To What Extent Has Modern Liberalism Departed from Classical Liberalism 40

Conservatism is a classic ideology that defends and promote existing traditional arrangement by encouraging structured community is maintained while ensuring common values to the people. They tends to oppose liberalist as the see liberalism as an ideology that preaches individualism rather than encouraging more benefits that a group of people or society can bring to people in general. The benefit would be much, should such group exists and well maintained within the society (Shively,

Another area in which it is suggested that modern liberalism has departed from classical liberalism is freedom. Classical liberals believe in negative freedom. This is simply that there should be an absence of external constraints on the individual and as such they should be left alone to make their own choices. In this way classical liberals were heavily influenced by the natural rights theories of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson claimed that we were born with inalienable rights and therefore no individual or government had the right to take these away. Freedom from constraints is therefore an essential condition for exercising these rights. In practise, this has meant that classical liberals have advocated a minimal state or what John Locke referred to as the ‘night-watchman state’. The activities of this state should be limited to the enforcement of contracts, maintaining order and protection from foreign threats to prevent the state from infringing on individual liberties as much as possible.

Classical Liberalism is against government interventionism in all realms of life. They believe that everyone should be treated equally regardless of income. This differs from reform liberalism, as they want government intervention to guarantee equality of opportunity. This is made possible by progressive income tax, government regulation on big business, and social welfare. In My opinion Classical Liberalism is superior as its fair and easier to implement than reform Liberalism.

One has to try as much as possible to try to preserve the rest of humankind from any evil that can happen to the other people. Neo-liberalism emphasizes that all being are equal and independent and no man is supposed to harm each other’s innocent life, health or possession as it recognizes all being as workmanship of on omnipotent (God). Moreover, no man that has the liberty to destroy himself and man should not have more than other hence encourage sharing such thing as power. For example, although people punish each other for transgressions, the offender has the right to seek forgiveness from the offended and can assist the offended to recover from the offended to make satisfaction for the harm he or she suffered. On the other hand, classic liberalism encourages the practice of individualism. For example, the essential feature of individualism from the elements provided by Christianity and the philosophy of classical antiquity was first completely developed during the Renaissance and from that time, it has grown and spread into what is today recognized as Western European civilization. Classic liberalism emphasizes on freedom and liberty hence encouraging men to develop their own individual gifts and bents. Whenever, small one man’s sphere is, he is encouraged to view and observe himself as supreme (Friedrich 7-14).

However, I consider the tensions and differences between classical and modern liberalists to be far more apparent when scrutinising this ideology.

The main thing that the classical liberals focus on is people’s freedoms which they didn’t have under feudalism. In the classical liberal tradition they also begin to focus more on using science to explain things rather than only using religion and god.

Modern and Classical liberalism can be distinguished historically. Indeed when most people attempt to distinguish the two, placing the strands into time periods is perhaps the most obvious and easiest distinctions to make. The period in between the late 18th century and the mid 19th is that magnanimous with Classical liberalism. It was the earliest liberal tradition, and reached its high point during the early industrialization of the 19th century and is therefore sometimes referred to as ‘19th century liberalism’. Politicians and thinkers associated with it are Smith, Ricardo and Locke. Modern liberal ideas were related to the further development of industrialization and thus people associate it with the period between the mid-19th century and the mid-20th century and with figures such as J. S. Mill, Green and Lloyd- George. Indeed the historical development of society led to a parallel evolution of liberalism, with the character of liberalism changing as the ‘rising middle classes’ succeeded in establishing their economic and political dominance. Liberalism was no longer radical or revolutionary, but had become increasingly conservative and concerned itself less with change and reform, but instead with the maintenance of the status quo. This lead to liberals in the late 19th century beginning to question the

Classical liberalism allow an individual to use primary social value of liberty in the political culture that extent until liberties of the others disturbed. Classical liberal ideas often form the basis for opposition to the use of government to attain social and personal objectives. They stress reliance on private the free market to determine the best outcomes rather than the private initiatives [1].

It was the government role to attempt to provide support for its citizens by overcoming poverty, disease and ignorance. Modern liberals defend welfarism on the basis of equality of opportunity. If particular individuals or groups are disadvantaged by their social circumstances, then the state possess a social responsibility to reduce or remove these disadvantages to create equal life chances. The effort made by both early liberals and modern liberals to enhance equality among human beings illustrated their full support to the principle of

Classical liberalism is the transition from focusing on government to focusing on the rights of individuals. This transition came about during the time of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment period was when man started to have more faith in his own reasoning. People began to look for evidence on their beliefs themselves and to find proof on these beliefs, so that they could come up with their own opinions on things. One way that they did this was by going back and rereading Roman and Greek texts and retranslating these texts. This new way of thinking also caused the Protestant Reformation to occur. Some of the most influential Enlightenment writers were John Locke, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and the people of France’s National Constituent Assembly.

Classical liberalism is an ideology that is usually unfavorable to using authority of the state other than ensuring rights and liberties. Government and individuals agree to protect people’s rights and allow for maximum freedom. Laissez-faire focuses on the liberty of an individual and the lack of social equality. Laissez-faire capitalism is where people are unrestricted to invest in what the prices of services will be, what the produce will sell at. In a modern welfare-state capitalism has influenced our understanding of the terms of the social contract because they practice a system of mixed capitalist that have rules by the government for businesses and marketing.

Classical liberalism comes from as an intellectual response to the Industrial Revolution and the problems with urbanization. (Epstein, pg. 2) Seeing that humans are self interested and will go after self interested situations, liberalism was seen to be used to back that fact. With self interest, came the financial standpoint of which people stood. Classical liberalism is sought to use trade and commerce to drive a strong international peace and bonds worldwide while also limiting the government. (Epstein, pg. 6) This was mainly used between Europe and America since there was not a high amount of ‘worldwide’ trade like there is today. Now we have a bounty of international and national trade which make the world today

Although liberals agree about the value of liberty, their views on what it means to be ‘free’ vary significantly. It was Isaiah Berlin who first created the concepts of negative and positive freedom that helped to differentiate between the two liberals’ views of freedom. The concept of negative freedom was adopted by classical liberals, who believed that freedom was defined as being left alone and free from interference. Classical liberals believed

Classical liberalism is a very interesting political theory. The underlying belief is that what makes a person human is freedom from the dependence on the will of others. It is complete freedom from any relations with others, except those entered voluntarily. Another main point of classical liberalism is that the individual is the owner of his person and his capacities, for which he owes nothing to society. The individual, although free, has no power to limit anyone else's freedom. Classical liberalism includes the following: an ethical emphasis on the individual as a rights-bearer prior to the existence of any state, community, or society, the support of the right of property carried to its economic

Another concept which is introduced is economic liberalism. It is defined as that the states do not intervene in the matters related to economy rather on the individuals. Economic liberalism and neoliberalism are separate entities from liberalism. In oxford English dictionary describes economic liberalism as,