Portal:Liberalism

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Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various and often mutually warring views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion, constitutional government and privacy rights. Liberalism is frequently cited as the dominant ideology of modern history.

Liberalism became a distinct movement in the Age of Enlightenment, gaining popularity among Western philosophers and economists. Liberalism sought to replace the norms of hereditary privilege, state religion, absolute monarchy, the divine right of kings and traditional conservatism with representative democracy, rule of law, and equality under the law. Liberals also ended mercantilist policies, royal monopolies, and other trade barriers, instead promoting free trade and marketization. Philosopher John Locke is often credited with founding liberalism as a distinct tradition based on the social contract, arguing that each man has a natural right to life, liberty and property, and governments must not violate these rights. While the British liberal tradition has emphasized expanding democracy, French liberalism has emphasized rejecting authoritarianism and is linked to nation-building. (Full article...)

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The New Freedom was Woodrow Wilson's campaign platform in the 1912 presidential election, and also refers to the progressive programs enacted by Wilson during his time as president. First expressed in his campaign speeches and promises, Wilson later wrote a 1913 book of the same name. After the 1918 midterm elections, Republicans took control of Congress and were mostly hostile to the New Freedom. As president, Wilson focused on various types of reform, such as the following:

Tariff reform: This came through the passage of the Underwood Tariff Act of 1913, which lowered tariffs for the first time since 1857 and went against the protectionist lobby.
Labor reform: This was achieved through measures such as the Eight Hour Law for Women of the District of Columbia, the Seaman’s Act, Workmen’s Compensation for Federal employees, the Federal Child Labor Bill, and the Adamson Act. During the 1912 campaign Wilson spoke in support of workers organizing into unions while endorsing "the betterment of men in this occupation and the other, the protection of women, the shielding of children , the bringing about of social justice.”
Business reform: This was established through the passage of the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, which established the Federal Trade Commission to investigate and halt unfair and illegal business practices by issuing "cease and desist" orders, and the Clayton Antitrust Act.
Agricultural reform: This was achieved through measures such as the Cotton Futures and Smith-Lever Acts of 1914, the Grain Standards and Warehouse Acts of 1916, and the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917.
Banking reform: This came in 1913 through the creation of the Federal Reserve System and in 1916 through the passage of the Federal Farm Loan Act, which set up Farm Loan Banks to support farmers. (Full article...)

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Rawls in 1971

John Bordley Rawls (/rɔːlz/; February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American moral, legal and political philosopher in the modern liberal tradition. Rawls has been described as one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20th century.

In 1990, Will Kymlicka wrote in his introduction to the field that "it is generally accepted that the recent rebirth of normative political philosophy began with the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice in 1971". Rawls's theory of "justice as fairness" recommends equal basic liberties, equality of opportunity, and facilitating the maximum benefit to the least advantaged members of society in any case where inequalities may occur. Rawls's argument for these principles of social justice uses a thought experiment called the "original position", in which people deliberately select what kind of society they would choose to live in if they did not know which social position they would personally occupy. In his later work Political Liberalism (1993), Rawls turned to the question of how political power could be made legitimate given reasonable disagreement about the nature of the good life. (Full article...)

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John Locke John Stuart Mill T. H. Green John Dewey Norberto Bobbio Isaiah Berlin David Lloyd George Jeremy Bentham

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There is a close connection between the assertion of natural rights and the theory of the social contract, or contract theory. The idea that the exercise of political power is legitimate only if it is founded on the consent of those who are subject to it (another of Locke’s theses), and thus that it is based on an agreement among those who decide to subject themselves to a higher power and with those to whom the exercise of power is entrusted, derives from the postulate that individuals possess rights not dependent on the institution of sovereignty and that the chief function of that institution is to allow the fullest possible realization of those rights compatible with secure social life. The connecting link between the doctrine of the rights of man and contract theory is the individualistic conception of society they hold in common: a conception according to which the particular individual, with his interests and needs, which take the form of rights in virtue of the acceptance of hypothetical law of nature, comes first and precedes the establishment of society. This contrasts with the organicist conception, in all its various guises, which takes the opposite view, seeing society as prior to the individual, or the social whole as taking precedence over its parts (in the Aristotelian formulation which had so enduring and influence). Modern contract theory is a real turning-point in the history of political thought, dominated as it had been by the organic idea, insofar as the contract theorists reversed the relationship between individual and society, and no longer saw society as a natural fact existing independently of the will of individuals, but as an artificial body, created by individuals in their own image and likeness to promote the satisfaction of their own interests and needs and the fullest exercise of their rights. The agreement which gives birth to the state is in turn viewed as possible, according to the theory of natural right, in virtue of the law of nature which attributes to all individuals certain natural rights that can be enjoyed only in the context of the free and ordered form of coexistence secured through such a voluntary accord-an accord requiring a mutual and reciprocal renunciation of certain rights on the part all the individuals concerned.

Without this Copernican revolution, which allowed the problem of the state to be viewed for the first time through the eyes of its subjects rather than its sovereign, the doctrine of the liberal sate, which is first and foremost the doctrine of juridical limits to state power, would have been impossible. Without individualism, there can be no liberalism.

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— Norberto Bobbio, Liberalism and Democracy, 1985.

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General images

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

Image 1Pamphlet calling for a protest of economic policy in 1983 following the economic crisis (from Neoliberalism)
Image 2Noam Chomsky's 1999 book Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order is an open critique of neoliberalism and the American economic structure (from Neoliberalism)
Image 3Execution of José María de Torrijos y Uriarte and his men in 1831 as Spanish King Ferdinand VII took repressive measures against the liberal forces in his country (from Liberalism)
Image 4The Great Depression, with its periods of worldwide economic hardship, formed the backdrop against which the Keynesian Revolution took place (the image is Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother depiction of destitute pea-pickers in California, taken in March 1936). (from Liberalism)
Image 5Franklin D. Roosevelt (from Liberalism)
Image 6John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of modern times and whose ideas, which are still widely felt, formalized modern liberal economic policy. (from Liberalism)
Image 7Per capita income during the Great Depression (from Neoliberalism)
Image 8U.S. President Bush, Canadian PM Mulroney, and Mexican President Salinas participate in the ceremonies to sign the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). (from Neoliberalism)
Image 9Madame de Staël (from Liberalism)
Image 10Sismondi, who wrote the first critique of the free market from a liberal perspective in 1819 (from Liberalism)
Image 11Unemployment in Chile and South America (1980–1990) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 12United States incarceration rate per 100,000 population, 1925–2014 (from Neoliberalism)
Image 13Gustave de Molinari (from Liberalism)
Image 14Julius Faucher (from Liberalism)
Image 15Mary Wollstonecraft, widely regarded as the pioneer of liberal feminism (from Liberalism)
Image 16John Locke was the first to develop a liberal philosophy, including the right to private property and the consent of the governed. (from Liberalism)
Image 17The 2017–2018 Russian protests were organized by Russia's liberal opposition. (from Liberalism)
Image 18Friedrich Hayek (from Neoliberalism)
Image 19The iconic painting Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix, a tableau of the July Revolution in 1830 (from Liberalism)
Image 20As a liberal nationalist, K. J. Ståhlberg (1865–1952), the President of Finland, anchored the state in liberal democracy, guarded the fragile germ of the rule of law, and embarked on internal reforms. (from Liberalism)
Image 21Chilean (orange) and average Latin American (blue) rates of growth of GDP (1971–2007) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 22Monument to the liberals of the 19th century in Agra del Orzán neighborhood, La Coruña, Galicia, (Spain) (from Liberalism)
Image 23The European Union–Mercosur free trade agreement, which would form one of the world's largest free trade areas, has been denounced by environmental activists and indigenous rights campaigners. (from Neoliberalism)
Image 24Member nations of the International Monetary Fund (from Neoliberalism)
Image 25John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty greatly influenced 19th-century liberalism (from Liberalism)
Image 26T. H. Green, an influential liberal philosopher who established in Prolegomena to Ethics (1884) the first major foundations for what later became known as positive liberty and in a few years, his ideas became the official policy of the Liberal Party in Britain, precipitating the rise of social liberalism and the modern welfare state (from Liberalism)
Image 27Raif Badawi, a Saudi Arabian writer and the creator of the website Free Saudi Liberals, who was sentenced to ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes for "insulting Islam" in 2014 (from Liberalism)
Image 28Wealth inequality in the United States increased from 1989 to 2013. (from Neoliberalism)
Image 29John Milton's Areopagitica (1644) argued for the importance of freedom of speech. (from Liberalism)
Image 30Benjamin Constant, a Franco-Swiss political activist and theorist (from Liberalism)
Image 31GDP per capita in Chile and Latin America 1950–2010 (time under Pinochet highlighted) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 32Builders in West Berlin, 1952 (from Neoliberalism)
Image 33Ludwig Erhard (from Neoliberalism)
Image 34Montesquieu, who argued for the separation of the powers of government (from Liberalism)