Social Liberalism
Social Liberalism (SocLib) also called Left-Liberalism (LeftLib), Modern Liberalism (ModLib), Welfare Liberalism (WelLib) and New Liberalism (NewLib) is an economically center-left to 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
The Social Liberal design is the Social Democratic Rose in the Liberal colours of Blue and Gold.
- Draw a ball,
- Fill it with the same shade of blue as Liberalism (#006AA7),
- Draw a rose in gold (#FFD700),
- Draw the eyes, and you're done!
Color Name | HEX | RGB | |
---|---|---|---|
Blue | #005C94 | 0, 92, 148 | |
Gold | #EEE8AA | 238, 232, 170 |
Relationships
Friends
Radicalism - My father, and greatest influence.
Classical Liberalism - My grandfather and second greatest influence.
Social Democracy - A slightly more regulationist version of myself. We often govern together.
Liberalism - Liberal Gang! Thanks for creating such a great system!
Georgism - We have so much in common.
Keynesianism - He have some very good ideas but I don't like his opinion on military matters.
Neo-Keynesianism - Not very different from his father, although his spending habits are weird.
Social Capitalism &
Social Libertarianism - Believes in having a moderate welfare state, but wants freer markets.
Ordo-Liberalism - We share the principle of moderately regulated markets with a welfare state.
Nordic Model - Same as Ordo-liberalism.
Bull Moose Progressivism - My cool older cousin. Hope you don't mind if I borrowed some of your notes for the New Deal cuz.
- File:Progress.png Progressivism - Helping out the poor, protecting civil liberties? What's not to like?
Regulationism - Taught me that sometimes markets need rules and regulations.
Technoliberalism - Fellow centrist liberal. You have some interesting takes, not gonna lie.
Frenemies
Libertarianism - Yeah,
Capitalism’s a great system, but it needs
regulation, and having too small a government means that citizens rights could be threatened. Also stop calling me a commie, I’m not
Liberal Socialism!
Third Way
- You are okay, but sometimes I feel like you're getting a bit too close to him
and further from us
.
Left-Wing Populism - Sometimes helpful for me, but he's still too radical.
Social Authoritarianism - Your economic ideas are ok, but you scare me.
Liberal Socialism - You're kinda like me, but take things a bit too far.
Social Georgism - LVT is a fairly radical idea, the voters may not be down with it.
Neoliberalism - I like some of your ideas, but shouldn't there be more welfare programs?
National Liberalism - Heh, if it isn't this Mr. "I'm too cool for
Alt-Right" himself. Although, I'll admit that working with you isn't always so bad.
Tridemism
- That health care system is nice, but why is it so hard for you to face what you did? Also stop calling me Green Taliban!!!
Longism - If I borrow some of your "Sharing the Wealth" ideas, will you stop bugging me for not going far enough? And stop working with the mob!
Enemies
Marxism–Leninism - I'M A LEFTIST, OK?! Anyways, you are somewhat racist and authoritarian you commie.
National Socialism - Didn't I kicked your genocidal ass out of Europe?
National Bolshevism - Combines the worse of the 2 above.
Showa Statism - That's what you get for sneak attacking me!
Neoconservatism - My primary opponent in American elections, we need to bring home the troops
unless I was the one who sent them there in the first place!State Liberalism - You are a fucking SJW asshole who gives both File:Prog.png Progressivism and
Liberalism a bad name! Also, You claimed to be a liberal, yet You're very authoritarian! HYPOCRISY AT ITS FINEST! I HATE YOU!
Marxist Feminism - I was the original feminist. You're an embarasment to our movment
Further Information
For overlapping political theory, see:
![](http://static.miraheze.org/polcompballwiki/8/8b/Lib.png)
![](http://static.miraheze.org/polcompballwiki/2/27/Socdem.png)
![](http://static.miraheze.org/polcompballwiki/c/c0/Welf.png)
![](http://static.miraheze.org/polcompballwiki/a/af/Keynes.png)
![](http://static.miraheze.org/polcompballwiki/0/0d/Regulationism.png)
![](http://static.miraheze.org/polcompballwiki/c/c4/3way.png)
Literature
- On Liberty, Principles of Political Economy and On Socialism by John Stuart Mill
- The Liberal Revolution and Liberal consciousness and working class by Piero Gobetti
- A Theory of Justice by John Rawls
- Liberalism is the best Cure for Poverty by Dirk Verhofstadt
- The New Liberalism: Reconciling Liberty and Community by Avital Simhoni and Davis Weinstein
- Towards a Socio-Liberal Theory of World Development by Arno Tausch and Fred Prager
- Two Concepts of Liberty by Isaiah Berlin
- Rights From Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights by Alan Dershowitz
- The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman
Wikipedia
People
John Stuart Mill
John Maynard Keynes
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Harry S. Truman
John F. Kennedy
Robert Kennedy
Lyndon B. Johnson
Jimmy Carter
Karl Popper
Anthony Giddens
Pierre Trudeau
Justin Trudeau
John Rawls
Al Gore
Wen Jiabao
Moon Jae-in
Tsai Ing-wen
Jan Björklund
Elizabeth Warren
Andrew Yang
Ro Khanna
Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya
Kaja Kallas
Vlado Mirosevic
Brian Tyler Cohen
Videos
- Social Democracy vs Social Liberalism Explained by Liberaven
- Classical vs. Social Liberalism by Nick Carroll
- IdeoLogs: Interview With a Liberal by IdeoLogs
Communities
Gallery
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