Portal:Liberalism

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Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property, and equality before the law. Different liberals espouse various and sometimes conflicting views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support liberal democracy, private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. Liberalism is frequently cited as the dominant ideology of modern history.

Liberalism became a distinct movement in the Age of Enlightenment, gaining popularity among Western philosophers and economists. Liberalism sought to replace the norms of hereditary privilege, state religion, absolute monarchy, the divine right of kings, and traditional conservatism with representative democracy, rule of law, and equality under the law. Liberals also ended mercantilist policies, royal monopolies, and other trade barriers, instead promoting free trade and marketization. The philosopher John Locke is often credited with founding liberalism as a distinct tradition based on the social contract, arguing that each man has a natural right to life, liberty and property, and governments must not violate these rights. While the British liberal tradition emphasized expanding democracy, French liberalism emphasized rejecting authoritarianism. (Full article...)

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The Liberal Democrats, colloquially known as the Lib Dems, is a political party in the United Kingdom. Ideologically adhering to liberalism, it was founded in 1988. The party is based at Liberal Democrat Headquarters, which since September 2025 has been located at Buckingham Gate, in the Westminster area of Central London. The party's leader is Ed Davey. It is the third-largest party in the United Kingdom, with 72 members of Parliament (MPs) in the House of Commons. It has 74 members of the House of Lords, 10 in the Scottish Parliament, 1 in the Welsh Senedd, and around 3,200 local council seats. The party holds a twice yearly Liberal Democrat Conference, at which policy is formulated. In contrast to its main opponents, the Lib Dems grant all members attending Conference the right to vote on policy, under a one member, one vote system. As well as voting in the Conference Hall, the party allows its members to vote online for its policies and leadership elections. Members are also free to join organisations representing strands of party thinking, such as Liberal Reform and Social Liberal Forum, and for those under 30 years, Young Liberals.

In 1981, an electoral alliance was established between the Liberal Party, a group which descended from the 18th-century Whigs, and the Social Democratic Party (SDP), a splinter group from the Labour Party. In 1988, the parties merged as the Social and Liberal Democrats, adopting their present name a year later. Under the leaderships of Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy, the party grew in the 1990s and 2000s, focusing its campaigns on specific seats and retained the third-largest party status in the House of Commons, although with significantly more seats than the predecessor Liberal Party. In the 1997 election, the Liberal Democrats doubled their seat count to 46. In 2010, under Nick Clegg's leadership, the Lib Dems were junior partners in the Conservative-led coalition government, in which Clegg served as deputy prime minister. Though it allowed the party to implement some of its policies, the coalition damaged its electoral standing; it lost 48 of its 56 MPs at the 2015 general election, which relegated it to fourth-largest party in the House of Commons. Under the leaderships of Tim Farron, Vince Cable and Jo Swinson, the party refocused as a pro-Europeanist party opposing Brexit. In the 2019 general election, the party garnered 11.5% of the vote on an anti-Brexit platform, but this did not translate into seat gains. However, the party's success was renewed under the leadership of Ed Davey, winning hundreds of councillors and 72 MPs in the 2024 general election, its highest result since 1923, and resuming its status as the third largest party in the House of Commons. (Full article...)

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Lloyd George in 1919

David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor (17 January 1863 – 26 March 1945), was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1916 to 1922. A Liberal Party politician from Wales, he was known for leading the United Kingdom during the First World War, for social-reform policies, for his role in the Paris Peace Conference, and for negotiating the establishment of the Irish Free State.

Born in Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester, and raised in Llanystumdwy, Lloyd George gained a reputation as an orator and proponent of a Welsh blend of radical Liberal ideas that included support for Welsh devolution, the disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales, equality for labourers and tenant farmers, and reform of land ownership. He won an 1890 by-election to become the Member of Parliament for Caernarvon Boroughs, and was continuously re-elected to the seat for 55 years. He served in Henry Campbell-Bannerman's cabinet from 1905. After H. H. Asquith succeeded to the premiership in 1908, Lloyd George replaced him as Chancellor of the Exchequer. To fund extensive welfare reforms, he proposed taxes on land ownership and high incomes in the 1909 People's Budget, which the Conservative-dominated House of Lords rejected. The resulting constitutional crisis was only resolved after elections in 1910 and passage of the Parliament Act 1911. His budget was enacted in 1910, with the National Insurance Act 1911 and other measures helping to establish the modern welfare state. He was embroiled in the 1913 Marconi scandal but remained in office and secured the disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales. (Full article...)

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Are there no other contracts which, less obviously perhaps but really, are open to the same objection? In the first place, let us consider contracts affecting labour. Labour, the economist tells us, is a commodity exchangeable like other commodities. This is in a certain sense true, but it is a commodity which attaches in a peculiar manner to the person of man. Hence restrictions may need to be placed on the sale of this commodity which would be unnecessary in other cases, in order to prevent labour from being sold under conditions which make it impossible for the person selling it ever to become a free contributor to social good in any form. This is most plainly the case when a man bargains to work under conditions fatal to health, e.g. in an unventilated factory. Every injury to the health of the individual is, so far as it goes, a public injury. It is an impediment to the general freedom; so much deduction from our power, as members of society, to make the best of ourselves. Society is, therefore, plainly within its right when it limits freedom of contract for the sale of labour, so far as is done by our laws for the sanitary regulations of factories, workshops, and mines. . . .Its application to compulsory education may not be quite so obvious, but it will appear on a little reflection. Without a command of certain elementary arts and knowledge, the individual in modern society is as effectually crippled as by the loss of a limb or a broken constitution. He is not free to develop his faculties. With a view to securing such freedom among its members it is as certainly within the province of the state to prevent children from growing up in that kind of ignorance which practically excludes them from a free career in life, as it is within its province to require the sort of building and drainage necessary for public health.

Our modern legislation then with reference to labour, and education, and health, involving as it does manifold interference with freedom of contract, is justified on the ground that it is the business of the state, not indeed directly to promote moral goodness, for that, from the very nature of moral goodness, it cannot do, but to maintain the conditions without which a free exercise of the human faculties is impossible. . . .

Now we shall probably all agree that a society in which the public health was duly protected, and necessary education duly provided for, by the spontaneous action of individuals, was in a higher condition than one in which the compulsion of law was needed to secure these ends. But we must take men as we find them. Until such a condition of society is reached, it is the business of the state to take the best security it can for the young citizens growing up in such health and with so much knowledge as is necessary for their real freedom.

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— Thomas Hill Green, Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract, 1861.

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General images

The following are images from various liberalism-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1Mary Wollstonecraft, widely regarded as the pioneer of liberal feminism (from Liberalism)
Image 2The US federal minimum wage if it had kept pace with productivity compared to the actual wage (from Neoliberalism)
Image 3Unemployment in Chile and South America (1980–1990) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 4Member nations of the International Monetary Fund (from Neoliberalism)
Image 5Builders in West Berlin, 1952 (from Neoliberalism)
Image 6The iconic painting Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix, a tableau of the July Revolution in 1830 (from Liberalism)
Image 7Execution of José María de Torrijos y Uriarte and his men in 1831 as Spanish King Ferdinand VII took repressive measures against the liberal forces in his country (from Liberalism)
Image 8John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty greatly influenced 19th-century liberalism (from Liberalism)
Image 9The European Union–Mercosur free trade agreement, which would form one of the world's largest free trade areas, has been denounced by environmental activists and indigenous rights campaigners. (from Neoliberalism)
Image 10Julius Faucher (from Liberalism)
Image 11Per capita income during the Great Depression (from Neoliberalism)
Image 12Monument to the liberals of the 19th century in Agra del Orzán neighborhood, La Coruña, Galicia (Spain) (from Liberalism)
Image 13U.S. President Bush, Canadian PM Mulroney, and Mexican President Salinas participate in the ceremonies to sign the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). (from Neoliberalism)
Image 14Sismondi, who wrote the first critique of the free market from a liberal perspective in 1819 (from Liberalism)
Image 15John Milton's Areopagitica (1644) argued for the importance of freedom of speech. (from Liberalism)
Image 16Raif Badawi, a Saudi Arabian writer and the creator of the website Free Saudi Liberals, who was sentenced to ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes for "insulting Islam" in 2014 (from Liberalism)
Image 17As a liberal nationalist, K. J. Ståhlberg (1865–1952), the President of Finland, anchored the state in liberal democracy, guarded the fragile germ of the rule of law, and embarked on internal reforms. (from Liberalism)
Image 18John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of modern times and whose ideas, which are still widely felt, formalized modern liberal economic policy (from Liberalism)
Image 19Pamphlet calling for a protest of economic policy in 1983 following the economic crisis (from Neoliberalism)
Image 20Montesquieu, who argued for the separation of the powers of government (from Liberalism)
Image 21Friedrich Hayek (from Neoliberalism)
Image 22Benjamin Constant, a Franco-Swiss political activist and theorist (from Liberalism)
Image 23Ronald Reagan (left) and Margaret Thatcher (right) were responsible for the popularisation of Neoliberalism. (from Neoliberalism)
Image 24Chilean (orange) and average Latin American (blue) rates of growth of GDP (1971–2007) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 25T. H. Green, an influential liberal philosopher who established in Prolegomena to Ethics (1884) the first major foundations for what later became known as positive liberty and in a few years, his ideas became the official policy of the Liberal Party in Britain, precipitating the rise of social liberalism and the modern welfare state (from Liberalism)
Image 26John Locke was the first to develop a liberal philosophy, including the right to private property and the consent of the governed. (from Liberalism)
Image 27The 2017–2018 Russian protests were organized by Russia's liberal opposition. (from Liberalism)
Image 28Madame de Staël (from Liberalism)
Image 29Ludwig Erhard (from Neoliberalism)
Image 30Gustave de Molinari (from Liberalism)
Image 31United States incarceration rate per 100,000 population, 1925–2014 (from Neoliberalism)
Image 32GDP per capita in Chile and Latin America 1950–2010 (time under Pinochet highlighted) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 33Wealth inequality in the United States increased from 1989 to 2013. (from Neoliberalism)
Image 34Franklin D. Roosevelt (from Liberalism)
Image 35The Great Depression, with its periods of worldwide economic hardship, formed the backdrop against which the Keynesian Revolution took place (the image is Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother depiction of destitute pea-pickers in California, taken in March 1936). (from Liberalism)