Talk:Liberalism/old version Talk Political liberalism

I am planning to integrate the pages on political liberalism and on liberalism into one page, whereby I would try to integrate also the text of the talk page liberalism. I would also merge the talk pages. Gangulf 11:06, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I moved the national sections to seperate articles at Worldwide liberalism Gangulf 19:31, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * The new pages can be found at Political liberalism in Germany, Political liberalism in the Netherlands, Political liberalism in the United Kingdom and Political liberalism in the United States. I deleted the remark in the Dutch page on Belgium. Gangulf 05:44, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Liberalism has little to do with the claim that human beings are naturally good, and Locke has a good deal less to do with that claim. Locke provides a blurry version of the social contract theory that Hobbes laid out earlier, and this theory is based squarely on the notion that people are selfish, frightened, and potentially violent.

The state of nature is a war of all against all, he said, and in it, the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. For purely selfish reasons, people concede some of their liberties to a ruler who can gather the resources to punish theft, force people to keep their word, and commit resources to necessities which each man would rather let someone else pay for.

This is Locke's argument too, although he is a muddled writer.

In any case, it is the idea of a social contract, not claims of natural goodness, which influenced political thought. Locke's conception of mankind is simply that people are created by their environment--the mind is a blank slate at birth--and this has more to do with his arguments about perception and thought than any political claims.

Except, of course, the implicit claim that everyone is equal at birth.

The claim of the social-contract is that the king is a creation of the people or, in our day, to say that a government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.

The only political philosopher who argues for the goodness of man, so far as I know, is Rousseau. He has no connection to political liberalism that I can see.

From the other Enlightenment authors, of whom Jefferson et al were great students, there is a similar notion--the perfectibility of man. Maybe that's what the author of this entry is trying to get at.

The idea here is that people can improve themselves and their society without the guidance of a traditional authority. It arises in response to the dominance of a land-owning aristocracy. It is more or less the ideology of the rising middle class.

You can see that the social contract and the idea of perfectibility are related. Both are attacks on conservative values, challenging the assumption that some class of gooder, smarter, righter people DESERVE to run the show.

The conservative idea: there is a set of people who own all the productive land and collect part of the harvests that other people produce, but this group of landowners contribute something essential to society. They are not grubbing for a living, so they can remember the past and think ahead. They preserve tradition, conserve resources for future generations, moderate the impulsive to-and-fro of little men's present worries.

By the time liberalism arises, the Church had allied with the men of property. And the word liberalism was, as I recall, originally a term of religious accusation--if people tried to think for themselves, they would become libertines: promiscuous, unproductive, ruled by impulse.

By that time, though, the French landed aristocracy was represented by fellows like the Marquis de Sade.

You evidently know, or think you know, a lot about liberalism and its history. What puzzles and surprises me, then, is that you go to all this trouble of writing on a "talk" page, which really doesn't matter in the grand Wikipedia scheme of things, instead of editing the main article. Moreover, the time it would have taken you to edit the main article would have been a fraction of the time it would have taken you to write the above, I imagine. And as soon as you had edited the main article, I hasten to point out, the above comments would have become pointless. --LMS

Part of a general revision which I'll submit once I've worked out its implications in my own mind.

Great, I'm looking forward to it! --LMS

ROFL - User:Stevertigo  -  Re-edited on Saturday To the recent editor/editors(learn how to spell and indent, (wouldya) and perhaps even (maybe)do the corrections in a text editor before changing the WP) thanks...

This article is a mess: AxelBoldt 19:52 Oct 28, 2002 (UTC)
 * It immediately mentions the articles progressivism and liberal, as if they were all synonymous.
 * "political liberals tend to, by definition, vote and otherwise act on behalf of public interests, and against private incorporated interests. " this is false. Political liberals in Germany and Japan (at least) are the strongest supporters of private businesses, because they see property rights as liberties. The sentence is true for the American version of liberals only.

Why on earth the refrence to Rawls? He is more of a social-democrate than a liberal, according to my (european) way of understanding the two terms. It would be great with a top-refrence to liberalism

OK, I've done the proverbial "bold" editing. I'm sure someone's ox has been gored, and for that I apologize, but I believe this article was a mess, and I believe that now it at least starts strong and has a decent structure. It could probably use a section specifically on the philosophers (as opposed to politicians) most associated with political liberalism. I think the US part is still very weak, and I plan to work on it if no one else fixes it very soon. I hope at least that the article now has a structure that will support the addition of a lot of improved content. -- Jmabel 09:35, 19 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Surely concerns re: fossil fuels/alternative energy sources, pollution and other environmental concerns should be included with the mention of animal rights.

I've done my best to (at least loosely) translate the Dutch-language content about liberalism in the Netherlands. I am very weak in Dutch, and I may have gotten something wrong; review is more than welcome. In particular, there was one paragraph I couldn't confidently enough get the sense of to attempt translation (it could have meant two almost opposite things. If anyone can understand this, please add the paragraph immediately after the discussion of the liberal role in Dutch coalition governments:

"Ook Nederland deed mee met de opkomst van het neo-liberalisme. Opmerkelijk genoeg had Nederland in deze periodes geen liberale premier, maar ook het CDA (Lubbers, Balkenende) en de Partij van de Arbeid (Kok) schuwden het neo-liberalisme niet."

All I can work out from this is "Also the Netherlands deed mee with the coming of neo-liberalism. Remarkably enough, the Netherlands in this period had no liberal prime minister, but even more that that the CDA (Lubbers, Balkenende) and the Partij van de Arbeid (Kok) ("Labor Party") schuwden het neo-liberalisme niet." I don't understand "deed mee" and while "schuwden het neo-liberalisme niet" seems to mean "didn't fear neo-liberalism", I can't tell whether that means they didn't fear it as a rival power or they didn't fear it because they embraced it. -- Jmabel 21:24, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC) -- I'm pretty much done with my major work in this article. I hope someone else will take on more countries, flesh out further what's there on the countries that are covered, and address the liberal philosophers as against the politicians. I didn't really take on the (US-related) section on "Contemporary use of the term as a pejorative"; I think it could be improved. Also, some of my writing on the US history could be a little POV: I strove for NPOV, but this is politics I was personally involved in (on the left edges), as was my father, so it's hard to be entirely neutral.

Anyway, time for someone else to carry this ball. -- Jmabel 21:24, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Well, for the "pejorative" section, I rearranged it so that it read better, at least. Then I removed this paragraph, which seems just wrong to me:


 * Consequently, while far right wing politics often are debated and voiced in the political world, liberalism has been associated with far-left politics, whose agendas are often voided.

It depends, of course, on what "far" means; but if we interpret this WRT the people in political power, then militarist neoconservatism is not far-right -- while (say) Pat Buchanan gets less attention than the Green Party. (Yeah, it's pretty sad -- compared to the rest of the First World -- that these are what's on the American political fringe, but still that's what's there!) -- Toby Bartels 20:13, 14 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Under "Liberalism in the United Kingdom", an anon recently changed "free trade, a capitalist economy (albeit with government intervention), and strong civil liberties" to "free trade (albeit with heavy regulation) and strong civil liberties." To me, the edit looks detrimental, but it was commented as "correction" and I don't know enough about the (UK) Liberal Democrats to feel confident in reverting. Could someone with a clue weigh in? -- Jmabel 19:54, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Refactoring
User:Wilfried Derksen has apparently radically refactored the material from this article. Wilfried, would you please put a note here letting us know to what articles the various parts have been moved, and whether there is any material you have deleted outright? Your 2-word change comment isn't much help to anyone who has had this article on their watchlist and now might want to add the various articles to which the material has been moved. Thanks in advance. -- Jmabel 04:12, Jul 23, 2004 (UTC)


 * The new pages can be found at Political liberalism in Germany, Political liberalism in the Netherlands, Political liberalism in the United Kingdom and Political liberalism in the United States. I deleted the remark in the Dutch page on Belgium. Sorry that I didn't mention this before. Gangulf 05:44, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

We now have an article on liberalism that doesn't even mention the names Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill. Isn't this getting a bit vacuous? -- Jmabel 17:16, Jul 23, 2004 (UTC)

Integration of the articles political liberalism and liberalism with their talk pages
I am planning to integrate the pages on political liberalism and on liberalism into one page, whereby I would try to integrate also the text of the talk page liberalism. I would also merge the talk pages. Gangulf 11:06, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)