Liberalism - Liberal Practice, Liberal Theories, The Historical Development Of The Liberal Idea, Some Issues In Liberal Theory And Practice
individual society liberty means
It is widely agreed that fundamental to liberalism is a concern to protect and promote individual liberty. This means that individuals can decide for themselves what to do or believe with respect to particular areas of human activity such as religion or economics. The contrast is with a society in which the society decides what the individual is to do or believe. In those areas of a society in which individual liberty prevails, social outcomes will be the result of a myriad of individual decisions taken by individuals for themselves or in voluntary cooperation with some others.
Liberalism in the political sphere cannot be a simple application of individual liberty, because decisions have to be taken collectively and are binding on all. Political liberalism means, first, that individual citizens are free to vote for representatives of their choice and to form voluntary associations to promote their ideas and interests in the realm of collective decision-making. Second, it means the adoption of constitutional procedures for limiting government power and making it accountable to the citizens.
Additional Topics
In discussing liberalism, it is important to distinguish between liberal practices and liberal theories. Liberal practices are those institutional and customary arrangements that support individual liberty. Of prime importance are individual legal rights to engage in certain activities such as to practice the religion of one's choice, to use one's property and labor as one pleases, a…
Liberal theories are theories designed to show that the liberal organization of society is the best for human beings with
regard to their fundamental nature and interests. The Western intellectual tradition includes several discourses of major importance that have this aim. It is widely held that the principles of liberalism can be traced back to the seventeenth-century natural rights and social …
From the discussion of liberalism above, one might assume that the term itself came into use in seventeenth-century northern Europe. In fact the term liberal was first used in connection with politics in Spain in the early nineteenth century to describe a political movement whose object was to establish constitutional constraints on government power. The term rapidly came to be applied to movement…
Liberalism has deep internal tensions primarily between the claims of equality and those of liberty arising from its equal commitment to both these principles. The tensions are held by some thinkers who are not well-disposed towards liberalism to be contradictions that prevent liberalism from living up to its own principles. Some of these issues are discussed briefly below together with some impor…
Bentham, Jeremy. The Works of Jeremy Bentham. Vol. 1. Edited by John Bowring. 1838–1843. Reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1962. Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de. Sketch of a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. Translated by June Barraclough with an introduction by Stuart Hampshire. New York: Noonday Press, 1955. Constant, Benjamin. "T…
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