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. Different liberals espouse various and sometimes conflicting views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support liberal democracy, private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), 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. (Full article...)

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The New Deal was a 1933–1938 series of economic, social, and political reforms in response to the Great Depression in the United States under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He introduced the phrase when accepting the Democratic Party presidential nomination in the 1932 United States presidential election, winning in a landslide over incumbent Herbert Hoover, whose administration was widely viewed as ineffective. Roosevelt attributed the Depression to inherent market instability and inadequate aggregate demand (following the Keynesian economic model), and argued that stabilizing and rationalizing the economy required massive government intervention.

During Roosevelt's first hundred days in office in 1933 until 1935, Roosevelt introduced what historians refer to as the "First New Deal", which focused on the "3 R's": relief for the unemployed and for the poor, recovery of the economy back to normal levels, and reforms of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression. Roosevelt signed the Emergency Banking Act, which authorized the Federal Reserve to insure deposits to restore confidence, and the 1933 Banking Act made this permanent with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Other laws created the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which allowed industries to create "codes of fair competition"; the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which protected investors from abusive stock market practices; and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), which raised rural incomes by controlling production. Public works were undertaken in order to find jobs for the unemployed (25 percent of the workforce when Roosevelt took office): the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) enlisted young men for manual labor on government land, and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) promoted electricity generation and other forms of economic development in the drainage basin of the Tennessee River. (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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“

The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement, being in unceasing antagonism to that disposition to aim at something better than customary, which is called, according to circumstances, the spirit of liberty, or that of progress or improvement. The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people; and the spirit of liberty, in so far as it resists such attempts, may ally itself locally and temporarily with the opponents of improvement; but the only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty, since by it there are as many possible independent centres of improvement as there are individuals. The progressive principle, however, in either shape, whether as the love of liberty or of improvement, is antagonistic to the sway of Custom, involving at least emancipation from that yoke; and the contest between the two constitutes the chief interest of the history of mankind. The greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of Custom is complete. This is the case over the whole East. Custom is there, in all things, the final appeal; justice and right mean conformity to custom; the argument of custom no one, unless some tyrant intoxicated with power, thinks of resisting. And we see the result. Those nations must once have had originality; they did not start out of the ground populous, lettered, and versed in many of the arts of life; they made themselves all this, and were then the greatest and most powerful nations in the world. What are they now? The subjects or dependants of tribes whose forefathers wandered in the forests when theirs had magnificent palaces and gorgeous temples, but over whom custom exercised only a divided rule with liberty and progress. A people, it appears, may be progressive for a certain length of time, and then stop: when does it stop? When it ceases to possess individuality. If a similar change should befall the nations of Europe, it will not be in exactly the same shape: the despotism of custom with which these nations are threatened is not precisely stationariness. It proscribes singularity, but it does not preclude change, provided all change together. We have discarded the fixed costumes of our forefathers; every one must still dress like other people, but the fashion may change once or twice a year. We thus take care that when there is change, it shall be for change's sake, and not from any idea of beauty or convenience; for the same idea of beauty or convenience would not strike all the world at the same moment, and be simultaneously thrown aside by all at another moment. But we are progressive as well as changeable: we continually make new inventions in mechanical things, and keep them until they are again superseded by better; we are eager for improvement in politics, in education, even in morals, though in this last our idea of improvement chiefly consists in persuading or forcing other people to be as good as ourselves. It is not progress that we object to; on the contrary, we flatter ourselves that we are the most progressive people who ever lived. It is individuality that we war against: we should think we had done wonders if we had made ourselves all alike; forgetting that the unlikeness of one person to another is generally the first thing which draws the attention of either to the imperfection of his own type, and the superiority of another, or the possibility, by combining the advantages of both, of producing something better than either. We have a warning example in China—a nation of much talent, and, in some respects, even wisdom, owing to the rare good fortune of having been provided at an early period with a particularly good set of customs, the work, in some measure, of men to whom even the most enlightened European must accord, under certain limitations, the title of sages and philosophers. They are remarkable, too, in the excellence of their apparatus for impressing, as far as possible, the best wisdom they possess upon every mind in the community, and securing that those who have appropriated most of it shall occupy the posts of honour and power. Surely the people who did this have discovered the secret of human progressiveness, and must have kept themselves steadily at the head of the movement of the world. On the contrary, they have become stationary—have remained so for thousands of years; and if they are ever to be farther improved, it must be by foreigners. They have succeeded beyond all hope in what English philanthropists are so industriously working at—in making a people all alike, all governing their thoughts and conduct by the same maxims and rules; and these are the fruits. The modern régime of public opinion is, in an unorganised form, what the Chinese educational and political systems are in an organised; and unless individuality shall be able successfully to assert itself against this yoke, Europe, notwithstanding its noble antecedents and its professed Christianity, will tend to become another China.

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— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859.

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General images

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

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