Social liberalism
[15] Social liberal ideas and parties tend to be considered centre to centre-left, although there are deviations from these positions to both the political left or right.
[27] By the end of the 19th century, downturns in economic growth challenged the principles of classical liberalism, a growing awareness of poverty and unemployment present within modern industrial cities, and the agitation of organised labour.
A significant political reaction against the changes introduced by industrialisation and laissez-faire capitalism came from one-nation conservatives concerned about social balance and the introduction of the famous Education Act 1870.
[1] The New Liberals, including intellectuals Thomas Hill Green, Leonard Hobhouse and John A. Hobson, saw individual liberty achievable only under favourable social and economic circumstances.
The Liberal governments of Henry Campbell-Bannerman and H. H. Asquith, mainly thanks to Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Prime Minister David Lloyd George, established the foundations of the welfare state in the United Kingdom before World War I.
The comprehensive welfare state built in the United Kingdom after World War II, although primarily accomplished by the Labour Party's Attlee ministry, was significantly designed by two Liberals, namely John Maynard Keynes (who laid the foundations in economics with the Keynesian Revolution) and William Beveridge (whose Beveridge Report was used to design the welfare system).
Historian Peter Weiler has argued: Although still partially informed by older Liberal concerns for character, self-reliance, and the capitalist market, this legislation nevertheless marked a significant shift in Liberal approaches to the state and social reform, approaches that later governments would slowly expand and that would grow into the welfare state after the Second World War.
[32][33]In 1860s Germany, left-liberal politicians like Max Hirsch, Franz Duncker, and Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch established trade unions—modelled on their British counterparts—to help workers improve working and economic conditions through reconciliation of interests and cooperation with their employers rather than class struggle.
The main objectives of the left-liberal parties—the German Progress Party and its successors—were free speech, freedom of assembly, representative government, secret and equal but obligation-tied suffrage, and protection of private property.
The main differences between the left-liberal parties were: The term social liberalism (German: Sozialliberalismus) was used first in 1891 by Austria-Hungarian economist and journalist Theodor Hertzka.
[36] He tried to draw workers away from Marxism by proposing a mix of nationalism and Protestant-Christian-value-inflected social liberalism to overcome class antagonisms by non-revolutionary means.
Its ideas of a socially balanced economy with solidarity, duty, and rights among all workers struggled due to the economic sanctions of the Treaty of Versailles, but it influenced local cooperative enterprises.
[41] Among other things, the party committed itself to "self-determination", "democratization of society", a "reform of capitalism" and a form of ecoliberalism which prioritized "environmental protection over profit and personal gains".
[48][49] In the 1870s and the 1880s, the American economists Richard Ely, John Bates Clark, and Henry Carter Adams—influenced both by socialism and the Evangelical Protestant movement—castigated the conditions caused by industrial factories and expressed sympathy toward labour unions.
He 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.
John Dewey's expanding popularity as an economist also coincided with the greater Georgist movement that rose in the 1910s, pinnacling with the presidency of Woodrow Wilson.
[51] America later incorporated some social liberal ideas into the New Deal,[52] which developed as a response to the Great Depression when Franklin D. Roosevelt came into office.
Businesses accepted social liberalism in the face of widespread dissatisfaction with the boom and bust cycle of the earlier financial system as it seemed to them to be a lesser evil than more left-wing modes of government.
Governments could assume a vital role because the wartime economy had strengthened their power, but the extent to which this occurred varied considerably among Western democracies.
[57] Due to a reliance on what they believe to be a too centralized government to achieve its goals, critics have called this strain of liberalism a more authoritarian ideological position compared to the original schools of liberal thought, especially in the United States, where conservatives have called presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson authoritarians.
[40] Following World War II, the West German government adopted Rüstow's neoliberalism, now usually called ordoliberalism or the social market economy, under Ludwig Erhard.
While the economic policies of the New Deal appeared Keynesian, there was no revision of liberal theory in favour of more significant state initiatives.
[69] John Rawls' principal work, A Theory of Justice (1971), can be considered a flagship exposition of social liberal thinking, noted for its use of analytic philosophy and advocating the combination of individual freedom and a fairer distribution of resources.
[71] 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.
Writers such as Milton Friedman and Samuel Brittan, whom Friedrich Hayek influenced, advocated a reversal of social liberalism.
[15] Part of the reason for the collapse of the social liberal coalition was a challenge in the 1960s and 1970s from financial interests that could operate independently of national governments.
A related reason was the comparison of ideas such as socialized medicine, advocated by politicians such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, facing criticisms and being dubbed as socialist by conservatives during the midst of the Red Scare, notably by the previously mentioned Reagan.
[73] Another cause was the decline of organized labour which had formed part of the coalition but was also a support for left-wing ideologies challenging the liberal consensus.
(See list of progressive parties) Some notable scholars and politicians ordered by date of birth who are generally considered as having made significant contributions to the evolution of social liberalism as a political ideology include:
