Liberalism is a wide-ranging political philosophy that prioritizes individual liberty by advocating equality of opportunity and recognizing individual rights. Liberalism is synonymous with such ideals as freedom of speech and conscience, democracy, limited government and (to varying extents) free-market economics.
Liberalism – which derives from the Latin for ‘free’ – has a long pedigree. Aristotle noted: ‘Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved.’ However, modern liberalism grew out of Enlightenment thought and it was during the 17th and 18th centuries that many of its central tenets were established. One of its key founding texts was John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government (1689; see The Social Contract here), in which he outlined the individual’s natural (i.e. human and inalienable) rights to life, liberty and property. The cause of liberalism was taken up by several prominent French philosophers of the age. The Baron de Montesquieu, for example, called for monarchs to be subject to legal constraints (not a popular idea with the Bourbon dynasty), as did Voltaire.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, meanwhile, waged war on his contemporary society, famously noting that social convention stifles people’s basic freedoms. ‘Man is born free,’ he wrote, ‘and everywhere he is in chains.’ He not only dismissed the notion of the divine right of monarchs but claimed that the people (by which he meant all citizens, including – remarkably for the age – women) were the only legitimate sovereign power.
In America, the War of Independence of 1775–83 was built around the Locke-esque credo of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, while the French Revolution was imbued with the liberal ideas of Voltaire and Rousseau (although the subsequent Terror and the substitution of the monarchy with the emperorship of Napoleon fatally undermined those values).
On Liberty
In 1859, John Stuart Mill wrote his masterpiece of liberalism, On Liberty, in which he examined the relationship between the individual and authority. He made a spirited defence of the rights of the individual in all circumstances except when they impinge on the rights of another: ‘That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant . . . Over himself, over his body and mind, the individual is sovereign.’
Liberalism remained among the dominant philosophies of 20th- and 21st-century discourse – facing down, for instance, the rise of fascism and communism. In the words of the Austrian-American economist Ludwig von Mises: ‘Against what is stupid, nonsensical, erroneous, and evil, liberalism fights with the weapons of the mind, and not with brute force and repression.’