Liberalism

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Liberalism

The philosophy that one ought to be able to do what one would like provided it does not hurt another person. It was conceived in the 19th century primarily as an economic and social philosophy espousing religious liberty, the free market, and capitalism. In the 20th century, it became associated with the left, especially in the United States, due to a concern for social justice. As a result, a liberal tends to favor regulation of private enterprise. However, adherents to what is sometimes called "19th-century liberalism" or "European liberalism" are presumably more amenable to the free market.

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The history of liberalism, I believe, makes it clear that liberalism's underlying spirit is commitment to improving the lives of people through social action.

In praise of liberalism: an assessment of liberal political thought from the 17th century to today

Scholarship on the history of liberalism is thriving, especially inquiries into the theoretical foundations of the modern liberal order.

Levine, Alan. Sensual Philosophy: Toleration, Skepticism, and Montaigne's Politics of the Self

One of his major claims in this work is that the history of liberalism and that of the city are one and the same because the city, as a space of self-determined--and self-limited--flows, was both the precondition for the constitution of liberal subjectivity and its most characteristic expression.

The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City

Making sense of the history of liberalism has become as much a part of liberal thought as the more substantive analyses of power and institutions with which it traditionally has been occupied.

An Intellectual History of Liberalism

So it seemed to me that a radicalism, a materialism, a Marxism, that was elaborated on a weak and polemical reading of the complex and rich history of liberalism was not a radicalism worth having much truck with.

Translator translated

In An Intellectual History of Liberalism (1994), Manent emphasizes the fact that the "theological-political problem" in Europe did not arise in a homogeneous city-state or empire but rather out of the tension between universal Christian churches and particular absolutist monarchies.

The strange birth of liberal France

Following in the footsteps of Robert Wiebe, Ellis Hawley, and Louis Galambos, Stone traces the history of liberalism through the New Deal.

Public Service Liberalism: Telecommunications and Transitions in Public Policy

Edmund Fawcett, who wrote for The Economist for more than three decades, serves up a scholarly study of the history of liberalism. He traces the idea and its politics from its beginnings in the 1830s with Karl Marx in Germany, Ralph Waldo Emerson in the U.S., and Alexis deTocqueville in France, driven by the pressure of industrialization and social change, to the present.