Liberalism

[38][39][40] National social services, such as equal educational opportunities, access to health care, and transportation infrastructure are intended to meet the responsibility to promote the general welfare of all citizens as established by the United States Constitution.

[54] In contemporary times, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, Thomas Sowell, George Stigler, Larry Arnhart, Ronald Coase and James M. Buchanan are seen as the most prominent advocates of classical liberalism.

By placing the security of life, liberty and property as the supreme value of law and authority, Locke formulated the basis of liberalism based on social contract theory.

[88] Support for laissez-faire capitalism is often associated with this principle, with Friedrich Hayek arguing in The Road to Serfdom (1944) that reliance on free markets would preclude totalitarian control by the state.

[97] Among them was also one of the first thinkers to go by the name of "liberal", the Edinburgh University-educated Swiss Protestant, Benjamin Constant, who looked to the United Kingdom rather than to ancient Rome for a practical model of freedom in a large mercantile society.

As they struggled to expand suffrage rights, liberals increasingly understood that people left out of the democratic decision-making process were liable to the "tyranny of the majority", a concept explained in Mill's On Liberty and Democracy in America (1835) by Alexis de Tocqueville.

[113]: 64 Smith wrote that as long as supply, demand, prices and competition were left free of government regulation, the pursuit of material self-interest, rather than altruism, maximises society's wealth[114] through profit-driven production of goods and services.

[122] Cobden believed that military expenditures worsened the state's welfare and benefited a small but concentrated elite minority, combining his Little Englander beliefs with opposition to the economic restrictions of mercantilist policies.

He wrote: "For Government borrowing of one kind or another is nature's remedy, so to speak, for preventing business losses from being, in so severe a slump as the present one, so great as to bring production altogether to a standstill".

[127] At the height of the Great Depression in 1933, Keynes published The Means to Prosperity, which contained specific policy recommendations for tackling unemployment in a global recession, chiefly counter cyclical public spending.

The General Theory challenged the earlier neo-classical economic paradigm, which had held that the market would naturally establish full employment equilibrium if it were unfettered by government interference.

Classical economists believed in Say's law, which states that "supply creates its own demand" and that in a free market, workers would always be willing to lower their wages to a level where employers could profitably offer them jobs.

An innovation from Keynes was the concept of price stickiness, i.e. the recognition that, in reality, workers often refuse to lower their wage demands even in cases where a classical economist might argue it is rational for them to do so.

[127] Where the market failed to allocate resources properly, the government was required to stimulate the economy until private funds could start flowing again—a "prime the pump" kind of strategy designed to boost industrial production.

Liberal feminists believe that "female subordination is rooted in a set of customary and legal constraints that blocks women's entrance to and success in the so-called public world".

[140] Steven Pinker, an evolutionary psychologist, defines equity feminism as "a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology".

[142] Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi's New Principles of Political Economy (French: Nouveaux principes d'économie politique, ou de la richesse dans ses rapports avec la population) (1819) represents the first comprehensive liberal critique of early capitalism and laissez-faire economics, and his writings, which were studied by John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx among many others, had a profound influence on both liberal and socialist responses to the failures and contradictions of industrial society.

[143][144][145] By the end of the 19th century, the principles of classical liberalism were being increasingly challenged by downturns in economic growth, a growing perception of the evils of poverty, unemployment and relative deprivation present within modern industrial cities, as well as the agitation of organised labour.

In contrast, the "anti-state liberal tradition", as described by Ralph Raico, was supportive of a system where law enforcement and the courts being provided by private companies, minimizing or rejecting the role of the state.

In the mid-20th century, Rothbard synthesized elements from the Austrian School of economics, classical liberalism and 19th-century American individualist anarchists Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker (while rejecting their labour theory of value and the norms they derived from it).

Anarcho-capitalists say personal and economic activities under anarcho-capitalism would be regulated by victim-based dispute resolution organizations under tort and contract law rather than by statute through centrally determined punishment under what they describe as "political monopolies".

The Levellers, a largely ignored minority political movement that primarily consisted of Puritans, Presbyterians, and Quakers, called for freedom of religion, frequent convening of parliament and equality under the law.

However, the reformist ideas and trends did not reach the common population successfully, as the books, periodicals, and newspapers were accessible primarily to intellectuals and segments of the emerging middle class.

[188] In the United States, modern liberalism traces its history to the popular presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who initiated the New Deal in response to the Great Depression and won an unprecedented four elections.

[189] Meanwhile, the definitive liberal response to the Great Depression was given by the British economist John Maynard Keynes, who had begun a theoretical work examining the relationship between unemployment, money and prices back in the 1920s.

Economic woes prompted widespread unrest in the European political world, leading to the rise of fascism as an ideology and a movement against liberalism and communism, especially in Nazi Germany and Italy.

[197] The Great Society project launched by President Lyndon B. Johnson oversaw the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, the establishment of Head Start and the Job Corps as part of the War on Poverty and the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, an altogether rapid series of events that some historians have dubbed the "Liberal Hour".

[205] Conservatives have attacked what they perceive as the reckless liberal pursuit of progress and material gains, arguing that such preoccupations undermine traditional social values rooted in community and continuity.

[207] The first major proponent of modern conservative thought, Edmund Burke, offered a blistering critique of the French Revolution by assailing the liberal pretensions to the power of rationality and the natural equality of all humans.

[219][220] Deng Xiaoping believed that liberalization would destroy the political stability of the People's Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party, making it difficult for development to take place, and is inherently capitalistic.