Liberalism

(redirected from History of liberalism)
Also found in: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Legal, Encyclopedia.

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.

Mentioned in ?

References in periodicals archive ?

When it comes to foreign policy, Lakoff shows not only a misunderstanding of America, but also of the history of liberalism and the Democratic Party today.

Word games: George Lakoff, the Democrats' hottest new thinker, misses the meaning behind the message

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.