Liberal

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Canadian poster for the Liberal Party, in French, showing Prime Minister Mackenzie King welding together the provinces of the country ahead of the 1930 election. The Liberals governed Canada for nearly 70 years in the 20th century, but they suffered a rare and serious defeat in 1930.

Template:Liberalism sidebar Liberalism (from the Latin liberalis, "of freedom") is the belief in the importance of individual liberty. Liberals are very diverse in their specific views depending on their understanding of liberty, although most liberals support fundamental ideas like liberal democracy, written constitutions, free and fair elections, equality of opportunity, free markets, free trade, and secular society. These ideas and policies are often accepted even among political groups that do not openly profess a liberal ideological orientation. Liberalism encompasses several intellectual trends and traditions, but the dominant variants are social liberalism, which became popular in the 20th century, and classical liberalism, the original incarnation of liberal philosophy.

Liberalism first became a powerful force in the Age of Enlightenment, rejecting many foundational assumptions that dominated most earlier theories of government, such as hereditary status, established religions, absolute monarchies, and the Divine Right of Kings. Early thinkers like John Locke, who is often regarded as the founder of liberalism as a distinct philosophical tradition, employed the concept of natural rights to argue for the protection of private property, the consent of the governed, and the prevalence of legislative power over autocratic forms of rule. Liberal philosophy unfolded in the context of social contract theory, which maintained that the source of legitimacy for any ruling order ultimately lied with the people, who gave up their authority in return for the rule of law.

The French Revolution, which implemented several liberal ideas, was the most seminal event in the history of liberalism, paving the way for the development of modern history by launching or inspiring liberal movements around the world. Other political earthquakes that preceded the French Revolution, like the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution, also accelerated the advance of liberalism. In the 19th century, liberal governments were established in many nations across Europe, Latin America, and North America—often through violent revolutions and civil wars. Liberal power increased even further in the 20th century, when liberal democracies triumphed in the two world wars and survived major ideological challenges from fascism and communism. Today, liberalism is organized politically on all major continents, and the influence of liberals on the modern world is profound. Liberals have played a decisive role in the growth of republics, the spread of civil rights and civil liberties, the establishment of the modern welfare state, the institution of religious toleration and religious freedom, the evolution of theological ideas, the rise of political pluralism, and the development of globalization. They have also shown strong support for regional and international organizations like the European Union and the United Nations, hoping to reduce conflict through diplomacy and multilateral negotiations. Aiming to highlight the importance of liberalism in modern life, political scientist Alan Wolfe claimed that "liberalism is the answer for which modernity is the question".

Etymology and definition

Words like liberal, liberty, and libertarian all trace their history to the Latin liber, which means "free". One of the first recorded instances of the word liberal occurs in 1375, when it was used to describe the liberal arts. The word's early connection with the classical education of a medieval university, however, soon gave way to a proliferation of different denotations and connotations. Liberal could refer to "free in bestowing" as early as 1387, "made without stint" in 1433, "freely permitted" in 1530, and "free from restraint"—often as a pejorative remark—in the 16th and the 17th centuries. In 16th century England, liberal could have positive or negative attributes in referring to someone's generosity or indiscretion. In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare wrote of "a liberal villaine" who "hath...confest his vile encounters". With the rise of the Enlightenment, the word acquired decisively more positive undertones, being defined as "free from narrow prejudice" in 1781 and "free from bigotry" in 1823. Meanwhile, in 1815, the first use of the word liberalism appeared in English. By the middle of the 19th century, liberal had become famous and popular enough to transition into a fully politicized term for political parties and movements all over the world.

The Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary defines the word liberal as "giving freely, generous, not sparing; open-minded, not prejudiced; not literal (of interpretation); for general broadening of the mind". It also defines the word as "regarding many traditional beliefs as dispensable, invalidated by modern thought, or liable to change". Identifying any definitive meaning for the word, however, has proven challenging to scholars and to the general public. The widespread use of the word liberal often inspires people to understand it based on a wide array of factors, like geographic location or political orientation. The American political scientist Louis Hartz echoed this frustration and confusion, writing that "Liberalism is an even vaguer term, clouded as it is by all sorts of modern social reform connotations, and even when one insists on using it in the Lockian sense...there are aspects of our original life in the Puritan colonies and the South which hardly fit its meaning". Hartz emphasized the European origin of the word in his studies, conceptualizing a liberal as someone who believed in liberty, equality, and capitalism—in opposition to the association that American conservatives have tried to establish between liberalism and centralized government.

History

The history of liberalism spans the better part of the last four centuries, beginning in the English Civil War and continuing after the end of the Cold War. Liberalism started as a major doctrine and intellectual endeavor in response to the religious wars gripping Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. Its first notable incarnation came with the American Revolution before it fully exploded as a comprehensive movement against the old order during the French Revolution, which set the pace for the future development of both liberal and human history. Classical liberals, who broadly emphasized the importance of free markets and civil liberties, dominated liberal history for a century after the French Revolution. The onset of the First World War and the Great Depression, however, accelerated the trends begun in late 19th century Britain towards a new liberalism that emphasized a greater initiative for the state in ameliorating devastating social conditions. By the beginning of the 21st century, liberal democracies and their fundamental characteristics—support for constitutions, free and fair elections, and pluralistic society—had prevailed in most regions around the world.

Prelude to liberalism

For a more detailed treatment, see Middle Ages.
After centuries of dominance, the Roman Empire irrevocably splintered in 476 CE. The eastern part of the Roman world became the Byzantine Empire and the western part fractured into a series of kingdoms that collectively represented a shadow of the erstwhile Roman eagle. Despite these enormous geopolitical changes, however, one constant remained to give Europe a certain sense of unity and stability: Christianity. Originally insulted as a fringe cult, Christians were persecuted for centuries after the death of Jesus, but they spread efficiently throughout the empire despite constant harassment from Roman authorities, appealing especially to the poor and those at the bottom of the social ladder. When Constantine integrated them into Roman life in the fourth century CE, the stage was set for the eventual domination of the Christian religion. Although the Roman Empire collapsed and splintered, Christianity was sufficiently entrenched into the fabric of society to survive the resulting sociopolitical chaos that characterized the period.

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Reformation and Counter Reformation in Europe. Protestant lands are shown in blue and Catholic lands in olive. The Church tried to reverse Protestant gains for over a century before the Thirty Years War finally halted further expansion from the Catholics. The failure of the Counter Reformation was one of the major sparks for the rise of liberalism in Europe.

Christianity provided the post-Roman European world with a sense of purpose and direction. European experiences during the Middle Ages were often characterized by fear, uncertainty, and warfare—the latter being especially endemic in medieval life. Christian societies largely believed that history unfolded according to a divine plan over which humans had little control. Something of a quid pro quo relationship emerged between the Church and regional rulers: the Church gave kings and queens authority to rule while the latter spread the message of the Christian faith and did the bidding of Christian social and military forces. It was an astute, symbiotic relationship in a world rife with uncertainty and danger. For much of the Middle Ages, the authority of the Church was virtually unquestioned and unquestionable. Leaders who challenged that authority were often severely rebuked and sometimes even publicly embarrassed, as evidenced by Henry IV waiting barefoot in the snow at the fort of Canossa to receive forgiveness from the Pope. The world was very pious, and few aspects of life were spared from religious analysis and connotation. The influence of the Church can be clearly understood by the fact that the very term often referred to something like European society as a whole. When it invoked the will of God in 1095, the Church set the stage for dozens of crusades against pagans, Muslims, and various other groups.

The Church experienced fortunate times that lasted for centuries, but outside events and internal struggles crippled the power of the greatest institution in European life. In the 14th century, disputes over papal successions—and, indeed, over just who was the Pope and who was not—rocked the Western world. These disputes significantly harmed the reputation of the Church. The middle of the 14th century also witnessed the spread of the Black Death, which exterminated perhaps up to one-third of the European population—some 20 million humans gone in just a few years. These enormous fatality rates incensed people across the continent, and much of their rage was directed at the Church, which was viewed as ineffectual in the face of such carnage. Flagellant confraternities gained popularity during the Black Death, edged onwards by the prophecies of Joachim of Fiore, who had predicted that the world would end imminently. The Black Death had a profound influence on future European history, laying the groundwork—through peasant uprisings and the eventual emergence of a small class of property owners—for the eventual pluralism that became a hallmark of the liberal world. Further disillusionment with the Church prompted the growth of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. The Protestant Reformation developed from sentiments that viewed the Church as an oppressive ruling order too involved in the feudal and baronial structure of European society. The growth of the Renaissance also weakened the influence of the Church while reinvigorating interest in the classical world. In the middle of the 16th century, the Church launched a Counter Reformation to contain the bubbling agitation, but this effort ultimately unraveled in the Thirty Years War, a deadly European conflict that lasted from 1618 until 1648, which saw Catholic forces suffer massive defeats and failing to unify the European continent religiously. Meanwhile, in England, disputes between the Parliament and King Charles I sparked a massive civil war in the 1640s. Charles was executed in 1649 and the Parliament finally succeeded in establishing a limited and constitutional monarchy after centuries of chaos.

These frenzied events sparked a deluge of social and political dialogue in English intellectual circles. The main facets of early liberal ideology emerged from these discussions, and two historians characterize the period in the following light:

“

The unique thing about England was that Parliament, in defeating the king, arrived at a workable form of government. Government remained strong but came under parliamentary control. This determined the character of modern England and launched into the history of Europe and of the world the great movement of liberalism.

”

Enter liberalism

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John Locke is widely regarded as the Father of Liberalism for his important contributions to liberal philosophy. Locke coherently described some of the elementary principles of the nascent liberal movement, like the right to private property and the consent of the governed.

The early hero of that movement, the founder of liberal thought as a distinct ideology and the frequently identified Father of Liberalism, was an English physician and philosopher whose words later inspired revolutions: John Locke. To fully appreciate the thinking of Locke, however, requires knowing a few facts about the people that he opposed. His greatest rival was Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes and Locke looked at the same world and disagreed on nearly everything, although their arguments laid the groundwork for later social contract theories outlining the relationship between people and their governments. Their political sympathies and affiliations certainly inspired their ideas. Hobbes supported the monarchy and Locke backed Parliament. Hobbes was a fan of centralized, dictatorial authority. He wanted government to be like Leviathan, a mythical sea monster from the Bible. Locke preferred the legislature much more because he felt like Parliament embodied the will of the people. Locke developed a relatively radical political notion that earned him the paternal liberal sobriquet, arguing that government acquires consent from the governed. His celebrated Two Treatises (1690), the foundational text of liberal ideology, outlined his major ideas. Once humans moved out of their natural state and formed societies, Locke argued as follows: "Thus that which begins and actually constitutes any political society is nothing but the consent of any number of freemen capable of a majority to unite and incorporate into such a society. And this is that, and that only, which did or could give beginning to any lawful government in the world." The stringent insistence that lawful government did not have a supernatural basis was a sharp break with most previous traditions of governance.

Locke had other intellectual opponents besides Hobbes. In the First Treatise, Locke aimed his guns first and foremost at one of the doyens of 17th century English conservative philosophy: Robert Filmer. Filmer's Patriarcha (1680) argued for the Divine Right of Kings by appealing to biblical teaching, claiming that the authority granted to Adam by God gave all the male successors of Adam a right of dominion over all other humans and creatures in the world. Locke disagreed, to put it mildly. He disagreed so thoroughly and obsessively, in fact, that the First Treatise is something like a sentence-by-sentence refutation of Patriarcha. Reinforcing his respect for consensus, Locke argued that "conjugal society is made up by a voluntary compact between men and women". Locke maintained that the grant of dominion in Genesis was not to men over women, as Filmer believed, but to humans over animals. Locke was certainly no feminist by modern standards, but the first major liberal thinker in history accomplished an equally major task on the road to making the world more pluralistic: the integration of women into social theory. The intellectual journey of liberalism continued beyond Locke.

René Descartes asked in the 17th century if there were any beliefs that one could hold axiomatically—that is, any beliefs that could be regarded as a priori knowledge. He personally concluded that self-existence—"I think, therefore I am"—and the existence of a supernatural deity were two such beliefs. Descartes was looking for these kinds of absolutely certain beliefs because he was a deeply skeptical philosopher. He was so skeptical, in fact, that he launched a quest to find out if there was anything about the world that he could really be certain of. Once Descartes introduced systematic doubt as a formal philosophy, the intelligentsia of the European world took up the banner and spearheaded the Enlightenment, a period of profound intellectual vitality that questioned old traditions and influenced several European monarchies throughout the 18th century. A prominent example of a monarch who took the Enlightenment project seriously was Joseph II of Austria, who ruled from 1780 to 1790 and implemented a wide array of radical reforms, like the complete abolition of serfdom, the imposition of equal taxation policies between the aristocracy and the peasantry, the institution of religious toleration, including equal civil rights for Jews, and the suppression of Catholic religious authority throughout his empire, creating a more secular nation in its place. The ideas circulating in the Enlightenment did not exist in a vacuum, a fact to which the Americans and later the French, with permanent consequences for human history, paid much tribute.

Liberalism and revolution

For a more detailed treatment, see French Revolution.
For a more detailed treatment, see American Revolution.

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The Philadelphia Convention in 1787 adopted the United States Constitution, a very radical document for its time. The Constitution established a federalist republic with three equal branches of government, a reflection of Enlightenment influence on the American framers.

The American colonies had been loyal British subjects for decades, but tensions between the two sides were exacerbated by the Seven Years War, which lasted from 1756 until 1763. The war drained British coffers and forced the monarchy to squeeze more and more resources from its recalcitrant colonies. The colonies resented this taxation without representation and decided, after a myriad of internal discussions and petitions to the British government, that they would declare independence and face the consequences. Military engagements in the American Revolution began in 1775 and were largely complete by 1781, when a Franco-American army combined with a French fleet bottled up thousands of British troops at Yorktown. The American Revolution formally concluded in 1783 with the Treaty of Paris, in which the British recognized American independence.

After the war, the colonies debated about how to move forward. Their first attempt at something like unity occurred with the Articles of Confederation, which were eventually regarded as too inadequate to provide security, or just even a functional government. The colonies held a Constitutional Convention in 1787 to resolve the problems stemming from the Articles of Confederation. The resulting Constitution of the United States was a monumental document, not just in American history but in world history as well. In the context of the times, the Constitution symbolized—true to the revolution that made it happen—an extremely revolutionary and liberal document. The Americans skipped the monarchical system and settled on a republic, laying the groundwork for over two centuries of liberal democratic expansion throughout the globe. The Constitution revealed the degree to which the Enlightenment had influenced the American colonies. The very basic fabric of the new American government was lifted from the pages of a French philosopher, the Baron de Montesquieu, whose Spirit of Laws (1748) laid the framework for a republic with three branches of government: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. The American theorists and politicians that created the Constitution were also heavily influenced by the ideas of Locke. As one historian writes: "The American adoption of a democratic theory that all governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, as it had been put as early as the Declaration of Independence, was epoch-marking." The American Revolution was an important struggle in liberal history, and it was quickly followed by the most important: the French Revolution.

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The march of the women on Versailles in October 1789, one of the most famous examples of popular political participation during the French Revolution, forced the royal court back to Paris. It would remain there until the proclamation of the First Republic in 1792.

"The world has never since been the same," wrote two historians, after France fell into revolution in 1789. German writer Johann von Goethe reportedly told the defeated Prussian soldiers after Valmy that "from this place and from this time forth commences a new era in world history, and you can all say that you were present at its birth". Historians widely regard the Revolution as one of the most important events in human history, and the end of the early modern period, which started around 1500, is traditionally attributed to the onset of the French Revolution in 1789. The Revolution is often seen as marking the "dawn of the modern era". Describing the participatory politics of the French Revolution, one historian commented that "thousands of men and even many women gained firsthand experience in the political arena: they talked, read, and listened in new ways; they voted; they joined new organizations; and they marched for their political goals. Revolution became a tradition, and republicanism an enduring option."

The French Revolution began in 1789 with the convocation of the Estates-General in May. The first year of the Revolution witnessed members of the Third Estate proclaiming the Tennis Court Oath in June, the assault on the Bastille in July, the passage of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in August, and an epic march on Versailles that forced the royal court back to Paris in October. The next few years were dominated by tensions between a liberal legislature and a conservative monarchy intent on thwarting major reforms. The liberals proclaimed a republic in September 1792 and the king was executed the next year. External threats also played a dominant role in the development of the Revolution. The French Revolutionary Wars started in 1792 and ultimately featured spectacular French victories that facilitated the conquest of the Italian peninsula, the Low Countries, and most territories west of the Rhine—achievements that had defied previous French governments for centuries. Internally, popular sentiments radicalized the Revolution significantly, culminating in the brutal Reign of Terror from 1793 until 1794. After the fall of Robespierre and the Jacobins, the Directory assumed control of the French state in 1795 and held power until 1799, when it was replaced by the Consulate under Napoleon Bonaparte.

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With the Marseillaise echoing across the streets, the massive French parade through Berlin in 1806 was a chance for Napoleon to showcase himself as the liberal guardian of the Revolution. His opponents, however, thought he was a capricious dictator who represented a fundamental threat to European security.

Napoleon ruled as First Consul for about five years, centralizing power and streamlining the bureaucracy along the way. The Napoleonic Wars, pitting the heirs of a revolutionary state against the old monarchies of Europe, started in 1805 and lasted for a decade. Along with their boots and Charleville muskets, French soldiers brought to the rest of the European continent the liquidation of the feudal system, the liberalization of property laws, the end of seigneurial dues, the abolition of guilds, the legalization of divorce, the disintegration of Jewish ghettos, the collapse of the Inquisition, the permanent destruction of the Holy Roman Empire, the elimination of church courts and religious authority, the establishment of the metric system, and equality under the law for all men. Napoleon wrote that "the peoples of Germany, as of France, Italy and Spain, want equality and liberal ideas," with some historians suggesting that he may have been the first person ever to use the word liberal in a political sense. He also governed through a method that one historian described as "civilian dictatorship," which "drew its legitimacy from direct consultation with the people, in the form of a plebiscite". Napoleon did not always live up the liberal ideals he espoused, however. His most lasting achievement, the Civil Code, served as "an object of emulation all over the globe," but it also perpetuated further discrimination against women under the banner of the "natural order".

Stubborn French ambitions combined with a long conflict against Britain, the failure of the Continental System, and the catastrophe in Russia eventually led to the collapse of the First Empire in 1815 at the fields of Waterloo, where the Imperial Guard made its last stand under the rhythms of the Marseillaise, which was banned in the Bourbon Restoration. Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister, laid the groundwork for the conservative decades that stretched into the middle of the 19th century. This unprecedented period of chaos and revolution, however, had introduced the world to a new movement and ideology from which there was seemingly no escape.

Children of revolution

For a more detailed treatment, see Classical liberalism.

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The Liberals arrayed against the Carlists at Mendigorría, the most important battle of the First Carlist War, which resulted in a heavy defeat for the conservative Carlists. The Carlist Wars plagued Spain throughout the 19th century, even though the Carlists never managed to assume power.

The world after the French Revolution provided liberals with an opportunity to reshape the basic structures of society. Abolitionist and suffrage movements took off in the 19th century throughout the Western world. Slowly but surely, democratic ideals were spreading. Parliamentary power in Britain increased, France established an enduring republic in the 1870s, and a vicious war in the United States ensured the survival of that nation and signaled the end of slavery. Meanwhile, strange assortments of liberal and nationalist sentiments were on the march in Italy and Germany, which finally coalesced into nations in the late 19th century. Liberal agitation in Latin America reached a fever pitch as the region was gradually brought into the common social and political patterns of the modern world.

Liberals after the Revolution wanted to develop a world free from government intervention, or at least free from too much government intervention. They championed the ideal of negative liberty, which constitutes the absence of coercion and the absence of external constraints. They believed governments were cumbersome burdens and they wanted governments to stay out of the lives of individuals. Liberals simultaneously pushed for the expansion of civil rights and for the expansion of free markets and free trade. The latter kind of economic thinking had been formalized by Adam Smith in his monumental Wealth of Nations (1776), which revolutionized the field of economics and established the "invisible hand" of the free market as a self-regulating mechanism that did not depend on external interference. Sheltered by liberalism, the laissez-faire economic world of the nineteenth century emerged with full tenacity, particularly in the United States and in the United Kingdom.

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Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix. The iconic image of romantic revolution, it celebrates the July Revolution of 1830 in France. The July Revolution permanently removed the Bourbon monarchy from French soil and catapulted the Orléanist liberals to power for nearly two decades, after which the 1848 revolutions established the Second Republic.

Politically, liberals saw the 19th century as a gateway to achieving the promises of 1789. In Spain, the Liberales, the first group to use the 'liberal' label in a political context, fought for the implementation of the 1812 Constitution for decades—overthrowing the monarchy in 1820 as part of the Trienio Liberal and defeating the conservative Carlists in the 1830s. In France, the July Revolution of 1830, orchestrated by liberal politicians and journalists, removed the Bourbon monarchy and inspired similar uprisings elsewhere in Europe. Frustration with the pace of political progress, however, sparked even more gigantic revolutions in 1848. Revolutions spread throughout the Austrian Empire, the German states, and the Italian states. Governments fell rapidly. Liberal nationalists demanded written constitutions, representative assemblies, greater suffrage rights, and freedom of the press. A second republic was proclaimed in France. Serfdom was abolished in Prussia, Galicia, Bohemia, and Hungary. The supposedly indomitable Metternich, the Austrian builder of the reigning conservative order, shocked Europe when he resigned and fled to Britain in panic and disguise. Eventually, however, the success of the revolutionaries petered out. Without French help, the Italians were easily defeated by the Austrians. With some luck and skill, Austria also managed to contain the bubbling nationalist sentiments in Germany and Hungary, helped along by the failure of the Frankfurt Assembly to unify the German states into a single nation. Under abler leadership, however, the Italians and the Germans wound up realizing their dreams for independence. The Sardinian Prime Minister, Camillo di Cavour, was a shrewd liberal who understood that the only effective way for the Italians to gain independence was if the French were on their side. Napoleon III agreed to Cavour's request for assistance and France defeated Austria in the Franco-Austrian War of 1859, setting the stage for Italian independence. German unification transpired under the leadership of Otto von Bismarck, who decapitated the enemies of Prussia in war after war, finally triumphing against France in 1871 and proclaiming the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, ending another saga in the drive for nationalization. The French proclaimed a third republic after their loss in the war, and the rest of French history transpired under republican eyes.

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Eloy Alfaro was the leader of the Radical Liberals and the founder of modern Ecuador. He led the Liberal Revolution of 1895, which toppled a conservative government that had ruled Ecuador for several decades.

Just a few decades after the French Revolution, liberalism went global. The liberal and conservative struggles in Spain also replicated themselves in Latin America. Like its former master, the region was a hotbed of wars, conflicts, and revolutionary activity throughout the nineteenth century. In Mexico, the liberales instituted the program of La Reforma in the 1850s, reducing the power of the military and the Catholic Church. The conservadores were outraged at these steps and launched a revolt, which sparked a deadly conflict. From 1857 to 1861, Mexico was gripped in the bloody War of Reform, a massive internal and ideological confrontation between the liberals and the conservatives. The liberals eventually triumphed and Benito Juárez, a dedicated liberal and now a Mexican national hero, became the president of the republic. After Juárez, Mexico suffered from prolonged periods of dictatorial repression, which lasted until the Mexican Revolution in the early 20th century. Another regional example of liberal agitation can be found in Ecuador. Like other nations throughout the region at the time, Ecuador was steeped in conflict and uncertainty after gaining independence from Spain. By the middle of the 19th century, the country had descended into chaos and madness, with the people divided between rival liberal and conservative camps. From these conflicts, García Moreno established a conservative government that ruled the country for several years. Predictably, the liberals were incensed at the conservative regime and overthrew the whole thing in the Liberal Revolution of 1895. The Radical Liberals that toppled the conservatives were led by Eloy Alfaro, a firebrand who implemented a variety of sociopolitical reforms, including the separation of church and state, the legalization of divorce, and the establishment of public schools.

Liberals were active throughout the world in the 19th century, but it was in Britain that the future character of liberalism would take shape. The liberal sentiments unleashed after the French Revolution ultimately coalesced into the Liberal Party, formed in 1859 from various Radical and Whig elements, which went on to produce one of the greatest British prime ministers ever—William Gladstone, who was also known as the 'Grand Old Man'. Under Gladstone, the Liberals reformed education, disestablished the Church of Ireland, and introduced the secret ballot for local and parliamentary elections. Following Gladstone, and after a period of Conservative domination, the Liberals returned with a vengeance in the general election of 1906, aided by working class voters worried about food prices. After that historic victory, the Liberal Party shifted from its classical liberalism and laid the groundwork for the future British welfare state, establishing various forms of health insurance, unemployment insurance, and pensions for elderly workers. The intellectual foundations for this new liberalism were coherently established by philosopher Thomas Hill Green, who conceived of positive liberty as the affirmation of autonomous individual capacities. Green rejected the idea that humans were driven solely by self-interest, emphasizing instead the complex circumstances that are involved in the evolution of our moral character. In a very profound step for the future of modern liberalism, he also tasked social and political institutions with the enhancement of individual freedom and identity. After various global and catastrophic events, like wars and economic collapses, this new kind of liberalism would sweep over much of the world in the 20th century.

Modern liberalism

For a more detailed treatment, see Social liberalism.

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A Conservative poster in Britain attacking the Liberal welfare reforms of Prime Minister David Lloyd George as socialist. The reinvention of liberalism as a driving force behind the welfare state sparked many accusations of socialism from the right in various countries.

The 20th century started perilously for liberalism. The First World War sparked geopolitical turmoil throughout the European continent and threatened to unravel the success of liberal democracy. However, the Allies managed to win the war, and the number of republics in Europe reached 13 by the end of the war, as compared with only three at the start of the war in 1914. The Russian Revolution, which occurred during the war, marked another milestone on the road of modernity. The eventual communist victory and the creation of the Soviet Union highlighted the threat that liberalism now faced from a new and deadly enemy. Meanwhile, the uncertain world that emerged from the cauldron of the First World War suffered from massive economic setbacks in the years following 1918. Inflation skyrocketed in many European nations and the stock market in the United States collapsed in 1929, triggering a series of recessions throughout the Western world that became collectively known as the Great Depression. Liberalism survived through the rise of fascism and the Second World War before facing off against communism for several more decades during the Cold War.

World War I proved a major challenge for liberal democracies, although they ultimately defeated the dictatorial states of the Central Powers. The war precipitated the collapse of older forms of government, like empires and dynastic states, a phenomenon that became quite apparent in Russia. The massive defeats that Russia sustained in the first few years of World War I significantly tainted the reputation of the monarchy, already reeling from earlier losses to Japan and political struggles with the Kadets, a powerful liberal bloc in the Duma. Facing huge shortages in basic necessities along with widespread riots in early 1917, Czar Nicholas II abdicated in March, bringing to an end three centuries of Romanov rule and paving the way for liberals to declare a republic. To Russia's liberals, the French Revolution was the centerpiece of human history, and they repeatedly used the slogans, symbols, and ideas of the Revolution—plastering liberté, égalité, fraternité over major public spaces—to establish an emotional attachment to the past, an attachment that liberals hoped would galvanize the public to fight for modern values. But democracy was no simple task, and the Provisional Government that took over the country's administration needed the cooperation of the Petrograd Soviet, an organization that united leftist industrial laborers, to function and survive. Under the uncertain leadership of Alexander Kerensky, however, the Provisional Government mismanaged Russia's continuing involvement in the war, prompting angry reactions from the Petrograd workers, who drifted further and further to the left. The Bolsheviks, a communist group led by Vladimir Lenin, seized the political opportunity from this confusion and launched a second revolution in Russia during the same year. The communists violently overthrew the fragile liberal-socialist order in October, after which Russia witnessed several years of civil war between communists and conservatives wishing to restore the monarchy. The communist challenge to liberalism, however, paled in comparison to the economic problems that rocked the Western world in the 1930s.

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John Maynard Keynes is widely regarded as one of the most influential economists of all time. He was a brilliant investor and a committed member of the Liberal Party. His ideas, which are still widely felt, formalized modern liberal economic policy.

The Great Depression fundamentally changed the liberal world. It was such a calamitous period in Western civilization that the civilization itself looked like it was risking total and complete collapse. There was an inkling of a new liberalism during the First World War, and even earlier in the 19th century among some states and regions, but modern liberalism finally hatched in the 1930s with the Great Depression and a new economic mastermind whose ideas formalized the responsibilities of the modern state in its administration of the economy: John Maynard Keynes. Classical liberals posited that completely free markets were the optimal units capable of effectively allocating resources—that over time, in other words, they would produce full employment and economic security. Keynes spearheaded a broad assault on classical economics and its derivatives, arguing that totally free markets were actually not that ideal, and that hard economic times required intervention and investment from the state. Where the market failed to properly allocate resources, for example, the government was required to stimulate the economy until private funds could start flowing again—a "prime the pump" kind of strategy designed to boost industrial production.

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Unskilled laborers working for the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency that employed millions of workers during the Great Depression. Putting the unemployed to work through public programs is a key tenet of social liberalism.

The social liberal program launched by President Roosevelt in the United States, the New Deal, proved very popular with the American public. In 1933, when FDR came into office, the unemployment rate of the United States stood at roughly 25 percent. The size of the economy, measured by the GNP, had fallen to half the value it had in early 1929. The electoral victories of FDR and the Democrats precipitated a deluge of deficit spending and public works programs. In 1940, the level of unemployment had fallen by 10 points to around 15 percent. Additional state spending and the gigantic public works program sparked by the Second World War eventually pulled the United States out of the Great Depression. From 1940 to 1941, government spending increased by a mammoth amount of 59 percent, the GDP skyrocketed 17 percent, and unemployment fell below 10 percent for the first time since 1929. By 1945, after vast quantities of government spending, public debt stood at a staggering 120 percent of GNP, but unemployment had been effectively eliminated. Most nations that emerged from the Great Depression, including the likes of Sweden and Germany, did so with deficit spending and strong intervention from the state.

The economic woes of the period prompted widespread unrest in the European political world, leading to the rise of fascism as an ideology and a movement arrayed against both liberalism and communism. Broadly speaking, fascist ideology emphasized elite rule and absolute leadership, a radical rejection of equality, the imposition of patriarchal society, a stern commitment to war as an instrument of natural behavior, the elimination of supposedly inferior or subhuman groups from the structure of the nation, and the conception of life as an "unending struggle" in which the strong would destroy and dominate the weak. In Germany, the Nazis slighted the first year of the French Revolution: "1789 is abolished". Echoing the Germans, Mussolini stated that "we stand for a new principle in the world; we stand for the sheer, categorical, definitive antithesis to the world of democracy...to the world which still abides by the fundamental principles laid down in 1789". Hitler went further, commenting that the chief principle of fascism was "to abolish the liberal concept of the individual and the Marxist concept of humanity, and to substitute for them the Volk community, rooted in the soil and united by the bond of its common blood". The fascist and nationalist grievances of the 1930s eventually culminated in the Second World War, the deadliest conflict in human history. The Allies won the war by 1945, and their victory set the stage for the Cold War between communist states and liberal democracies.

The Cold War featured extensive ideological competition and several proxy wars, but the Soviet Union and the United States never fought against one another directly. At the end of the 20th century, communist states in Eastern Europe collapsed precipitously, leaving liberal democracies as the only legitimate forms of government. At the beginning of the Second World War, the number of democracies around the world was about the same as it had been forty years before. After 1945, liberal democracies spread like wildfires. Even as late as 1974, roughly 75 percent of all nations were considered dictatorial, but now more than half of all countries are democracies. This last achievement speaks volumes about the influence of liberalism, and it prompted an American intellectual, speculating on the "end of history," to make the following claim:

“

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such; that is, the end point of...ideological evolution and the universalization of...liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

”

Philosophy

Liberal philosophy had precursons in the Classical world. The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote praising "the idea of a polity administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech, and the idea of a kingly government which respects most of all the freedom of the governed". But liberalism is a philosophy of the city, and disappeared from Europe during the Middle Ages. In the medieval period, the Near East was more liberal than Europe; Islamic ethics allowed more freedom of religion than the Roman Catholic Church. The return of liberalism to Europe was presaged by such pivotal events as the Magna Carta, which reduced the power of the English monarch.. Most histories of modern liberal thought, however, begin with John Locke (1632–1704).

Locke's Two Treatises on Government (1689) discussed two fundamental liberal ideas: intellectual liberty, including freedom of conscience, which he further expounded in the same year in A Letter Concerning Toleration, and economic liberty, the right to have and use property. These early liberal ideas were tentative (and published anonymously). Locke did not extend religious freedom to Roman Catholics or atheists and thought that the right to have and use property, included the right to own slaves. Locke developed further the earlier idea of natural rights, a forerunner of the modern conception of human rights, which Locke described as the right to "life, health, liberty, or possessions".

Another 17th-century Englishman, John Lilburne (also known as Freeborn John), argued for basic human rights which he called freeborn rights, the natural rights that every human being is born with, as opposed to rights bestowed by government or by human law.

File:Charles Montesquieu.jpg

Charles Montesquieu wrote The Spirit of Laws in 1748.

On the European continent, the doctrine of laws restraining even monarchs was expounded by Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, whose The Spirit of the Laws argues that "Better is it to say, that the government most conformable to nature is that which best agrees with the humour and disposition of the people in whose favour it is established", rather than accept as natural the mere rule of force. Following in his footsteps, political economist Jean-Baptiste Say and Destutt de Tracy were ardent exponents of the "harmonies" of the market, and in all probability it was they who coined the term laissez-faire. This evolved into the physiocrats, and to the political economy of Rousseau.

The late French enlightenment saw two figures who would have tremendous influence on later liberal thought: Voltaire, who argued that the French should adopt constitutional monarchy and disestablish the Second Estate, and Rousseau, who argued for a natural freedom for mankind.

File:Anders Chydenius.jpg

Anders Chydenius

Rousseau also argued the importance of a concept that appears repeatedly in the history of liberal thought, namely, the social contract. He rooted this in the nature of the individual and asserted that each person knows their own interest best. His assertion that man is born free, and that education was sufficient to restrain him within society, rocked the monarchical society of his age. His ideas were a key element in the declaration of the National Assembly during the French Revolution, and in the thinking of Americans such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. In his view the unity of a state came from the concerted action of consent, or the "national will". This unity of action would allow states to exist without being chained to pre-existing social orders, such as aristocracy.

The "Scottish Enlightenment" included the writers David Hume and Adam Smith.

Adam Smith was one of the most important classical liberal thinkers.

David Hume's contributions were many and varied, but most important was his assertion that fundamental rules of human behavior would overwhelm attempts to restrict or regulate them. In A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739–1740, he disparaged mercantilism and the accumulation of gold and silver by governments. He argued that prices were related to the quantity of money, and that hoarding gold and issuing paper money would only lead to inflation.

Although Adam Smith is the most famous of the economic liberal thinkers, he was not without antecedents. The physiocrats in France had proposed the systematic study of political economy and asserted the self-organizing nature of markets. Benjamin Franklin wrote in favor of the freedom of American industry in 1750. In Sweden-Finland the period of liberty and parliamentary government from 1718 to 1772 produced a Finnish parliamentarian, Anders Chydenius, who was one of the first to propose free trade and unregulated industry, in The National Gain, 1765. His impact has proven to be lasting particularly in the Nordic area, but it also had a powerful effect in later developments elsewhere.

Adam Smith (1723–1790) expounded the theory that individuals could structure both moral and economic life without direction from the state, and that nations would be strongest when their citizens were free to follow their own initiative. He advocated an end to feudal and mercantile regulations, to state-granted monopolies and patents, and he promulgated "laissez-faire" economics. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759, he developed a theory of motivation which tried to reconcile human self-interest and an unregulated social order. In The Wealth of Nations, 1776, he argued that the market, under certain conditions, would naturally regulate itself and would produce more than the heavily restricted markets that were the norm at the time. He assigned to government the role of taking on tasks which could not be entrusted to the profit motive, such as preventing individuals from using force or fraud to disrupt competition, trade, or production. His theory of taxation was that governments should levy taxes only in ways which did not harm the economy, and that "The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state." He agreed with Hume that capital, not gold, is the wealth of a nation.

File:Immanuel Kant (painted portrait).jpg

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was strongly influenced by both Hume's empiricism and continental rationalism. His most important contributions to liberal thinking are in the realm of ethics, particularly his assertion of the categorical imperative. Kant argued that received systems of reason and morals were subordinate to natural law, and that, therefore, attempts to stifle this basic law would meet with failure. His idealism would become increasingly influential, since it asserted that there were fundamental truths upon which systems of knowledge could be based. This meshed well with the ideas of the English Enlightenment about natural rights.

Philosophical foundations for liberalism

Natural rights liberalism

The early liberal thinkers like John Locke endorsed liberal politics because of a belief in natural rights. They believed that humans beings were endowed with certain rights, and that the purpose of government was to protect these rights. Prominent liberal thinkers of this school include the aforementioned Locke, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and Robert Nozick. This viewpoint is closely related to deontological libertarianism.^{[Citation Needed]}

Consequentialist liberalism

The concept of natural rights later fell out of favor, and consequentialist arguments became prominent. Philosophers like David Hume, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were responsible for this trend, and they criticized earlier concepts about natural rights. Bentham famously denounced them as "nonsense upon stilts".^{[Citation Needed]} Thus, consequentialist liberals support liberal policies because they think that these policies best promote human well-being and happiness. Consequentialist arguments in favor of liberal policies are especially common within economics. Some prominent consequentialist liberals, in addition to the aforementioned thinkers, include Adam Smith, Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek. This viewpoint is closely related to consequentialist libertarianism.^{[Citation Needed]}

Liberalism worldwide

For a more detailed treatment, see Liberalism worldwide.

Liberals are committed to build and safeguard free, fair and open societies, in which they seek to balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community, and in which no one is enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity...Liberalism aims to disperse power, to foster diversity and to nurture creativity.

Liberal International

Politically, liberalism is organized extensively throughout the world. Liberal parties, think tanks, and other institutions are common in many nations, although they advocate for different causes based on their ideological orientation. Liberal parties can be center-left, centrist, or center-right depending on their location. They can further be divided based on their adherence to social liberalism or classical liberalism, although all liberal parties and individuals share basic similarities like support for civil rights and democratic institutions. On a global level, liberals are united in the Liberal International, which has over 100 influential liberal parties and organizations from across the ideological spectrum. Some parties in the LI are among the most famous in the world, like the Liberal Party of Canada, while others are among the smallest, like the Liberal Party of Gibraltar. Regionally, liberals are organized through various institutions depending on the prevailing geopolitical context. In the European Parliament, for example, the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe is the predominant group that represents the interest of European liberals.

Europe

For a more detailed treatment, see Liberalism in Europe.

File:Liberal Democrats UK Logo.svg

The British Liberal Democrats have achieved one of the most remarkable comebacks in the political history of European liberalism. After the Liberal Party almost went extinct in the 1950s, a long period of renewal culminated in a union with the Social Democratic Party in 1988 to form the current party, one of the largest in Britain.

In Europe, liberalism has a long tradition dating back to 17th century. Scholars often split those traditions into English and French versions, with the former version of liberalism emphasizing the expansion of democratic values and constitutional reform and the latter rejecting authoritarian political and economic structures, as well as being involved with nation-building. The continental French version was deeply divided between moderates and progressives, with the moderates tending to elitism and the progressives supporting the universalization of fundamental institutions, such as universal suffrage, universal education, and the expansion of property rights. Over time, the moderates displaced the progressives as the main guardians of continental European liberalism. Moderates were identified with liberalism or liberal conservatism whereas progressives could fall under a number of left-wing camps, from liberalism and radicalism to republicanism and social democracy. A prominent example of these divisions is the German Free Democratic Party, which was historically divided between national liberal and social liberal factions.

File:Katarina Kresal.jpg

Katarina Kresal is the leader of the center-left Liberal Democrats, the most powerful party in Slovenia since the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Modern European liberal parties exhibit diverse tendencies. Before the First World War, liberal parties dominated the European political scene, but they were gradually displaced by socialists and social democrats in the early 20th century. The fortunes of liberal parties since World War II have been mixed, with some gaining strength while others suffering from continuous declines. The fall of the Soviet Union and the breakup of Yugoslavia at the end of the 20th century, however, allowed the formation of many liberal parties throughout Eastern Europe. These parties developed varying ideological characters. Some, like the Slovenian Liberal Democrats or the Lithuanian Social Liberals, have been characterized as center-left. Others, like the Romanian National Liberal Party, have been classified as center-right. Meanwhile, some liberal parties in Western Europe have undergone renewal and transformation, coming back to the political limelight after historic disappointments. Perhaps the most famous case features the Liberal Democrats in Britain. The Liberal Democrats are the heirs of the once-mighty Liberal Party, which suffered a huge erosion of support to the Labour Party in the early 20th century. After nearly vanishing from the British political scene altogether, the Liberals eventually united with the Social Democratic Party, a Labour splinter group, in 1988—forming the current Liberal Democrats along the way. The Liberal Democrats have earned significant popular support in recent general elections and local council elections, marking the first time in decades that a British party with a liberal ideology has achieved such electoral success. Both in Britain and elsewhere in Western Europe, liberal parties have cooperated often with socialist and social democratic parties, as evidenced by the Purple Coalition in the Netherlands at the turn of the 21st century. The Purple Coalition, one of the most consequential in Dutch history, brought together the progressive left-liberal D66, the market liberal and center-right VVD, and the socialist Labour Party—an unusual combination that ultimately legalized same-sex marriage, legalized euthanasia, legalized prostitution, and instituted a non-enforcement policy on marijuana.

Americas

For a more detailed treatment, see Liberalism in the United States.
For a more detailed treatment, see Liberalism and conservatism in Latin America.

File:ObamaAbingtonPA.JPG

Barack Obama is the current, 44th President of the United States and the leader of the Democratic Party. He arrived in office facing a major economic crisis, to which he and his party responded by passing the Recovery Act as a source of fiscal stimulus.

In North America, unlike in Europe, the word liberalism almost exclusively refers to social liberalism in contemporary politics. The dominant Canadian and American parties, the Liberal Party and the Democratic Party, are frequently identified as being modern liberal or center-left organizations in the academic literature. Modern liberalism in the United States traces its history to the popular presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who initiated the New Deal in response to the Great Depression and won an unprecedented four elections. The New Deal tradition established by FDR left a decisive legacy and impacted many future American presidents, including John F. Kennedy, who defined a liberal as follows:

“

...someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties—someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad.

”

American liberals and other American ideological groups have been the subject of significant demographic analysis. From January to December 2009, polls conducted by the New York Times and CBS News revealed that between 20% and 27% of American adults identify as liberal, versus moderate or conservative. In the 2008 presidential election, exit polls showed that 22% of the electorate self-identified as liberal, 34% as conservative, and 44% as moderate.

In Canada, the long-dominant Liberal Party, affectionately known as the Grits, ruled the country for nearly 70 years during the 20th century. The party produced some of the most famous prime ministers in Canadian history, like Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chrétien, and has been primarily responsible for the development of the Canadian welfare state. The enormous success of the Liberals—virtually unmatched in any other liberal democracy—has prompted many political commentators over time to identify them as the nation's natural governing party.

In Latin America, liberal agitation dates back to the 19th century, when liberal groups frequently fought against and violently overthrew conservative regimes in several countries across the region. Liberal revolutions in countries like Mexico and Ecuador ushered in the modern world for much of Latin America. Today, market liberals in Latin America are organized in the Red Liberal de América Latina, a network that brings together dozens of liberal parties and organizations. RELIAL includes parties like Nueva Alianza in Mexico and the Cuban Liberal Union, which aims to secure power in Cuba. Some major liberal parties in the region continue, however, to align themselves with social liberal ideas and policies—a notable case being the Colombian Liberal Party, which is a member of the Socialist International. Another famous example is the Paraguayan Authentic Radical Liberal Party, one of the most powerful parties in the country, which has also been classified as center-left.

Asia and Oceania

File:Liberal ph.png

The Filipino Liberal Party has produced three presidents since it was founded in 1945.

In Asia, liberalism is a much younger political current than in Europe or the Americas. Continentally, liberals are organized through the Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats, which includes powerful parties like the Liberal Party in the Philippines, the Democratic Progressive Party in Taiwan, and the Democrat Party in Thailand. Two notable examples of liberal influence can be found in India and Australia.

In Australia, liberalism is primarily championed by the center-right Liberal Party. The Liberals in Australia support free markets as well as social conservatism. In India, the most populous democracy in the world, the Indian National Congress has long dominated political affairs. The INC was founded in the late 19th century by liberal nationalists demanding the creation of a more liberal and autonomous India. Liberalism continued to be the main ideological current of the group through the early years of the 20th century, but socialism gradually overshadowed the thinking of the party in the next few decades. A famous struggle led by the INC eventually earned India's independence from Britain. In recent times, the party has adopted more of a liberal streak, championing open markets while simultaneously seeking social justice. In its 2009 Manifesto, the INC praised a "secular and liberal" Indian nationalism against the nativist, communal, and conservative ideological tendencies it claims are espoused by the right.

Africa

Liberalism in Africa is comparatively weak. In recent times, however, liberal parties and institutions have made a major push for political power. On a continental level, liberals are organized in the Africa Liberal Network, which contains influential parties like the Popular Movement in Morocco, the Democratic Party in Senegal, and the Rally of the Republicans in Côte d'Ivoire. Among African nations, South Africa stands out for having a notable liberal tradition that other countries on the continent lack. In the middle of the 20th century, the Liberal Party and the Progressive Party were formed to oppose the apartheid policies of the government. The Liberals formed a multiracial party that originally drew considerable support from urban Africans and college-educated whites. It also gained supporters from the "westernized sectors of the peasantry", and its public meetings were heavily attended by black Africans. The party had 7,000 members at its height, although its appeal to the white population as a whole was too small to make any meaningful political changes. The Liberals were disbanded in 1968 after the government passed a law that prohibited parties from having multiracial membership. Today, liberalism in South Africa is represented by the Democratic Alliance, the official opposition party to the ruling African National Congress.

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Further reading

Prominent law scholars

• Putting liberalism in its place / Paul W Kahn, 2005 (Yale University)
• Liberalism divided: freedom of speech and the many uses of State power / Owen M Fiss, 1996 (Yale University)
• The future of liberal revolution / Bruce A Ackerman, 1992 (Yale University)
• Social justice in the liberal state / Bruce A Ackerman, 1980 (Yale University)
• Notions of fairness versus the Pareto principle: on the role of logical consistency / Louis Kaplow, 2000 (Harvard University)
• Knowledge & politics / Roberto Mangabeira Unger., 1975 (Harvard University)
• Principles for a free society / Richard Allen Epstein, 1999 (University of Chicago)
• Fairness in a liberal society / Richard Allen Epstein, 2005 (University of Chicago)
• Skepticism and freedom: a modern case for classical liberalism / Richard Allen Epstein., 2003 (University of Chicago)
• Cultivating humanity: a classical defense of reform in liberal education / Martha Nussbaum, 1997 (University of Chicago)
• Free markets and social justice / Cass R Sunstein, 1997 (University of Chicago)
• Reasonably radical: deliberative liberalism and the politics of identity / Anthony Simon Laden, 2001 (University of Chicago)
• The new inequality: creating solutions for poor America / ed. Joshua Cohen, 1999 (Stanford University)
• The rise and fall of British liberalism, 1776-1988 / Alan Sykes, 1997 (Stanford University)
• A stream of windows: unsettling reflections on trade, immigration, and democracy / Jagdish Bhagwati, 1998 (Columbia University)
• Nature and politics: liberalism in the philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau / Andrzej Rapaczynski, 1987 (Columbia University)
• Law and liberalism in the 1980s: the Rubin lectures at Columbia University / Vincent Blasi, 1991 (Columbia University)
• Ways of war and peace: realism, liberalism, and socialism / Michael W Doyle, 1997 (Columbia University)
• The Liberal future in America: essays in renewal / ed. Michael B Levy, 1985 (University of California, Berkeley)
• Boundaries and allegiances: problems of justice and responsibility in liberal thought / Samuel Scheffler, 2001 (University of California, Berkeley)
• The anatomy of antiliberalism / Stephen Holmes, 1993 (University of New York)
• Passions and constraint: on the theory of liberal democracy / Stephen Holmes, 1995 (University of New York)
• Benjamin Constant and the making of modern liberalism / Stephen Holmes, 1984 (University of New York)
• Liberal rights: collected papers, 1981-1991 / Jeremy Waldron, 1993 (University of New York)
• Liberals and social democrats / Peter Clarke., 1978 (University of Oxford)
• Law and the community: the end of individualism? / ed. Leslie Green, 1989 (University of Oxford)
• From promise to contract: towards a liberal theory of contract / Dori Kimel, 2003 (University of Oxford)
• The new enlightenment: the rebirth of liberalism / ed. Peter Clarke, 1986 (University of Oxford)
• Constitutional justice: a liberal theory of the rule of law / T.R.S Allan, 2001 (University of Cambridge)

Prominent philosophers

• Liberalism and social action / John Dewey, 1963 (University of Chicago)
• Combat liberalism / Mao Zedong, 1954 (Peking University)
• Free thought and official propaganda / Bertrand Russell, 1922 (University of Cambridge)
• Political Liberalism / John Rawls, 2005 (Harvard University)
• Lectures on the history of political philosophy / John Rawls, 2007 (Harvard University)
• The law of peoples; with, The idea of public reason revisited / John Rawls., 1999 (Harvard University)
• Conditions of liberty: civil society and its rivals / Ernest Gellner, 1994 (University of Cambridge)
• Liberty: incorporating four essays on liberty / Isaiah Berlin., 2002 (University of Oxford)
• Objectivity and liberal scholarship / Noam Chomsky, 2003 (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• Profit over people: neoliberalism and global order / Noam Chomsky, 1999 (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• Democracy in a neoliberal order: doctrines and reality / Noam Chomsky, 1997 (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• Liberal politics and the public sphere / Charles Taylor, 1995 (McGill University)
• Beyond liberalization: social opportunity and human capability / Amartya Kumar Sen., 1994 (Harvard University)
• Sovereign virtue: the theory and practice of equality / Ronald Dworkin, 2000 (University of New York))
• The legacy of Isaiah Berlin / ed. Ronald Dworkin., 2001 (University of New York)
• Concealment and exposure: and other essays / Thomas Nagel, 2002 (University of New York)
• Liberals and communitarians / Stephen Mulhall., 1992 (University of Oxford)
• John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism / Alan Ryan, 1995 (University of Oxford)
• Liberal reform in an illiberal regime: the creation of private property in Russia / Stephen Williams, 2006 (University of Oxford)
• Liberalism, religion, and the sources of value / Simon Blackburn, 2005 (University of Cambridge)
• Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America / Richard Rorty, 1999 (Stanford University)
• Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education / Bob Reich, 2002 (Stanford University)
• Boundaries and allegiances: problems of justice and responsibility in liberal thought / Samuel Scheffler, 2001 (University of California, Berkeley)
• The logos reader: rational radicalism and the future of politics / ed. Michael Thompson, 2006 (University of Pittsburgh)
• The feminist critique of liberalism / Martha Craven Nussbaum, 1997 (University of Chicago)
• Nietzsche, politics, and modernity: a critique of liberal reason / David Owen, 1995 (University of Arizona)
• Contemporary Theories of Liberalism / Gerald Gaus, 2003 (University of Arizona)
• Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity / Gary Gutting, 1999 (University of Notre Dame)

Prominent political scientists

• Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities/Gad Barzilai, 2003 University of Michigan
• Liberal America and the Third World; political development ideas in foreign aid and social science / Robert A Packenham, 1973 (Stanford University)
• Structural conflict: the Third World against global liberalism / Stephen D Krasner, 1985 (Stanford University)
• Democracy's discontent: America in search of a public philosophy / Michael J Sandel, 1998 (Harvard University)
• Liberalism and the limits of justice / Michael J Sandel, 1998 (Harvard University)
• The spirit of liberalism / Harvey Claflin Mansfield., 1978 (Harvard University)
• Liberalism and the moral life / Nancy L Rosenblum, 1989 (Harvard University)
• Bentham's theory of the modern state / Nancy L Rosenblum, 1978 (Harvard University)
• Another liberalism: romanticism and the reconstruction of liberal thought / Nancy L Rosenblum., 1987 (Harvard University)
• Liberalism and its critics / Michael J Sandel, 1984 (Harvard University)
• Technopols: freeing politics and markets in Latin America in the 1990s / Jorge I Domínguez., 1997 (Harvard University)
• The new majority: towards a popular progressive politics / Theda Skocpol, 1999 (Harvard University)
• Tyranny and liberty: big government and the individual in Tocqueville's science of politics / Harvey Mansfield., 1999 (Harvard University)
• The new American dilemma: liberal democracy and school desegregation / Jennifer L Hochschild, 1984 (Harvard University)
• Politics out of history / Wendy Brown, 2001 (University of California, Berkeley)
• Radicals and conservatives / William McGovern; David S Collier, 1957 (University of California, Berkeley)
• Tocqueville's revenge: state, society, and economy in contemporary France / Jonah D Levy, 1999 (University of California, Berkeley)
• Liberalism's crooked circle: letters to Adam Michnik / Ira Katznelson, 1996 (Columbia University)
• Liberal socialism (Carlo Rosselli) / ed. Nadia Urbinati, 1994 (Columbia University)
• On liberal revolution (Piero Gobetti) / ed. Nadia Urbinati, 2000 (Columbia University)
• The clash of orthodoxies: law, religion, and morality in crisis / Robert P George, 2001 (Princeton University)
• Liberal equality / Amy Gutmann., 1980 (Princeton University)
• Diversity and distrust : civic education in a multicultural democracy / Stephen Macedo, 1999 (Princeton University)
• Liberal virtues: citizenship, virtue, and community in liberal constitutionalism / Stephen Macedo, 1991 (Princeton University)
• The inner ocean: individualism and democratic culture / George Kateb, 1992 (Princeton University)
• Economic change and political liberalization in Sub-Saharan Africa / Jennifer A Widner, 1994 (Princeton University)
• Natural law, liberalism, and morality: contemporary essays / Robert P George, 1996 (Princeton University)
• Natural law and public reason / Robert P George, 2000 (Princeton University)
• Liberal international relations theory: a social scientific assessment / Andrew Moravcsik., 2001 (Princeton University)
• Liberalism and international relations theory / Andrew Moravcsik, 1992 (Princeton University)

External links

• Liberal International is the premier international political federation of liberal parties and institutions.
• Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe is the major liberal political group in the European Parliament.
• Africa Liberal Network is the main organization for liberal parties on the African continent.
• Liberal Party of Canada is one of the largest and the most dominant liberal parties in the world.
• Liberal Party of Gibraltar is one of the smallest liberal parties in the world.
• The Liberal is a British magazine dedicated to coverage of liberal politics and liberal culture.
• Ludwig von Mises Institute is a think tank devoted to the promotion of libertarian and classical liberal socioeconomic policies.
• Friedrich Naumann Foundation is a global advocacy organization that supports liberal ideas and policies.
• Americans for Democratic Action is an American advocacy organization that champions modern liberalism.
• The American Prospect is an American political magazine that backs social liberal policies.
• RELIAL (in Spanish) is a group of Latin American liberal organizations that advocates for market liberal causes.
• Swedish International Liberal Centre (in Swedish) is a liberal organization that aims to spread pluralism and democracy worldwide.
• Liberal Conspiracy is the premier left-liberal blog about British politics.
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