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Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion, constitutional government and privacy rights. Liberalism is frequently cited as the dominant ideology of modern history.

Liberalism became a distinct movement in the Age of Enlightenment, gaining popularity among Western philosophers and economists. Liberalism sought to replace the norms of hereditary privilege, state religion, absolute monarchy, the divine right of kings and traditional conservatism with representative democracy, rule of law, and equality under the law. Liberals also ended mercantilist policies, royal monopolies, and other trade barriers, instead promoting free trade and marketization. Philosopher John Locke is often credited with founding liberalism as a distinct tradition based on the social contract, arguing that each man has a natural right to life, liberty and property, and governments must not violate these rights. While the British liberal tradition has emphasized expanding democracy, French liberalism has emphasized rejecting authoritarianism and is linked to nation-building. (Full article...)

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The Liberal Party of Canada (French: Parti libéral du Canada) is a federal political party in Canada. The party espouses the principles of liberalism, and generally sits at the centre to centre-left of the Canadian political spectrum, with their main rival, the Conservative Party, positioned to their right and the New Democratic Party positioned to their left. The party is described as "big tent", practising "brokerage politics", attracting support from a broad spectrum of voters. The Liberal Party is the longest-serving and oldest active federal political party in the country, and has dominated federal politics of Canada for much of its history, holding power for almost 70 years of the 20th century. As a result, it has sometimes been referred to as Canada's "natural governing party".

The party first came into power in 1873 under Alexander Mackenzie, but were voted out five years later due to the economic conditions at the time. They would not come back to office until 1896; Wilfrid Laurier was prime minister from that year until the party's defeat in 1911 and his tenure was marked by several compromises between English and French Canada. From the early 1920s until the mid-1950s, the Liberal Party under Prime Ministers William Lyon Mackenzie King and Louis St. Laurent gradually built a Canadian welfare state. (Full article...)

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Universal Declaration of Human Rights Classical liberalism Social liberalism Neoliberalism Liberal Movement (Australia) Modern liberalism in the United States Progressivism in the United States Civil rights movement Fair Deal Liberal Republican Party (United States) New Deal New Democrats Charles Sumner Radical Republicans Progressive Era The Demands of Liberal Education Great Society Square Deal Right-libertarianism The New Freedom Libertarianism New Frontier List of liberal theorists Glorious Revolution Civil liberties Liberty Judicial independence Universal suffrage Suffrage Women's suffrage History of liberalism National Liberal Party-Brătianu National Peasants' Party People's Party for Freedom and Democracy Social democracy Social justice Orange Revolution Partnership for Civil Justice Fund Libertarian Party (United States) Liberal Democrats (UK) Liberal Revolution of 1820 Liberal welfare reforms Liberal Alliance (Denmark) Left-wing politics Boston Tea Party Storming of the Bastille Liberal Party (UK)

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Portrait of Locke in 1697 by Godfrey Kneller

John Locke FRS (/lɒk/; 29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704) was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "father of liberalism". Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, Locke is equally important to social contract theory. His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American Revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence. Internationally, Locke's political-legal principles continue to have a profound influence on the theory and practice of limited representative government and the protection of basic rights and freedoms under the rule of law.

Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. (Full article...)

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John Stuart Mill T. H. Green John Dewey Norberto Bobbio John Rawls Isaiah Berlin David Lloyd George Jeremy Bentham

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“ Liberalism is the philosophy for our time, because it does not try to conserve every tradition of the past, because it does not apply to new problems the old doctrinaire solutions, because it is prepared to experiment and innovate and because it knows that the past is less important than the future. ” — Pierre Trudeau, Defining liberalism at the 1968 Liberal leadership convention.

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General images

The following are images from various liberalism-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1U.S. President Bush, Canadian PM Mulroney, and Mexican President Salinas participate in the ceremonies to sign the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). (from Neoliberalism)
Image 2As a liberal nationalist, K. J. Ståhlberg (1865–1952), the President of Finland, anchored the state in liberal democracy, guarded the fragile germ of the rule of law, and embarked on internal reforms. (from Liberalism)
Image 3Gustave de Molinari (from Liberalism)
Image 4Thomas Hill Green, an influential liberal philosopher who established in Prolegomena to Ethics (1884) the first major foundations for what later became known as positive liberty and in a few years, his ideas became the official policy of the Liberal Party in Britain, precipitating the rise of social liberalism and the modern welfare state (from Liberalism)
Image 5Julius Faucher (from Liberalism)
Image 6Execution of José María de Torrijos y Uriarte and his men in 1831 as Spanish King Ferdinand VII took repressive measures against the liberal forces in his country (from Liberalism)
Image 7Pamphlet calling for a protest of economic policy in 1983 following the economic crisis (from Neoliberalism)
Image 8Madame de Staël (from Liberalism)
Image 9United States incarceration rate per 100,000 population, 1925–2013 (from Neoliberalism)
Image 10Montesquieu, who argued for the separation of the powers of government (from Liberalism)
Image 11John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty greatly influenced 19th-century liberalism (from Liberalism)
Image 12Benjamin Constant, a Franco-Swiss political activist and theorist (from Liberalism)
Image 13The iconic painting Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix, a tableau of the July Revolution in 1830 (from Liberalism)
Image 14GDP per capita in Chile and Latin America 1950–2010 (time under Pinochet highlighted) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 15Builders in West Berlin, 1952 (from Neoliberalism)
Image 16The Great Depression, with its periods of worldwide economic hardship, formed the backdrop against which the Keynesian Revolution took place (the image is Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother depiction of destitute pea-pickers in California, taken in March 1936). (from Liberalism)
Image 17Chilean (orange) and average Latin American (blue) rates of growth of GDP (1971–2007) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 18Monument to the liberals of the 19th century in Agra del Orzán neighborhood, La Coruña, Galicia, (Spain). (from Liberalism)
Image 19The 2017–2018 Russian protests were organized by Russia's liberal opposition. (from Liberalism)
Image 20Per capita income during the Great Depression (from Neoliberalism)
Image 21Unemployment in Chile and South America (1980–1990) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 22Friedrich Hayek (from Neoliberalism)
Image 23Noam Chomsky's 1999 book Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order is an open critique of neoliberalism and the American economic structure (from Neoliberalism)
Image 24Mary Wollstonecraft, widely regarded as the pioneer of liberal feminism (from Liberalism)
Image 25John Locke was the first to develop a liberal philosophy, including the right to private property and the consent of the governed. (from Liberalism)
Image 26The European Union–Mercosur free trade agreement, which would form one of the world's largest free trade areas, has been denounced by environmental activists and indigenous rights campaigners. (from Neoliberalism)
Image 27Member nations of the International Monetary Fund (from Neoliberalism)
Image 28Wealth inequality in the United States increased from 1989 to 2013. (from Neoliberalism)
Image 29Sismondi, who wrote the first critique of the free market from a liberal perspective in 1819 (from Liberalism)
Image 30Ludwig Erhard (from Neoliberalism)
Image 31Franklin D. Roosevelt (from Liberalism)
Image 32John Milton's Areopagitica (1644) argued for the importance of freedom of speech. (from Liberalism)
Image 33John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of modern times and whose ideas, which are still widely felt, formalized modern liberal economic policy (from Liberalism)
Image 34Raif Badawi, a Saudi Arabian writer and the creator of the website Free Saudi Liberals, who was sentenced to ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes for "insulting Islam" in 2014 (from Liberalism)

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