What Is Liberalism?
At times it seems as if the term liberal has as many definitions as it does detractors and advocates. To help parse through these manifold meanings, we asked some of our editors and advisors to provide their own definitions of liberalism and some insight into what the future of this political tradition may be.
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Contrary to what is usually believed, liberalism did not first emerge from the fever dreams of Enlightenment philosophers. Instead, it originated as an organic response to the political problems of the late medieval period. The Catholic Reformation and the rise of modern commerce unsettled European society, fracturing the unified culture that had sustained human co-existence for centuries. In response to this, liberalism sought to build a political regime whose sole purpose would be to protect the rights of individuals and ensure a multitude of cultural communities could live in harmony. Only later did philosophers such as John Locke, Edmund Burke, and Montesquieu step up to try and defend the liberal order. In so doing they established the many diverging strains of the liberal tradition that continue to exist to this day. Though at its core liberalism should always continue to be committed to a pluralist society.
All of this is not to imply that the liberal project is an easy one or that we liberals have always remained committed to our lofty goals. It is no easy thing to live with people whose entire way of life we find repugnant. Yet that is exactly what liberalism asks of us: to recognize the inherent dignity of all people and live harmoniously with them. There could be no greater political project than this.
Jeffery Tyler Syck
Editor in Chief, The Vital Center
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G.K. Chesteron wrote that we should view government as analogous to love-letter writing and nose-blowing. “These things we want a man to do for himself,” said Chesterton, “even if he does them badly.” I see this as the central insight of liberalism: that we should regard all humans as possessed of equal and inherent dignity, as well as the capacity to make choices. As such, all humans deserve to have a say in—to make choices regarding—government.
But liberals have advanced oppositional understandings of their lodestar, liberty. Some encourage us to see participation in government as the truest expression of liberty. Others suggest that government is the major constraint on our liberty. Isaiah Berlin famously distinguished these as “positive” and “negative” conceptions of liberty, and many subsequent thinkers have run with Berlin’s terms. It is common, for instance, to read that the ancients believed in positive liberty, while we moderns believe in negative liberty.
That story may be true, to a point. But I sense that in practice, contemporary liberals are attached to both visions of liberty. Take Chesterton, who both seems to locate liberty in nature (in our inherent dignity) and in the polity (in our participation in rule).
Liberalism, at least as it has evolved in the world we know, has a self-contradictory quality. It suggests that government is both the major obstacle to, and major expression of, human freedom. That internal self-contradiction is what, I think, lends contemporary liberalism both its flexibility and its fragility.
Susan McWilliams Barndt
Professor of Politics, Pomona College
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Liberalism loves liberty, but soberly. It shares with Libertarianism a commitment to limited government, with Progressivism the belief that government should act for the public good, and with National Conservativism a commitment to family, church, and voluntary associations. But sobriety separates it from those three. Their outlooks are drunk with false hopes. They see an earthly heaven as possible either by minimizing government restraint (libertarians) or by treating public policy as the means to salvation (progressives and national conservatives).
Locke is the liberal patriarch, stipulating that legitimate government is based on popular consent and its sole aim is to preserve rights. But it was the framers of the Constitution who invented liberal political science. Article One and the Bill of Rights are American Liberalism’s Ten Commandments – a covenant to ensure popular rule and the preservation of rights. Thus, there must be no impenetrable obstacles blocking popular will. However, to prevent tyranny of the majority, they devised governing institutions that place hurdles, not barriers, for the popular will to surmount. Such undemocratic institutions as the Senate and the Supreme Court and the Electoral College may temporarily impede majority will, but the people will prevail if they can hold together for a decent length of time.
For liberalism to flourish, it must defend limited government, against Libertarian quasi-anarchism, and against the progressives and national conservatives, who mistakenly see big government as the pathway to virtue.
Marc Landy
Professor of Political Science, Boston College
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Liberalism is a political tradition and intellectual lineage that oscillates between two poles. The first is liberalism as a “meta-morality,” or a structure and set of norms for enabling “moral tribes” with competing interests, cultures, and notions of the good to co-exist and cooperate. It seeks to protect the individual from both the state and the tyranny of the majority without advancing its own vision of the good. The philosopher John Gray calls this “modus vivendi” liberalism, holding that “We do not need common values in order to live together in peace. We need common institutions in which many forms of life can co-exist.”
The second pole is liberalism as a moral mission that calls on citizens to do more than pursue self-interest and get out of each other’s ways. This liberalism seeks to enhance individual opportunity, dispel ignorance, confront cruelty and prejudice, oppose tyrannies large and small, and achieve a more just society. This liberalism undergirded the Great Society and the feminist, labor, Civil Rights, and gay rights movements, calling not just for equal treatment under the law but civic respect and dignity for the marginalized.
These might be called the libertarian and progressive poles of liberalism. They are in tension with each other, but this can be a productive tension between individuals’ right to pursue happiness as they see fit and the need for reform and collective action in the pursuit of justice. Most individual liberals embody these tensions in complex ways. John Stuart Mill, for instance, championed individual expression and autonomy, but he was also a consummate reformer who advocated the vote for women and labor rights, among other causes. He lived within the tension of taking people as they were and calling them to be better, individually and collectively.
Between these poles lies a broad liberal family united by a shared set of values, nicely summarized by Edmund Fawcett: a Madisonian recognition of the inevitability of conflict in society, a distrust of concentrated power in any form, belief in human progress, and respect for individual rights and dignities. To Fawcett’s list I would add epistemic humility, or a caution about our ability to know what is right, good, and effective. Liberals on this wide spectrum may argue, but adherence to these principles ensures that the quarrels stay within the family.
Joseph Stieb
Foreign Affairs Editor, The Vital Center
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Liberalism as an ideology is like visiting an art gallery. It is simultaneously the recognition of a shared space, a shared structure that we engage in alongside other people, accompanied with a profound commitment to the idea that whatever one finds within that place is both deeply personal and a reflection of their own individual values. Similarly, to be a liberal, or to tour an art gallery, is hard work. It requires vulnerability, allowing oneself an openness to experience and creativity, experimentation, and diversity. To appreciate, even if we cannot understand, the distinct character and perspective of those individuals and works who we are spending our time with. To find something to admire, even when we do not like or fully comprehend what we are looking at.
For liberalism to thrive though, it must turn itself away from abstract idealism and recognize the role it has to play as a philosophy of ordinary life. It is not only within treatises of political theory, but in novels, films, paintings, and poetry that one can see the principles of freedom and their significance emerge. It is an ideology first and foremost which believes in a future that is better, seeing people as they are and not as we want them to be, and an aspiration towards embracing what it means to live in a community where we cherish and care for one another.
Shal Mariott
Contributing Editor, The Vital Center
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Liberalism embraces variety; the history of liberalism embodies it. Yet through the varied liberal theories and programs that have proliferated, three main strands have been braided. First, liberals are committed to preserving individual liberty, understood as the ability to make decisions about crucial aspects of one’s own life for oneself; and to ensuring the just or equitable enjoyment of liberty: among the most compelling reasons for limiting the liberty of anyone is the preservation of similar liberties for others. Liberalism is thus individualist and egalitarian. But it inhabits a terrain of constrained, not absolute, individualism and egalitarianism, lest these impulses, pushed too far, “bear down too cruelly” on human lives (in Isaiah Berlin’s phrase).
This fear of cruelty—emphasized by Berlin’s fellow refugee Judith Shklar—motivates the second strand: insistence on the limitation of power. This reflects an assumption that the exercise of power by some over others is inevitable and dangerous, deeply attractive and morally corrupting. In their fear of power—and awareness that not only venal self-interest, but moral idealism, can inspire the abuse of power—liberals accept the same limitations on their own ability to pursue the ends they value, as they insist on for others.
Third, liberals assume that human societies are marked by variety, divergence, and conflict. They accept, indeed embrace, these features; they seek to channel and moderate conflict, not suppress it.
Liberalism has thrived by returning to primal experiences—of the indignity of subjection and injustice, the terror of persecution, and the frustration of constriction—while also reaching out for new responses to novel forms of these evils. A mix of constancy and flexibility—which includes the ability to recognize and learn from liberals’ own past mistakes—is necessary. So is the chastening insight that most gains involve genuine losses, that victories are never final, that politics is defined by tragedy and mutability. But in the recognition of tragedy lies lessons in humility and compassion, and in mutability lies opportunity.
Human life is Sisyphean—a never-ending struggle. As long as the struggle is sustained, through means that reserve room for freedom and revision, there is hope for the revival of old values, and the blossoming of new ones. Perhaps, even while grappling with some of the gravest threats to human existence yet faced, we can imagine the liberal Sisyphus happy.
Joshua Cherniss
Associate Professor of Government, Georgetown University
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Liberalism is the greatest force for good in human history, materially and morally. The material case is an easy one to make: liberal countries consistently outperform illiberal countries in terms of quality of life, both in history and side-by-side today. The greatest political threat to liberalism has come from its own adherents’ unwillingness—at times, a seeming inability—to consistently make the moral case. We must make the moral case if we wish to sustain either our current unprecedented material well-being or our unprecedented freedom to seek virtue and happiness. We must remember that the material benefits of liberalism are a consequence of its moral core. It is the moral core of liberalism we must return to if we wish to preserve liberalism for our children.
The core of liberalism is tolerance. Such a virtue is rare in the days of social media rants. Tolerance in a political sense should be understood as an aspect of the cardinal virtue of temperance. Unless we return tolerance to the forefront of our political discourse, liberalism will erode from the inside out. This is the central threat to liberalism, and therefore to all of us.
Jacob Nestle
Politics Editor, The Vital Center
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Most -isms fail definitions just as most institutions imposed on a people come to be resented. Meaning develops through use of a word; definitions are participatory. That being said, liberalism as a shorthand for what a liberal person believes is about as close as we will come. It stands to reason that if there are different types of liberals, there will be different types of liberalism unless there are common features among liberals. If there are common features among liberals, then perhaps there is a central case to be made on what is liberalism. It’s tough going to find a central case on what is a liberal.
The English word “liberal” has been used in many ways but roughly there are two dominant uses of the term “liberal” to describe a liberal person. The more ancient of the two types is associated with generosity and magnanimity. This type was counted as a virtue by Aristotle and Aquinas. A virtuous liberal person is someone who selflessly directs his or her material things to others. Starting in the 19th century Liberalism becomes a set of beliefs that places choosing as the personal apotheosis with all policy beginning and ending with the individual. Choosing became more important than the choice. J.S. Mill suggested this type of liberalism is “a mode of thought, or rather perhaps of feeling.”
From this political liberalism we see the bookends of left-liberalism and right-liberalism focusing on securing space for the choosing. Neither left nor right liberalism shrink from material prosperity and both generally advocate that individuals are in a better position to freely choose whatever they choose if the individual is materially secure. The bookends differ, however, on how to secure material well-being of the individual. Despite the differing means, left and right liberalism still starts and ends with the individual.
The political liberalism of the 19th century has seen many formulations and strains is quite different from the more ancient virtue-oriented liberal quality in which a liberal person loses himself or herself in generous outward direction toward others. Somewhere along the way we ended up with two types of liberal. Even more than two types of liberal, we got a word that is the antonym of itself. In the English language, the individualist liberal has outpaced the virtue-oriented liberal. The Oxford English Dictionary now labels the term “liberal” as applied to someone carrying the quality of liberality as “Obsolete”, one foot from the grave of “Archaic.”
Ryan Meade
Faculty of Law, University of Oxford
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In 1783, at the end of the war, General George Washington reflected on how liberty influenced his service to his country in the Revolutionary War: “The establishment of Civil and Religious Liberty was the Motive which induced me to the Field.” He thought that the liberal object was attained at the end of the war. That liberty was a natural right inherent in every individual human. Moreover, the purpose of the republican regime was to preserve the liberty under law, human reason, and virtue. The idea of liberty under law was a model of liberalism guided the American revolutionaries and founders in creating their “new order for the ages.”
The American people enjoyed unprecedented levels of political, religious, and economic liberty in the modern world. Republican self-governance meant that government was rooted in representation and constitutionally limited. Citizens largely governed themselves in their local communities under local government and voluntary associations.
Religious liberty as a natural right was a transformative idea of the American Revolution that broke with the rise of religious tolerance in Europe. Many states laid down the principle of religious liberty in their constitutions. The Virginia Declaration of Rights asserted, “all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.”
Americans also enjoyed economic liberty. The Constitution empowered the national government to tax and regulate interstate trade, and Alexander Hamilton’s financial plans may have consolidated the public debt and created a national bank, but the economy was rooted in free enterprise unlike the mercantilist imperial economies of Europe.
Tony Williams
Senior Teaching Fellow, Bill of Rights Institute
