Liberalism

The individual comes first. People have rights the state can’t take away, governments need consent, and markets and tolerance are the defaults. Disputes inside liberalism are mostly about how big the state should be to make those rights real.

Classical liberalism wants a small “night-watchman” state: law, order, defense, and little else. Social liberalism argues that rights mean little without education, healthcare, and a floor under poverty — so the state should actively secure opportunity. Most center-left and center-right parties borrow from both.

Both, historically: liberals led revolutions for constitutions and free markets, and today “liberal” means center-right in much of Europe and center-left in the United States. On our dimensions, liberalism is liberty-first on civil liberties and typically center-right on economics.

Liberals celebrate change and individual choice; conservatives see institutions and customs as accumulated wisdom that change should not rush. They can ally on markets and the rule of law, and split on social issues and the pace of reform.

Libertarianism is classical liberalism taken further: taxes and regulation are treated as near-injustices and the state shrinks toward a minimum. Liberals generally accept taxation for public goods and some correction of markets.

Many carry the label: the UK Liberal Democrats, Germany’s FDP, the Dutch VVD, Canada’s Liberal Party — though the last governs well left of classical liberalism. In the US, “liberal” usually means the social-liberal center-left.

From the 17th–18th century Enlightenment — Locke, Montesquieu, Smith — and the American and French revolutions. It supplied the vocabulary of constitutional government, rights, and markets that nearly every modern democracy now speaks.

That it underestimates unequal starting points (the social-liberal reply), that markets produce concentrations of power liberalism itself distrusts, and that radical individualism can erode the communities individuals rely on.