LIBERALISM

the creed of those who believe in individual liberty. More specifically, since no government allows absolute liberty (Locke), it is the belief that it is desirable to maximize the amount of liberty in the state. Traditionally, a liberal believes that the primary function of the state is to protect the rights of the citizens. These rights are often ascribed to nature (natural rights) and frequently affirmed in proclamations, petitions, bills of rights, declarations of the rights of man, and so forth. Particularly at the beginning of liberal movements, liberals are reformers, enemies of entrenched institutions, traditions, and customs. Liberal programs, therefore, seek to place constraints on governmental power. Sometimes this may be achieved in the structure of the government itself, through a parliamentary system of government or a constitutional monarchy, or through the separation of governmental powers into functionally differentiated agencies such as executive, legislative, and judiciary, the classical example being the U.S. government. These constraints may also include barring the government so far as possible from the marketplace, as in the policies known as laissez-faire economics. Finally, these constraints may be introduced in the form of more specific limitations on governmental power, such as guarantees of habeas corpus, bail, rights of speech and assembly, and so on. As the word liberty is ambiguous, however, so is the word liberal. A liberal may believe that freedom is a matter for the individual alone and that the role of the state should be minimal, or he may believe that freedom is a matter for the state and that the state can and should be used as an instrument to promote it. The former view in its extreme tends toward anarchism, while the latter in its extreme tends toward socialism, called social, or welfare, liberalism. In between are myriad gradations. Rarely has a liberal movement been unaffected by this ambiguity; some have even collapsed because of it. Great Britain was the birthplace of both modern liberalism and modern conservatism. The term liberal first appeared in that country in the early 19th century. Originally, it carried a pejorative sense; the Tories began to refer to their Whig opponents as liberales after the Spanish political party by that name. The philosophical foundations of British liberalism were laid by John Locke, while Adam Smith developed the classical laissez-faire economic theory associated with liberalism. The British Liberal Party was formed upon the dissolution of the old Whigs, on a much wider electoral base, and was forged into a strong parliamentary party by William E. Gladstone. The party ultimately split in 1918, however, between one faction tending toward classical laissez-faire liberalism and another tending more toward social liberalism. In France the seeds of a similar split were already present in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a precursor of French liberalism. The first sentence of his Social Contract reads: Man is born free, but is everywhere in chainsa classical individualistic liberal position. Yet a few pages later Rousseau writes that this situation can only be overcome if the individual submits himself, with all his rights, to the state; he continues in a vein familiar to later social liberals. Voltaire, Franois Guizot, and others took the individualist side of liberalism; various figures of the French Revolution and the young Napoleon I himself took the socialist side. In France and in other European countries, liberalism is also associated with anticlericalism. The path of liberalism in the United States was much less difficult than that of European movements. American liberalism was not forced to struggle with the remnants of aristocratic traditions and institutions, and the U.S. Constitution took shape at a time when liberal ideals were in full bloom. political philosophy emphasizing the value of individual liberty and the role of the state in protecting the rights of its citizens. Liberalism does not lend itself to easy definition. A major difficulty is that, with some exceptions, liberals have shunned dogma, preferring generally a pragmatic to a doctrinaire approach to social problems. Another, which has been a prolific source of misunderstanding, has been liberals' own frequently opposing views concerning the scope of government. The confusion thus engendered is sometimes compounded by a tendency to identify liberalism exclusively with its 18th- and 19th-century variant, or with the program of this or that liberal party, in a formulation that has on occasion led many to announce the decline or end of liberalism and to compose obituaries that have been quite misleading. Through the centuries liberalism has changed drastically in content, but it has maintained a constant form. Those who note the first and neglect the second understandably find the term confusing and its application inconsistent. by Max Lerner This article first appeared in 1960 and remained in print until 1973, the last year of the Fourteenth Edition. Lerner was a passionate, though by no means blind, adherent of the liberal view and here is eloquent in his exposition and defense of it. Above the pleasure of the prose and the clarity of thought behind it, the article offers a reminder of a time when "liberal" was not yet an epithet. liberalism Additional reading General works include Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (1970); Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 3 vol. (1968; originally published in German, 4th rev. ed., 1956); mile Durkheim, Durkheim on Politics and the State, ed. by Anthony Giddens, trans. from German (1986); Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971); Patrick Dunleavy and Brendan O'Leary, Theories of the State: The Politics of Liberal Democracy (1987); Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner (eds.), Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy Revisited (1991); Robert Denoon Cumming, Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought (1969); Harry K. Girvetz, Evolution of Liberalism, rev. ed. (1963), a comparison of classical and contemporary liberalism that examines the psychological assumptions underlying the political and economic views of the classical liberals; Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (1955, reprinted 1991); Kingsley Martin, French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed., rev. (1954, reprinted as The Rise of French Liberal Thought, 1980); K.R. Minogue, The Liberal Mind (1963), on the contention that liberalism reflects a moral and political consensus; and Frederick Watkins, The Political Tradition of the West: A Study in the Development of Modern Liberalism (1948, reprinted 1982).Classical liberalism is treated in A.V. Dicey, Lectures on the Relation Between Law and Public Opinion in England During the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. (1914, reprinted 1981); E. Halvy, The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism (1928, reissued 1972; originally published in French, 3 vol., 190104); L.T. Hobhouse, Liberalism (1911, reissued 1980); Harold J. Laski, The Rise of Liberalism: The Philosophy of a Business Civilization (1936; also published as The Rise of European Liberalism, 1936, reissued 1971); Guido De Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism (1927, reissued 1981; originally published in Italian, 1925); and Leslie Stephen, The English Utilitarians, 3 vol. (1900, reprinted 1968).Works on contemporary liberalism include Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1933, reissued 1991), the classic account of how the private corporation has generated managerial power; William H. Beveridge, Full Employment in a Free Society, 2nd ed. (1960), by the chief English architect of the welfare state; G.D.H. Cole, Economic Planning (1935, reissued 1971); the work by Crosland cited above; John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (1922, reissued 1957), the best criticism of the psychological preconceptions of the classical liberals; John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power, rev. ed. (1956, reissued 1993), The Affluent Society, 4th ed. (1984), one of the first works to contend that liberal emphasis should shift from greater productivity to the question of priorities, and The New Industrial State, 4th ed. (1985); Alvin H. Hansen, Economic Policy and Full Employment (1947), by a prominent American exponent of Keynesianism; Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (1993); John Gray, Beyond the New Right: Markets, Government, and the Common Environment (1993); Seymour E. Harris, Economic Planning (1949), an examination of economic planning in 10 European countries as well as in the United States, Argentina, Japan, and India; John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-faire (1926), and The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1935, reissued 1991), the most influential economic tract of the first half of the 20th century; W. Arthur Lewis, The Principles of Economic Planning, 3rd ed. (1969), on the difference between direct and indirect planning and its important implications; James Edward Meade, Planning and the Price Mechanism (1949), a liberal socialist approach to the problems of planning and use of the price mechanism in postwar Britain; Gunnar Myrdal, Beyond the Welfare State (1960, reprinted 1982), on the social impact of economic planning in highly industrialized states and the economic relationships between them and less developed economies; Steven M. DeLue, Political Obligation in a Liberal State (1989), on the social impact of post-Keynesianism; Eugene V. Rostow, Planning for Freedom (1959), an analysis of the impact of the Keynesian revolution on government intervention in the economic sphere; and Andrew Levine, Liberal Democracy: A Critique of its Theory (1981). Harry K. Girvetz The Editors of the Encyclopdia Britannica