Liberalism torrent

Corporate power often advanced unwanted social agendas using economic blackmail, such as the boycott of North Carolina following the passage of anti-transgender legislation. Countries such as Cambodia, Argentina, Columbia, Chile, Guatemala, and Nicaragua were only a few of the victims of this liberal imperialism. In nearly every example, the American-led democratization effort collapsed or caused bloody revolution.

However, like a malignant tumor, liberalization continued under a myth of invincibility: all peoples would eventually become the Last Men of liberalism. The September 11 th attacks were perhaps the first true challenge to post-Cold War liberalism. Commanded by the Israel lobby, the United States embarked on a brute-force democratization effort across the Middle East.

The Afghan War, and later the Iraq War, were central to the imperial mission of enforcing liberalism in places beholden to traditionalist politics. Nation-building, billed as a bloodless and adaptable task, proved far tougher in practice. For nearly twenty years, the American occupation of Afghanistan, alongside other economic and strategic goals, attempted to undermine the social conservatism of the country.

A new consumerist culture tried to undermine the bonds of the traditional Afghan family. Where the Taliban were once the harbingers of law and order, the American military elite allowed a culture of sexual assault, rapes, and homosexual activity to flourish among the Afghan people.

Indeed, the Afghan fertility rate collapsed under the strain of war, feminization, consumerism, and liberalism. Despite this, the Taliban retained enough mass popular support to retake the country in August It would be a mistake to presume that the only form of American-led liberalization occurred through bloody regime changes. The Arab Spring showed the radical potential of psychological and cultural subversion, whereby American soft power and the State Department could spur the nouveau-bourgeois Arab youth into action.

Regimes across Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen were all afflicted by this imperial extension. The Mubarak and Qaddafi regimes collapsed, while Yemen and Syria descended into civil war. Even with the entire liberal establishment pressuring such countries to Westernize, the energetic authoritarian emerged victorious.

The year-long drawdown in Afghanistan provided ample time for the Taliban to mobilize its resources and plan the inevitable rewind to pre normalcy. Yellow is the political colour most commonly associated with liberalism.

Liberalism became a distinct movement in the Age of Enlightenment, when it became popular among Western philosophers and economists.

Liberalism sought to replace the norms of hereditary privilege, state religion, absolute monarchy, the divine right of kings and traditional conservatism with representative democracy and the rule of law. Liberals also ended mercantilist policies, royal monopolies and other barriers to trade, instead promoting free markets.

Philosopher John Locke is often credited with founding liberalism as a distinct tradition, based on the social contract, arguing that each man has a natural right to life, liberty and property and governments must not violate these rights. While the British liberal tradition has emphasized expanding democracy, French liberalism has emphasized rejecting authoritarianism and is linked to nation-building.

Leaders in the Glorious Revolution of , the American Revolution of and the French Revolution of used liberal philosophy to justify the armed overthrow of royal tyranny. Liberalism started to spread rapidly especially after the French Revolution. The 19th century saw liberal governments established in nations across Europe and South America, whereas it was well-established alongside republicanism in the United States.

In Victorian Britain, it was used to critique the political establishment, appealing to science and reason on behalf of the people. During 19th and early 20th century, liberalism in the Ottoman Empire and Middle East influenced periods of reform such as the Tanzimat and Al-Nahda as well as the rise of secularism, constitutionalism and nationalism. These changes, along with other factors, helped to create a sense of crisis within Islam, which continues to this day, leading to Islamic revivalism.

Before , the main ideological opponent of classical liberalism was conservatism, but liberalism then faced major ideological challenges from new opponents: fascism and communism. However, during the 20th century liberal ideas also spread even further—especially in Western Europe—as liberal democracies found themselves on the winning side in both world wars. Today, liberal parties continue to wield power and influence throughout the world.

However, liberalism still has challenges to overcome in Africa and Asia. The fundamental elements of contemporary society have liberal roots. The early waves of liberalism popularised economic individualism while expanding constitutional government and parliamentary authority. Liberals sought and established a constitutional order that prized important individual freedoms, such as freedom of speech and freedom of association; an independent judiciary and public trial by jury; and the abolition of aristocratic privileges.

Later waves of modern liberal thought and struggle were strongly influenced by the need to expand civil rights. Liberals have advocated gender and racial equality in their drive to promote civil rights and a global civil rights movement in the 20th century achieved several objectives towards both goals. Continental European liberalism is divided between moderates and progressives, with the moderates tending to elitism and the progressives supporting the universalisation of fundamental institutions, such as universal suffrage, universal education and the expansion of property rights.

Over time, the moderates displaced the progressives as the main guardians of continental European liberalism. One of the first recorded instances of the word liberal occurs in , when it was used to describe the liberal arts in the context of an education desirable for a free-born man. In Spain, the liberales , the first group to use the liberal label in a political context, fought for decades for the implementation of the Constitution.

By the middle of the 19th century, liberal was used as a politicised term for parties and movements worldwide. Over time, the meaning of the word liberalism began to diverge in different parts of the world. Franklin D. Consequently, in the United States the ideas of individualism and laissez-faire economics previously associated with classical liberalism became the basis for the emerging school of libertarian thought and are key components of American conservatism.

Unlike Europe and Latin America, the word liberalism in North America almost exclusively refers to social liberalism. Liberalism —both as a political current and an intellectual tradition—is mostly a modern phenomenon that started in the 17th century, although some liberal philosophical ideas had precursors in classical antiquity and in Imperial China.

Scholars have also recognised a number of principles familiar to contemporary liberals in the works of several Sophists and in the Funeral Oration by Pericles. Liberal philosophy symbolises an extensive intellectual tradition that has examined and popularised some of the most important and controversial principles of the modern world.

The objectives of liberal theorists and philosophers have differed across various times, cultures and continents. Despite these variations, liberal thought does exhibit a few definite and fundamental conceptions. At its very root, liberalism is a philosophy about the meaning of humanity and society. Political philosopher John Gray identified the common strands in liberal thought as being individualist, egalitarian, meliorist and universalist. The individualist element avers the ethical primacy of the human being against the pressures of social collectivism, the egalitarian element assigns the same moral worth and status to all individuals, the meliorist element asserts that successive generations can improve their sociopolitical arrangements and the universalist element affirms the moral unity of the human species and marginalises local cultural differences.

The meliorist element has been the subject of much controversy, defended by thinkers such as Immanuel Kant who believed in human progress while suffering criticism by thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who instead believed that human attempts to improve themselves through social cooperation would fail.

The liberal philosophical tradition has searched for validation and justification through several intellectual projects. The moral and political suppositions of liberalism have been based on traditions such as natural rights and utilitarian theory, although sometimes liberals even requested support from scientific and religious circles. Through all these strands and traditions, scholars have identified the following major common facets of liberal thought: believing in equality and individual liberty, supporting private property and individual rights, supporting the idea of limited constitutional government, and recognising the importance of related values such as pluralism, toleration, autonomy, bodily integrity and consent.

See also: John Locke. Enlightenment philosophers are given credit for shaping liberal ideas. These ideas were first drawn together and systematized as a distinct ideology by the English philosopher John Locke, generally regarded as the father of modern liberalism.

Thomas Hobbes attempted to determine the purpose and the justification of governing authority in a post-civil war England. Employing the idea of a state of nature—a hypothetical war-like scenario prior to the state—he constructed the idea of a social contract that individuals enter into to guarantee their security and in so doing form the State, concluding that only an absolute sovereign would be fully able to sustain such a peace.

Hobbes had developed the concept of the social contract, according to which individuals in the anarchic and brutal state of nature came together and voluntarily ceded some of their individual rights to an established state authority, which would create laws to regulate social interactions.

Whereas Hobbes advocated a strong monarchical authority the Leviathan , Locke developed the then radical notion that government acquires consent from the governed which has to be constantly present for the government to remain legitimate.

He concluded that the people have a right to overthrow a tyrant. By placing life, liberty and property as the supreme value of law and authority, Locke formulated the basis of liberalism based on social contract theory. His influential Two Treatises , the foundational text of liberal ideology, outlined his major ideas. The stringent insistence that lawful government did not have a supernatural basis was a sharp break with the dominant theories of governance which advocated the divine right of kings and echoed the earlier thought of Aristotle.

Locke had other intellectual opponents besides Hobbes. In the First Treatise , Locke aimed his guns first and foremost at one of the doyens of 17th century English conservative philosophy: Robert Filmer. However, Locke disagreed so thoroughly and obsessively with Filmer that the First Treatise is almost a sentence-by-sentence refutation of Patriarcha.

Locke maintained that the grant of dominion in Genesis was not to men over women, as Filmer believed, but to humans over animals. Locke was certainly no feminist by modern standards, but the first major liberal thinker in history accomplished an equally major task on the road to making the world more pluralistic: the integration of women into social theory.

Locke also originated the concept of the separation of church and state. Based on the social contract principle, Locke argued that the government lacked authority in the realm of individual conscience, as this was something rational people could not cede to the government for it or others to control. For Locke, this created a natural right in the liberty of conscience, which he argued must therefore remain protected from any government authority.

He also formulated a general defence for religious toleration in his Letters Concerning Toleration. Locke was also influenced by the liberal ideas of Presbyterian politician and poet John Milton, who was a staunch advocate of freedom in all its forms. Milton argued for disestablishment as the only effective way of achieving broad toleration. As assistant to Oliver Cromwell, Milton also took part in drafting a constitution of the independents Agreement of the People ; that strongly stressed the equality of all humans as a consequence of democratic tendencies.

His central argument was that the individual is capable of using reason to distinguish right from wrong. In a natural state of affairs, liberals argued, humans were driven by the instincts of survival and self-preservation and the only way to escape from such a dangerous existence was to form a common and supreme power capable of arbitrating between competing human desires.

Another example would be the United Nations UN , which currently strives to establish global peace by fostering a broader sense of international cooperation with respect to distinct political, social, economic, and militaristic perspectives. Those seeking a career in diplomacy and international affairs benefit from understanding how nongovernmental actors like the United Nations help broker peace and agreements between warring states and set the stage for international law or coalitions.

Institutional liberalism helps to facilitate activities that are beneficial to states such as trade , reduces transnational fears that can result in tension, and provides a flow of information as well as opportunities to negotiate between states in the event of tensions over arms control or economics.

Ultimately, the goal is for states to see institutions as mutually beneficial; a good example is NATO, which uses transnational ties to create a security community among Western countries. The liberal perspective on international politics views the state as a unit of analysis, but takes the principles of realism and moves them one step further, including international law, peace theories, international organizations, and nongovernmental organizations as equally important factors in world politics.

Liberalism is a valuable concept for those on political and diplomatic career tracks. Understanding and practicing liberalism to further an acceptance of Western political systems and how international laws and peace are brokered. Those with a background in liberalism may be more successful on the international stage. Through its online programs, Norwich delivers relevant and applicable curricula that allow its students to make a positive impact on their places of work and their communities.

Our online Master of Arts in International Relations program offers a curriculum that evolves with current events to help you face the future of international affairs.

You can further strengthen your knowledge by choosing one of five concentrations in International Security, National Security, International Development, Cyber Diplomacy, or Regions of the World. Liberalism , Oxford University Press. What is Liberalism? Power International Relations , InternationalRelations.

Cosmopolitanism: global redistribution versus open borders , Open Borders. Skip to main content. Norwich University Online. Search form. In this manifesto, the Levellers advocated for freedom of religion, voting suffrage, and equality for all.

Fellow radical John Locke embraced the ideas of early liberalism, and believed that, because the government gets consent from those that it governs in order to act, that consent must be continual in order to keep the government legitimate. The Glorious Revolution of led to what many consider to be the first modern, liberal state in England. Three significant contributions that the Glorious Revolution made in the history of liberalism included:.

The Age of Enlightenment was a period in history during which people were continually questioning the traditions they had been taught. This spurred a significant expansion of the liberalism movement. The American Age of Enlightenment, which was heavily influenced by the European Age of Enlightenment, encouraged scientific reasoning to be used to evaluate differing ideals, such as religion, politics, and even scientific notions.

The American Age of Enlightenment, as an example of liberalism, also saw the promotion of religious tolerance, and a restored importance and appreciation being placed on creative fields, such as literature, arts, and music, as professions worthy of being studied.

After the Revolutionary War, the Articles of Confederation were found to be inadequate to maintain a functional government, so leaders the Founding Fathers debated on how exactly they should proceed from that point forward. For the era in which it was written, the Constitution was a document that embraced both republican and liberal ideals. The drafters of this document sought to create a strong national government, while providing a distinct separation of powers among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government , so as to prevent any one branch from being more powerful than others.