Liberalism
Ideology · 17th century onward, Europe and North America · Politics, stage 2: Map the ideologies
Liberalism starts from the individual: each person has a life of their own to lead, and political arrangements exist to protect that. Its advocates argue for limits on state power, equality before the law, freedom of speech, conscience and association, secure property, and government answerable to the governed. The tradition contains two large camps. Classical liberals read freedom mainly as the absence of interference and favour a narrowly bounded state; egalitarian liberals in the line of Rawls hold that formal liberties are worth little without the resources to use them, and so accept substantial redistribution. Critics on the left argue that liberalism treats existing holdings as a neutral baseline and ignores the private power exercised by employers and markets; conservative and communitarian critics argue that it thins out the traditions, communities and shared purposes that give people their identities in the first place.
What it claims
- Individuals, rather than groups or states, are the fundamental unit of political concern.
- State power always requires justification, and must be limited by rights and by law.
- A legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed.
- People disagree permanently about how to live, so the state should not enforce one answer.
Key ideas
People
Sources
- Liberalism Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- John Rawls Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyThe egalitarian wing of the tradition in its most systematic form.
- Liberalism Wikipedia
