History of liberalism

Algernon Sidney was second only to John Locke in his influence on liberal political thought in eighteenth-century Britain and Colonial America, and was widely read and quoted by the Whig opposition during the Glorious Revolution.

In particular, the Levellers, a radical political movement of the period, published their manifesto Agreement of the People which advocated popular sovereignty, an extended voting suffrage, religious tolerance and equality before the law.

Montesquieu pleaded in favor of a constitutional system of government, the preservation of civil liberties and the law and the idea that political institutions ought to reflect the social and geographical aspects of each community.

[42] Four years into the French Revolution, German writer Johann von Goethe reportedly told the defeated Prussian soldiers after the Battle of Valmy that "from this place and from this time forth commences a new era in world history, and you can all say that you were present at its birth".

However, conflict between rival political factions, the Girondins and the Jacobins, culminated in the Reign of Terror, that was marked by mass executions of "enemies of the revolution", with the death toll reaching into the tens of thousands.

Different strands of the movement developed, with middle-class reformers aiming to widen the franchise to represent commercial and industrial interests and towns without parliamentary representation while Popular Radicals drawn from the middle class and from artisans agitated to assert wider rights including relieving distress.

The Economist took the position that regulation of factory hours was harmful to workers and also strongly opposed state support for education, health, the provision of water and granting of patents and copyrights.

[61]: 76  His philosophy proved to be extremely influential on government policy and led to increased Benthamite attempts at government social control, including Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police, prison reforms, the workhouses and asylums for the mentally ill. 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 and the agitation of organized labour.

At Balliol College, Oxford, Thomas Hill Green argued that the state should foster and protect the social, political and economic environments in which individuals will have the best chance of acting according to their consciences.

[73] The Gladstonian liberals in 1891 adopted "the Newcastle Programme that included home rule for Ireland, disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales and Scotland, tighter controls on the sale of liquor, major extension of factory regulation and various democratic political reforms.

[74] The German savant Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) made a major contribution to the development of liberalism by envisioning education as a means of realizing individual possibility rather than a way of drilling traditional ideas into youth to suit them for an already established occupation or social role.

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.

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 to present one, so great as to bring production altogether to a standstill.

"[80] 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.

However, the reformist ideas and trends of the Nahda and Tanzimat didn't reach the common population successfully, as the books, periodicals, and newspapers were accessible primarily to intellectuals and segments of an emerging middle class, while many Muslims saw them as foreign influences on the world of Islam.

[123][120][124][125] Although this period was short lived, with Abdülhamid ultimately suspending the constitution and parliament in 1878 in favor of a return to absolute monarchy with himself in power,[126] the legacy and influence of the Young Ottomans continued to endure until the collapse of the empire.

Thinkers and religious reformers rejected traditional views and encourage modernization through the abandonment of taqlid (imitation, conformity to legal precedent) and emphasis on ijtihad (intellectual effort, reasoning and hermeneutics), which they saw as a return to Islamic origins.

[133] Initially an offshoot of the Transcaucasia-based Social Democratic Party, it was largely composed of liberal middle-class intellectuals and stood for a representative political system and the separation of church and state, to limit the authority of the monarchy and the clergy.

[145] The front was conceived to be a broad alliance of like-minded associations, included various, nationalist, liberal, and social democratic parties, with the aim of strengthening democracy, press freedom, and constitutional government.

The Radical Liberals who toppled the conservatives were led by Eloy Alfaro, a firebrand who implemented a variety of sociopolitical reforms, including the separation of church and state, the legalization of divorce, and the establishment of public schools.

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

[182] 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.

With some luck and skill, Austria also managed to contain the bubbling nationalist sentiments in Germany and Hungary, helped along by the failure of the Frankfurt Assembly to unify the German states into a single nation.

The Anti-Corn Law League brought together a coalition of liberal and radical groups in support of free trade under the leadership of Richard Cobden and John Bright, who opposed militarism and public expenditure.

[199] The People's Budget of 1909, championed by David Lloyd George and fellow liberal Winston Churchill, introduced unprecedented taxes on the wealthy in Britain and radical social welfare programmes to the country's policies.

Facing huge shortages in basic necessities along with widespread riots in early 1917, Czar Nicholas II abdicated in March, bringing to an end three centuries of Romanov rule and paving the way for liberals to declare a republic.

[205] But democracy was no simple task, and the Provisional Government that took over the country's administration needed the cooperation of the Petrograd Soviet, an organization that united leftist industrial laborers, to function and survive.

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

In Russia, liberalism was defeated when the Communists came to power under Vladimir Lenin in October 1917, in Italy when Mussolini set up his dictatorship in 1922, in Poland in 1926 under Józef Piłsudski, and in Spain in 1939 after the Spanish Civil War.

The Purple Coalition, one of the most consequential in Dutch history, brought together the progressive left-liberal D66,[213] the economic liberal and centre-right VVD,[214] and the social democratic Labour Party—an unusual combination that ultimately legalised same-sex marriage, euthanasia, and prostitution while also instituting a non-enforcement policy on marijuana.