Portal:Liberalism

The Liberalism portal

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various and sometimes conflicting 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. 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. The 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 emphasized expanding democracy, French liberalism emphasized rejecting authoritarianism and is linked to nation-building. (Full article...)

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Libertarianism (from French: libertaire, lit. 'free and egalitarian'; or from Latin: libertas, lit. 'freedom') is a political philosophy that holds freedom, personal sovereignty, and liberty as primary values. Many libertarians believe that the concept of freedom is in accord with the non-aggression principle, according to which each individual has the right to live as they choose, as long as they do not violate the rights of others by initiating force or fraud against them.

Libertarians advocate the expansion of individual autonomy and political self-determination, emphasizing the principles of equality before the law and the protection of civil rights, including the rights to freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom of choice. They generally support individual liberty and oppose authority, state power, warfare, militarism and nationalism, but some libertarians diverge on the scope and nature of their opposition to existing economic and political systems. (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 decriminalizing 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". However, he viewed the Magna Carta as important, citing it to argue that the treatment of convicts in Australia was unlawful. 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. 22. THE natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule. The liberty of man, in society, is to be under no other legislative power, but that established, by consent, in the commonwealth; nor under the dominion of any will, or restraint of any law, but what that legislative shall enact, according to the trust put in it. Freedom then is not what Sir Robert Filmer tells us, Observations, A. 55. a liberty for every one to do what he lists, to live as he pleases, and not to be tied by any laws: but freedom of men under government is, to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, where the rule prescribes not; and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man: as freedom of nature is, to be under no other restraint but the law of nature.

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— John Locke, Two Treatises on Government, 1690.

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General images

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

Image 1John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty greatly influenced 19th-century liberalism (from Liberalism)
Image 2Franklin D. Roosevelt (from Liberalism)
Image 3Mary Wollstonecraft, widely regarded as the pioneer of liberal feminism (from Liberalism)
Image 4United States incarceration rate per 100,000 population, 1925–2014 (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 6U.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 7Noam 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 8Julius Faucher (from Liberalism)
Image 9The iconic painting Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix, a tableau of the July Revolution in 1830 (from Liberalism)
Image 10Montesquieu, who argued for the separation of the powers of government (from Liberalism)
Image 11Unemployment in Chile and South America (1980–1990) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 12As 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 13John Milton's Areopagitica (1644) argued for the importance of freedom of speech. (from Liberalism)
Image 14The 2017–2018 Russian protests were organized by Russia's liberal opposition. (from Liberalism)
Image 15Raif 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 16Per capita income during the Great Depression (from Neoliberalism)
Image 17Pamphlet calling for a protest of economic policy in 1983 following the economic crisis (from Neoliberalism)
Image 18Madame de Staël (from Liberalism)
Image 19T. 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 20Chilean (orange) and average Latin American (blue) rates of growth of GDP (1971–2007) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 21Friedrich Hayek (from Neoliberalism)
Image 22GDP per capita in Chile and Latin America 1950–2010 (time under Pinochet highlighted) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 23Ludwig Erhard (from Neoliberalism)
Image 24Wealth inequality in the United States increased from 1989 to 2013. (from Neoliberalism)
Image 25Monument to the liberals of the 19th century in Agra del Orzán neighborhood, La Coruña, Galicia (Spain) (from Liberalism)
Image 26Sismondi, who wrote the first critique of the free market from a liberal perspective in 1819 (from Liberalism)
Image 27The 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 28Benjamin Constant, a Franco-Swiss political activist and theorist (from Liberalism)
Image 29Gustave de Molinari (from Liberalism)
Image 30Member nations of the International Monetary Fund (from Neoliberalism)
Image 31The 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 32John Locke was the first to develop a liberal philosophy, including the right to private property and the consent of the governed. (from Liberalism)
Image 33Execution 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 34Builders in West Berlin, 1952 (from Neoliberalism)
Image 35US federal minimum wage if it had kept pace with productivity. Also, the real minimum wage. (from Neoliberalism)