Liberalism

Conceptual Overview

Liberalism is a protean term, even more so than its great rival conservatism. Unlike conservatism, liberalism can be used to mean the entire contemporary democratic political system, with its emphasis on party competition and other forms of checks and balances. Relatedly, the term can be used to refer to a worldview that believes in the competition of interests and values in democracies with market economies as the culminating stage in human historical development, as envisioned in Fukuyama's work. In these overarching senses, liberalism as a system or worldview is opposed not to conservatism but to various forms of authoritarianism or utopian radicalism, such as Marx's, that find capitalist democracies fundamentally lacking in organic community or untrue to their own principles of liberty and creativity.

When it is used in juxtaposition with conservatism, four major meanings for liberalism need to be distinguished. Classically, liberalism referred to a political stance that favored changing society through free (or freer) markets in economics and also in culture, especially with respect to religion. Early 19th century English liberals, with their support for free trade, reduced regulation of business, and nonconformist approaches to religion, epitomized classical liberalism, which was once a powerful political contender in England and elsewhere in Europe but which lost support when the vote was extended from the middle and upper classes to a wider electorate.

A second major type of liberalism, which is largely opposed to the classical meaning, began to surface in late 19th century England but rose more clearly to the fore in the United States during Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and remains significant in the United States and elsewhere. This type of liberalism, which may be called New Deal liberalism or egalitarian liberalism, accepts markets but holds that government needs to be active on behalf of workers and other underdog groups who are relatively disadvantaged by markets and other prevailing social institutions. With the [Page 812]abandonment in recent decades of the anticapitalist, socialist politics once widely professed by European left of center parties, egalitarian liberalism has become a significant presence in Europe as well as the United States. However, such a politics is generally described as social democratic or leftist rather than liberal in Europe and other democracies outside the United States.

A third major type of liberalism rose to prominence in the United States and other Western democracies in the 1960s and later decades. Associated with a shift among some members of increasingly affluent populaces toward postmaterialist values, as chronicled by Ronald Inglehart, this new type of liberalism cobbles together egalitarian liberalism's support for regulating economic markets with classical liberalism's support for freer, more flexible cultural markets in areas such as marriage and religion. Because support for regulating economic markets tends to be stronger among working-class people, while support for freer cultural markets tends to be stronger among more educated people as noted by Clark and Lipset, this new kind of liberalism lacks a clear class base of support. It also lacks the ideological coherence associated with both classical and egalitarian liberalism. In spite of, or perhaps because of, its lack of a coherent ideology and class base, it is this new type of liberalism, which may be termed modern liberalism, that has become dominant in affluent, stable democracies over the past few decades, along with a similarly heterogeneous modern conservatism (see Conservatism).

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