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HISTORY AND PEOPLE OF MODERN LIBERALISM. Several prominent socialist ideologies that emerged at the time included: Marxism and utopia socialism. Marxism is best associated with Karl Marx and the system of ideas he established in his books ‘The Communist Manifesto’ and ‘Das Kapital’.
- Welfare State
The welfare state is best associated with the 20th century...
- Herbert Hoover
Herbert Hoover was the 31st President of the United States....
- Karl Marx
Karl Marx was born on May 5th, 1818 in Trier, Prussia which...
- Robert Owen
Robert Owen was a British industrialist who lived from 1771...
- Utopian Socialism
Robert Owen was a British industrialist who lived from 1771...
- Child Labor
The Industrial Revolution was a major event in world history...
- Marxism
Marxism is a form of socialism that occurred after the...
- Horrible Working Conditions
The final aspect of the working conditions that people faced...
- Welfare State
- Overview
- The modern liberal program
- World War I and the Great Depression
- Postwar liberalism to the 1960s
Such, at any rate, was the verdict reached by an increasing number of liberals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As noted above, modern liberals held that the point of government is to remove the obstacles that stand in the way of individual freedom. In this they followed the lead of thinkers and reformers such as the British political philosopher T.H. Green. According to Green, the excessive powers of government may have constituted the greatest obstacles to freedom in an earlier day, but by the middle of the 19th century these powers had been greatly reduced or mitigated. The time had come, therefore, to recognize hindrances of another kind—such as poverty, disease, discrimination, and ignorance—which individuals could overcome only with the positive assistance of government. The new liberal program was thus to enlist the powers of government in the cause of individual freedom. Society, acting through government, was to establish public schools and hospitals, aid the needy, and regulate working conditions to promote workers’ health and well-being, for only through public support could the poor and powerless members of society truly become free.
Although most liberals eventually adopted this new course, there were some dissenters, notably the influential social Darwinists Herbert Spencer in England and William Graham Sumner in the United States. As the term Darwinists indicates, these writers thought of politics, economics, and society in general in evolutionary terms. Like Paine, they regarded government as at best a necessary evil—not, however, because it coerces but because it too often interferes with the struggle for survival that nature imposes on human beings as much as on other species (see natural selection). Helping the poor and the weak, they argued, impedes individual freedom and retards social progress by holding back the strong and the fit. The social Darwinists concluded that the sole responsibility of government must be to protect the lives and property of the people—that is, to be nothing more than a “night watchman.”
Such, at any rate, was the verdict reached by an increasing number of liberals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As noted above, modern liberals held that the point of government is to remove the obstacles that stand in the way of individual freedom. In this they followed the lead of thinkers and reformers such as the British political philosopher T.H. Green. According to Green, the excessive powers of government may have constituted the greatest obstacles to freedom in an earlier day, but by the middle of the 19th century these powers had been greatly reduced or mitigated. The time had come, therefore, to recognize hindrances of another kind—such as poverty, disease, discrimination, and ignorance—which individuals could overcome only with the positive assistance of government. The new liberal program was thus to enlist the powers of government in the cause of individual freedom. Society, acting through government, was to establish public schools and hospitals, aid the needy, and regulate working conditions to promote workers’ health and well-being, for only through public support could the poor and powerless members of society truly become free.
Although most liberals eventually adopted this new course, there were some dissenters, notably the influential social Darwinists Herbert Spencer in England and William Graham Sumner in the United States. As the term Darwinists indicates, these writers thought of politics, economics, and society in general in evolutionary terms. Like Paine, they regarded government as at best a necessary evil—not, however, because it coerces but because it too often interferes with the struggle for survival that nature imposes on human beings as much as on other species (see natural selection). Helping the poor and the weak, they argued, impedes individual freedom and retards social progress by holding back the strong and the fit. The social Darwinists concluded that the sole responsibility of government must be to protect the lives and property of the people—that is, to be nothing more than a “night watchman.”
The further development of liberalism in Europe was brutally interrupted in 1914–18 by the prolonged slaughter of World War I. The war overturned four of Europe’s great imperial dynasties—Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Ottoman Turkey—and thus at first appeared to give added impetus to liberal democracy. Europe was reshaped by the Treaty of Versailles on the principle of national self-determination, which in practice meant the breakup of the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires into nationally homogeneous states. The League of Nations was created in the hope that negotiation would replace war as a means of settling international disputes.
But the trauma of the war had created widespread disillusionment about the entire liberal view of progress toward a more humane world. The harsh peace terms imposed by the victorious Allies, together with the misery created by the Great Depression, beginning in 1929, enfeebled Germany’s newly established Weimar Republic and set the stage for the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. In Italy, meanwhile, dissatisfaction with the peace settlement led directly to the takeover by the Fascist Party in 1922. Liberalism was also threatened by Soviet communism, which seemed to many to have inherited the hopes for progress earlier associated with liberalism itself.
While liberalism came under political attack in the interwar period, the Great Depression threatened the very survival of the market economy. The boom-and-bust character of the business cycle had long been a major defect of market economies, but the Great Depression, with its seemingly endless downturn in business activity and its soaring levels of unemployment, confounded classical economists and produced real pessimism about the viability of capitalism.
The wrenching hardships inflicted by the Great Depression eventually convinced Western governments that complex modern societies needed some measure of rational economic planning. The New Deal (1933–39), the domestic program undertaken by Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt to lift the United States out of the Great Depression, typified modern liberalism in its vast expansion of the scope of governmental activities and its increased regulation of business. Among the measures that New Deal legislation provided were emergency assistance and temporary jobs to the unemployed, restrictions on banking and financial industries, more power for trade unions to organize and bargain with employers, and establishment of the Social Security program of retirement benefits and unemployment and disability insurance. In his influential work The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), the liberal British economist John Maynard Keynes introduced an economic theory that argued that government management of the economy could smooth out the highs and lows of the business cycle to produce more or less consistent growth with minimal unemployment.
Liberalism, in strategic alliance with Soviet communism, ultimately triumphed over fascism in World War II, and liberal democracy was reestablished in West Germany, Italy, and Japan. As western Europe, North America, and Japan entered a period of steady economic growth and unprecedented prosperity after the war, attention shifted to the institutional factors that prevented such economies from fully realizing their productive potential, especially during periods of mass unemployment and depression. Great Britain, the United States, and other Western industrialized nations committed their national governments to promoting full employment, the maximum use of their industrial capacity, and the maximum purchasing power of their citizenry. The old rhetoric about “sharing the wealth” gave way to a concentration on growth rates, as liberals—inspired by Keynes—used the government’s power to borrow, tax, and spend not merely to counter contractions of the business cycle but to encourage expansion of the economy. Here, clearly, was a program less disruptive of class harmony and the basic consensus essential to a democracy than the old Robin Hood method of taking from the rich and giving to the poor.
A further and final expansion of social welfare programs occurred in the liberal democracies during the postwar decades. Notable measures were undertaken in Britain by the Labour government of Prime Minister Clement Attlee and in the United States by the Democratic administration of Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson as part of his Great Society program of national reforms. These measures created the modern welfare state, which provided not only the usual forms of social insurance but also pensions, unemployment benefits, subsidized medical care, family allowances, and government-funded higher education. By the 1960s social welfare was thus provided “from the cradle to the grave” throughout much of western Europe—particularly in the Scandinavian countries—and in Japan and Canada and to a lesser extent in the United States.
The defenders of what is sometime called “the mixed economy welfare state” are called “modern liberals.” It became their job to defend government intervention as such – against the laissez faire ideal of classical liberalism.
Nov 28, 1996 · 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.
The chapter considers classical versus modern liberalism, the divide within liberal theory between liberalism and libertarianism, and liberal opposition to absolutism, religious authority, and capitalism. It also discusses liberalism as a theory for the individual, society, and the state.
Dr. Gregory Millard and Dr. Valérie Vézina. There are a number of important divisions within the liberal tradition. At the most abstract level, there is a deep disagreement over how to justify liberalism’s core principles.
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Jul 1, 2007 · This chapter assesses the rise of modern liberalism by examining the works of selected theorists and their fellow liberal critics. The first section summarizes the origins and subsequent development of modern liberal thinking on the family by examining the works of Hugo Grotius and Johannes Althusius, followed by contractarian (Thomas Hobbes ...
