Originally posted by: BoberFett
Classic liberal. Modern liberals have nothing in common with them and I refuse to identify with big government authoritarian types.
An excellent descriptive label and I thank you for reminding me of what I should have remembered from the political philosophy classes I took so long ago.
I am proud to be an
American classical liberal and I detest the bastardization of the word "liberal" by those who are clearly not. And, in some minor way, I am offended that my good position, and apparently that of others here, is not adequately recognized nor represented in the polling conducted to date. We must be heard!
Classical Liberalism
Extracted from the above Wiki article:
Modern classical liberals trace their ideology to ancient Greece, the Roman republic and the Renaissance. They cite the 16th century School of Salamanca in Spain as a precursor, with its emphasis on human rights and popular sovereignty, its belief that morality need not be grounded in religion, and its moral defense of commerce.
Other Renaissance thinkers such as Erasmus and Niccolò Machiavelli represent the rise of humanism in place of the religious tradition of the Middle Ages. Rationalist philosophers of the 17th Century, such as Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza developed further ideas that would become important to liberalism, such as the social contract.
However, liberalism's classic formulation came in The Age of Enlightenment. John Locke's Two Treatises of Government argued that legitimate authority depended on the consent of the governed, while Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations rejected mercantilism, which advocated state interventionism in the economy and protectionism, and developed modern free-market economics. These early liberals saw mercantilism as enriching privileged elites at the expense of well being of the populace.
Classical liberalism holds that individual rights are natural, inherent, or inalienable, and exist independently of government. Thomas Jefferson called these inalienable rights: "...rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law', because law is often but the tyrant?s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual."
For classical liberalism, rights are of a negative nature?rights that require that other individuals (and governments) refrain from interfering with individual liberty, whereas social liberalism (also called modern liberalism or welfare liberalism) holds that individuals have a right to be provided with certain benefits or services by others. Unlike social liberals, classical liberals are "hostile to the welfare state." They do not have an interest in material equality but only in "equality before the law." Classical liberalism is critical of social liberalism and takes offense at group rights being pursued at the expense of individual rights.
Libertarianism's resemblance to liberalism is superficial; in the end, libertarians reject essential liberal institutions. Correctly understood, libertarianism resembles a view that liberalism historically defined itself against, the doctrine of private political power that underlies feudalism. Like feudalism, libertarianism conceives of justified political power as based in a network of private contracts. It rejects the idea, essential to liberalism, that political power is a public power to be impartially exercised for the common good.
Facebook
Twitter