1. Liberalism Sarah Richardson

2. Outline Definitions Common features Origins (England/France)
Challenges
Is Liberalism still relevant

3. Clegg & Cameron Nick Clegg (May 2010):
For me, that is what liberalism is all about: ensuring that everyone has the chance, no matter who they are and where they are from, to be the person they want to be. To live the life they want to live. You can call it fairness. You can call it responsibility. You can call it liberalism. Whatever words you use, the change it will make to your life is the same.
David Cameron (July 2010):
Let me briefly explain what the "big society" is and why it is such a powerful idea. You can call it liberalism. You can call it empowerment. You can call it freedom. You can call it responsibility. I call it the "big society".

4. Common Features
Individualism: it asserts the moral primacy of the person against the claims of any social collectivity
Egalitarian: claims all men are equal rejecting differences of moral worth between individuals
Universalist
Progressive: all social institutions and political systems are able to be continually improved.

5. Origins
Some Liberal ideas exist in ancient world – particularly classical Greece and Rome
But as a movement Liberalism has only existed since the 17th century.
Word is first used when the term was adopted by the Spanish political party the Liberales in 1812.
Roots of liberalism come from two very different traditions of English and French political thought.

6. England: Hobbes
Hobbes first expounds the idea of civil association: every man may pursue individualism without coming into conflict with other individuals
But also argues that ignorance and slavery are the natural conditions of man with enlightenment and freedom the exceptions.
Hobbes provided a context for the work of John Locke.

7. Title-page to Hobbes' Leviathan (London: Andrew Cooke, 1651)
An allegory of governance and the nature of civil and ecclesiastical authority. A crowned man (Leviathan) whose body is made of numerous human bodies, emerges from a mountain at the foot of which is a city, holding a sword in his left hand and a crozier in in right hand thus wielding both religious and secular power, and formed of men who have come together in a voluntary and artificial covenant to form a commonwealth
Bottom half contains ten framed allegories: Left side: castle, crown, cannon, military trophies, battle
Right side: church, bishop mitre, thunder, trident and forks, and assembly of magistrates

8. England: Locke
Locke ( ). Context: a Britain emerging from civil war and religious strife towards commercial prosperity.
Twin ideas: The contract theory of government. Basis of limited, constitutional govt (Two Treatises of Government, 1690) & religious toleration (‘A Letter on Toleration’, 1689)

9. Key concept: civil society of free men, equal under the rule of law, bound together by no common purpose but sharing respect for each others rights.
Incorporates doctrine of natural rights
Links private property with individual liberty

10. England: Adam Smith Wealth of Nations (1776) adds economic dimension
Smith merged the Hobbes/Locke ideas of civil society with economic theory.
Pre-eminence of laissez-faire or free trade economics in liberalism
Used concept of invisible hand where benevolent God administered a universe in which human happiness was maximised

11. France: Rousseau ROUSSEAU (1712-78).
Leading philosophe, contributed to the Encyclopdie of Diderot, and participated in the salons in Paris
His Social Contract (1762) and theory of `the general will’ demonstrate alternative origins of Liberalism.
Men must resolve problems through capacity to choose how we ought to live.

12. Social Contract "Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains".
Humans are essentially freebut the ‘progress' of civilization has substituted subservience to others for that freedom
Purpose of politics is to restore freedom to us by submitting our individual, particular wills to the collective or general will

13. Age of Classical Liberalism France
French Liberalism grappled with a series of challenges when compared to the English experience.
Dilemmas faced by French liberals: how to ‘end’ the French Revolution how to reconcile order and liberty in a nation torn apart by civil war called for a rethinking of Liberalism
3 major figures: Alexis de Tocqueville, Benjamin Constant and Francois Guizot.

14. Delacroix – Liberty leading the people (1830)

15. Guizot (1787-1874) His father executed during the Terror.
Became professor at the Sorbonne at the age of 25 and member of the doctrinaires.
Guizot `deconstructed’ the French Revolution, and distinguished between moderate liberalism and extremist Jacobinism.
Resorted to selective readings of the past, one that emphasised continuities but he acknowledged the development of political institutions was dependent on the social conditions in which they operated.

16. Age of Classical Liberalism England
Liberal society par excellence?
Classical variant of liberalism challenged by new liberalism.
Important legislation: Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, the Reform Act of 1832 and the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 (Cobden & Bright)
But this classic ‘night-watchman’ state never achieved even in Britain.

17. Moderate Liberalism constitutional monarchy
civil liberties but can be curtailed against revolutionary threats
Free trade         
religious toleration
belief in gradual progress rather than revolution.
limited ‘nightwatchman’ state

18. Ford Madox Brown - Work

19. John Stuart Mill ( )
Work included logic and metaphysics, history and literature, economics and political theory.
Learned Greek at three, Latin a little later; by the age of 12, he was a competent logician and by 16 a well-trained economist.
At 20 he suffered a nervous breakdown
Utilitarianism: ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’.
Mill: should maximise human development for a better society

20. Wordle from On Liberty

21. On Liberty
Government might be antagonistic to the causes of individual freedom
Sole purpose of government is “self-protection”
May only coerce others in self-defence
Individuality and self development
Anti-paternalism
Representative Government
Chapters on Socialism

22. But…. Where are the women?!
Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)
Attack on patriarchy and paternalism
Demand for women’s rights to education, property, in marriage, etc.

23. Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill Mill’s dedication to On Liberty: Like all that I have written for many years, it belongs as much to her as to me…

24. The Subjection of Women (1869)
‘The vilest malefactor has some wretched woman tied to him, against whom he can commit any atrocity except killing her, and, if tolerably cautious, can do that without much danger of the legal penalty.’
But there are fundamental issues about liberal understandings of rights, in relation to property, control of reproduction etc., that has made the liberal tradition one that women have rarely wholeheartedly committed to.
Waves of feminism:
1st Equal liberal rights 19thth C
2nd Women’s distinctive claims and substantive rights (1960s)
3rd moving away from universalist account of women and interests (1990s)

25. Challenges to Liberalism
from above: conservative upper classes
from below: socialism 
religion
Great Depression, : prompts moves away from free trade
militarism and imperialism

26. Liberal upsurge?
Growth of prosperity & decline of traditional industry has encouraged individualism
Experience of communism has made liberal concerns with ‘freedom’  more relevant
Decline of belief in utopias and revolutionary violence
Role of America, where liberalism was never replaced by socialism?
But which variety of Liberalism is dominant?

28. Challenges to modern Liberalism
There are two faces of liberalism: political and economic
Economically liberal states may be in the majority but autocracies remain prevalent
Eg China unprecedented economic growth rate over the last three decades but remains authoritarian
Populace is “prepared to accept autocratic government so long as economic growth continues.” 
Instead of the liberal order that was so predicted at end of Cold War, conventions of global politics are diverging

29. Procedural liberalism
Aims for fundamental agreement on processes – concerned to protect the rights of participants – but to allow whatever outcomes these processes produce as legitimate.
Liberal societies regarded as fair because people have their say – not because they get their way.
Raises questions about what personal, educational, intellectual, etc., resources people need for effective participation in these processes; and Qs about the culture in which those processes are conducted.
What level of self-censorship is appropriate to the public forum?
What are the threats: Trump, Brexit, austerity, increasing fragility of procedures over outcomes
Procedures need at least three components:
Impartiality, transparency, determinacy

30. Twentieth-century patterns of governance

31. Mapping Liberalism (freedom?) 2018

32. Concluding questions Is liberalism solely a western ideology?
As an ideology is it fit for purpose in the contemporary? In economic (global economic crisis/quantitative easing etc) and/or political (% of autocratic regimes unwilling to embrace democracy) terms
What are the limits of classical liberalism?