image 33Wealth inequality in the United States increased from 1989 to 2013. (from Neoliberalism)
Image 34Mary Wollstonecraft, widely regarded as the pioneer of liberal feminism (from Liberalism)