Liberalism (from the Latin liberalis, "of freedom")[1] is the belief in the importance of individual liberty and equal

rights.[2] Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but most liberals support such fundamental ideas as constitutions, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights, capitalism, free trade, and the separation of church and state. These ideas are widely accepted, even by political groups that do not openly profess a liberal ideological orientation. Liberalism encompasses several intellectual trends and traditions, but the dominant variants are classical liberalism, which became popular in the eighteenth century, and social liberalism, which became popular in the twentieth century. Liberalism first became a powerful force in the Age of Enlightenment, rejecting several foundational assumptions that dominated most earlier theories of government, such as hereditary status, established religion, absolute monarchy, and the Divine Right of Kings. The early liberal thinker John Locke, who is often credited for the creation of liberalism as a distinct philosophical tradition, employed the concept of natural rights and the social contract to argue that the rule of law should replace absolutism in government, that rulers were subject to the consent of the governed, and that private individuals had a fundamental right to life, liberty, and property. The revolutionaries in the American Revolution and the French Revolution used liberal philosophy to justify the armed overthrow of tyrannical rule. The nineteenth century saw liberal governments established in nations across Europe, Latin America, and North America. Liberal ideas spread even further in the twentieth century, when liberal democracies triumphed in two world wars and survived major ideological challenges from fascism and communism. Conservatism, fundamentalism, and military dictatorship remain powerful opponents of liberalism. Today, liberals are organized politically on all major continents. They 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, and the development of globalization. Political scientist Alan Wolfe wrote, "liberalism is the answer for which modernity is the question".

Etymology and definition

Words such as liberal, liberty, libertarian, and libertine all trace their history to the Latin liber, which means "free".[4] One of the first recorded instances of the word liberal occurs in 1375, when it was used to describe the liberal arts.[4] The word's early connection with the classical education of a medieval university 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 remarkin the 16th and the 17th centuries.[4] In 16th century England, liberal could have positive or negative attributes in referring to someone's generosity or indiscretion.[4] In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare wrote of "a liberal villaine" who "hath...confest his vile encounters".[4] 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.[4] In 1815, the first

use of the word liberalism appeared in English.[5] By the middle of the 19th century, liberal started to be used as a politicized term for parties and movements all over the world 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, although the historical context for the ascendancy of liberalism goes back to the Middle Ages. The first notable incarnation of liberal unrest came with the American Revolution, and liberalism fully exploded as a comprehensive movement against the old order during the French Revolution, which set the pace for the future development of 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 role for the state in ameliorating devastating social conditions. By the beginning of the 21st century, liberal democracies and their fundamental characteristicssupport for constitutions, civil rights and individual liberties, pluralistic society, and the welfare statewere widespread in most regions around the world.
[edit] Inception to revolution See also: Middle Ages, Age of Enlightenment, and American Revolution

The emergence of the Renaissance in the 15th century helped to weaken unquestioning submission to the institutions of the Middle Ages by reinvigorating interest in science and in the classical world.[6] In the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation developed from sentiments that viewed the Catholic Church as an oppressive ruling order too involved in the feudal and baronial structure of European society.[7] The Church launched a Counter Reformation to contain these bubbling sentiments, but the effort unraveled in the Thirty Years War of the 17th century. In England, a civil war led to the execution of King Charles I in 1649. Parliament ultimately succeededwith the Glorious Revolution of 1688in establishing a limited and constitutional monarchy. The main facets of early liberal ideology emerged from these events, and historians Colton and Palmer 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.[8]

The early messenger for that movement was the English philosopher John Locke, frequently identified as the Father of Liberalism,[9][10] whose Two Treatises (1690) established the liberal idea that government acquires consent to rule from the governed, not

from supernatural authorities.[11] The intellectual journey of liberalism continued beyond Locke with the Enlightenment, a period of profound intellectual vitality that questioned old traditions and influenced several monarchies throughout the 18th century. The ideas circulating in the Enlightenment had a powerful impact in North America and in France.

Johannes Adam Simon Oertel. Pulling Down the Statue of King George III, N.Y.C., ca. 1859. The painting is a romanticised version of events following the reading of the United States Declaration of Independence to the Continental Army and residents on the New York City commons by George Washington on July 9th, 1776.

The American colonies had been loyal British subjects for decades, but they declared independence from rule under the monarchy in 1776 as a result of their dissatisfaction with lack of representation in the governing parliament overseas, which manifested itself most directly and dramatically through taxation policies that colonists considered a violation of their constitutionally guaranteed rights as Englishmen. The American Revolution was primarily a civil and political matter at first, but escalated to military engagements in 1775 that were largely complete by 1781. After the war, the new nation held a Constitutional Convention in 1787 to resolve the problems stemming from the first attempt at a confederated national government under the Articles of Confederation. The resulting Constitution of the United States settled on a republic with a federal structure. The United States Bill of Rights quickly followed in 1789, which guaranteed certain natural rights fundamental to liberal ideals. The American Revolution predicated a series of drastic sociopolitical changes across nations and continents, collectively referred to as the "Atlantic Revolutions", of which the most famous is probably the French Revolution.
[edit] French Revolution Main article: French Revolution

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

Three years into the French Revolution, German writer Johann von Goethe reportedly told the defeated Prussian soldiers after the Battle of 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".[12] Historians widely regard the Revolution as one of the most important events in human history, and the onset of the Revolution in 1789 is considered by some to mark the end of the early modern period.[13]

The French Revolution is often seen as marking the "dawn of the modern era,"[14] and its convulsions are widely associated with "the triumph of liberalism".[15] For liberals, the Revolution was their defining moment, and later liberals approved of the French Revolution almost entirely"not only its results but the act itself," as two historians noted.[16] The French Revolution began in May 1789 with the convocation of the EstatesGeneral. The first year of the Revolution witnessed, among other major events, the Storming of the Bastille in July and the passage of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in August. The next few years were dominated by tensions between various liberal assemblies and a conservative monarchy intent on thwarting major reforms. A republic was proclaimed in September 1792. External conflict and internal squabbling significantly radicalized the Revolution, culminating in the brutal Reign of Terror. 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. 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.[17] Napoleon wrote that "the peoples of Germany, as of France, Italy and Spain, want equality and liberal ideas,"[18] with some historians suggesting that he may have been the first person ever to use the word liberal in a political sense.[18] 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".[19] 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,"[20] but it also perpetuated further discrimination against women under the banner of the "natural order".[21] The First Empire eventually collapsed in 1815, but this period of chaos and revolution introduced the world to a new movement and ideology that would soon crisscross the globe. Liberalismboth as a political current and an intellectual traditionis mostly a modern phenomenon that started in the 17th century, although some liberal philosophical ideas had precursors in classical antiquity. The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius praised "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".[48] Scholars have also recognized a number of principles familiar to contemporary liberals in the works of several Sophists and in the Funeral Oration by Pericles.[49] Liberal philosophy symbolizes an extensive intellectual tradition that has examined and popularized some of the most important and controversial principles of the modern world. Its immense scholarly and academic output has been characterized as containing "richness and diversity," but that

diversity often has meant that liberalism comes in different formulations and presents a challenge to anyone looking for a clear definition.[50]
[edit] Major themes

Though all liberal doctrines possess a common heritage, scholars frequently assume that those doctrines contain "separate and often contradictory streams of thought".[50] The objectives of liberal theorists and philosophers have differed across various times, cultures, and continents. The diversity of liberalism can be gleaned from the numerous adjectives that liberal thinkers and movements have attached to the very term liberalism, including classical, egalitarian, economic, social, welfare-state, ethical, humanist, deontological, perfectionist, democratic, and institutional, to name a few.[51] Despite these variations, liberal thought does exhibit a few definite and fundamental conceptions. At its very root, liberalism is a philosophy about the meaning of humanity and society. Political philosopher John Gray identified the common strands in liberal thought as being individualist, egalitarian, meliorist, and universalist. The individualist element avers the ethical primacy of the human being against the pressures of social collectivism, the egalitarian element assigns the same moral worth and status to all individuals, the meliorist element asserts that successive generations can improve their sociopolitical arrangements, and the universalist element affirms the moral unity of the human species and marginalizes local cultural differences.[52] The meliorist element has been the subject of much controversy, defended by thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, who believed in human progress, while suffering from attacks by thinkers such as Rousseau, who believed that human attempts to improve themselves through social cooperation would fail.[53] Describing the liberal temperament, Gray claimed that it "has been inspired by skepticism and by a fideistic certainty of divine revelation ... it has exalted the power of reason even as, in other contexts, it has sought to humble reason's claims". The liberal philosophical tradition has searched for validation and justification through several intellectual projects. The moral and political suppositions of liberalism have been based on traditions such as natural rights and utilitarian theory, although sometimes liberals even requested support from scientific and religious circles.[52] Through all these strands and traditions, scholars have identified the following major common facets of liberal thought: believing in equality and individual liberty, supporting private property and individual rights, supporting the idea of limited constitutional government, and recognizing the importance of related values such as pluralism, toleration, autonomy, and consent.[54] Liberals accept that war is sometimes necessary, but in contrast to neoconservatives, liberals believe that applying unilateral force is wrong, and will only initiate a cycle of violence that will be impossible to stop.[55]
[edit] Classical and modern

Thomas Hill Green was one of the most influential liberal philosophers ever. In Prolegomena to Ethics (1884), he established the first major foundations for what later became known as positive

liberty. 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.

Early liberals, including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Baruch Spinoza, attempted to determine the purpose of government in a liberal society. To these liberals, securing the most essential amenities of lifeliberty and private property among themrequired the formation of a "sovereign" authority with universal jurisdiction.[56] In a natural state of affairs, liberals argued, humans were driven by the instincts of survival and selfpreservation, and the only way to escape from such a dangerous existence was to form a common and supreme power capable of arbitrating between competing human desires.[57] This power could be formed in the framework of a civil society that allows individuals to make a voluntary social contract with the sovereign authority, transferring their natural rights to that authority in return for the protection of life, liberty, and property.[57] These early liberals often disagreed in their opinion of the most appropriate form of government, but they all shared the belief that liberty was natural and that its restriction needed strong justification.[57] Liberals generally believed in limited government, although several liberal philosophers decried government outright, with Thomas Paine writing that "government even in its best state is a necessary evil".[58] As part of the project to limit the powers of government, various liberal theoristssuch as James Madison and the Baron de Montesquieuconceived the notion of separation of powers, a system designed to equally distribute governmental authority among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.[58] Governments had to realize, liberals maintained, that poor and improper governance gave the people authority to overthrow the ruling order through any and all possible meanseven through outright violence and revolution, if needed.[59] Contemporary liberals, heavily influenced by social liberalism, have continued to support limited constitutional government while also advocating for state services and provisions to ensure equal rights. Modern liberals claim that formal or official guarantees of individual rights are irrelevant when individuals lack the material means to benefit from those rights, urging a greater role for government in the administration of economic affairs.[60] Early liberals also laid the groundwork for the separation of church and state. As heirs of the Enlightenment, liberals believed that any given social and political order emanated from human interactions, not from divine will.[61] Many liberals were openly hostile to religious belief itself, but most concentrated their opposition to the union of religious and political authorityarguing that faith could prosper on its own, without official sponsorship or administration from the state.[61] Beyond identifying a clear role for government in modern society, liberals also have obsessed over the meaning and nature of the most important principle in liberal philosophy: liberty. From the 17th century until the 19th century, liberalsfrom Adam Smith to John Stuart Millconceptualized liberty as the absence of interference from government and from other individuals, claiming that all people should have the freedom to develop their own unique abilities and capacities without being sabotaged by others.[62] Mill's On Liberty (1859), one of the classic texts in liberal philosophy, proclaimed that "the only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way".[62] Support for laissez-faire capitalism is often associated with this principle, with Friedrich Hayek arguing

in The Road to Serfdom (1944) that reliance on free markets would preclude totalitarian control by the state.[63] Beginning in the late 19th century, however, a new conception of liberty entered the liberal intellectual arena. This new kind of liberty became known as positive liberty to distinguish it from the prior negative version, and it was first developed by British philosopher Thomas Hill Green. 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.[64] 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.[64] Foreshadowing the new liberty as the freedom to act rather than to avoid suffering from the acts of others, Green wrote the following:

If it were ever reasonable to wish that the usage of words had been other than it has been...one might be inclined to wish that the term 'freedom' had been confined to the...power to do what one wills.[65]

The official logo of the French government displays the motto of the French Revolution. The mantra of libert, galit, fraternit has featured prominently in the social and political fabric of the modern world, a testament to the wide-ranging influence of liberal principles.

Rather than previous liberal conceptions viewing society as populated by selfish individuals, Green viewed society as an organic whole in which all individuals have a duty to promote the common good.[66] His ideas spread rapidly and were developed by other thinkers such as L. T. Hobhouse and John Hobson. In a few short years, this New Liberalism had become the essential social and political program of the Liberal Party in Britain,[67] and it would encircle much of the world in the 20th century. In addition to examining negative and positive liberty, liberals have tried to understand the proper relationship between liberty and democracy. As they struggled to expand suffrage rights, liberals increasingly understood that people left out of the democratic decision-making process were liable to the tyranny of the majority, a concept explained in Mill's On Liberty and in Democracy in America (1835) by Alexis de Tocqueville.[68] As a response, liberals began demanding proper safeguards to thwart majorities in their attempts at suppressing the rights of minorities.[68] Besides liberty, liberals have developed several other principles important to the construction of their philosophical structure, such as equality, pluralism, and toleration. Highlighting the confusion over the first principle, Voltaire commented that "equality is at once the most natural and at times the most chimeral of things".[69] All forms of liberalism assume, in some basic sense, that individuals are equal.[70] In maintaining that people are naturally equal, liberals assume that they all possess the same right to liberty.[71] In other words, no one is inherently entitled to enjoy the benefits of liberal society more than anyone else, and all people are equal subjects before the law.[72] Beyond this basic conception, liberal theorists diverge on their understanding of equality. American

philosopher John Rawls emphasized the need to ensure not only equality under the law, but also the equal distribution of material resources that individuals required to develop their aspirations in life.[72] Libertarian thinker Robert Nozick disagreed with Rawls, championing the former version of Lockean equality instead.[72] To contribute to the development of liberty, liberals also have promoted concepts like pluralism and toleration. By pluralism, liberals refer to the proliferation of opinions and beliefs that characterize a stable social order.[73] Unlike many of their competitors and predecessors, liberals do not seek conformity and homogeneity in the way that people think; in fact, their efforts have been geared towards establishing a governing framework that harmonizes and minimizes conflicting views, but still allows those views to exist and flourish.[74] For liberal philosophy, pluralism leads easily to toleration. Since individuals will hold diverging viewpoints, liberals argue, they ought to uphold and respect the right of one another to disagree.[75] From the liberal perspective, toleration was initially connected to religious toleration, with Spinoza condemning "the stupidity of religious persecution and ideological wars".[75] Toleration also played a central role in the ideas of Kant and John Stuart Mill. Both thinkers believed that society will contain different conceptions of a good ethical life and that people should be allowed to make their own choices without interference from the state or other individuals.[75]