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General presentation

The individual is in the center of liberalism. The highest task of the State is to ensure and defend the individual freedom which is regarded as imprescriptible. Individual freedom being with the eyes of the liberals the fundamental standard and the base of the human society around which the State, the political and economic order must be structured.

But, whereas for the traditional liberals, the primacy of individual freedom is an overriding principle which applies to all the fields of the life in society, it became current to subordinate the application of this principle to the circumstances, to consider that the shutters philosophical, political, social and economic of liberalism are independent from/to each other, to even reduce liberalism to its economic aspects like does it the French modern use.

Various currents within liberalism

There exist several liberal currents of thought which are different in particular by their philosophical bases, the limits and the functions which they assign in the State, and by the field to which they apply the principle of liberty (economy, political institutions, social domain). It is thus current to distinguish traditional liberalism from Adam Smith from the Social-liberalism and Libertarianisme (Minarchisme, Agorisme and Anarchist-capitalism).

Currents opposed to liberalism

Liberalism is opposed moreover to the doctrines holists such as the Socialisme, the state control or the Communautarisme which define the person as belonging to a social body (social group, company…) to which its behaviors and its choices are subordinates. He is also opposed to the Totalitarisme and with all the forms of abuses of power which even limit destroy the freedom of the individuals. It is finally in contradiction with the theories preaching is the total nationalization of the economy (the such Marxisme) or in any case the regulation of the economy by the State (like the keynesianism). If the recognition and the acceptance of the slopes social and political exceed the liberal current, economic freedom is much accepted (many obligatory official services, attempts at control of the economy by the collective).

Lastly, the word “liberalism” is used in different, more or less broad, and sometimes contradictory directions. Partly with the favor of this semantic blur, liberalism is the object of many and often violent controversies and this especially in France, which often result from a dissension on the direction even of the term. Certain opponents redefine it like a Idéologie responsible for the majority of the evils of the world, or like a current of thought being diverted today of its vocation of origin; the deregulation of the economy not being automatically factrice of individual freedoms for all the economic actors.

Uses of the term

In the oldest tradition, individual freedom is a general principle which applies to all the fields of the life in society. According to this point of view, it is an error to separate various forms from liberalism, because all are indissociable consequences of a single philosophical principle of freedom. This current is often called “traditional liberalism” to distinguish it from the other modern uses of the word “liberalism”.

Other authors do not see the principle of liberty like absolute and preach it according to the field. They are joined by specialists who are interested only in one quite precise field, and who for this reason avoid speaking about liberalism in general on which they do not work. Three principal fields then are distinguished:

the political Liberalism with the narrow direction (organization of the political rights) or broad (habits, manners, possibly religion);
the Economic liberalism;
liberalism as regards manners and on the security questions.

The historians of the political ideas, on their side, are interested in the currents which claimed liberalism at various times and in various places. They are thus brought to distinguish a great number of finer varieties from liberal currents. It appears whereas the term “liberalism” recovers also various realities according to the countries and their political history.

In the United States, one calls “ liberals ” progressists, about equivalent to the social democrat European but in less etatists, which even places them at the left at the extreme left: the stress is laid on the freedom of morals and the equality in rights (in particular on the racial level). By-effect, the adversaries of the State created the term “ libertarian ” (of which one of the most radical forms is the Anarchist-capitalism).
In Europe, on the contrary, the “liberal” qualifier is used most of the time to nominate a person favorable to the economic liberalism, without necessarily referring to liberal philosophy.

History of liberalism

Although the term “liberalism” to indicate a current of thought appeared only in 1823 in the universal Dictionnaire of the French language , the origins of this movement are remote.

Origins

For certain historians, the liberal tradition would prolong the movement of ideas which, since Aristote, Épictète and the Stoïciens, Diogène and the Cyniques, affirms the primacy of the Individu, reaffirmed by the Monothéisme abrahamic (Judaïsme, Christianisme and Islam), then the Humanisme of the Renaissance.
As of, the philosophers of the school of Salamanque reformulate the concept of natural Right inherited Aristote and Thomas d' Aquin, and the principles deduce some from sovereignty of the people and Séparation of the capacities. In the economic domain, they justify the private Propriété, freedom of movement of the people and the goods and defend free the Marché. With, the liberal movement incarnates in particular in the Levellers of the English revolution of 1642.

The liberal thought is built between the medium of and the medium of, under the impulse of the philosophers of the Lumières, in opposition to the political Absolutisme legitimated by religious designs.

Birth of liberalism

John Locke poses what will become the bases of modern philosophy liberal, while organizing and by developing its main themes: theory of the natural rights, limitation and separation of the capacities, justification of the civil Disobedience, assertion of the freedom of conscience, separation of the Church and the State.

Hume, Condillac, Montesquieu develops the consequences of their liberal philosophical positions in the fields policy and economic. Rather known thinkers as economists, as Turgot, Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill, take care to attach their economic positions to the philosophical roots of liberalism. Liberal the school known as “traditional” is constituted then like a coherent thought including all the fields of the human action studied at that time.

Influence growing in occident

Liberalism exerted a deep influence on the American Révolution of 1775. Part of the elites, in particular middle-class, having supported the French revolution of 1789 and having directed the country after the fall of the Constitutional monarchy, was partisane liberalism which was translated into France by a thought subversive against the Absolute monarchy of divine right. Some of the principles founders of liberalism are contained in the preamble to the American Constitution of 1787, like in the Déclaration of the human rights and the citizen of 1789. The American revolution is rich liberal authors, of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin with Thomas Paine.
The beginning of sees the deepening of the liberal ideas, with, for example in the political arena, Benjamin Constant and rings it of Coppet which gathers liberal opponents with Napoleon, and Jean-Baptiste Say in the economic domain. The liberals endeavor to widely diffuse their ideas, which are opposed to the ideas prevalent etatists in the circles of the capacity. In the middle of the century the famous lampoons of Frederic Bastiat are published.

Industrial revolution at our days

Starting from the end of, divergences appear within the current liberal which relate to the role and the nature of the interventions of the State. A current progressist appears with L.T.Hobhouse which tries to more take into account the social conditions which allow the freedom of each one.

With, the two world wars and the great economic crises (1929) involve a redefinition of the role and contours of the State in the direction of an increasing intervention. The controversies and the debates around liberalism relate especially to the economy considered independently. Traditional liberal philosophy remains nevertheless long-lived although very minority, range in particular by philosophers like Mario Vargas Llosa or, in France, by Alain, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Raymond Aron and Jean-François Revel, like by authors of the tradition known as Austrian, especially known as economists (Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Pascal Salin).

Bases of liberalism

Natural rights

The base of the liberal thought is a theory of the right according to which each human being is only Master of itself and has basic rights and inalienable which rises from its simple existence and are inherent in the human nature, independently of the social structures in which it (or is not) is inserted. These rights are the right to the Liberté and the right to the Propriété.

Right to the life rise the right of self-defense against any aggression, the right to the Sûreté and the right of resistance to oppression.

The definition of the most current individual freedom is that of article 4 of the Déclaration of the human rights and the citizen of 1789:

“the Liberté consists in being able to do all that does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of each man has terminals only those which ensure the other members of the company the pleasure of these same rights. ”

Certain philosophers of the Lumières prefer the following definition to him:

“freedom is the authorization to obey no other external law but those to which I could give my approval” (Kant, note of the 2nd section of Towards perpetual peace ).

Freedom results in the right for each one to act as it decides it in order to pursue its own goals by its own means, to exchange, to join and contract freely, to be expressed freely and to choose its information sources freely.

The property right is the right for each individual to have with his own way of the fruit of its activity and the richnesses which it created or acquired in a legitimate way, as to adapt any thing (for example space that it occupies or the air that it breathes) which is not already the property of another individual. These rights are universal. They are applicable to all the human beings, constantly and in any place, which founds the equality in right.

A natural right is distinguished from a positive Droit in what its exercise supposes nothing as for the action of other people and who it does not rise from a legislative definition. “Personality, Freedom, Propriété are former and higher than any human legislation” (Bastiat).

The thesis of the natural rights is largely developed by John Locke. Of this theory the modern design from the human rights is resulting which historically provided part of the ideological justification of the American Révolution and French revolution.

However, the theory of the natural rights was vigorously disputed by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. According to these two authors, whose ideas are already present in nucleo at David Hume ( Enquête into the principles of morals , Section V, Why the utility likes, Second part), the principles of liberalism did not arise with the respect of natural rights of which Bentham and Mill denies the existence in addition, but with the contribution essential of freedom with our happiness. For the utilitarian ones, a happy company is an free society where each one saw as he hears it as much as that does not harm others. It is the principle of not-harmful effect developed by J.S. Mill in its One Liberty . Utilitarianism thus poses that the liberal companies are those which maximize our happiness.

One sees consequently where is the difference between the liberal school of the natural rights whose Kant is one of the representatives most outstanding, and utilitarian liberalism. Utilitarianism will admit for example the sacrifice of some with the happiness of the greatest number while the liberalism of Kantian obedience will hold the human life for crowned and inalienable since the absolute respect of the life of others is imposed by the natural right. The question arises then of knowing if a liberal democracy has the right to enlist its citizens when it is in danger. Fault of considering cases such as the war, the liberal theory of the natural rights avoids thinking the role of the State (of which the extreme version libertarienne question of the remainder legitimacy) in the international relations. Conversely, liberal utilitarianism court the danger engraves to justify the reasoning of the type The end justifies the means . Until where there is the right to sacrifice the happiness of some to the happiness of the greatest number? Or even: is there places for the eugenism in a liberal company?

Ethics

The liberal Morale can be summarized by only one precept: You will not violate the natural rights of another human being . It leaves each one free choose its own ends, its own means and its own morals, insofar as it does not prevent the others from doing as much of it.

Reciprocally, these rights imply obligations which form the core of a personal morals. They imply the prohibition of any aggression against the integrity of the person, of the Meurtre, the flight and the Esclavage under all their forms, and of any form of Dictature. They order the tolerance with regard to the ideas, of the beliefs and the acts of others.

Besides that, liberalism does not prescribe any behavior particular to the individual level. He regards that morals and the Religion S are out of its field and is restricted to prohibit the use of the religious or moral matter constraint, as in all the other matters.

The Responsabilité, inseparable from freedom and the property, known as that each individual must support the consequences of his actions, good or bad. It is a condition of freedom: if others became responsible for our actions, it should acquire the authority to impose its views to us and thus to restrict our freedom. It is also a component of the safety of others.

The concept of freedom is related to that of equality in right: the freedom of the others implies to recognize the same rights to them as those which one agrees. For the liberals, all the human beings must be treated like the equal ones whatever their differences.

Liberalism is not the Anomie like absence of legal provisions. The right is formed on the one hand by the natural Right, and on the other hand by the positive Droit which is the product of the contracts signed between the individuals.

Various aspects of liberalism

Social aspect

Liberalism requires company the respect of the natural rights and the limitation of competences of the State (see the test of the German Wilhelm von Humboldt on this topic). A liberal company is the result of the choices and the actions freely carried out by the whole of its members, which theoretically enables him to take very diverse forms.

However, the majority of the liberal authors form an explicit or implicit forecast on the form which must take a liberal company. They leave the report which the human being is a deeply social animal, which is attentive with the feelings and the Bien-être of its similar and knows that association with them is the means of its own survival and its own satisfaction. While recognizing the extreme diversity of the human beings, the liberal thinkers have a priori confidence in their spontaneous action, and think that the individuals are led by their instincts and their reason to cooperate and to set up effective solutions from an individual and social point of view (principle asserted by the liberals since Mandeville and Adam Smith).

Nothing in liberalism is opposed to the class action suits, provided that associations which undertake them are entirely voluntary and exert any constraint neither on their members, who must be able to leave them freely, nor on the other individuals.

According to the projects in which he wants to take part, each human being can belong to an unspecified number of communities, each one being able to require of him only what is necessary to the realization of its particular object. The ideal liberal company is neither a juxtaposition of foreign egoistic individuals the ones with the others, nor a juxtaposition of separated communities, but rather a tangle of voluntary associations of all natures through which each one can work for purposes that it gives itself, while cooperating freely with those which divide such or such of its ideals.

For the example and the imitation, the objectives, the rules and the methods adopted by certain groups can be diffused with the whole of the company, making emerge a spontaneous Ordre that the liberals regard as only legitimates, provided that he does not violate the natural right individuals.

Political aspect

Traditional liberalism admits that the institution of the State is necessary to make respect the prohibition of the Violence. Each one must give up using violence, according to the basic principle of individual responsibility, and entrusting to the State the monopoly of it, the service of the protection of each one against all the others.

The State being a human organization, the liberals think that the risk that the men who compose it misuse this monopoly of violence is permanent. At the same time as it is guaranteeing freedoms, the State is thus perceived like the most serious threat for these same freedoms. He to grant “the monopoly of legitimate violence” (max Weber) has as a counterpart necessary to limit its field of action in a rigorous way.

For the traditional liberals, the only legitimate functions of the State are those which ensure the protection of the Citoyen: police force, Justice, Diplomacy and National defense. These functions form the minimal State limited to its functions known as kingly. In the performance of these duties, the State must be subjected to the same laws as the citizens, and not make laws which it would not apply to itself.

Traditional liberalism does not come to a conclusion on the institutional form of the State, but only about the extent of its capacities. He prefers nevertheless the provisions which make it possible to limit these capacities indeed, like the Démocratie and the Séparation of the capacities.

Traditional liberalism does not recognize specific rights in the majority, even democratically elected. In the same way that it prohibits with one more extremely to impose its will on weaker, it prohibits with a greater number of individuals to impose their will on more a small number. The role of the liberal State is not to make reign the law of the majority, but contrary to protecting freedom from the individuals and the minorities against strongest and most. In particular, traditional liberalism refuses that an even democratic majority can extend the exclusive field of action of the State beyond the minimal State.

This political philosophy could be summarized in three quotations:

Montaigne : “ the princes give me much if they do not remove me anything, and do enough good to me when they do not make me evil; it is all that I ask ” (foot-note: much = much);
Jean-Baptiste Say: “ With the head of a government, it is already to make much although not to make of evil ”;
Frederic Bastiat: “ to await State only two things: freedom, safety. And to see well that one would not know, with the risk to lose them both, to ask a third of it”.

These positions were developed with by the École of the public choices, which analyzes the actions of the State as those of an organization like the others (which defends the private interests of those which compose it or which support it) and the non-existence of the “general interest notes” (insofar as it is impossible to give the least definition or characteristic of it). The most radical liberals, the Libertariens or anarchist-capitalists, affirm that the sphere of legitimate attributions of the political power is empty, and that the risk taken while entrusting to the State the monopoly violence is too great to be worth to be run. They thus regard the State as an enemy and preach his total disappearance and the end of the policy. By opposition, holding them of the traditional positions on the minimal State are often called minarchists.

The modern democracies are qualified the liberal ones because are instituted there the Rule of law, the separation and the limitation of the capacities as well as freedom of the press. They take is the shape of a republic (example: Germany, India, France) are of a constitutional monarchy (example: Spain, Norway, Netherlands, the United Kingdom and its Commonwealth, Sweden).

Economic aspect

See also: Economic liberalism, Critical of the economic liberalism

Two positions coexist in the traditional tradition. Following Adam Smith, the English traditional school (Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Stuart Millet) a certain intervention of the State in the economic sphere legitimates by assigning three duties initially to him:

“ the sovereign has only three duties to fill. the first, it is to defend the company of any act of violence or invasion on behalf of other independent companies. The second, it is to have to protect, as much as it is possible each member of the company against the injustice or the oppression of any other member, or the duty to establish an exact administration of justice. And the third, it is the duty to set up or maintain certain public works and certain institutions which the private interest of a private individual or some private individuals could never carry them to set up or maintain, because never the profit would not refund of it the expenditure with a private individual or some private individuals, though with regard to a large company this profit makes more than to refund the expenditure ” ( Recherche on the nature and the causes of the richness of the nations , Livre IV, chap. IX).

To the wire of the Richness of the nations , Adam Smith adds other prerogatives to the State. He prevents that the “invisible hand” intervenes only in competition, as the small craft industry, and informs that, for their part, the industrialists conspire always together in order to raise the prices. The State has thus the duty to safeguard the conditions of the competition against the capitalists. Lastly, certain activities of industry have nondesirable effects (principle of the Externalité S): the Division of the labor abrutit men; and it should be wished that the State deal with these nuisances, by ensuring the education of the population for example.

For traditional French (Turgot, Condillac, Say), the Economic liberalism is primarily the application of liberal philosophy to the economic acts: the economy is only one of the fields of the human activity where the State does not have legitimacy to intervene differently than like an economic actor without particular privileges, and in more the possible small number of fields: the protection of the citizens, execution of the Justice and defense against possible attackers. They consider useless and dangerous any additional intervention, considering on the one hand that the private initiative, informed by the Marché, is capable advantageously to compensate the majority of the functions of the State, and, on the other hand, that the extension of the sphere of intervention of the State leads to a not controlled growth of the public sphere to the detriment of private initiative, chronic inefficiencies, and even to totalitarian drifts.

To this form of traditional liberalism, the Austrian École adds the idea that any agreement voluntarily agreed or together of freely authorized exchanges increases the satisfaction of the participants as perceived by each one of them, because if it were different, that which would feel injured would refuse this agreement which would thus not take place. Freedom to exchange and undertake is seen by these authors at the same time like a particular case of the philosophical principle of freedom, therefore a moral requirement which is essential independently of its consequences, and like a means which most probably leads to greatest general satisfaction.

The utilitarian vision of the role of the State became prevalent nowadays with the neo-classic design , which sees the freedom of the exchanges only like one means of arriving at a definite economic optimum in addition. In this utilitarian approach, freedom can be called into question if there exist other means of reaching this optimum. The State must then facilitate the enrichment of the citizens, play a central role as a referee of the economic exchanges, ensure the respect of the execution of the contracts, frame the commercial exchanges by a legislation adapted in order to correct the failures of the market, to manage the public goods, to open shopping streets, etc

In the same way, the Keynésianisme or the various forms of the “liberalism of left”, while claiming liberalism, recommends reasonable” and limited intervention a “State in the economy to ensure the full employment, economic stability and the growth; but also to set up a “floor” under the liberal company in order to help the most stripped, while keeping in mind which it is important to interfere the least possible with economic and political freedoms fundamental.

Taking into account a natural risk of constitution of Trust S (or Trust S), all the great Western democracies obtained antitrust laws like the Sherman Act, which aim to restore the Fluidité economic reports/ratios and to even protect to institutionalize the free competition. This so-called protection of the free competition is often denounced like an imposture, for example by Alan Greenspan. For the same reason - prohibition of agreement between economic producers, but this time of the workmen - which the Grève was some time at the XIXème century regarded as illegal activity.

Criticisms

Only criticisms are evoked here general. Criticisms of an economic nature and social are detailed in the article Critique economic liberalism .
Some advance that the Liberté and the free will would be illusions (Déterminisme, Fatalisme…). Or that presupposed the individualistic of liberalism would be scientifically false because contrary with human reality: the social unit activates would be primarily the group, and the individual could not be apprehended in his totality on strictly individual bases only and. According to the group which is considered, one finds various varieties of take Holisme into account of collective realities such as the company, association, the family… According to these criticisms, “individualism included/understood well passes by the class action suit”.
Others advance that the human beings should be subjected to higher principles of moral nature, religious or political. This position is not in oneself contrary with the liberal principles as long as this tender remains voluntary; but it becomes it when, for example, certain men, even elected democratically, undertake to make laws according to the principle of the general interest.
Another objection, transversal with several currents of thought, is that “philosophical liberalism” would not have an existence real in practice economic, social, and even philosophical. According to this point of view, liberalism constitutes a disparate ideological corpus used by its followers “to justify” the inequalities from which they would profit. In addition to this attitude becomes to the trap door authors as important as Locke, Montesquieu or Kant, the liberals see, in this personalization of the argumentation, a test of other thinkers to justify their own ambitions of catch in hand of the company, even if it means to standardize it. For part of the anarchistic , the economic freedom defended by the liberals would be a source of inequalities and restrictions of freedoms which would actually harm the true freedom, in particular political. In the current liberal companies, they would criticize in more the incentive with consumption (by publicity normally) which would limit economic freedom.
Others critical of an economic nature are based on the difference between formal freedoms (right to circulate, for example) and real freedoms (economic capacity really to circulate, for example) and reproach the liberals for considering only the first.
According to the liberals, criticisms most would rest only on one divergence of interpretation of the liberalism term, which its adversaries denounce under the name of “liberalism” being only one intellectual construction quite far away from the position of the liberals themselves which are regarded as “the first to reject the restrictions on individual freedoms”, as shows it the following quotation: “The adversaries of liberalism left in war against the fictions which are ultra-liberalism and the neoliberalism, two built concepts of all parts by the collectivists and in whom the liberals do not recognize themselves” (Pascal Salin).

References

See also: Capitalism, political Liberalism, History of the economic liberalism, contemporary Liberalism in the United States, Economic liberalism, Libertarianisme, National-liberalism, theological Liberalism, Absolutism, Communism

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