Liberalism

In this paper I am going to explain about liberalism in contemporary political philosophy as written by Alan Ryan. I will give the meaning of liberalism, the varieties of liberalism, liberal antipathies, liberal prescription, success or failure, critics and finally my conclusion.

To start with, “In political philosophy liberalism is a name given to a range of views which take as their central value liberty or freedom” This thought rose in early modern English political philosophy in the works of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, also, in European enlightenment in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The deepest commitment of liberal political philosophy is individualism.

When dealing with this issue of liberalism, we may face the question about the liberalism and liberalisms. It is easy to list the liberals but hard to say what they have in common. Some do not agree about the boundaries of toleration, the legitimacy of the welfare state, and the virtues of democracy. They even do not agree on the nature of the liberty they think liberals ought to seek. Talking about liberalism we have conservatives and socialists. You can differentiate them only in dealing with issues by issue. For example the conservative who opposes railway nationalisation and supports government subsidies of defence contractors, while the liberal who support the establishment of an ethics committee to investigate the ethics of school teachers.

In addition, there are some factors which lead to indefinability of political terms. One of them being, the terms are used as terms of praise in political struggle; this modern version of Hobbes view that disputed definitions are the result of competing interests. For example the communitarianism emerges as the movement against liberalism. Another factor is that political terms are essentially contested terms; terms whose meaning is open to debate question after question for example ‘what is liberty?’

Furthermore, we have varieties of liberalism whereby we...