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 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 Alliance (LA; Danish: [libəˈʁɑˀl aliˈɑŋsə]) is a classical liberal and right-libertarian political party in Denmark. The party is a component of the centre-right bloc in Danish politics. The party's platform is based upon economic liberalism, promotion of tax cuts and reduction of welfare programmes, and a critical, oppositional stance towards European integration.

From November 2016 to June 2019, the Liberal Alliance (I) was part of the Lars Løkke Rasmussen III Cabinet a three-party coalition government, alongside Liberal Party (Danish: Venstre) and the Conservative People's Party (Danish: Det Konservative Folkeparti). Following the 2022 Danish general election, the party holds 14 seats. (Full article...)

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Portrait by Henry William Pickersgill

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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When, then, I say that the first object of a renascent liberalism is education, I mean that its task is to aid in producing the habits of mind and character, the intellectual and moral patterns, that are somewhere near even with the actual movements of events. It is, I repeat, the split between the latter as they have externally occurred and the ways of desiring, thinking, and of putting emotion and purpose into execution that is the basic cause of present confusion in mind and paralysis in action. The educational task cannot be accomplished merely by working upon men's minds, without action that effects actual change in institutions. The idea that dispositions and attitudes can be altered by merely "moral" means conceived of as something that goes on wholly inside of persons is itself one of the old patterns that has to be changed. Thought, desire and purpose exist in a constant give and take of interaction with environing conditions. But resolute thought is the first step in that change of action that will itself carry further the needed change in patterns of mind and character.

In short, liberalism must now become radical, meaning by "radical" perception of the necessity of thoroughgoing changes in the set-up of institutions and corresponding activity to bring the changes to pass. For the gulf between what the actual situation make possible and the actual state itself is so great that it cannot be bridged by piecemeal policies undertaken ad hoc. The process of producing the changes will be, in any case, a gradual one. But "reforms" that deal now with this abuse and now with that without having a social goal based upon an inclusive plan, differ entirely from effort at re-forming, in its literal sense, the institutional scheme of things. The liberals of more than a century ago were denounced in their time as subversive radicals, and only when the new economic order was established did they become apologists for the status quo or else content with social patchwork. If radicalism he defined as perception of need for radical change, then today any liberalism which is not also radicalism is irrelevant and doomed.

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— John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action, 1935.

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General images

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

Image 1Pamphlet calling for a protest of economic policy in 1983 following the economic crisis (from Neoliberalism)
Image 2United States incarceration rate per 100,000 population, 1925–2013 (from Neoliberalism)
Image 3Mary Wollstonecraft, widely regarded as the pioneer of liberal feminism (from Liberalism)
Image 4The iconic painting Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix, a tableau of the July Revolution in 1830 (from Liberalism)
Image 5Execution 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 6Julius Faucher (from Liberalism)
Image 7Unemployment in Chile and South America (1980–1990) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 8As 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 9John 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 10Gustave de Molinari (from Liberalism)
Image 11GDP per capita in Chile and Latin America 1950–2010 (time under Pinochet highlighted) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 12Ludwig Erhard (from Neoliberalism)
Image 13Monument to the liberals of the 19th century in Agra del Orzán neighborhood, La Coruña, Galicia, (Spain). (from Liberalism)
Image 14The 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 15The 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 16Montesquieu, who argued for the separation of the powers of government (from Liberalism)
Image 17John Milton's Areopagitica (1644) argued for the importance of freedom of speech. (from Liberalism)
Image 18Member nations of the International Monetary Fund (from Neoliberalism)
Image 19The 2017–2018 Russian protests were organized by Russia's liberal opposition. (from Liberalism)
Image 20U.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 21Per capita income during the Great Depression (from Neoliberalism)
Image 22Raif 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 23Builders in West Berlin, 1952 (from Neoliberalism)
Image 24Sismondi, who wrote the first critique of the free market from a liberal perspective in 1819 (from Liberalism)
Image 25Madame de Staël (from Liberalism)
Image 26Benjamin Constant, a Franco-Swiss political activist and theorist (from Liberalism)
Image 27Franklin D. Roosevelt (from Liberalism)
Image 28Wealth inequality in the United States increased from 1989 to 2013. (from Neoliberalism)
Image 29John Locke was the first to develop a liberal philosophy, including the right to private property and the consent of the governed. (from Liberalism)
Image 30Friedrich Hayek (from Neoliberalism)
Image 31T. 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 32John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty greatly influenced 19th-century liberalism (from Liberalism)
Image 33Chilean (orange) and average Latin American (blue) rates of growth of GDP (1971–2007) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 34Noam Chomsky's 1999 book Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order is an open critique of neoliberalism and the American economic structure (from Neoliberalism)