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, the 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. 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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Orange-clad demonstrators gather in the Independence Square in Kyiv on 22 November 2004.

The Orange Revolution (Ukrainian: Помаранчева революція, romanized: Pomarancheva revoliutsiia) was a series of protests that led to political upheaval in Ukraine from late November 2004 to January 2005. It gained momentum primarily due to the initiative of the general population, sparked by the aftermath of the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election run-off which was claimed to be marred by massive corruption, voter intimidation and electoral fraud. Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, was the focal point of the movement's campaign of civil resistance, with thousands of protesters demonstrating daily. Nationwide, this was highlighted by a series of acts of civil disobedience, sit-ins, and general strikes organized by the opposition movement.

The protests were prompted by reports from several domestic and foreign election monitors as well as the widespread public perception that the results of the run-off vote of 21 November 2004 between leading candidates Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych were rigged by the authorities in favour of the latter. The nationwide protests succeeded when the results of the original run-off were annulled, and a revote was ordered by Ukraine's Supreme Court for 26 December 2004. Under intense scrutiny by domestic and international observers, the second run-off was declared to be "free and fair". The final results showed a clear victory for Yushchenko, who received about 52% of the vote, compared to Yanukovych's 44%. Yushchenko was declared the official winner and with his inauguration on 23 January 2005 in Kyiv, the Orange Revolution ended. In the following years, the Orange Revolution had a negative connotation among pro-government circles in Belarus and Russia. (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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Another common example of a free market is the universal practice of children swapping baseball cards-the sort of thing where you swap "two Hank Aaron[s]" for "one Willie Mays". The "prices" of the various cards and the exchanges that took place, were based on the relative importance that the kids attached to each baseball player. As one way of annoying liberals we might put the case this way: liberals are supposed to be in favor of any voluntary actions performed, as the famous cliché goes, by "two consenting adults". Yet it is peculiar that while liberals are in favor of any sexual activity engaged in by two consentings adults, when these consenting adults engage in trade or exchange, the liberals step in to harass, cripple, restrict, or prohibit that trade. And yet both the consenting sexual activity and the trade are similar expressions of liberty in action. Both should be favored by any consistent libertarian. But the government, especially a liberal government, habitually steps in to regulate and restrict such trade.

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— Murray Rothbard, Economic Controversies, 2011.

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General images

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

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