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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The Liberal Democrats (colloquially referred to as the Lib Dems) are a liberal political party in the United Kingdom, founded in 1988. They have been the third-largest UK political party by the number of votes cast since the 1992 general election, with the exception of the 2015 general election. They have 15 members of Parliament in the House of Commons, 84 members of the House of Lords, four Members of the Scottish Parliament and one member in the Welsh Senedd. The party has over 3000 local council seats, the third largest of the British political parties. The party holds a twice-per-year Liberal Democrat Conference, at which party policy is formulated. In contrast to its main opponents' conference rules, the Lib Dems grant all members attending its Conference the right to speak in debates and vote on party policy, under a one member, one vote system. The party also allows its members to vote online for its policies and in the election of a new leader. The party served as the junior party in a coalition government with the Conservative Party between 2010 and 2015; with Scottish Labour in the Scottish Executive from 1999 to 2007; and with Welsh Labour in the Welsh Government from 2000 to 2003 and from 2016 to 2021.

In 1981, an electoral alliance was established between the Liberal Party, a group which descended from the 18th-century Whigs, and the Social Democratic Party (SDP), a splinter group from the Labour Party. In 1988, the parties merged as the Social and Liberal Democrats, adopting their present name just over a year later. Under the leadership of Paddy Ashdown and later Charles Kennedy, the party grew during the 1990s and 2000s, focusing its campaigns on specific seats and becoming the third-largest party in the House of Commons. In 2010, under Nick Clegg's leadership, the Liberal Democrats were junior partners in David Cameron's Conservative-led coalition government in which Clegg served as Deputy Prime Minister. Although it allowed them to implement some of their policies, the coalition badly damaged the party's electoral standing and they lost 48 of their 56 MPs at the 2015 general election, which relegated them to fourth-largest party in the House of Commons. Under the leaderships of Tim Farron, Vince Cable and Jo Swinson, the party was refocused as a pro-Europeanist party opposing Brexit. Since 2015, the party has failed to recapture its pre-coalition successes, and a poor performance in the 2019 general election saw Swinson lose her seat. However, the party has gained hundreds more seats on local councils under the leadership of Ed Davey, being especially successful in the 2022, 2023, and 2024 local elections. Davey is the party's first leader since Ashdown in the 1990s to win four by-elections in the space of one Parliament. (Full article...)

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Norberto Bobbio (Italian: [norˈbɛrto ˈbɔbbjo]; 18 October 1909 – 9 January 2004) was an Italian philosopher of law and political sciences and a historian of political thought. He also wrote regularly for the Turin-based daily La Stampa.

Bobbio was a social liberal in the tradition of Piero Gobetti, Carlo Rosselli, Guido Calogero [it], and Aldo Capitini. He was also strongly influenced by Hans Kelsen and Vilfredo Pareto. He was considered one of the greatest Italian intellectuals of the 20th century. (Full article...)

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

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Are there no other contracts which, less obviously perhaps but really, are open to the same objection? In the first place, let us consider contracts affecting labour. Labour, the economist tells us, is a commodity exchangeable like other commodities. This is in a certain sense true, but it is a commodity which attaches in a peculiar manner to the person of man. Hence restrictions may need to be placed on the sale of this commodity which would be unnecessary in other cases, in order to prevent labour from being sold under conditions which make it impossible for the person selling it ever to become a free contributor to social good in any form. This is most plainly the case when a man bargains to work under conditions fatal to health, e.g. in an unventilated factory. Every injury to the health of the individual is, so far as it goes, a public injury. It is an impediment to the general freedom; so much deduction from our power, as members of society, to make the best of ourselves. Society is, therefore, plainly within its right when it limits freedom of contract for the sale of labour, so far as is done by our laws for the sanitary regulations of factories, workshops, and mines. . . .Its application to compulsory education may not be quite so obvious, but it will appear on a little reflection. Without a command of certain elementary arts and knowledge, the individual in modern society is as effectually crippled as by the loss of a limb or a broken constitution. He is not free to develop his faculties. With a view to securing such freedom among its members it is as certainly within the province of the state to prevent children from growing up in that kind of ignorance which practically excludes them from a free career in life, as it is within its province to require the sort of building and drainage necessary for public health.

Our modern legislation then with reference to labour, and education, and health, involving as it does manifold interference with freedom of contract, is justified on the ground that it is the business of the state, not indeed directly to promote moral goodness, for that, from the very nature of moral goodness, it cannot do, but to maintain the conditions without which a free exercise of the human faculties is impossible. . . .

Now we shall probably all agree that a society in which the public health was duly protected, and necessary education duly provided for, by the spontaneous action of individuals, was in a higher condition than one in which the compulsion of law was needed to secure these ends. But we must take men as we find them. Until such a condition of society is reached, it is the business of the state to take the best security it can for the young citizens growing up in such health and with so much knowledge as is necessary for their real freedom.

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— Thomas Hill Green, Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract, 1861.

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General images

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

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