Social Liberalism: Difference between revisions

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|caption = "The sense of justice is continuous with the love of mankind. "
|caption = "The sense of justice is continuous with the love of mankind. "
|aliases = [[File:Soclib.png]] SocLib <br> [[File:Socdem.png]] Diet [[Social Democracy|SocDem]] <br> [[File:Demcr.png]] [[Syncretic Liberalism|Modern Liberalism]] ([[File:Cball-US.png]] United States) <br> [[File:Demlib.png]] [[Third Way|New Liberalism]] ([[File:Cball-UK.png]] United Kingdom) <br>[[File:WelfLib.png]] [[Welfarism|Welfare Liberalism]] <br> [[File:ProgLib.png]] [[Progressivism|Progressive Liberalism]] <br>[[File:Leftliberalism-icon.png]] Left-Liberalism ([[File:Cball-Germany.png]] Germany) <br> [[File:FDRismF.png]] New Deal Liberalism / New Dealism<br>[[File:Yabl.png]] Yavlinskyism<br>[[File:Radlib.png]] Cortezism ([[File:Cball-Russia.png]] Russia)<br>[[File:Mill.png]] Millism <br> [[File:Keynes.png]] [[Keynesianism|Keynesian Liberalism]]
|aliases = [[File:Soclib.png]] SocLib <br> [[File:Socdem.png]] Diet [[Social Democracy|SocDem]] <br> [[File:Demcr.png]] [[Syncretic Liberalism|Modern Liberalism]] ([[File:Cball-US.png]] United States) <br> [[File:Demlib.png]] [[Liberalism|New Liberalism]] ([[File:Cball-UK.png]] United Kingdom) <br>[[File:WelfLib.png]] [[Welfarism|Welfare Liberalism]] <br> [[File:ProgLib.png]] [[Progressivism|Progressive Liberalism]] <br>[[File:Leftliberalism-icon.png]] Left-Liberalism ([[File:Cball-Germany.png]] Germany) <br> [[File:FDRismF.png]] New Deal Liberalism / New Dealism<br>[[File:Yabl.png]] Yavlinskyism<br>[[File:Radlib.png]] Cortezism ([[File:Cball-Russia.png]] Russia)<br>[[File:Mill.png]] Millism <br> [[File:Keynes.png]] [[Keynesianism|Keynesian Liberalism]]
|alignments =
|alignments =
[[File:Libunity-yellow.png]] [[:Category:Libertarian Unity|LibUnity]] <br> [[File:Lib.png]] [[:Category:Liberals|Liberals]] <br>
[[File:Libunity-yellow.png]] [[:Category:Libertarian Unity|LibUnity]] <br> [[File:Lib.png]] [[:Category:Liberals|Liberals]] <br>

Revision as of 15:54, 29 November 2021

Template:Featured

Social Liberalism (SocLib) also called Left-Liberalism (LeftLib), Modern Liberalism (ModLib), Welfare Liberalism (WelLib) and New Liberalism (NewLib) is an economically center, civically liberal, and culturally progressive political ideology which combines elements of liberal democracy and economic interventionism in the name of "ensuring economic justice as well as civil liberty". Social Liberals view the common good as harmonious with individual freedom. Much of Social Liberalism's success is due to the fact that it's polices have gained broad support across the political spectrum because of it's reform-minded polices that address societal problems without overhauling the capitalist economic system. As economic circumstances became more dire in places, many were more willing to accept social liberalism since it seemed to be less radical and evil than other forms of left-wing government. Becasue of this, Social liberalism has been characterized by cooperation between businesses, government and labor unions. Many governments throughout the modern world have successfully adopted social liberal policies, and is now the dominant form of liberalism in North America, where it's often referred to as simply 'liberalism'.

History

Heavily inspired by his father Radicalism, SocLib began to take his first steps in the late 19th century as welfare states around the world started to grow. But it didn't become a more fully developed ideology until the post-war period when numerous Western democracies throughout the world began to implement social liberal policies in the aftermath of World War II.

United Kingdom

Social Liberalism started in the United Kingdom at the end of the 19th century as a trend within the Liberal Party that moved away from laissez-faire economics, accepting certain market regulations, and moved more towards a social welfare system and from the more traditional classical liberal deontological view of morality to a more utilitarian view of morality based on the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham.

The most influential figure behind the move towards this kind of liberalism is the English philosopher John Stuart Mill, who believed in certainly free markets along with welfare systems to assure equal opportunities.

The New Liberals

In the late 19th century and early 20th century, a group called the New Liberals began to argue against the laissez-faire economic system of classical liberalism and argued in favor of state interventionism in the economy as a way to ensure individual liberty would be secured under favorable social and economic circumstances.

The Liberal Party, one of the two major political parties in the UK during the 19th and early 20th century, established the foundations of the welfare state in the United Kingdom before World War I. These liberal welfare reforms included progressive taxation, pensions for poor elderly people, and the National Insurance Act of 1911 which established health, sickness and unemployment insurance. At this time, big bussiness owners, who regularly opposed these reforms, started to leave the Liberal Party to join the Conservative Party. The welfare state in the United Kingdom became more robust after World War II, mainly due to the efforts of the Labour Party, and was heavily inspired by the economics of John Maynard Keynes and the welfare system of William Beveridge.

In modern day United Kingdom, Social Liberalism is most prominently represented by the Liberal Democrats and has had a strong influence on the Labour Party.

Germany

In the 1860s, some left-liberal politicians in Germany started to establish trade unions with the goal of improving worker conditions through cooperation between employees and employers. By the 1870s, some liberal economists were promoting social reform that rejected classical economics and supported an alternative to classical liberalism and File:Soc.png Socialist Revolution.

In the 19th century, the German left-liberal movement began to fragment into new parties including the German Progress Party. The main objectives of these parties were free speech, freedom of assembly, representative government, and protection of private property but they were opposed to the creation of a welfare state which they called state socialism.

The Protestant pastor Friedrich Naumann founded the National-Social Association Party in 1896 which proposed a mix of nationalism, christian socialism, and social liberalism. He attempted to use this party to draw workers away from Marxism but it only lasted for roughly seven years and was unable to win any seats.

In the Weimar Republic, the German Democratic Party was founded in 1918. It had both a social-liberal and classical liberal wing. It heavily favored republicanism over monarchism. It's ideas consisted of a socially balanced economy with solidarity, duty and rights among all workers, but it struggled due to the economic sanctions of the Treaty of Versailles.

In 1932, the economist Alexander Rüstow called his version of social liberalism Neoliberalism, although that term now carries a meaning different from the one proposed by Rüstow. His form of liberalism provided an alternative to File:Soc.png socialism and to the classical liberal economics developed in the German Empire. In 1938, Alexander Rüstow attended the Colloque Walter Lippmann conference. There, Rüstow advocated a strong state to enforce free markets and state intervention to correct market failures.

Following World War II, Rüstow's neoliberalism, now usually called ordoliberalism or the social market economy, was adopted by the West German government under Ludwig Erhard, who was the Minister of Economics and later became Chancellor. Price controls were lifted and free markets were introduced. While these policies are credited with Germany's post-war economic recovery, the welfare state—which had been established under Bismarck—became increasingly costly.

After 1945, the Free Democrats included most of the social liberals while others joined the Christian Democratic Union of Germany. Until the 1960s, post-war ordoliberalism was the model for Germany. It had theoretical influence of social liberalism based on duty and rights. As the Free Democrats discarded social liberal ideas in favor of more conservative and economical liberal approach in 1982, some members left the party and formed the social liberal Liberal Democrats.

United States

American political discourse resisted this social turn in European liberalism. In the United States, the term social liberalism was used to differentiate it from classical liberalism or laissez-faire, which dominated political and economic thought for a number of years until the term branched off from it around the Great Depression and the New Deal.

In the 1870s and the 1880s, the American economists Richard Ely, John Bates Clark and Henry Carter Adams—influenced both by File:Soc.png socialism and the Evangelical Protestant movement—castigated the conditions caused by industrial factories and expressed sympathy towards labor unions. However, none developed a systematic political philosophy and they later abandoned their flirtations with File:Soc.png socialist thinking. In 1883, Lester Frank Ward published the two-volume Dynamic Sociology and formalized the basic tenets of social liberalism while at the same time attacking the laissez-faire policies advocated by Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. The historian Henry Steele Commager ranked Ward alongside William James, John Dewey and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and called him the father of the modern welfare state. Writing from 1884 until the 1930s, John Dewey—an educator influenced by Hobhouse, Green and Ward—advocated File:Soc.png socialist methods to achieve liberal goals. Some social liberal ideas were later incorporated into the New Deal, which developed as a response to the Great Depression when Franklin D. Roosevelt came into office.

While the economic policies of the New Deal appeared Keynesian, there was no revision of liberal theory in favor of greater state initiative. Even though the United States lacked an effective File:Soc.png socialist movement, New Deal policies often appeared radical and were attacked by the right. The separate development of modern liberalism in the United States is often attributed to American exceptionalism, which kept mainstream American ideology within a narrow range.

John Rawls' principal work A Theory of Justice (1971) can be considered a flagship exposition of social liberal thinking, advocating the combination of individual freedom and a fairer distribution of resources. According to Rawls, every individual should be allowed to choose and pursue his or her own conception of what is desirable in life, while a socially just distribution of goods must be maintained. Rawls argued that differences in material wealth are tolerable if general economic growth and wealth also benefit the poorest. A Theory of Justice countered utilitarian thinking in the tradition of Jeremy Bentham, instead following the Kantian concept of a social contract, picturing society as a mutual agreement between rational citizens, producing rights and duties as well as establishing and defining roles and tasks of the state. Rawls put the equal liberty principle in the first place, providing every person with equal access to the same set of fundamental liberties, followed by the fair equality of opportunity and difference principle, thus allowing social and economic inequalities under the precondition that privileged positions are accessible to everyone, that everyone has equal opportunities and that even the least advantaged members of society benefit from this framework. This was later restated in the equation of Justice as Fairness. Rawls proposed these principles not just to adherents of liberalism, but as a basis for all democratic politics, regardless of ideology. The work advanced social liberal ideas immensely within the 1970s political and philosophic academia. Rawls may therefore be seen as a "patron saint" of social liberalism.

In recent US history, both former democratic President Barrack Obama and current democratic President Joe Biden have incorporated social liberal principles and policies throughout their presidencies.


Beliefs

SocLib believes in modestly regulated capitalism with a large social safety net in a similar vein to Social Democracy. Unlike more leftist ideologies, however, SocLib believes that it's best for such a system to have taxes and regulations low enough to create as much tax revenue as realistically possible for the social programs while also providing as much economic freedom to the people as is practical.

Personality

Social Liberalism acts like a stereotypical western urban/suburban middle-class millennial. He's very modern and loves to read analytic philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, and John Stuart Mill. He's also a massive DGGer.

How to Draw

File:Soclib flag(2).png
Flag of Social Liberalism

The Social Liberal design is the Social Democratic Rose in the Liberal colours of Blue and Gold.

  1. Draw a ball,
  2. Fill it with the same shade of blue as Liberalism (#006AA7),
  3. Draw a rose in gold (#FFD700),
  4. Draw the eyes, and you're done!
Color Name HEX RGB
Blue #005C94 0, 92, 148
Gold #EEE8AA 238, 232, 170


Relationships

Friends

Frenemies

Enemies

Further Information

For overlapping political theory, see:

Liberalism, Social Democracy, Welfarism, File:Prog.png Progressivism, Keynesianism, Regulationism, and Third Way.

Literature

Wikipedia

People

Videos

Communities

Gallery

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