The Development of the Liberal Tradition

The purpose of this essay is to discuss and analyze the development of two schools of the liberal/democratic tradition during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the "classical" and the "modern."

A. The Core Values of the Liberal Tradition.

Modern liberalism emerged as the major unifying theory of politics, economics, and society among the middle and upper classes of European-style nations in the late nineteenth century, and continues to be a major theory at the end of the twentieth century, despite challenges by reactionaries and "conservatives," many of whom subscribe to what were the theories of classical liberalism.

In the eighteenth century, conservatives were those who defended the traditional rights and powers of monarchs, the nobility, and the hereditarily rich. In contrast, liberals were those who defended the rights of individuals against the powers of the state. According to Perry et al., "liberalism aspired to carry out the promise of the philosophes and the Revolution. Liberals called for a constitution that protected individual liberty and denounced censorship, arbitrary arrest, and other forms of repression. They believed that through reason and education, social evils could be remedied . . . that individuals should be judged on the basis of achievement, not of birth . . . [and] that the individual would develop into a good and productive human being and citizen if not coerced by governments and churches" (137).

Benjamin Constant warned against the

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g a countervailing force against modern concentrations of wealth and power that did even then infringe on the rights of other citizens. It was not many years after Mill's writings and speeches in Parliament that policies very similar to those he advocated started being carried out in the United States and in Germany. C. Modern Liberalism as a Response to Industrialization. As Bernard Shaw supposedly once said, a conservative is a liberal who never changed his views as he aged. Adam Smith's prediction that a completely unregulated free market would eventually lead to monopolies whose power would destroy the freedom of the market for all others had become obviously fulfilled by the 1880s, and with the threat of socialism everywhere at hand, it became clear to the political leaders of European-style nations that some reforms would be needed in order to prevent a revolution. This motivation is stated unequivocally in the speeches of Bismarck and Lloyd George. This movement toward modern liberalism manifested in the United States in the form of regulation of the railroads, "trust-busting," and introduction of the graduated income tax. After the hiatus of World War I and the 1920s, it came into full flower as FDR's "New Deal" pol

Category: History - T