advantage of liberalism essay

Essay on Liberalism

Students are often asked to write an essay on Liberalism in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on Liberalism

What is liberalism.

Liberalism is a way of thinking about how society should work. It believes that everyone should have freedom to live how they want, as long as they do not harm others. It also says that people should have equal chances to succeed in life.

Freedom and Rights

One key idea in liberalism is that people should have basic rights like freedom of speech and religion. This means you can say what you think and follow any religion, or not follow one, without fear.

Government’s Role

In liberalism, the government is there to protect people’s freedoms and rights. It should not control everything but must help in areas like education and health.

Economy and Liberalism

Liberalism also talks about money and business. It supports a system where businesses compete fairly, and the government only steps in to keep things fair for everyone.

Liberalism Today

Today, liberalism influences many countries’ laws and ways of life. It promotes a society where people can freely express themselves and have the opportunity to live a good life.

250 Words Essay on Liberalism

Liberalism is a way of thinking about how people should live together in society. It believes that everyone should have the freedom to speak their mind, follow their own beliefs, and make choices about their lives. The main idea is that as long as you’re not hurting anyone, you should be free to do what you think is best for you.

Freedom and Equality

One key part of liberalism is that all people are equal and deserve equal rights. This means no matter where you come from, what you look like, or what you believe in, you should be treated the same as everyone else. Freedom is also very important. This includes being able to say what you want, meet with who you want, and have your own ideas.

In liberal thinking, the government’s job is to protect these freedoms and make sure everyone is treated fairly. But it should not control everything. People should have the chance to make their own money, choose where they work, and buy what they need or want.

Today, many countries use liberal ideas to run their governments. These places often have laws that protect people’s rights to think and speak freely. They also have markets where people can buy and sell things without too much control from the government. Liberalism has helped many people live better lives, but there are always discussions about the best ways to make it work for everyone.

500 Words Essay on Liberalism

Liberalism is a belief in freedom and equal rights for everyone. It started hundreds of years ago and has shaped many of the rules and ways countries are run today. People who believe in liberalism are called liberals. They think that every person should have the chance to do what they want in life as long as they don’t hurt others.

The Roots of Liberalism

The ideas of liberalism began in Europe in the 17th century. Back then, kings and queens had all the power, and regular people had very little. Some thinkers started to say that this wasn’t fair. They believed that everyone should have a say in how their country is run. This was a big change from the way things were, and it led to many fights for freedom around the world.

One of the main points of liberalism is that people should have freedom. This means they can think, speak, and believe what they want. It also means they can choose who makes the laws in their country by voting. Another important part is that everyone has rights that can’t be taken away, like the right to be treated fairly by the law.

Government and Economy

Liberals think the government should protect people’s freedoms and rights but not control everything they do. In business, this means people should be able to start companies and buy and sell things without too much government control. However, the government should still make rules to keep things fair and help people who need it.

Today, liberalism has spread to many countries. It has helped to create democracies where people vote for their leaders. It has also led to the idea of human rights, which are rules that say how people should be treated no matter where they live. Liberals still work to make sure everyone has the same chances in life, no matter their background.

Challenges to Liberalism

Even though liberalism has done a lot of good, it faces challenges. Some people think it gives too much freedom and can lead to unfairness. Others say it doesn’t do enough to help people who are poor or treated badly. These debates keep going, and liberals keep trying to find the best ways to make a fair world for everyone.

In conclusion, liberalism is all about freedom, rights, and making sure everyone has a fair chance in life. It has changed the world in many ways and continues to be important in how we think about running countries and treating each other. Understanding liberalism is key to knowing how modern societies work and how we can make them better for everyone.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

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Pros and Cons of Liberalism

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Post published: November 24, 2018
Post category: Politics
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Every person has a right to life, liberty, freedom to choose, and a right to pursue happiness. Liberalism is a political and moral ideology based on the equality and liberty of people. Modern liberalism focuses on protecting the rights of people, Promoting economic activities, protecting the environment, and enhancing the freedom of individuals in a particular country. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of liberalism in a country.

1 . Promotes economic growth: With less government regulation to inhibit business growth, businesses will be productive and innovative thus promoting economic growth.

2 . Eliminates slavery: Liberalism ensures we have a great country free from injustices and slavery.

3 . Stable economy: Liberalism results in a stable economy with fewer risks of recession and less wealth disparity. Many people are able to obtain an adequate amount of income with fewer people becoming richer.

4 . Few regulations: Liberalism ensures there are few regulations and promotes individual liberty. Having a few restrictions on minimum wage enables companies to set up their wages which makes them competitive in the marketplace.

5 . Preserve human rights: Infringing human rights is against liberal philosophies and they fight to ensure the rights of individuals are preserved.

6 . Equality: Liberalism is individualistic and each individual’s moral values should be treated equally to the moral ideologies of others. The state ensures there are equal opportunities for all regardless of gender, status, or age.

7 . Government involvement: Liberals ensure government involvement in the conservation of the environment and promote opportunities to the citizens.

8 . Collective security: Liberal countries aim at preserving the liberty of their members and promoting order and justice within the communities. Having collective security promotes democracy and a free market for people to trade freely.

9 . Global harmony: Liberalism promotes peace and harmony among countries. Liberal trade markets create international harmony and cooperation.

10 . Fair competition: Minimal state regulations ensure there is perfect competition and also ensure there are no barriers to entry as well as reduce monopoly.

1 . Unfair business activities: If businesses are left alone without any regulations or restrictions, they may not automatically formulate themselves into the best and fair formation.

2 . Exploitation of resources: Fewer regulations on business economic practices results in the exploitation of natural resources.

3 . Market Inconsistency: The government cannot easily control market growth, there are cases where the market is unstable and experiencing a recession or affected by human behaviors making it difficult to predict the competitive market system.

4 . Unfair wages: A lack of restrictions on the minimum wage rate may allow some companies to pay fewer wages which cannot cover the cost of living. This also inhibits consumerism.

5 . Over-dependence: It results in over-dependence or over-reliance on the government to meet the social, economic, political, and personal needs of individuals in the country.

6 . Government criticism: The government receives a lot of critics that it commits to a lot of expensive programs which yield unintended consequences and create more social problems than it addresses.

7 . Extensive social protection: Extensive social protection can affect the overall economy of the country since many people may decide to live off government support instead of looking for jobs.

8 . Unattractive investments: State control of the economy and health care facilities of the country can result in unattractive investments.

9 . Moral issues: Liberalism can bring unhealthy and morally objectionable problems or practices.

10 . Cultural issues: Liberal emphasis on human rights and freedom of choice/speech has affected the inherited restrictions, and it has influenced the changing characters of western society in terms of lifestyle, mode of eating, and dressing.

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Liberal Internationalism

There are many theories associated with international relations. This essay aims to discuss the ways in which liberal internationalism provides a more convincing account of international relations than class based approaches. It will provide an outline of liberal internationalism’s key aims and successes in comparison to class based approaches such as the Gramscian-Marxist approach.

Before discussing whether or not liberal internationalism is more convincing than its class based competitors, it is important to define what is meant by liberal internationalism. The concept of liberal internationalism is often associated with former US President Woodrow Wilson, thus sometimes being referred to as ‘Wilsonianism’ (Hoffman, 1995: pg 159). Wilson suggested that the cause of instability and conflict was the “undemocratic nature of international politics”, particularly in regards to foreign policy and the balance of power (Baylis et al. 2008: pg 111). Having identified the cause of conflict, it is possible to suggest that the aims of liberal internationalism are expanding democratic practices and free trade, defending democracy from its rivals while protecting and promoting human rights (Hoffman, 1995: pg 159).

This idea of how the world ought to develop appears to have been inspired in part by Immanuel Kant’s ‘Perpetual Peace’. It can be argued that Kant was advocating a “federation of free states governed by the rule of law” (Steans & Pettiford, 2001: pg 45). Kant suggested that when states became republics and their citizens are given the opportunity to make decisions, they are less likely to choose to go to war, therefore it is possible to argue that as more states become republics and democracy spreads then the likelihood of war between nations becomes smaller until eventually all nations view war as irrational and peace triumphs over conflict (Kant, 1795; (Baylis et al. 2008). The pursuit of perpetual peace seems to be a key aspect of liberal internationalism. To summarise, liberal internationalism can be defined as an approach to international relations aiming to spread liberal democracy throughout the world in order to bring an end to conflicts.

Having defined liberal internationalism, it may be useful to outline the class-based approaches to international relations, which will be used to examine how convincing the liberal internationalist approach is. While liberal internationalism identifies states as the key actor, Marxist thought would argue that social class is the most significant actor (Heywood, 2004). Marxists tend to argue that society, domestically and internationally, is “systematically prone to class conflict”, whereas liberals assume an “essential harmony of interests” among the various social groups (Baylis et al. 2008: pg 146). As previously mentioned, liberal internationalism seeks to expand, defend and promote democracy across the globe in order to maintain stability and peace, Marxist thinkers such as Gramsci would argue that this stability is maintained through the concept of hegemony. Gramsci highlights the significance of ideology in maintaining class rule and suggests that the ruling classes legitimise their power and preserve the status quo presenting their ideas as the only feasible option (Steans & Pettiford, 2001). This suggests that ruling elites can gain consent for their ideas but crucially, according to Gramsci, their legitimacy is not threatened due to a fear of coercion felt by the “exploited and alienated” classes (Baylis et al. 2008: pg 150). It may be possible to argue from a Gramscian point of view that leading powers in the international system have developed a world order suited to their interests and goals, convinced the lower classes that this world order is also in their interests yet continue to exploit them (Baylis et al. 2008). Summed up, class based approaches to international relations do not view states as the most important actors in the international system, with the Gramscian school of thought arguing that ruling classes manipulate the majority of society into the belief that there is only one world order that will produce peace and stability.

Having presented an outline of liberal internationalism and class based approaches to international relations, it is now possible to examine whether or not liberal internationalism offers a more convincing account of international relations than its class based counterparts.

Liberal internationalism may be viewed as a convincing approach to international relations as it is possible to argue that this approach has been relatively successful in creating and sustaining stability. Taking each of liberal internationalism’s key aims, as outlined previously, it is possible to assess how much success has been gained through this approach to international relations.

Firstly, liberal internationalism is praised for speaking up against violations of human rights (Hoffman, 1995). Combating human rights violations may be achieved through the use of various international institutions, which have liberal internationalist ideals embedded in their constitutions; examples of such institutions would be the United Nations (UN), European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), (Goldstein et al. 2000). Such institutions give citizens the opportunity to stand up to what Marxists might term the ruling class, an example of this could be the Siliadin v. France case submitted to the European Court of Human Rights in 2001 (European Court of Human Rights, 2008). This case claimed that French law was “inadequate in preventing ‘domestic slavery’”, thus committing a violation of ECHR’s Article 4, the “prohibition of slavery and forced labour” (European Court of Human Rights, 2008).

This would appear to illustrate that the international institutions put in place to protect the aims of liberal internationalism are fulfilling their goal, however it could be argued that there have been times when promoters of liberal internationalism have been silent on certain human rights violations in order to pursue other objectives. An example of this would be the way in which liberal internationalist leader, America, appeared to ignore the human rights violations occurring in China in order to use the Chinese to help in the fight against the Soviet form of communism (Hoffman, 1995). It is possible then to suggest that Gramscianism trend of thought was correct in assuming that leaders in the international system will pursue their own interests at the expense of others being exploited, also choosing to pursue particular interests at particular points in time.

It is possible to suggest that the protection of human rights comes only when the values of democracy have been accepted. Attention is now turned to liberal internationalism’s success in achieving the spread of democratic values, assessing whether or not this approach to international relations is convincing in its attempt to secure global stability. It may be suggested that democracy is the “antidote that will prevent future wars” (Layne, 1994: pg 5). Democratic peace theorists appear to argue that democratic states are “no less war-prone than non-democratic states” but generally choose not to engage in war with other democratic states the relationships between democratic states are built on mutual respect, cooperation and interdependence (Layne, 1994: pg 8). The assumption could then be made that as democracy expands, the tendency to engage in military conflict reduces.

Although this appears to be a convincing way to promote international peace and stability, questions have been asked as to how democracy is spread. It appears that one way in which liberal internationalists spread democracy is through intervening in non-democratic states to replace the governing regime with an alternative democratic one, an example of this would be US and coalition forces involvement in Afghanistan to replace the Islamic Taliban regime with a democratic government. It could be argued that this intervention has been partly successful in that August 2009 saw the first Afghan run elections since international involvement in 2001 illustrating that not only has the undemocratic regime been removed from power but that Afghanistan is capable of holding its own democratic elections (Doucet, 2009). However these elections have come under much criticism and campaigning for a second round is underway following a recount of the initial votes due to claims of fraud (BBC News, 2009). In addition to criticism surrounding the presidential elections, it is possible to suggest that intervention in Afghanistan has not achieved its goal of spreading democracy and peace as the death toll of both military personnel and civilians in the region continues to rise. One figure suggests that there were upwards of 3,000 people killed in violence during 2008 alone (USA Today, 2008). Evidence such as this would appear to demonstrate that when liberal international powers intervene they succeed in promoting democratic reform in the short term but in the long run end up delivering unstable situations (Bueno de Mesquita & Downs, 2006). This appears to suggest that the practice of interventionism is only part of a wider attempt to expand democracy, therefore only being part of the examination of liberal internationalism’s success.

Linked to the previous analysis of spreading democracy in order to ensure international peace and stability, it is possible to argue that liberal internationalism is a convincing approach to international relations because the number of liberal democracies has risen throughout the 20 th century. Huntington identified three ‘waves’ of democratization, that is periods of time where the number of states establishing themselves as democracies outnumbered the number of states experiencing democratic breakdown (Diamond, 1996). Diamond suggests that the there is between 76 and 117 democracies now operating (ibid.). Although data may show the number of democracies is increasing, has the spread of democracy reduced the number of conflicts thus achieving the liberal internationalist aim of promoting democracy to help ensure stability? In support of liberal internationalism’s approach to international relations would be that along with the increased number of democratic states, there has been no violent conflict on the scale on the two world wars.

However, there has continued to be international conflict, notably the ‘War on Terror’. Supporters of class-based approaches would perhaps argue that focus should not be placed on conflict between states but rather on the conflicts arising out of class tensions. Drawing on the earlier relationship between the spread of democracy and intervention, advocates of class-based approaches to international relations, particularly those who concerned with the World Systems Theory, appear to suggest that intervening in order to expand democratic practices is merely a way of legitimizing the hegemonic imperialism of liberal internationalist powers (Baylis et al. 2008). It is thus possible to argue that the US and its allies are not engaged in the ‘War on Terror’ in order to pursue democracy and peace but rather to enforce their own beliefs on seemingly unwilling states while demonstrating their coercive powers in order to keep those on the periphery from becoming part of the core unless they sign up completely to the aims of those already part of the core. In support of this argument would be the idea that if the states or institutions intervening were truly democratic then they would be peaceful in all relations, whether with fellow democracies or not, pursuing negotiations and peaceful resolutions rather than engaging in violent, military conflict (Layne, 1994).

Although the liberal international approach appears to have been relatively successful in achieving its aim of protecting human rights and spreading democratic practices, it is perhaps possible to argue that this is a more convincing approach to international relations than class-based approaches due to the influence of free trade economics. Gramscian scholars would argue that free trade hinders the economic and social development of those on the periphery (Baylis et al. 2008). However those in support of liberal internationalism would counter this claim by suggesting that free trade creates interdependence between states suggesting that is to everyone’s benefit to have open markets as it rests upon the assumption that transactions between states will be “determined by prices rather than coercion” thus producing a “mutual security” (Doyle, 1986: pg. 1161).

In conclusion, liberal internationalism can be seen as a more convincing approach to international relations than its class-based rivals as not only has it experienced success in reaching its aims to spreading democracy, protecting human rights and promoting economic free trade in order to maintain peace, it has also continued to be a dominant force in international relations while class-based approaches have failed to make any lasting and significant impact (Doyle, 1986). However it is also important to note that liberal internationalism is not without its internal faults and has appeared to value certain aims over others at various points in history.

Bibliography

Baylis. J, Smith. S, Owens. P, 2008, The Globalization of World Politics , Oxford University Press, Oxford

BBC News, 2009, Campaigning for Afghan Elections, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8323708.stm Accessed: 30/10/2009

Bueno de Mesquita. B and Downs. G, 2006, ‘Intervention and Democracy’, International Organisation , 60: 3: 627-649

Diamond. L, 1996, ‘Is the Third Wave Over?’, Journal of Democracy , 7: 3: 20-37

Doucet. L, 2009, Afghanistan’s Day of Reckoning, BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8205787.stm Accessed: 30/10/2009

Doyle. M, 1986, ‘Liberalism and World Politics’, The American Political Science Review , 80: 4: 1151-1169

European court of Human Rights, 2008, The European Court of Human Rights: Some Facts and Figures 1998-2008, http://www.echr.coe.int/NR/rdonlyres/ACF07093-1937-49AF-8BE6-36FE0FEE1759/0/FactsAndFiguresENG10ansNov.pdf Accessed: 31/10/2009

Goldstein. J, Kahler. M, Keohane. R, Slaughter. A, 2000, ‘Introduction: Legalization and World Politics, International Organisation , 54: 3: 385-399

Heywood. A, 2004, Political Theory: An Introduction , Palgrave MacMillan, Hampshire

Hoffman. S, 1995, ‘The Crisis of Liberal Internationalism’, Foreign Policy , 98: 159-177.

Kant. I, 1795 (2005), Perpetual Peace , Cosimo Inc., New York

Layne. C, 1994, ‘Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace’, International Security , 19: 2: 5-49

Steans. J. and Pettiford. L, 2001, International Relations: Perspectives and Themes , Pearson Education Limited, Essex

USA Today, 2008, Afghan Death Toll Reaches 500, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-08-07-afghan-war_N.htm Accessed: 31/10/2009

Written by: Miriam E Dornan

Written at: University of Strathclyde

Written for: Dr Bill Patterson

Date written: November 2009

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Liberalism is more than one thing. On any close examination, it seems to fracture into a range of related but sometimes competing visions. In this entry we focus on debates within the liberal tradition. (1) We contrast three interpretations of liberalism’s core commitment to liberty. (2) We contrast ‘old’ and ‘new’ liberalism. (3) We ask whether liberalism is a ‘comprehensive’ or a ‘political’ doctrine. (4) We close with questions about the ‘reach’ of liberalism — does it apply to all humankind? Must all political communities be liberal? Could a liberal coherently answer this question by saying No? Could a liberal coherently answer this question by saying Yes?

1.1 The Presumption in Favor of Liberty

1.2 negative liberty, 1.3 positive liberty, 1.4 republican liberty, 2.1 classical liberalism, 2.2 the ‘new liberalism’, 2.3 liberal theories of social justice, 3.1 political liberalism, 3.2 liberal ethics, 3.3 liberal theories of value, 3.4 the metaphysics of liberalism, 4.1 is liberalism justified in all political communities, 4.2 is liberalism a cosmopolitan or a state-centered theory, 4.3 liberal interaction with non-liberal groups: international, 4.4 liberal interaction with non-liberal groups: domestic, 5. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the debate about liberty.

“By definition,” Maurice Cranston says, “a liberal is a man who believes in liberty” (1967: 459). In two ways, liberals accord liberty primacy as a political value.

(i) Liberals have typically maintained that humans are naturally in “a State of perfect Freedom to order their Actions…as they think fit…without asking leave, or depending on the Will of any other Man” (Locke, 1960 [1689]: 287). Mill too argued that “the burden of proof is supposed to be with those who are against liberty; who contend for any restriction or prohibition…. The a priori assumption is in favour of freedom…” (1963, vol. 21: 262). Recent liberal thinkers such as as Joel Feinberg (1984: 9), Stanley Benn (1988: 87) and John Rawls (2001: 44, 112) agree. Liberalism is a philosophy that starts from a premise that political authority and law must be justified. If citizens are obliged to exercise self-restraint, and especially if they are obliged to defer to someone else’s authority, there must be a reason why. Restrictions on liberty must be justified.

(ii) That is to say, although no one classifies Hobbes as a liberal, there is reason to regard Hobbes as an instigator of liberal philosophy (see also Waldron 2001), for it was Hobbes who asked on what grounds citizens owe allegiance to the sovereign. Implicit in Hobbes’s question is a rejection of the presumption that citizens are the king’s property; on the contrary, kings are empowered by citizens who are themselves, initially, sovereign in the sense of having a meaningful right to say no. In the culture at large, this view of the relation between citizen and king had been taking shape for centuries. The Magna Carta was a series of agreements, beginning in 1215, arising out of disputes between the barons and King John. The Magna Carta eventually settled that the king is bound by the rule of law. In 1215, the Magna Carta was part of the beginning rather than the end of the argument, but by the mid-1300s, concepts of individual rights to trial by jury, due process, and equality before the law were more firmly established. The Magna Carta was coming to be seen as vesting sovereignty not only in nobles but in “the People” as such. By the mid-1400s, John Fortescue, England’s Chief Justice from 1442 to 1461, would write The Difference Between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy , a plea for limited monarchy that arguably represents the beginning of English political thought (Schmidtz and Brennan, 2010: chap. 2).

Hobbes generally is treated as one of the first and greatest social contract thinkers. Typically, Hobbes also is seen as an advocate of absolute sovereignty. On Hobbes’s theory, Leviathan’s authority is almost absolute along a particular dimension: namely, Leviathan is authorized to do whatever it takes to keep the peace. This special end justifies almost any means, including drastic limitations on liberty. Yet, note the limitations implicit in the end itself. Leviathan’s job is to keep the peace: not to do everything worth doing, but simply to secure the peace. Hobbes, the famed absolutist, in fact developed a model of government sharply limited in this most important way.

Paradigmatic liberals such as Locke also maintain that justified limitations on liberty are fairly modest. Only a limited government can be justified; indeed, the basic task of government is to protect the equal liberty of citizens. Thus John Rawls’s paradigmatically liberal first principle of justice: “Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive system of equal basic liberty compatible with a similar system for all” (Rawls, 1999b: 220).

Liberals disagree, however, about the concept of liberty, and as a result the liberal ideal of protecting individual liberty can lead to different conceptions of the task of government. Isaiah Berlin famously advocated a negative conception of liberty:

I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved. Coercion is not, however, a term that covers every form of inability. If I say that I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air, or cannot read because I am blind…it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced. Coercion implies the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act. You lack political liberty or freedom only if you are prevented from attaining a goal by human beings (Berlin, 1969: 122).

For Berlin and those who follow him, then, the heart of liberty is the absence of coercion by other agents; consequently, the liberal state’s commitment to protecting liberty is, essentially, the job of ensuring that citizens do not coerce each other without compelling justification. So understood, negative liberty is a matter of which options are left to our discretion, or more precisely, which options are foreclosed by the actions of others, and with what warrant, and this is so regardless of whether we exercise such options (Taylor, 1979).

Many liberals have been attracted to more ‘positive’ conceptions of liberty. Although Rousseau (1973 [1762]) seemed to advocate a positive conception of liberty, according to which one was free when one acted according to one’s true will (the general will), the positive conception was best developed by the British neo-Hegelians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Thomas Hill Green and Bernard Bosanquet (2001 [1923]). Green acknowledged that “…it must be of course admitted that every usage of the term [i.e., ‘freedom’] to express anything but a social and political relation of one man to other involves a metaphor…It always implies…some exemption from compulsion by another…”(1986 [1895]: 229). Nevertheless, Green went on to claim that a person can be unfree in another way, a psychological rather than political way, if he is subject to an impulse or craving that cannot be controlled. Such a person, Green argued, is “…in the condition of a bondsman who is carrying out the will of another, not his own” (1986 [1895]: 228). Just as a slave is not doing what he really wants to do, one who is, say, an alcoholic, is being led by a craving to look for satisfaction where it cannot, ultimately, be found.

For Green, a person is free only if she is self-directed or autonomous. Running throughout liberal political theory is an ideal of a free person as one whose actions are in some sense her own . In this sense, positive liberty is an exercise-concept . One is free merely to the degree that one has effectively determined oneself and the shape of one’s life (Taylor, 1979). Such a person is not subject to compulsions, critically reflects on her ideals and so does not unreflectively follow custom, and does not ignore her long-term interests for short-term pleasures. This ideal of freedom as autonomy has its roots not only in Rousseau’s and Kant’s political theory, but also in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. And today it is a dominant strain in liberalism, as witnessed by the work of S.I. Benn (1988), Gerald Dworkin (1988), and Joseph Raz (1986); see also the essays in Christman and Anderson (2005).

Green’s autonomy-based conception of positive freedom is often run together with a notion of ‘positive’ freedom: freedom as effective power to act or to pursue one’s ends. In the words of the British socialist R. H. Tawney, freedom thus understood is ‘the ability to act’ (1931: 221; see also Gaus, 2000; ch. 5.) On this positive conception, a person not prohibited from being a member of a Country Club but too poor to afford membership is not free to be a member: she lacks an effective power to act. Positive freedom qua effective power to act closely ties freedom to material resources. (Education, for example, should be easily available so that all can develop their capacities.) It was this conception of positive liberty that Hayek had in mind when he insisted that although “freedom and wealth are both good things…they still remain different” (1960: 17–18). To Hayek, wealth implies capability in a way that freedom does not.

An older notion of liberty that has recently resurfaced is the republican, or neo-Roman, conception of liberty, which has roots in the writings of Cicero and Niccolo Machiavelli (1950 [1513]). According to Philip Pettit,

The contrary of the liber , or free, person in Roman, republican usage was the servus , or slave, and up to at least the beginning of the last century, the dominant connotation of freedom, emphasized in the long republican tradition, was not having to live in servitude to another: not being subject to the arbitrary power of another (Pettit, 1996: 576).

On this view, the opposite of freedom is domination. To be unfree is to be “subject to the potentially capricious will or the potentially idiosyncratic judgement of another” (Pettit, 1997: 5). The ideal liberty-protecting government, then, ensures that no agent, including the government, has arbitrary power over any citizen. This is accomplished through an equal disbursement of power. Each person has power that offsets the power of another to arbitrarily interfere with her activities (Pettit, 1997: 67).

The republican conception of liberty is distinct from both Greenian positive and negative conceptions. Unlike Greenian positive liberty, republican liberty is not primarily concerned with rational autonomy, realizing one’s true nature, or becoming one’s higher self. When all dominating power has been dispersed, republican theorists are generally silent about these goals (Larmore 2001). Unlike negative liberty, republican liberty is primarily focused upon “defenseless susceptibility to interference, rather than actual interference” (Pettit, 1996: 577). Thus, in contrast to the ordinary negative conception, on the republican conception the mere possibility of arbitrary interference is a limitation of liberty. Republican liberty thus seems to involve a modal claim about the possibility of interference, and this is often cashed out in terms of complex counterfactual claims. It is not clear whether these claims can be adequately explicated (Gaus, 2003; cf. Larmore, 2004).

Some republican theorists, such as Quentin Skinner (1998: 113), Maurizio Viroli (2002: 6) and Pettit (1997: 8–11), view republicanism as an alternative to liberalism. When republican liberty is seen as a basis for criticizing market liberty and market society, this is plausible (Gaus, 2003b). However, when liberalism is understood more expansively, and not so closely tied to either negative liberty or market society, republicanism becomes indistinguishable from liberalism (Ghosh, 2008; Rogers, 2008; Larmore, 2001; Dagger, 1997).

2. The Debate Between the ‘Old’ and the ‘New’

Liberal political theory, then, fractures over how to conceive of liberty. In practice, another crucial fault line concerns the moral status of private property and the market order. For classical liberals — ‘old’ liberals — liberty and private property are intimately related. From the eighteenth century to the present day, classical liberals have insisted that an economic system based on private property is uniquely consistent with individual liberty, allowing each to live her life —including employing her labor and her capital — as she sees fit. Indeed, classical liberals and libertarians have often asserted that in some way liberty and property are really the same thing; it has been argued, for example, that all rights, including liberty rights, are forms of property; others have maintained that property is itself a form of freedom (Gaus, 1994; Steiner, 1994). A market order based on private property is thus seen as an embodiment of freedom (Robbins, 1961: 104). Unless people are free to make contracts and sell their labour, save and invest their incomes as they see fit, and free to launch enterprises as they raise the capital, they are not really free.

Classical liberals employ a second argument connecting liberty and private property. Rather than insisting that the freedom to obtain and employ private property is simply one aspect of people’s liberty, this second argument insists that private property effectively protects liberty, and no protection can be effective without private property. Here the idea is that the dispersion of power that results from a free market economy based on private property protects the liberty of subjects against encroachments by the state. As F.A. Hayek argues, “There can be no freedom of press if the instruments of printing are under government control, no freedom of assembly if the needed rooms are so controlled, no freedom of movement if the means of transport are a government monopoly” (1978: 149).

Although classical liberals agree on the fundamental importance of private property to a free society, the classical liberal tradition itself is a spectrum of views, from near-anarchist to those that attribute a significant role to the state in economic and social policy (on this spectrum, see Mack and Gaus, 2004). At the libertarian end of the classical liberal spectrum are views of justified states as legitimate monopolies that may with justice charge for essential rights-protection services: taxation is legitimate if necessary and sufficient for effective protection of liberty and property. Further ‘leftward’ we encounter classical liberal views that allow taxation for public education in particular, and more generally for public goods and social infrastructure. Moving yet further ‘left’, some classical liberal views allow for a modest social minimum.(e.g., Hayek, 1976: 87). Most nineteenth century classical liberal economists endorsed a variety of state policies, encompassing not only the criminal law and enforcement of contracts, but the licensing of professionals, health, safety and fire regulations, banking regulations, commercial infrastructure (roads, harbors and canals) and often encouraged unionization (Gaus, 1983b). Although classical liberalism today often is associated with libertarianism, the broader classical liberal tradition was centrally concerned with bettering the lot of the working class, women, blacks, immigrants, and so on. The aim, as Bentham put it, was to make the poor richer, not the rich poorer (Bentham, 1952 [1795]: vol. 1, 226n). Consequently, classical liberals treat the leveling of wealth and income as outside the purview of legitimate aims of government coercion.

What has come to be known as ‘new’, ‘revisionist’, ‘welfare state’, or perhaps best, ‘social justice’, liberalism challenges this intimate connection between personal liberty and a private property based market order (Freeden, 1978; Gaus, 1983b; Paul, Miller and Paul, 2007). Three factors help explain the rise of this revisionist theory. First, the new liberalism was clearly taking its own distinctive shape by the early twentieth century, as the ability of a free market to sustain what Lord Beveridge (1944: 96) called a ‘prosperous equilibrium’ was being questioned. Believing that a private property based market tended to be unstable, or could, as Keynes argued (1973 [1936]), get stuck in an equilibrium with high unemployment, new liberals came to doubt, initially on empirical grounds, that classical liberalism was an adequate foundation for a stable, free society. Here the second factor comes into play: just as the new liberals were losing faith in the market, their faith in government as a means of supervising economic life was increasing. This was partly due to the experiences of the First World War, in which government attempts at economic planning seemed to succeed (Dewey, 1929: 551–60); more importantly, this reevaluation of the state was spurred by the democratization of western states, and the conviction that, for the first time, elected officials could truly be, in J.A. Hobson’s phrase ‘representatives of the community’ (1922: 49). As D.G. Ritchie proclaimed:

be it observed that arguments used against ‘government’ action, where the government is entirely or mainly in the hands of a ruling class or caste, exercising wisely or unwisely a paternal or grandmotherly authority — such arguments lose their force just in proportion as the government becomes more and more genuinely the government of the people by the people themselves. (1896: 64)

The third factor underlying the currency of the new liberalism was probably the most fundamental: a growing conviction that, so far from being ‘the guardian of every other right’ (Ely, 1992: 26), property rights foster an unjust inequality of power. They entrench a merely formal equality that in actual practice systematically fails to secure the kind of equal positive liberty that matters on the ground for the working class. This theme is central to what is now called ‘liberalism’ in American politics, combining a strong endorsement of civil and personal liberties with indifference or even hostility to private ownership. The seeds of this newer liberalism can be found in Mill’s On Liberty. Although Mill insisted that the ‘so-called doctrine of Free Trade’ rested on ‘equally solid’ grounds as did the ‘principle of individual liberty’ (1963, vol. 18: 293), he nevertheless insisted that the justifications of personal and economic liberty were distinct. And in his Principles of Political Economy, Mill consistently emphasized that it is an open question whether personal liberty can flourish without private property (1963, vol. 2; 203–210), a view that Rawls was to reassert over a century later (2001: Part IV).

One consequence of Rawls’s great work, A Theory of Justice (1999 [first published in 1971]) is that the ‘new liberalism’ has become focused on developing a theory of social justice. Since the 1960s when Rawls began to publish the elements of his emerging theory, liberal political philosophers have analyzed, and disputed, his famous ‘difference principle’ according to which a just basic structure of society arranges social and economic inequalities such that they are to the greatest advantage of the least well off representative group (1999b:266). For Rawls, the default is not liberty but rather an equal distribution of (basically) income and wealth; only inequalities that best enhance the long-term prospects of the least advantaged are just. As Rawls sees it, the difference principle constitutes a public recognition of the principle of reciprocity: the basic structure is to be arranged such that no social group advances at the cost of another (2001: 122–24). Many followers of Rawls have focused less on the ideal of reciprocity than on the commitment to equality (Dworkin, 2000). Indeed, what was previously called ‘welfare state’ liberalism is now often described as liberal egalitarianism. However, see Jan Narveson’s essay on Hobbes’s seeming defense of the welfare state (in Courtland 2018) for historical reflections on the difference.

And in one way that is especially appropriate: in his later work Rawls insists that welfare-state capitalism does not constitute a just basic structure (2001: 137–38). If some version of capitalism is to be just it must be a ‘property owning democracy’ with a wide diffusion of ownership; a market socialist regime, in Rawls’s view, is more just than welfare-state capitalism (2001: 135-38). Not too surprisingly, classical liberals such as Hayek (1976) insist that the contemporary liberal fixation on ‘the mirage of social justice’ leads modern liberals to ignore the extent to which, as a matter of historical observation, freedom depends on a decentralized market based on private property, the overall results of which are unpredictable.

Thus, Robert Nozick (1974: 160ff) famously classifies Rawls’s difference principle as patterned but not historical: prescribing a distribution while putting no moral weight on who produced the goods being distributed. One stark difference that emerges from this is that Rawlsian liberalism’s theory of justice is a theory about how to distribute the pie while old liberalism’s theory of justice is a theory about how to treat bakers (Schmidtz, 2022).

The problem with patterned principles is that, in Nozick’s words, liberty upsets patterns. “No end-state principle or distributional patterned principle of justice can be continuously realized without continuous interference with people’s lives” (1974: 163). To illustrate, Nozick asks you to imagine that society achieves a pattern of perfect justice by the lights of whatever principle you prefer. Then someone offers Wilt Chamberlain a dollar for the privilege of watching Wilt play basketball. Before we know it, thousands of people are paying Wilt a dollar each, every time Wilt puts on a show. Wilt gets rich. The distribution is no longer equal, and no one complains. Nozick’s question: If justice is a pattern, achievable at a given moment, what happens if you achieve perfection? Must you then prohibit everything—no further consuming, creating, trading, or even giving —so as not to upset the perfect pattern? Notice: Nozick neither argues nor presumes people can do whatever they want with their property. Nozick, recalling the focus on connecting property rights to liberty that animated liberalism in its classical form, notes that if there is anything at all people can do, even if the only thing they are free to do is give a coin to an entertainer, then even that tiniest of liberties will, over time, disturb the favored pattern. Nozick is right that if we focus on time slices, we focus on isolated moments, and take moments too seriously, when what matters is not the pattern of holdings at a moment but the pattern of how people treat each other over time. Even tiny liberties must upset the pattern of a static moment. By the same token, however, there is no reason why liberty must upset an ongoing pattern of fair treatment. A moral principle forbidding racial discrimination, for example, prescribes no particular end-state. Such a principle is what Nozick calls weakly patterned, sensitive to history as well as to pattern, and prescribing an ideal of how people should be treated without prescribing an end-state distribution. It affects the pattern without prescribing a pattern. And if a principle forbidding racial discrimination works its way into a society via cultural progress rather than legal intervention, it need not involve any interference whatsoever. So, although Nozick sometimes speaks as if his critique applies to all patterns, we should take seriously his concession that “weak” patterns are compatible with liberty. Some may promote liberty, depending on how they are introduced and maintained. See Schmidtz (2006: chap.6). For work by modern liberals that resonates with Nozick’s dissection of the dimensions of equality that plausibly can count as liberal, see also Anderson (1999), Young (1990), and Sen (1992).

Accordingly, even granting to Nozick that time-slice principles license immense, constant, intolerable interference with everyday life, there is some reason to doubt that Rawls intended to embrace any such view. In his first article, Rawls said, “we cannot determine the justness of a situation by examining it at a single moment” (1951: 191) Years later, Rawls added, “It is a mistake to focus attention on the varying relative positions of individuals and to require that every change, considered as a single transaction viewed in isolation, be in itself just. It is the arrangement of the basic structure which is to be judged, and judged from a general point of view” (1999b: 76). Thus, to Rawls, basic structure’s job is not to make every transaction work to the working class’s advantage, let alone to the advantage of each member of the class. Rawls was more realistic than that. Instead, it is the trend of a whole society over time that is supposed to benefit the working class as a class . To be sure, Rawls was a kind of egalitarian, but the pattern Rawls meant to endorse was a pattern of equal status, applying not so much to a distribution as to an ongoing relationship. This is not to say that Nozick’s critique had no point. Nozick showed what an alternative theory might look like, portraying Wilt Chamberlain as a separate person in a more robust sense (unencumbered by nebulous debts to society) than Rawls could countenance. To Nozick, Wilt’s advantages are not what Wilt finds on the table; Wilt’s advantages are what Wilt brings to the table. And respecting what Wilt brings to the table is the exact essence of respecting him as a separate person. In part due to Nozick, today’s egalitarians now acknowledge that any equality worthy of aspiration will focus less on justice as a property of a time-slice distribution and more on how people are treated: how they are rewarded for their contributions and enabled over time to make contributions worth rewarding. (Schmidtz, 2006).

3. The Debate About the Comprehensiveness of Liberalism

As his work evolved, Rawls (1996: 5ff) insisted that his liberalism was not a ‘comprehensive’ doctrine, that is, one which includes an overall theory of value, an ethical theory, an epistemology, or a controversial metaphysics of the person and society. Our modern societies, characterized by a ‘reasonable pluralism’, are already filled with such doctrines. The aim of political liberalism is not to add yet another sectarian doctrine, but to provide a political framework that is neutral between such controversial comprehensive doctrines (Larmore, 1996: 121ff). Rawls’s notion of a purely political conception of liberalism seems more austere than the traditional liberal political theories discussed above, being largely restricted to constitutional principles upholding basic civil liberties and the democratic process.

Gaus (2004) argues that the distinction between ‘political’ and ‘comprehensive’ liberalism misses a great deal. Liberal theories form a broad continuum, from those that constitute full-blown philosophical systems, to those that rely on a full theory of value and the good, to those that rely on a theory of the right (but not the good), all the way to those that seek to be purely political doctrines. Nevertheless, it is important to appreciate that, though we treat liberalism as primarily a political theory, it has been associated with broader theories of ethics, value, and society. Indeed, many believe that liberalism cannot rid itself of all controversial metaphysical (Hampton, 1989) or epistemological (Raz, 1990) commitments.

Following Wilhelm von Humboldt (1993 [1854]), in On Liberty Mill argues that one basis for endorsing freedom (Mill believes there are many), is the goodness of developing individuality and cultivating capacities:

Individuality is the same thing with development, and…it is only the cultivation of individuality which produces, or can produce, well-developed human beings…what more can be said of any condition of human affairs, than that it brings human beings themselves nearer to the best thing they can be? or what worse can be said of any obstruction to good, than that it prevents this? (Mill, 1963, vol. 18: 267)

This is not just a theory about politics: it is a substantive, perfectionist, moral theory about the good. On this view, the right thing to do is to promote development or perfection, but only a regime securing extensive liberty for each person can accomplish this (Wall, 1998). This moral ideal of human perfection and development dominated liberal thinking in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and much of the twentieth: not only Mill, but T.H. Green, L.T. Hobhouse, Bernard Bosanquet, John Dewey and even Rawls show allegiance to variants of this perfectionist ethic and the claim that it provides a foundation for endorsing a regime of liberal rights (Gaus, 1983a). And it is fundamental to the proponents of liberal autonomy discussed above, as well as ‘liberal virtue’ theorists such as William Galston (1980). That the good life is necessarily a freely chosen one in which a person develops his unique capacities as part of a plan of life is probably the dominant liberal ethic of the past century.

The main challenge to Millian perfectionism’s status as the distinctly liberal ethic comes from moral contractualism/contractarianism, which can be divided into what might very roughly be labeled ‘Kantian’ and ‘Hobbesian’ versions. According to Kantian contractualism, “society, being composed of a plurality of persons, each with his own aims, interests, and conceptions of the good, is best arranged when it is governed by principles that do not themselves presuppose any particular conception of the good…” (Sandel, 1982: 1). On this view, respect for the personhood of others demands that we refrain from imposing our view of the good life on them. Only principles that can be justified to all respect the personhood of each. We thus witness the tendency of recent liberal theory (Reiman, 1990; Scanlon, 1998) to transform the social contract from an account of the state to an overall justification of morality, or at least a social morality. This is not to deny, however, that liberalism is, after all, essentially a view that there is such a thing as minding one’s own business, and that there is a sphere within which we have the right to say “It’s my life” while politely declining invitations to justify ourselves. Liberalism is the idea that there are limits to any need for public justification.

In contrast, distinctively Hobbesian contractarianism supposes only that individuals are self-interested and correctly perceive that each person’s ability to effectively pursue her interests is enhanced by a framework of norms that structure social life and divide the fruits of social cooperation (Gauthier, 1986; Hampton, 1986; Kavka, 1986). Morality, then, is a common framework that advances the self-interest of each. The claim of Hobbesian contractarianism to be a distinctly liberal conception of morality stems from the importance of individual freedom and property in such a common framework: only systems of norms that allow each person great freedom to pursue her interests as she sees fit could, it is argued, be the object of consensus among self-interested agents (Courtland, 2008; Gaus, 2012; Ridge, 1998; Gauthier, 1995). The continuing problem for Hobbesian contractarianism is the apparent rationality of free-riding: if everyone (or enough) complies with the terms of the contract, and so social order is achieved, it would seem rational to defect, and act immorally when one can gain by doing so. This is essentially the argument of Hobbes’s ‘Foole’, and from Hobbes (1948 [1651]: 94ff) to Gauthier (1986: 160ff), Hobbesians have tried to reply to it.

Turning from rightness to goodness, we can identify three main candidates for a liberal theory of value. We have already encountered the first: perfectionism. Insofar as perfectionism is a theory of right action, it can be understood as an account of morality. Obviously, however, it is an account of rightness that presupposes a theory of value or the good: the ultimate human value is developed personality or an autonomous life. Competing with this objectivist theory of value are two other liberal accounts: pluralism and subjectivism.

In his famous defence of negative liberty, Berlin insisted that values or ends are plural, and further, the pursuit of one end necessarily implies that other ends will not be achieved. In this sense ends collide. In economic terms, the pursuit of one end entails opportunity costs: foregone pursuits which cannot be impersonally shown to be less worthy. There is no interpersonally justifiable way to rank the ends, and no way to achieve them all. Each person must devote herself to some ends at the cost of ignoring others. For the pluralist, then, autonomy, perfection or development are not necessarily ranked higher than hedonistic pleasures, environmental preservation or economic equality. All compete for our allegiance, but because they are incommensurable, no choice can be interpersonally justified.

The pluralist is not a subjectivist: that values are many, competing and incommensurable does not imply that they are somehow dependent on subjective experiences. But the claim that what a person values rests on experiences that vary from person to person has long been a part of the liberal tradition. To Hobbes, what one values depends on what one desires (1948 [1651]: 48). Locke advances a ‘taste theory of value’:

The Mind has a different relish, as well as the Palate; and you will as fruitlessly endeavour to delight all Man with Riches or Glory, (which yet some Men place their Happiness in,) as you would satisfy all men’s Hunger with Cheese or Lobsters; which, though very agreeable and delicious fare to some, are to others extremely nauseous and offensive: And many People would with reason preferr [sic] the griping of an hungry Belly, to those Dishes, which are a Feast to others. Hence it was, I think, that the Philosophers of old did in vain enquire, whether the Summum bonum consisted in Riches, or bodily Delights, or Virtue, or Contemplation: And they might have as reasonably disputed, whether the best Relish were to be found in Apples, Plumbs or Nuts; and have divided themselves into Sects upon it. For…pleasant Tastes depend not on the things themselves, but their agreeableness to this or that particulare Palate, wherein there is great variety…(1975 [1706]: 269).

The perfectionist, the pluralist and the subjectivist concur on the crucial point: the nature of value is such that reasonable people pursue different ways of living. To the perfectionist, this is because each person has unique capacities, the development of which confers value on her life; to the pluralist, it is because values are many and conflicting, and no one life can include them all, or make the interpersonally correct choice among them; and to the subjectivist, it is because our ideas about what is valuable stem from our desires or tastes, and these differ from one individual to another. All three views, then, defend the basic liberal idea that people rationally follow different ways of living. But in themselves, such notions of the good are not full-fledged liberal ethics, for an additional argument is required linking liberal value with norms of equal liberty, and to the idea that other people command a certain respect and a certain deference simply by virtue of having values of their own. To be sure, Berlin seems to believe this is a very quick argument: the inherent plurality of ends points to the political preeminence of liberty (see, for example, Gray: 2006). Guaranteeing each a measure of negative liberty is, Berlin argues, the most humane ideal, as it recognizes that ‘human goals are many’, and no one can make a choice that is right for all people (1969: 171). It is here that subjectivists and pluralists alike sometimes rely on versions of moral contractualism. Those who insist that liberalism is ultimately nihilistic can be interpreted as arguing that this transition cannot be made successfully: liberals, on their view, are stuck with a subjectivistic or pluralistic theory of value, and no account of the right emerges from it.

Throughout the last century, liberalism has been beset by controversies between, on the one hand, those broadly identified as ‘individualists’ and, on the other, ‘collectivists’, ‘communitarians’ or ‘organicists’ (for skepticism about this, though, see Bird, 1999). These vague and sweeping designations have been applied to a wide array of disputes; we focus here on controversies concerning (i) the nature of society; (ii) the nature of the self.

Liberalism is, of course, usually associated with individualist analyses of society. ‘Human beings in society’, Mill claimed, ‘have no properties but those which are derived from, and which may be resolved into, the laws of the nature of individual men’ (1963, Vol. 8: 879; see also Bentham: 1970 [1823]: chap. I, sec. 4). Herbert Spencer agreed: “the properties of the mass are dependent upon the attributes of its component parts” (1995 [1851]: 1). In the last years of the nineteenth century this individualist view was increasingly subject to attack, especially by those who were influenced by idealist philosophy. D. G. Ritche, criticizing Spencer’s individualist liberalism, denies that society is simply a ‘heap’ of individuals, insisting that it is more akin to an organism, with a complex internal life (1896: 13). Liberals such as L. T. Hobhouse and Dewey refused to adopt radically collectivist views such as those advocated by Bernard Bosanquet (2001), but they too rejected the radical individualism of Bentham, Mill and Spencer. Throughout most of the first half of the twentieth century such ‘organic’ analyses of society held sway in liberal theory, even in economics (see A.F Mummery and J. A. Hobson, 1956: 106; J.M. Keynes, 1972: 275).

During and after the Second World War the idea that liberalism was based on inherently individualist analysis of humans-in-society arose again. Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies (1945) presented a sustained critique of Hegelian and Marxist theory and its collectivist and historicist, and to Popper, inherently illiberal, understanding of society. The reemergence of economic analysis in liberal theory brought to the fore a thoroughgoing methodological individualism. Writing in the early 1960s, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock adamantly defended the ‘individualistic postulate’ against all forms of ‘organicism’: “This [organicist] approach or theory of the collectivity….is essentially opposed to the Western philosophical tradition in which the human individual is the primary philosophical entity” (1965: 11–12). Human beings, insisted Buchanan and Tullock, are the only real choosers and decision-makers, and their preferences determine both public and private actions. The renascent individualism of late-twentieth century liberalism was closely bound up with the induction of Hobbes as a member of the liberal pantheon. Hobbes’s relentlessly individualistic account of society, and the manner in which his analysis of the state of nature lent itself to game-theoretical modeling, yielded a highly individualist, formal analysis of the liberal state and liberal morality.

Of course, as is widely known, we have recently witnessed a renewed interest in collectivist analyses of liberal society —though the term ‘collectivist’ is abjured in favor of ‘communitarian’. Writing in 1985, Amy Gutmann observed that “we are witnessing a revival of communitarian criticisms of liberal political theory. Like the critics of the 1960s, those of the 1980s fault liberalism for being mistakenly and irreparably individualistic” (1985: 308). Starting with Michael Sandel’s (1982) famous criticism of Rawls, a number of critics charge that liberalism is necessarily premised on an abstract conception of individual selves as pure choosers, whose commitments, values and concerns are possessions of the self, but never constitute the self. Although the ‘liberal-communitarian’ debate ultimately involved wide-ranging moral, political and sociological disputes about the nature of communities, and the rights and responsibilities of their members, the heart of the debate was about the nature of liberal selves. For Sandel the flaw at the heart of Rawls’s liberalism is its implausibly abstract theory of the self, the pure autonomous chooser. Rawls, he charges, ultimately assumes that it makes sense to identify us with a pure capacity for choice, and that such pure choosers might reject any or all of their attachments and values and yet retain their identity.

From the mid-1980s onwards various liberals sought to show how liberalism may consistently advocate a theory of the self which finds room for cultural membership and other non-chosen attachments and commitments which at least partially constitute the self (Kymlicka, 1989). Much of liberal theory has became focused on the issue as to how we can be social creatures, members of cultures and raised in various traditions, while also being autonomous choosers who employ our liberty to construct lives of our own.

4. The Debate About The Reach of Liberalism

In On Liberty Mill argued that “Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion” (1963, vol. 18: 224). Thus “Despotism is a legitimate form of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement…” (1963, vol. 18: 224). This passage — infused with the spirit of nineteenth century imperialism (and perhaps, as some maintain, latent racism) — is often ignored by defenders of Mill as an embarrassment (Parekh, 1994; Parekh, 1995; Mehta, 1999; Pitts, 2005).This is not to say that such Millian passages are without thoughtful defenders. See, for example, Inder Marawah (2011). Nevertheless, it raises a question that still divides liberals: are liberal political principles justified for all political communities? In The Law of Peoples Rawls argues that they are not. According to Rawls there can be a ‘decent hierarchical society’ which is not based on the liberal conception of all persons as free and equal, but instead views persons as “responsible and cooperating members of their respective groups” but not inherently equal (1999a: 66). Given this, the full liberal conception of justice cannot be constructed out of shared ideas of this ‘people’, though basic human rights, implicit in the very idea of a social cooperative structure, apply to all peoples. David Miller (2002) develops a different defense of this anti-universalistic position, while those such as Thomas Pogge (2002: ch. 4) and Martha Nussbaum (2002) reject Rawls’s position, instead advocating versions of moral universalism: they claim that liberal moral principles apply to all states.

The debate about whether liberal principles apply to all political communities should not be confused with the debate as to whether liberalism is a state-centered theory, or whether, at least ideally, it is a cosmopolitan political theory for the community of all humankind. Immanuel Kant — a moral universalist if ever there was one — argued that all states should respect the dignity of their citizens as free and equal persons, yet denied that humanity forms one political community. Thus he rejected the ideal of a universal cosmopolitan liberal political community in favor of a world of states, all with internally just constitutions, and united in a confederation to assure peace (1970 [1795]).

On a classical liberal theory, the difference between a world of liberal communities and a world liberal community is not of fundamental importance. Since the aim of government in a community is to assure the basic liberty and property rights of its citizens, borders are not of great moral significance in classical liberalism (Lomasky, 2007). In contrast under the ‘new’ liberalism, which stresses redistributive programs to achieve social justice, it matters a great deal who is included within the political or moral community. If liberal principles require significant redistribution, then it is crucially important whether these principles apply only within particular communities, or whether their reach is global. Thus a fundamental debate between Rawls and many of his followers is whether the difference principle should only be applied within a liberal state such as the United States (where the least well off are the least well off Americans), or whether it should be applied globally (where the least well off are the least well off in the world) (Rawls, 1999a: 113ff; Beitz, 1973: 143ff; Pogge, 1989: Part Three).

Liberal political theory also fractures concerning the appropriate response to groups (cultural, religious, etc.) which endorse illiberal policies and values. These groups may deny education to some of their members, advocate female genital mutilation, restrict religious freedom, maintain an inequitable caste system, and so on. When, if ever, should a liberal group interfere with the internal governance of an illiberal group?

Suppose first that the illiberal group is another political community or state. Can liberals intervene in the affairs of non-liberal states? Mill provides a complicated answer in his 1859 essay ‘A Few Words on Non-Intervention’. Reiterating his claim from On Liberty that civilized and non-civilized countries are to be treated differently, he insists that “barbarians have no rights as a nation , except a right to such treatment as may, at the earliest possible period, fit them for becoming one. The only moral laws for the relation between a civilized and a barbarous government, are the universal rules of morality between man and man” (1963, vol. 21: 119). Although this strikes us today as simply a case for an objectionable paternalistic imperialism (and it certainly was such a case), Mill’s argument for the conclusion is more complex, including a claim that, since international morality depends on reciprocity, ‘barbarous’ governments that cannot be counted on to engage in reciprocal behavior have no rights qua governments. In any event, when Mill turns to interventions among ‘civilized’ peoples he develops an altogether more sophisticated account as to when one state can intervene in the affairs of another to protect liberal principles. Here Mill is generally against intervention. “The reason is, that there can seldom be anything approaching to assurance that intervention, even if successful, would be for the good of the people themselves. The only test possessing any real value, of a people’s having become fit for popular institutions, is that they, or a sufficient proportion of them to prevail in the contest, are willing to brave labour and danger for their liberation” (1963, vol. 21: 122).

In addition to questions of efficacy, to the extent that peoples or groups have rights to collective self-determination, intervention by a liberal group to induce a non-liberal community to adopt liberal principles will be morally objectionable. As with individuals, liberals may think that peoples or groups have freedom to make mistakes in managing their collective affairs. If people’s self-conceptions are based on their participation in such groups, even those whose liberties are denied may object to, and perhaps in some way be harmed by, the imposition of liberal principles (Margalit and Raz, 1990; Tamir, 1993). Thus rather than proposing a doctrine of intervention, many liberals propose various principles of toleration which specify to what extent liberals must tolerate non-liberal peoples and cultures. As is usual, Rawls’s discussion is subtle and enlightening. In his account of the foreign affairs of liberal peoples, Rawls argues that liberal peoples must distinguish ‘decent’ non-liberal societies from ‘outlaw’ and other states; the former have a claim on liberal peoples to tolerance while the latter do not (1999a: 59–61). Decent peoples, argues Rawls, ‘simply do not tolerate’ outlaw states which ignore human rights: such states may be subject to ‘forceful sanctions and even to intervention’ (1999a: 81). In contrast, Rawls insists that “liberal peoples must try to encourage [non-liberal] decent peoples and not frustrate their vitality by coercively insisting that all societies be liberal” (1999a: 62). Chandran Kukathas (2003) — whose liberalism derives from the classical tradition — is inclined to almost complete toleration of non-liberal peoples, with the non-trivial proviso that there must be exit rights.

The status of non-liberal groups within liberal societies has increasingly become a subject of debate, especially with respect to some citizens of faith. We should distinguish two questions: (i) to what extent should non-liberal cultural and religious communities be exempt from the requirements of the liberal state? and, (ii) to what extent can they be allowed to participate in decision-making in the liberal state?

Turning to (i), liberalism has a long history of seeking to accommodate religious groups that have deep objections to certain public policies, such as the Quakers, Mennonites or Sikhs. The most difficult issues in this regard arise in relation to children and education (see Galston, 2003; Fowler, 2010; Andersson, 2011) Mill, for example, writes:

Consider … the case of education. Is it not almost a self-evident axiom, that the State should require and compel the education, up to a certain standard, of every human being who is born its citizen? Yet who is there that is not afraid to recognize and assert this truth? Hardly any one indeed will deny that it is one of the most sacred duties of the parents (or, as law and usage now stand, the father), after summoning a human being into the world, to give to that being an education fitting him to perform his part well in life towards others and towards himself … . that to bring a child into existence without a fair prospect of being able, not only to provide food for its body, but instruction and training for its mind, is a moral crime, both against the unfortunate offspring and against society … . (1963, vol. 18)

Over the last thirty years, there has been a particular case that is at the core of this debate — Wisconsin vs. Yoder : [406 U.S. 205 (1972)]. In this case, the United States Supreme Court upheld the right of Amish parents to avoid compulsory schooling laws and remove their children from school at the age of 14 — thus, according to the Amish, avoiding secular influences that might undermine the traditional Amish way of life. Because cultural and religious communities raise and educate children, they cannot be seen as purely voluntary opt-outs from the liberal state: they exercise coercive power over children, and so basic liberal principles about protecting the innocent from unjustified coercion come into play. Some have maintained that liberal principles require that the state should intervene (against groups like the Amish) in order to [1] provide the children with an effective right of exit that would otherwise be denied via a lack of education (Okin, 2002), [2] to protect the children’s right to an autonomous and ‘open future’ (Feinberg, 1980) and/or [3] to insure that children will have the cognitive tools to prepare them for their future role as citizens (Galston, 1995: p. 529; Macedo, 1995: pp. 285–6). Other liberal theorists, on the other hand, have argued that the state should not intervene because it might undermine the inculcation of certain values that are necessary for the continued existence of certain comprehensive doctrines (Galston, 1995: p. 533; Stolzenberg, 1993: pp. 582–3). Moreover, some such as Harry Brighouse (1998) have argued that the inculcation of liberal values through compulsory education might undermine the legitimacy of liberal states because children would not (due to possible indoctrination) be free to consent to such institutions.

Question (ii) — the extent to which non-liberal beliefs and values may be employed in liberal political discussion— has become the subject of sustained debate in the years following Rawls’s Political Liberalism . According to Rawls’s liberalism — and what we might call ‘public reason liberalism’ more generally — because our societies are characterized by ‘reasonable pluralism’, coercion cannot be justified on the basis of comprehensive moral or religious systems of belief. But many friends of religion (e.g., Eberle, 2002; Perry, 1993) argue that this is objectionably ‘exclusionary’: conscientious believers are barred from voting on their deepest convictions. Again liberals diverge in their responses. Some such as Stephen Macedo take a pretty hard-nosed attitude: ‘if some people…feel “silenced” or “marginalized” by the fact that some of us believe that it is wrong to shape basic liberties on the basis of religious or metaphysical claims, I can only say “grow up!”’ (2000: 35). Rawls, in contrast, seeks to be more accommodating, allowing that arguments based on religious comprehensive doctrines may enter into liberal politics on issues of basic justice “provided that, in due course, we give properly public reasons to support the principles and policies that our comprehensive doctrine is said to support” (1999a: 144). Thus Rawls allows the legitimacy of religious-based arguments against slavery and in favor of the United States civil rights movement, because ultimately such arguments were supported by public reasons. Others (e.g., Greenawalt, 1995) hold that even this is too restrictive: it is difficult for liberals to justify a moral prohibition on a religious citizen from voicing her view in liberal political debate.

Given that liberalism fractures on so many issues — the nature of liberty, the place of property and democracy in a just society, the comprehensiveness and the reach of the liberal ideal — one might wonder whether there is any point in talking of ‘liberalism’ at all. It is not, though, an unimportant or trivial thing that all these theories take liberty to be the grounding political value. Radical democrats assert the overriding value of equality, communitarians maintain that the demands of belongingness trump freedom, and conservatives complain that the liberal devotion to freedom undermines traditional values and virtues and so social order itself. Intramural disputes aside, liberals join in rejecting these conceptions of political right.

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16.2 The Advent of the Liberal Economy

Learning outcomes.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Explain the origins of the market economy.
Define wealth according to classical liberal theory.
Describe Adam Smith’s argument regarding the three levels of analysis.

The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution marked the introduction of new concepts that fundamentally transformed European societies and the world. Enlightenment thinkers freed human beings from an unquestionable religiosity, superstitions, and social rigidity. Absolutism could no longer be defended on the basis of God’s will and divine providence. The ideas of anthropocentrism , or the argument that human beings are the most important component of the Universe; rationalism , which is the belief that reason rather than experience is the foundation of knowledge; and scientism , or the view that inductive methods of the natural sciences are the only source of genuine knowledge, prompted changes that culminated with the French Revolution and the Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies. Movements toward political democratization and economic development based on these ideas have since been diffused to the four corners of the world.

The Enlightenment period promoted the idea of civilization as opposed to savagery. Societies that reflected anthropocentrism, rationalism, and scientism were the first to reap the benefits of the Industrial Revolution, including the development of the market and social progress, and to embody the idea of civilization. These societies were initially located in Western Europe and were then propagated to the colonized world, accompanying the migration movement and the birth of industrialization. Societies based on traditional religion and superstition, where family relationships defined power and politics, were considered savage. In University of Denver emeritus professor David P. Levine ’s words, “Civilization is an important concept in political economy. . . . Civilized society provides its members with opportunities not otherwise available; but it also confronts them with dangers.” 16

One of these opportunities is wealth creation. Enlightenment thinkers rejected the mercantilist idea that wealth is finite, proposing that wealth could in fact be created. The concept of wealth had been transformed. As Levine puts it, “Producing wealth is a special sort of activity. It is one that employs some of our assets to produce commodities: goods and services valued in the market.” 17

This change in the perception of what constituted wealth had an enormous impact on political economy. If wealth is understood as the extent to which the market values a good or service, and if the creativity and industriousness of the human mind is boundless, then wealth is infinite.

More than 200 years later, we still employ Enlightenment ideas about the concept of wealth. Adam Smith played an important role in defining our understanding of wealth creation, the functioning of the market, and the role of the government in a market-based society. His beliefs in science and in human beings’ inclination toward progress are key to his account of political economy. Adam Smith laid the foundation for liberalism , the dominant economic practice that persists today, in his classic work The Wealth of Nations (1776). He rejected mercantilism , suggesting that monarchy’s insistence on the balance of trade surplus through trade barriers would hurt the economy. According to Adam Smith, the best approach to the economy was a laissez-faire one, in other words, the free-market approach in which governments do not interfere in the market and let things take their own course.

Adam Smith developed his argument in The Wealth of Nations using different levels of analysis . First, he focused on the individual level and argued that self-interested individuals, or in other words, individuals focused on advancing their personal interests, tend to make decisions that will maximize results to their own benefit. Thus, if governments guarantee individuals the freedom to produce and trade as they please, society will be better off in the long run.

His second level of analysis examined the state. Adam Smith argued that countries should dedicate themselves to the production of what they produce best, following their comparative advantages. For example, he argued that given France’s geographic characteristics and the developed skills and abilities of its people, France can produce better cheese and wine than, for example, Great Britain, and at a lower cost. Therefore, he argued, France should produce cheese and wine. On the other hand, given Great Britain’s geographic characteristics and traditions, the British can produce better quality wool than the French, and therefore Smith argued that the British should produce wool and not cheese and wine.

At the international level of analysis, Smith argued that if countries stick to their comparative advantages, international trade should allow individuals in different countries to have access to the best products at the lowest costs. This would eliminate the need for trade barriers and result in a system of free international trade. In this case, both the French and the British would get the best cheese, wine, and wool at the lowest cost.

Adam Smith’s assumption regarding the benefits of a laissez-faire economy has accompanied the mainstream understanding of political economy since the publication of The Wealth of Nations . According to Adam Smith, the accumulation of capital in preindustrial societies allowed for the emergence of the Industrial Revolution, which produced consumable goods for society and elevated the quality of life of industrialized nations.

The ideas promulgated by Adam Smith and other political economists slowly promoted trade liberalization in Europe. Britain moved toward free trade in the 1780s with the repeal of the Corn Laws , trade restrictions such as tariffs and quotas on imported corn and food. The Corn Laws intended to keep corn prices high and favor domestic producers of food. 18 Several European states followed Britain’s move and similarly promoted trade liberalization. Nevertheless, Britain returned to protectionist policies during the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), a series of battles fought by the French Empire and its allies, led by Napoleon I, against several European countries that formed various coalitions. The costs of war are high, and as war expenses accumulated, the British government levied tariffs on imported goods to generate revenues and pay for the costs of war. The end of the Napoleonic Wars culminated with the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), a peace conference to reconstruct European relations after the downfall of Napoleon I. The Congress of Vienna led to the Concert of Europe , a general consensus to promote equilibrium among the five great European powers (Austria, France, Prussia, Russia, and the United Kingdom). It prevented another war from breaking out in Europe from 1815 to 1914.

The Concert of Europe period saw the flourishing of trade liberalization. Moreover, improved technology and the advent of new players in the international commodities market increased competition, and domestic pressure in favor of protectionist policies led the recently unified Germany to defect from the free-trade regime and return to protectionism in the 1870s.

In general terms, international trade picked up from the late 19th century until World War I. After World War I, protectionist policies became the rule again until the end of World War II, when the bases of the current international financial system were established.

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Liberalism, Constitutionalism, and Democracy

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2 Liberalism: Political and Economic

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Despite the singular term liberalism, there are two relatively distinct historical branches—political and economic liberalisms—and a collection of variously titled modern branches. Political liberalism arose in the seventeenth century to counter universalistic religious views whose proponents were so ardent as to wish to impose those views by force, and in a sense therefore it was an invention to resolve a then current, awful problem. There have been many comparable social inventions, many of which have failed, as communism, egalitarianism, and perhaps socialism have all failed to date. In contrast, by the time Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, and others came to analyse economic liberalism, they were analysing characteristics of their own society, some of which had been developing over many centuries. Insofar as the early economic liberals had programmes, these were for reforms of political practice to end elements of state‐sponsored monopoly and protection and of political theory to give a moral (welfarist) justification for the supposedly immoral greed that drives markets to greater production; as he put it, public virtue comes from private vice.

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12 Benefits of a Liberal Arts Education

A liberal arts education prepares students to examine ideas from multiple points of view, solve problems, adapt, and collaborate.

January 17, 2020

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Liberal Arts. The term itself conjures up a wide range of definitions - ask 20 people what it means and you’re likely to get 20 different responses.

For some, the term “liberal” is a roadblock they can’t get past. Which is unfortunate, because although it includes the word, not all liberal arts students are liberal in their political views. Some are. Others are ultra-conservative. The rest fall somewhere in between. A liberal arts education is not rooted in politics, but rather the desire to broaden the mind.

Of course, there are others who zero in on the term “arts” and assume that a liberal arts education excludes STEM and business fields. Which couldn’t be further from the truth. Naturally fine arts, including music and theatre, play a major role in a liberal arts education. But so do science, math and computer sciences and many others. In fact, plenty of tech industry leaders have been quoted touting the benefits of a liberal arts education. Turns out developers that can code AND have an eye for visual details – or engineers that can analyze data from multiple points of view – are much better positioned to truly innovate and create real change in their industry.

Benefits of a Liberal Arts Education

A liberal arts education prepares students to examine ideas from multiple points of view, solve problems, adapt, and collaborate. By combining multiple disciplines of study, liberal arts colleges expose students to a wide range of subjects, encouraging them to think outside a narrow focus and contribute to original solutions – all skills that are highly valued by top employers.

To help outline some of the pros of attending a liberal arts school, here is a list of 12 benefits of a liberal arts education:

1). Interdisciplinary approach to learning – A liberal arts education intentionally integrates different areas of study, exposing students to a wide range of subjects. Business majors will have classes in the arts, while pre-med majors may get a taste of sociology. This broad education prepares students to succeed in whatever career they choose. People that can view things from multiple perspectives, no matter their field, provide greater value to employers.

2). Relatively small size – The majority of liberal arts colleges are small, at least in in comparison to major public universities. In addition to creating a more intimate, “family” feel of camaraderie on campus, the smaller size creates multiple opportunities for personalized, individual learning experiences.

3). Get to know faculty – The professors not only get to know their students’ names, but their strengths, challenges and passions. They provide mentorship in a way faculty at larger institutions can’t always offer due to the sheer volume of students.

4). Interactive classes – The classes at liberal arts colleges provide a huge benefit. Rather than massive lecture halls with 200+ half-dozing students, students are more likely to find themselves in a small, interactive environment. A low student-faculty ratio and small class size allows for deeper connections and true learning. Student engagement is expected and questions are encouraged.

5). Exposure to cool things – Students are constantly exposed to interesting ideas, creative concepts and new experiences. Whether it’s studying abroad, community engaged learning or conducting peer-reviewed research with a professor (an experience often reserved for graduate work at other schools), students continuously have the opportunity to explore, take risks and try new things.

6). Teaches critical & innovative thinking skills – Through intentional experience and exposure, liberal arts colleges provide students with the all-important problem-solving and critical thinking skills. They focus on how to think, not what to think. Instead of memorizing facts and then forgetting the information at the end of the semester, students learn to examine, think and connect ideas. These valuable skills, practiced and reiterated throughout the entire college experience, are the skills necessary to innovate and create meaningful change in the world.

7). Strong alumni – Liberal arts colleges tend to have very active and involved alumni. While on campus students build lifelong friendships, and they continue to remain involved as mentors, donors and school supporters throughout their careers and life.

8). Financial Aid Opportunities – Liberal arts colleges often have generous financial aid options available for students.

9). Post-Graduation Jobs - Liberal arts colleges have some of the very best job placement rates, and for good reason. Graduates leave armed with the skills that employers value most – critical thinking, communication and the ability to view ideas from multiple perspectives. Best of all, they actively contribute to developing real solutions to real problems.

10). Graduate Program Acceptance - The idea that liberal arts are too, well, “arty” to be taken seriously is long gone. Today liberal arts have higher than average numbers of graduates being accepted into top graduate schools including medical school, law school, vet school and engineering programs. Why? Because the best schools know that liberal arts students are prepared to think, create, connect and come up with original solutions.

11). Prepares for Jobs Yet to be Created - Perhaps this should have been first on the list, because it’s arguably the most important. Not only do liberal arts colleges prepare students for their first job out of college, but they prepare them for future jobs that aren’t even jobs yet! It’s eye-opening to realize that according to the U.S. Department of Labor, 65% of current students will eventually be employed in jobs that have yet to be created , and 40% of current jobs will soon be a thing of the past. In twenty-five years, many of today’s college students will be in their mid-40s, working in jobs or fields that don’t yet exist. What is going to help them succeed in an ever-changing world? The ability to think, create, collaborate and adapt. These are classic liberal arts skills.

12). Social Responsibility – With an emphasis on civic responsibility and opportunities for community engagement, liberal arts students spend more volunteer hours than those at public universities. They open their eyes to the world around them, and how certain actions affect others. Whether it’s a service trip abroad during spring break or a class project working with a local non-profit, liberal arts students are engaged and committed to making the world a better place.

If you’re considering attending a liberal arts college, it pays to do your research and truly think about the relevant skills for the future. Not just your first job out of college, but the one you’ll have 20 years from now. Ask employers what they look for in employees, or what the most valuable skills are. The list often includes transferable skills such as the ability to collaborate, view things from multiple perspectives, adapt to changing demands and analyze and interpret data.

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As the nation’s post-Roe chapter begins, here are key facts about Americans’ views on abortion, based on two Pew Research Center polls: one conducted from June 25-July 4 , just after this year’s high court ruling, and one conducted in March , before an earlier leaked draft of the opinion became public.

This analysis primarily draws from two Pew Research Center surveys, one surveying 10,441 U.S. adults conducted March 7-13, 2022, and another surveying 6,174 U.S. adults conducted June 27-July 4, 2022. Here are the questions used for the March survey , along with responses, and the questions used for the survey from June and July , along with responses.

Everyone who took part in these surveys is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

A majority of the U.S. public disapproves of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe. About six-in-ten adults (57%) disapprove of the court’s decision that the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee a right to abortion and that abortion laws can be set by states, including 43% who strongly disapprove, according to the summer survey. About four-in-ten (41%) approve, including 25% who strongly approve.

A bar chart showing that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade draws more strong disapproval among Democrats than strong approval among Republicans

About eight-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (82%) disapprove of the court’s decision, including nearly two-thirds (66%) who strongly disapprove. Most Republicans and GOP leaners (70%) approve , including 48% who strongly approve.

Most women (62%) disapprove of the decision to end the federal right to an abortion. More than twice as many women strongly disapprove of the court’s decision (47%) as strongly approve of it (21%). Opinion among men is more divided: 52% disapprove (37% strongly), while 47% approve (28% strongly).

About six-in-ten Americans (62%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to the summer survey – little changed since the March survey conducted just before the ruling. That includes 29% of Americans who say it should be legal in all cases and 33% who say it should be legal in most cases. About a third of U.S. adults (36%) say abortion should be illegal in all (8%) or most (28%) cases.

A line graph showing public views of abortion from 1995-2022

Generally, Americans’ views of whether abortion should be legal remained relatively unchanged in the past few years , though support fluctuated somewhat in previous decades.

Relatively few Americans take an absolutist view on the legality of abortion – either supporting or opposing it at all times, regardless of circumstances. The March survey found that support or opposition to abortion varies substantially depending on such circumstances as when an abortion takes place during a pregnancy, whether the pregnancy is life-threatening or whether a baby would have severe health problems.

While Republicans’ and Democrats’ views on the legality of abortion have long differed, the 46 percentage point partisan gap today is considerably larger than it was in the recent past, according to the survey conducted after the court’s ruling. The wider gap has been largely driven by Democrats: Today, 84% of Democrats say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, up from 72% in 2016 and 63% in 2007. Republicans’ views have shown far less change over time: Currently, 38% of Republicans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, nearly identical to the 39% who said this in 2007.

A line graph showing that the partisan gap in views of whether abortion should be legal remains wide

However, the partisan divisions over whether abortion should generally be legal tell only part of the story. According to the March survey, sizable shares of Democrats favor restrictions on abortion under certain circumstances, while majorities of Republicans favor abortion being legal in some situations , such as in cases of rape or when the pregnancy is life-threatening.

There are wide religious divides in views of whether abortion should be legal , the summer survey found. An overwhelming share of religiously unaffiliated adults (83%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as do six-in-ten Catholics. Protestants are divided in their views: 48% say it should be legal in all or most cases, while 50% say it should be illegal in all or most cases. Majorities of Black Protestants (71%) and White non-evangelical Protestants (61%) take the position that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while about three-quarters of White evangelicals (73%) say it should be illegal in all (20%) or most cases (53%).

A bar chart showing that there are deep religious divisions in views of abortion

In the March survey, 72% of White evangelicals said that the statement “human life begins at conception, so a fetus is a person with rights” reflected their views extremely or very well . That’s much greater than the share of White non-evangelical Protestants (32%), Black Protestants (38%) and Catholics (44%) who said the same. Overall, 38% of Americans said that statement matched their views extremely or very well.

Catholics, meanwhile, are divided along religious and political lines in their attitudes about abortion, according to the same survey. Catholics who attend Mass regularly are among the country’s strongest opponents of abortion being legal, and they are also more likely than those who attend less frequently to believe that life begins at conception and that a fetus has rights. Catholic Republicans, meanwhile, are far more conservative on a range of abortion questions than are Catholic Democrats.

Women (66%) are more likely than men (57%) to say abortion should be legal in most or all cases, according to the survey conducted after the court’s ruling.

More than half of U.S. adults – including 60% of women and 51% of men – said in March that women should have a greater say than men in setting abortion policy . Just 3% of U.S. adults said men should have more influence over abortion policy than women, with the remainder (39%) saying women and men should have equal say.

The March survey also found that by some measures, women report being closer to the abortion issue than men . For example, women were more likely than men to say they had given “a lot” of thought to issues around abortion prior to taking the survey (40% vs. 30%). They were also considerably more likely than men to say they personally knew someone (such as a close friend, family member or themselves) who had had an abortion (66% vs. 51%) – a gender gap that was evident across age groups, political parties and religious groups.

Relatively few Americans view the morality of abortion in stark terms , the March survey found. Overall, just 7% of all U.S. adults say having an abortion is morally acceptable in all cases, and 13% say it is morally wrong in all cases. A third say that having an abortion is morally wrong in most cases, while about a quarter (24%) say it is morally acceptable in most cases. An additional 21% do not consider having an abortion a moral issue.

A table showing that there are wide religious and partisan differences in views of the morality of abortion

Among Republicans, most (68%) say that having an abortion is morally wrong either in most (48%) or all cases (20%). Only about three-in-ten Democrats (29%) hold a similar view. Instead, about four-in-ten Democrats say having an abortion is morally acceptable in most (32%) or all (11%) cases, while an additional 28% say it is not a moral issue.

White evangelical Protestants overwhelmingly say having an abortion is morally wrong in most (51%) or all cases (30%). A slim majority of Catholics (53%) also view having an abortion as morally wrong, but many also say it is morally acceptable in most (24%) or all cases (4%), or that it is not a moral issue (17%). Among religiously unaffiliated Americans, about three-quarters see having an abortion as morally acceptable (45%) or not a moral issue (32%).

Religion & Abortion

What the data says about abortion in the U.S.

Support for legal abortion is widespread in many countries, especially in europe, nearly a year after roe’s demise, americans’ views of abortion access increasingly vary by where they live, by more than two-to-one, americans say medication abortion should be legal in their state, most latinos say democrats care about them and work hard for their vote, far fewer say so of gop, most popular.

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6 Common Leadership Styles — and How to Decide Which to Use When

Rebecca Knight

Being a great leader means recognizing that different circumstances call for different approaches.

Research suggests that the most effective leaders adapt their style to different circumstances — be it a change in setting, a shift in organizational dynamics, or a turn in the business cycle. But what if you feel like you’re not equipped to take on a new and different leadership style — let alone more than one? In this article, the author outlines the six leadership styles Daniel Goleman first introduced in his 2000 HBR article, “Leadership That Gets Results,” and explains when to use each one. The good news is that personality is not destiny. Even if you’re naturally introverted or you tend to be driven by data and analysis rather than emotion, you can still learn how to adapt different leadership styles to organize, motivate, and direct your team.

Much has been written about common leadership styles and how to identify the right style for you, whether it’s transactional or transformational, bureaucratic or laissez-faire. But according to Daniel Goleman, a psychologist best known for his work on emotional intelligence, “Being a great leader means recognizing that different circumstances may call for different approaches.”

RK Rebecca Knight is a journalist who writes about all things related to the changing nature of careers and the workplace. Her essays and reported stories have been featured in The Boston Globe, Business Insider, The New York Times, BBC, and The Christian Science Monitor. She was shortlisted as a Reuters Institute Fellow at Oxford University in 2023. Earlier in her career, she spent a decade as an editor and reporter at the Financial Times in New York, London, and Boston.

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Ross Douthat

Is the internet the enemy of progress.

By Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

It’s unusual when you find a strong dose of pessimism about the future of technological progress highlighted by one of the world’s leading techno-optimists. But if you follow the combative venture capitalist Marc Andreessen on X, you would have seen him giving wide circulation to this passage from Michael Crichton’s 1995 “Jurassic Park” sequel “The Lost World,” in which Crichton’s ever-prescient Dr. Ian Malcolm warns that the internet will put an end to human progress:

“It means the end of innovation,” Malcolm said. “This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down … And everybody on Earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media — it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity — our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But we haven’t figured that out, so now we’re planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it’ll freeze the entire species … Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity.”

This is the kind of quotation I would normally highlight at the end of this newsletter, in my “This Week in Decadence” feature. But it’s 29 years old, written when the true internet era was still just a gleam in Al Gore’s eye.

And as prophecies go, it’s pretty impressive — up there with Malcolm’s rather more famous prediction about just how bad things would get in John Hammond’s amusement park. The quote doesn’t capture everything about the current age (more on the prophecy’s limits in a moment), but it predicted quite a lot: the popular styles that seem stuck on repeat ; the mid-list musicians and novelists disappearing amid the dominance of megastars; the dwindling interest in new music as the algorithm steers everyone to the Beatles; the “ age of average ” in everything from art and architecture to hotel décor , auto design and Instagram looks.

You could further argue that the passage predicted the Great Stagnation that Tyler Cowen identified in 2011, the productivity slowdown and disappointing economic growth that followed the initial 1990s-era internet boom. You could say that it predicted the remarkable ideological groupthink of the liberal Western leadership class over the same period, the rise of Davos Man and then the heightened elite conformism of the woke era. Finally, you could say that it predicted the striking phenomenon of birthrates declining globally, not just locally, in nearly every country and region touched by the iPhone version of modernity.

This last point is central to the updating of the Malcolm/Crichton thesis offered recently by the George Mason University professor Robin Hanson. Writing for Quillette, he argues that globalization and homogenization have reduced cultural competition in roughly the way that the “Lost World” passage describes. Instead of a bevy of cultural models competing the way private-sector firms do and dying off quickly if they don’t adapt successfully, globalization gives us a tendency toward “macro culture” — a few large-scale cultural models, or maybe eventually even just a global monoculture. This has initial benefits but long-term drawbacks:

The recent big jump in the size of macro cultures has boosted within -culture innovation, powering peace, trade and fast-growing wealth. As a result, our few huge cultures today suffer much less from famine, disease or war. But because of these effects, we should expect to now get much less selection of cultures, and thus less long-run innovation. It’s not just that we’re forgoing opportunities to improve our macro cultures. Selection may also be too weak — at least in the short run — to cancel the mistakes of cultural drift. Shouldn’t we expect that macro cultures, when selection is weak, will drift into dysfunction just as firm cultures do?

This kind of maladaptive cultural drift, Hanson argues, is what’s happening with below-replacement fertility. For a variety of social and economic reasons, the developed world has converged on a reproductive model that’s already leading to rapid population aging and could lead — with South Korea as the blinking-red indicator light — to outright population collapse. This all but guarantees that technological and economic progress will slow down, but Hanson goes further and argues that depopulation may turn the world over to “insular cultures like Mennonites, Amish, and Haredim,” which by “doubling every two decades,” he writes, “look on track to replace our mainline civilization in a few centuries.”

For him, this is basically a fall-of-Rome scenario, with insular religious minorities playing the role of the early Christians and the rest of us cast in the role of the decadent Roman elites. And Hanson suggests that it’s extremely difficult for a culture that’s become universal but also maladaptive to escape this kind of fate, to get back to dynamism without first going through a crackup or collapse that yields more competition in the wreckage.

Now let’s consider the alternative to this kind of pessimism. When he posted the Ian Malcolm quotation, Andreessen did not endorse it; rather, he caveated it, saying that Crichton “was right about this. But also wrong. The internet is also the land of a million shards, cultures, cults.” Meaning that while there is a powerful tendency toward cultural homogenization and global uniformity, the online era also allows for more of Hanson’s within-culture innovation, if you know where to look for it: more conformism at the center, maybe, but more ferment at the fringe; more debilitating groupthink but also more eccentricity and radical experiments.

To develop this argument, you might say that while Crichton’s character got a lot of big things right, his prophecy underestimated the human tendency to react against stagnation and decadence once it begins to set in.

So the past decade or so has delivered polarization and division as well as incurious conformism, with populist rebellions and socialist revivals and extreme-outsider ideas coming into fashion rather than everyone thinking the same thing at the same time — and these have been mediated and encouraged by the same internet that’s encouraged homogeneity.

Outside the West, there are now various explicit attempts to escape the universal politics of global liberalism — the various visions of what Bruno Maçães calls “ civilization states ” in China and India and Russia, the quest for non-Western models of 21st-century development and power. Some of these paths are grim and tyrannical, but they aren’t just seeking sameness and convergence. For good or ill, they’re aiming at the strong cultural competition that Hanson thinks we need.

Meanwhile within the Western world, America, at least, has slipped somewhat free from the Great Stagnation. For all its flaws, Silicon Valley remains an exceptional culture, the American South and West are booming, the artificial intelligence breakthroughs are real, however uncertain their consequences. There are forms of spiritual ferment ( charismatic revivals , pagan experiments, the neo-traditionalism of younger Christians) at work even as the old Christian institutions continue to decline. Even American cinema is showing a few big bright spots after its Covid-era diminishment.

If the rule of a globalized, digitally united world is maladaptive conformity, in other words, you can also see some notable exceptions — enough of them, maybe, to say that we aren’t just waiting for the Amish to take over, that Andreessen’s plethora of shards, cultures and cults will suffice to deliver renewal from within.

What makes me a bit less optimistic than the venture capitalist is my sense that it’s hard for the shards and subcultures to scale up. On the largest scale, the alternatives to the globalized macro culture often seem to be either fake or failing: Russia is a gangster state, not a civilizational alternative; China is plunging into the low-fertility future faster than the West, and so on.

But on the smaller scale, the smallness is the problem. You can have a micro culture that resists the macro culture, an exceptionalism in one town, one region, one college, one very online community, but if we aren’t going to just sink into civilizational old age, at some point this nonconformism has to break out and actually change the world. You need your weird art scenesters to reshape the movie business, your trads to build cathedrals as well as home-school co-ops, your high-fertility exceptions to retain their fecundity while adding more non-zealous normies to their ranks, your populists and radicals to actually govern effectively, not just gripe and critique. And so far, we have only scanty models of this happening.

(This issue applies to the Amish and Mennonites as well. I don’t think insular religious subcultures could take over the West the way Christians took over the Roman Empire, because their current success depends on their insularity. To exert real influence of the kind the early Christians gained, they would have to shed some of that separatism, and once they did so, they would immediately be subject to the same homogenizing forces as everyone else.)

I also worry — and this is a running disagreement I’ve had with Andreessen — that the pull of online reality and headset-mediated simulations almost automatically carries us toward a variation on the Crichton dystopia, a version of stagnation that’s sustained by the illusion of exploration, an age of fundamental conformity disguised by the personal tailoring of everyone’s private holodeck.

Andreessen often worries , and reasonably so, about how A.I. could be co-opted by a culture of conformity, deployed as a tool of ideological groupthink , the chat prompt’s minders herding everyone into the same narrow zone of speech and thought. But A.I. also seems like it could carry us more organically into a future of personalized illusions, comfortable numbness, simulated relationships and precision-guided digital addictions just as easily as into a future of A.I.-enabled artistic masterpieces, cancer cures, self-driving cars and Mars expeditions.

I think there’s hope of escape from the Crichton prophecy. But if we don’t escape, these will be the terms of our imprisonment: a wired-together environment that freezes us in place while being so perpetually stimulating and distracting that only the dropouts and the despairing notice what’s really going on.

Razib Khan on how cities make and break civilizations.

Alexandra Walsham on early modern atheism .

Michael Brendan Dougherty on the inescapable 1990s .

Josh Dzieza on the World Wide Web in the depths of the sea .

Ruxandra Teslo on a proposed cure for cavities .

Tyler Cowen interviews Peter Thiel.

Advertisements for Myself

I’ll be speaking at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Fla., this coming Tuesday, April 23, at 7 p.m., on the future of the Catholic Church. The event is free and open to the public.

Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author, most recently, of “The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.” @ DouthatNYT • Facebook

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Key facts about the abortion debate in America

What the data says about abortion in the U.S.

Research Topics

6 Common Leadership Styles — and How to Decide Which to Use When

Partner Center

Ross Douthat

Advertisements for Myself

VISITING ASSISTANT PROFESSOR NON FICTION WRITING

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