Traditional Culture Encyclopedia - Traditional festivals - What is "liberalism"?

What is "liberalism"?

Libertarianism is an ideology, a philosophy, and a collection of schools of thought in which freedom is a major political value. In a broad sense, libertarianism seeks a society that protects individual freedom of thought, laws that limit the use of government power, the concept of free trade, a market economy that supports private enterprise, and a transparent political system that protects the rights of minorities.

In modern societies, libertarians support liberal democracies structured as ****ums or constitutional monarchies, with open and fair electoral systems that give all citizens equal rights to participate in political affairs. Liberalism rejects many of the earlier dominant political structures, such as the divine right of kings, hereditary systems, and state religion. Libertarianism's basic human rights claims are the right to life, the right to liberty, and the right to property.

In many countries, "modern" libertarians have departed from the original classical liberalism and have argued that governments should provide a minimum amount of material well-being by extracting taxes. Liberalism took root during the Age of Enlightenment, and by now the term liberalism encompasses a wide range of political ideas, with supporters spread across the political spectrum from the left to the right.

Expanded Information:

I. Modern Liberalism

In the post-war period of liberalism, modern liberalism began to dominate. Linking the concepts of modernism and progressivism, modern liberalism argued that ensuring that the population had sufficient economic and educational property was the best way to combat the threat of totalitarianism.

Liberals of this period argued that individual freedom and self-fulfillment would be maximized through the inspiration of liberal institutions. Libertarian writers of this period include economist John Galbraith, philosopher John Rawls, and sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf.

Also during this period, a school of thought that insisted that government should not intervene in the economy, or else it would be a betrayal of the principles of liberty, called itself free willism, a movement centered on the ideas of the Austrian School of Economics.

Another important debate within libertarianism is whether people are positively free as social ****s, and whether they have the right to ask for ****s protection from the wrongdoings of others. For many libertarians, the answer is yes: as members of a nation, region, and political community, individuals have positive liberties and the right to expect benefits and protection from those communities. Members of the ****congress have the right to demand that their ****congress establish some degree of control over the economy so that its growth and decline are not manipulated in the hands of certain individuals.

And if individuals have the right to participate in public office, then they also have the right to education and protection from society - i.e., the right to be free from discrimination by others. Other libertarians answer in the negative: Individuals do not have a right to be a member of a ****ing community, because such a right would conflict with the fundamental "negative" rights of other community members.

After the 1970s, the liberal pendulum began to move away from emphasizing the role of government and back toward free markets and laissez-faire principles. In essence, many of the pre-World War I libertarian ideas began to return.

This shift came partly from the confidence of the time in the certainty of the libertarian form, but also from the roots of libertarian philosophy, especially the tradition of skepticism about the role of the state - whether economic or political. Even libertarian institutions can be misused to restrict freedom rather than enhance it.

The emphasis on the free market grew with Milton Friedman in the United States and the Austrian school of economics in Europe. They asserted that regulatory government intervention in the economy was a rather precarious slope, leading in any case to more and more intervention, and more and more intervention being more difficult to remove.

II. The Impact of Liberalism on the World

Liberalism has had a rather deep impact on the modern world. Individual liberty, personal dignity, freedom of speech, tolerance of beliefs, personal property, universal human rights, government transparency, limitation of government power, popular sovereignty, national self-determination of nations, privacy, enlightened and rational policies, regulations, basic equality, free-market economy, and free trade are all fundamental concepts that have characterized libertarianism for 250 years.

Liberal democracy is the quintessential multi-party pluralistic political form. Today, some countries have embraced these liberal concepts as policy goals, although they often differ greatly in statement and reality. These concepts are not only the goals of liberalism, but also of social democracy, conservatism, and Christian democracy.