Definitional Note on “Liberalism” as Ideal or Political-Philosophical Liberalism

In discussions at this blog I will generally employ the word “liberalism” to refer to a political-philosophical doctrine, rather than to liberalism as restrictively understood in contemporary American politics. In short, I am using the historically expansive but conceptually narrow definition of “liberal” to describe the doctrine of rights or freedoms of the individual human being as crystallized by early modern metaphysics, but under a practical awareness of the evolution of politicized liberalism to include “liberal democracy,” “social liberalism,” and “welfare state liberalism” as well as the pure or pre-socialized liberalism of “libertarianism” and the de-socializing orientation of “neo-liberalism.” American “constitutional conservatism” and “neo-conservatism” also lie within this same historical horizon, though they, like all other “real existing” liberalisms if perhaps sometimes more self-consciously, often seek to integrate diverse pre- or extra-liberal contents, such as traditional religion or a quasi-religious American nationalism, within a broadly liberal, modern, and democratic project: In the present era even those who seek to situate themselves beyond the liberal and chiefly liberal democratic horizon, but within the horizon of the evolving international system, must do so in relationship to liberalism, not merely as a philosophical or intellectual task, but in response to the political-economic and cultural influence of the liberal democratic states.

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  1. […] am thinking about the confrontation between “liberalism” – in the form of “liberal democracy” – and Islamism, but with a […]

  2. […] (as philosophical or ideal liberalism) is the ideology that turns what non-liberals prefer into its opposite, then insists that they […]

  3. […] the victory of the liberals, as Mr. Ibish and his allies like to point out, Islamists in particular could go on being […]

  4. […] know the underlying conflict between liberalism and Islamism well enough even to assess it (as between faith in reason and any reason of faith, but […]

  5. […] questions would and must be both non-legalistically simple as well as simply favorable to the ideological liberal legal position. As an ideologue, she is unwilling to imagine that the truth might be relatively […]

  6. […] marks the common and for the larger discussion quite typical problem with definitions of “liberalism,” while raising questions about what, after all, American conservatives and their critics, […]

  7. […] we call “liberalism” may appears to us as more a set of “priorities or predispositions” than a coherent ideology […]

  8. […] American libertarian, or for classical or philosophical or ideal “liberals” – “liberals” broadly speaking –  freedom of speech is essentially, as it were inalienably and self-evidently, bound to […]

  9. […] American libertarian, or for classical or philosophical or ideal “liberals” – “liberals” broadly speaking –  freedom of speech is essentially, as it were inalienably and self-evidently, bound to […]

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