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Articles

What is Liberalism?

Phil Badger guides us through the varieties of liberalism, historical and philosophical.

The big ideas of political philosophy are often hard to get clear in our minds, and there is no better example of this than when we try to pin down the meaning of ‘liberalism’. The slipperiness of this concept is bound up with its history, and its complex role in the political culture of Europe and North America. In the UK, we have recently witnessed the coming to power of a Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government, while in Barack Obama the United States has its most ‘liberal’ president in a generation. Moreover, liberals can be ‘classical’ (great fans of free trade and the minimal state), ‘new’ (proto-social democrats who see a big role for the state), ‘neo’ (which is definitely not the same thing as ‘new’), or ‘progressive’ (which might or might not turn out to mean the same thing as ‘new’ but which certainly isn’t the same thing as ‘classical’). Faced with all of this, it might be tempting to suggest that from the point of view of political philosophy, the usefulness of the term ‘liberalism’ is fatally compromised (a view taken by Skidelsky in Prospect magazine, June 2010).

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