Liberalism

Liberalism is the name for a diverse family of views about government and society that emerged in Europe following the Protestant Reformation and that now dominates political discourse throughout much of the world. The branches of this family are loosely united by shared commitments to toleration of a range of views about the meaning and ends of life, to the ideas of limited government and the rule of law, to the institution of private property as a means of limiting the reach of governmental authority, and perhaps above all, to the protection of personal liberty by whatever means are most likely to be efficacious. These branches have often been divided by feuds over just how far toleration should extend and whether governments should seek to bring about a more robust form of equality than that entailed by equality under law as well as by tensions over the idea of free markets and over the implications for the rule of law of the twentieth-century regulatory state. Some of these differences grow out of a major divide between two main trunks of the liberal tradition, one of which holds that liberty can best be protected by the adoption of limited aims focused on avoidance of tyranny whereas the other sets its sights on more ambitious social objectives.

The term liberal acquired its modern, political meaning gradually throughout Europe during the first few decades of the nineteenth century, beginning with Napoleon Bonaparte's use of the phrase idées libérales in his Proclamation of the 18th Brumaire in [Page 525]1799. In 1810, a faction in the Spanish Cortes that opposed royal absolutism adopted the label as its own, and within a decade, liberalism had entered the English lexicon to signify the holding of liberal opinions in politics or theology. In the early years of the century, English writers often adopted the Spanish form liberales to give the label a pejorative connotation—ironically because the Spanish advocates of liberalism had from the beginning invoked John Locke and other British authorities in support of their cause. Only in the 1860s did the radical wing of the Whigs in British politics begin to call themselves the Liberal Party, about the same time as the Liberal Republicans began to use the label in the United States and a half-century before it was deployed consistently in American political discourse. Thus, the liberal tradition of political thought was originally constructed retrospectively by writers who discovered affinities between their own values and those of earlier thinkers who sought to limit the reach of political authority.

Liberalism emerged as a product of changes in values in early modern Europe and of the development of the modern state. To retrospective observers, the most conspicuous early signs of a transformation of values can be found in the writings of the Protestant reformers, especially Martin Luther. In contrast to the prevailing teachings of the Catholic Church, Luther insisted that Christianity is primarily a matter of faith, which involves a direct relationship between the individual and God. Luther's thinking led to the notion that nothing could be more important to a person than freedom of conscience and, by extension, the freedom to shape his or her life in accordance with his or her beliefs.

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