(Note: This article does not in any way represent the views of the author, but an overlook of classical liberalism, rid of political jargon. This article, also does not expand on constitutional government, in the context of liberalism, nor on the tenets of modern liberalism. )
Are you someone who is tired of being labelled as a pseudo-liberal? Are you tired of conservatives spamming you with religious scriptures, when you bring up women’s suffrage or women’s equality in the status quo? Or are you someone, who tends to get annoyed by the correlation found between liberals and drug-traffickers? (There isn’t).
Let’s look into it.
Liberalism emerged in the 19th century, during the industrialization of the United Kingdom and North America, with an Anglo-Saxon origin. It comes from the latin word Libel, which means “class of free men”. The concepts, though emerged as a direct resultant of feudalism breaking down, post-Dark Ages in Europe, during the Age of Reason, Enlightenment and/or the Renaissance. Remember Isaac Newton in Physics class? Yep, he was responsible for it too. But what were the turning points for the emergence of the concept of Liberalism?
Simple: The American Revolution. The French Revolution. The Glorious Revolution. Note: Not every revolution, can be accounted to liberal ideology surfacing up in the middle-class. Think about Bolshevik Revolution in the 1920? (Socialist in nature).
Over the course of the years, many philosophers have argued whether there is a relationship between liberalism and capitalism. Well, empirically speaking, there is. From a normative standpoint, it is debatable. Friedrich Hayek, propagated this very relationship by stating it the “right to own, use and dispose of private property”. “Ew, private property”, shouted Marx in the background, who believed, ideology itself, of the ruling intellectual class, prevailed over the proletariat or the working class.
Okay, now that one has understood the origins, what are some of the central themes?
The Individual
Freedom
Reason
Justice
Toleration and Diversity
The Individual
One has to understand that, in feudal Europe, the feudal lord would be concerned with the collective output of the peasants’ produce, which in turn meant that peasants did not have any individual worth, right to own property, right to express themselves, or think of themselves in a distinctive way. Therefore, an English Philosopher, John Locke propagated the idea of natural-God given rights as “life, liberty and property”. Later, Thomas Jefferson, the man behind the U.S Constitution, alongside James Madison, surfaced the idea of “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness”. Later on, a German Philosopher, Immaneul Kant (Known for his work on rational discourse and morality), stated the importance of individuals being an end in themselves, rather than being the means for the ends of others. In 1973, Macpherson, found a problem with early or classical liberalism. Classical liberalism stated that individuals in society, are self-sufficient, atomistic in nature, and owe nothing to the society. The conflict with this idea is that the individual owes nothing to society.
Freedom
A young man, tired of his father (James Mill’s Utilitarianism), believed that if liberty is absolute, it becomes a license to infringe on the freedom of others. Therefore, this young man, John Stuart Mill, an English philosopher, an economist, and politician, in his work On Liberty (1859), stated that there should be a limit to this freedom. But Mill, did not accept any restrictions, such as harming one’s self. (Yes! You thought right. Mill believed that suicide came in the paradigm of his version of freedom. But the most important distinction was made by Isaiah Berlin, the UK Historian, in her work Two Concepts of Liberty (1969), where difference of negative freedom and positive freedom was realized. Negative freedom meant absolute freedom, adopted by the classical liberals, and positive freedom focused on autonomy and self-mastery in the process of self-actualization.
Reason
Since. Liberalism was an output of the Enlightenment project, the case of rationality, intrinsically present in an individual to provide for him/her self was propagated by Immaneul Kant in Critique of Pure Reason, Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations (an economic perspective), and Jeremy Bentham.
Justice
It denoted a particular kind of moral judgement, in the distribution of wealth, social welfare, medicaid, housing, in a social perspective, equality. The debate whether meritocracy (the argument of the classicals), has been a heated one, since liberals faced the conflict of justifying social inequality. Neo-Liberals on the other hand, more specifically, Robert Nozick, criticised Locke for social inequality is justified, for the harder one works, the richer they are, with a noble status in society, and lazy a person is, lesser they worked. Deeming it an odd theory, John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (1970), argued that social inequality needs to be measured and only be deemed beneficial as long as it works for the benefit of the proletariat.
Tolerance and Diversity
Pluralism , whether one calls it political pluralism or social pluralism, is the commitment to diversity, with John Stuart Mill arguing that :
“If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”
One can date this back to the protestant reformation, and the intolerance of the Catholic Church, specifically in the context of religious tolerance that emerged in the latter part of the 19th century. One of most heated tensions within liberalism, in this paradigm is the competitive nature of Universalist liberalism and Pluralist Liberalism, with one focusing on universal reason, and one focusing on skepticism.
With this being said, social Darwinism, constitutional and representative government (James Madison), neo-liberalism (propagation of laissez faire in free market principles. Think Thatcherism in the UK and Reaginism in the U.S in the late 1970s) modern liberalism in the 20th century, are all core concepts of the ever-expanding liberal ideology.
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