Liberalism

Liberalism begins from a presumption in favour of liberty: individuals are free and equal, and any use of collective force against them needs a justification they could in principle accept. From this follow its characteristic commitments — equal civil rights, freedom of conscience, speech and association, the rule of law, limits on government through constitutions and divided powers, government by consent, and, in most versions, private property and market exchange. Liberalism is less a single programme than a family of positions that disagree about how far these commitments reach, especially in the economy.

Origins

Liberal ideas emerged from the religious wars and constitutional struggles of early modern Europe. John Locke grounded government in consent and natural rights and argued for religious toleration; Montesquieu and the authors of the Federalist made the separation of powers a safeguard of liberty; Adam Smith argued that a 'system of natural liberty' in commerce would generally serve the public good; and Benjamin Constant distinguished the 'liberty of the moderns' — private independence protected by law — from the ancients' collective self-rule. John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859) gave the classic statement of the harm principle: society may coerce an individual only to prevent harm to others.

Classical and social liberalism

Classical liberals tie liberty closely to private property and market order, arguing that property is a precondition of independence and that dispersed economic power checks the state. From the late nineteenth century new or social liberals such as T. H. Green and L. T. Hobhouse doubted that markets were self-correcting, held that property rights can entrench unequal power, and defended a positive conception of liberty as the real capacity for self-direction — supporting public education, social insurance and labour regulation. Twentieth-century liberalism divided again between market liberals (Hayek, Friedman) and egalitarian liberals (Rawls, Dworkin).

Political liberalism

John Rawls's Political Liberalism (1993) argued that in a pluralist society liberalism should not be a comprehensive philosophy of life but a political framework that citizens holding different religious and moral doctrines can endorse, justified by 'public reason'. Critics argue that liberalism cannot escape contested metaphysical commitments.

Liberalism and democracy

Liberalism and democracy are allies but not identical. Liberal constitutionalism limits what majorities may do — through bills of rights, courts, federalism and supermajority rules — out of fear of the tyranny of the majority. Fareed Zakaria's 'illiberal democracy' (1997) named regimes that hold elections while eroding constitutional liberties; the reverse case is liberal but weakly democratic rule by courts or technocrats.

• Constitutional revolutions. The English Bill of Rights (1689), the US Constitution and Bill of Rights (1787–1791) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) are founding documents, though all coexisted with slavery, colonialism or the exclusion of women and the propertyless.
• Nineteenth-century reform. British liberals extended the franchise in stages, repealed the Corn Laws (1846) and promoted free trade, religious emancipation and civil-service reform based on examinations.
• Post-1945 constitutions. West Germany's Basic Law (1949), with its guarantee of human dignity and a powerful constitutional court, became a model of 'militant' liberal democracy; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the European Convention on Human Rights (1950) internationalised liberal rights.
• Post-1989 transitions. Central and Eastern European states adopted liberal constitutions and joined the European Union under membership criteria requiring democracy, the rule of law and protection of minorities. Hungary after 2010 and Poland between 2015 and 2023 became cases of 'democratic backsliding' in which elected governments curtailed judicial independence and media pluralism; Poland's government elected in 2023 set out to reverse some of those changes.
• Liberalism inside new polities. Charter cities, special economic zones and some network-state projects present themselves as liberal in a narrow, economic sense — strong property rights and contract enforcement — often with limited political rights, illustrating that liberal economic and political commitments can come apart.

• Communitarian. Michael Sandel and others argue that liberalism rests on an 'unencumbered' self that chooses its ends, ignoring unchosen attachments to family, community and tradition, and so corrodes the social fabric it depends on.
• Conservative and post-liberal. Conservatives argue that liberal individualism weakens the institutions that sustain order; post-liberal writers such as Patrick Deneen (Why Liberalism Failed, 2018) contend that liberalism's success produced atomisation, inequality and a managerial elite.
• Socialist. Marx and later socialists argue that liberal rights are formal: equal before the law, workers remain subject to the domination of employers, and economic power converts into political power.
• Republican. Neo-republicans such as Philip Pettit argue that liberty as non-interference misses domination — being subject to another's arbitrary will even if they do not interfere.
• Feminist. Carole Pateman and others argue that the liberal division between public and private shielded domination within the family and that the social contract presupposed women's subordination.
• Postcolonial. Scholars note that Mill and other liberals justified empire by denying 'backward' peoples the capacity for self-government.
• Practical. Critics across the spectrum argue that liberal democracies delegate too much to courts, central banks and international bodies, feeding a sense that voters cannot change outcomes.

Liberal democracies are, on most measures, the richest and freest societies in the world, but the direction of causation is debated. Acemoglu, Naidu, Restrepo and Robinson (2019) estimate from panel data that democratisation raises GDP per capita substantially in the long run, while others argue that prosperity makes liberal democracy more likely rather than the reverse. The 'democratic peace' — the observation that established liberal democracies rarely if ever fight wars with one another — is one of the strongest regularities in international relations, though its explanation is contested.

After the end of the Cold War, liberal democracy appeared to many to have no ideological rival. Since the mid-2000s, democracy-measurement projects including V-Dem and International IDEA have reported a sustained decline in liberal-democratic quality in many countries, often driven by elected leaders. For institution designers, liberalism's record suggests that rights, independent courts and competitive elections are mutually reinforcing, and that their erosion typically proceeds through legal means — packing courts, capturing media regulators, redrawing districts — rather than coups.

• Shane D. Courtland, Gerald Gaus and David Schmidtz, 'Liberalism', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689); John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)
• John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971) and Political Liberalism (1993)
• Fareed Zakaria, 'The Rise of Illiberal Democracy', Foreign Affairs (1997) — DOI
• Daron Acemoglu et al., 'Democracy Does Cause Growth', Journal of Political Economy (2019) — DOI
• Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (2018)