Portal:Liberalism

The Liberalism portal

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. Different liberals espouse various and sometimes conflicting views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support liberal democracy, private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. 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. The 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 emphasized expanding democracy, French liberalism emphasized rejecting authoritarianism. (Full article...)

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The New Deal was a 1933–1938 series of economic, social, and political reforms in response to the Great Depression in the United States under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He introduced the phrase when accepting the Democratic Party presidential nomination in the 1932 United States presidential election, winning in a landslide over incumbent Herbert Hoover, whose administration was widely viewed as ineffective. Roosevelt attributed the Depression to inherent market instability and inadequate aggregate demand (following the Keynesian economic model), and argued that stabilizing and rationalizing the economy required massive government intervention.

During Roosevelt's first hundred days in office in 1933 until 1935, FDR introduced what historians refer to as the "First New Deal", which focused on the "3 R's": relief for the unemployed and for the poor, recovery of the economy back to normal levels, and reforms of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression. Roosevelt signed the Emergency Banking Act, which authorized the Federal Reserve to insure deposits to restore confidence, and the 1933 Banking Act made this permanent with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Other laws created the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which allowed industries to create "codes of fair competition"; the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which protected investors from abusive stock market practices; and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), which raised rural incomes by controlling production. Public works were undertaken in order to find jobs for the unemployed (25 percent of the workforce when Roosevelt took office): the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) enlisted young men for manual labor on government land, and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) promoted electricity generation and other forms of economic development in the drainage basin of the Tennessee River. (Full article...)

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Portrait by Henry William Pickersgill, 1828

Jeremy Bentham (/ˈbɛnθəm/; 4 February 1747/8 O.S. [15 February 1748 N.S.] – 6 June 1832) was an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism.

Bentham defined as the "fundamental axiom" of his philosophy the principle that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong". He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism. He advocated individual and economic freedoms, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and (in an unpublished essay) the decriminalizing of homosexual acts. He called for the abolition of slavery, capital punishment, and physical punishment, including that of children. He has also become known as an early advocate of animal rights. Though strongly in favour of the extension of individual legal rights, he opposed the idea of natural law and natural rights (both of which are considered "divine" or "God-given" in origin), calling them "nonsense upon stilts". However, he viewed the Magna Carta as important, citing it to argue that the treatment of convicts in Australia was unlawful. Bentham was also a sharp critic of legal fictions. (Full article...)

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Liberals said chemical weapons would be used against our troops. That didn't happen. They predicted huge civilian casualties. That didn't happen. They said Americans would turn against the war as our troops came home in body bags. That didn't happen. They warned of a mammoth terrorist attack in America if we invaded Iraq. That didn't happen. Just two weeks ago, they claimed American troops were caught in another Vietnam quagmire. That didn't happen. The only mishap liberals can carp about is that some figurines from an Iraqi museum were broken-a relief to college students everywhere who have ever been forced to gaze upon Mesopotamiam pottery. We're not talking about Rodins here. So the Iraqis looted. Oh well. War are messy. Liberalism is part of a religious disorder that demands a belief that life is controllable.

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— Ann Coulter, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must), 2004.

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General images

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

Image 1Mary Wollstonecraft, widely regarded as the pioneer of liberal feminism (from Liberalism)
Image 2Franklin D. Roosevelt (from Liberalism)
Image 3Benjamin Constant, a Franco-Swiss political activist and theorist (from Liberalism)
Image 4John Milton's Areopagitica (1644) argued for the importance of freedom of speech. (from Liberalism)
Image 5U.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 6Monument to the liberals of the 19th century in Agra del Orzán neighborhood, La Coruña, Galicia (Spain) (from Liberalism)
Image 7Madame de Staël (from Liberalism)
Image 8Friedrich Hayek (from Neoliberalism)
Image 9Ludwig Erhard (from Neoliberalism)
Image 10Chilean (orange) and average Latin American (blue) rates of growth of GDP (1971–2007) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 11GDP per capita in Chile and Latin America 1950–2010 (time under Pinochet highlighted) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 12Execution 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 13The iconic painting Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix, a tableau of the July Revolution in 1830 (from Liberalism)
Image 14John Locke was the first to develop a liberal philosophy, including the right to private property and the consent of the governed. (from Liberalism)
Image 15Montesquieu, who argued for the separation of the powers of government (from Liberalism)
Image 16T. 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 17Builders in West Berlin, 1952 (from Neoliberalism)
Image 18The 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 19Ronald Reagan (left) and Margaret Thatcher (right) were responsible for the popularisation of Neoliberalism. (from Neoliberalism)
Image 20Per capita income during the Great Depression (from Neoliberalism)
Image 21Gustave de Molinari (from Liberalism)
Image 22Member nations of the International Monetary Fund (from Neoliberalism)
Image 23United States incarceration rate per 100,000 population, 1925–2014 (from Neoliberalism)
Image 24Raif 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 25Julius Faucher (from Liberalism)
Image 26As 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 27Pamphlet calling for a protest of economic policy in 1983 following the economic crisis (from Neoliberalism)
Image 28Unemployment in Chile and South America (1980–1990) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 29The US federal minimum wage if it had kept pace with productivity compared to the actual wage (from Neoliberalism)
Image 30John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty greatly influenced 19th-century liberalism (from Liberalism)
Image 31Sismondi, who wrote the first critique of the free market from a liberal perspective in 1819 (from Liberalism)
Image 32The 2017–2018 Russian protests were organized by Russia's liberal opposition. (from Liberalism)
Image 33John 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 34Wealth inequality in the United States increased from 1989 to 2013. (from Neoliberalism)
Image 35The 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)