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View Full Version : Precisely when did classic liberalism lose its name to modern liberalism


John Scott
09-05-2008, 02:34 PM
By the time of the Great Depression, liberalism in America had changed its definition to describe its former opposition, for example in the opinion of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.:

when the growing complexity of industrial conditions required increasing government intervention in order to assure more equal opportunities, the liberal tradition, faithful to the goal rather than to the dogma, altered its view of the state," and "there emerged the conception of a social welfare state, in which the national government had the express obligation to maintain high levels of employment in the economy, to supervise standards of life and labor, to regulate the methods of business competition, and to establish comprehensive patterns of social security.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism

John Scott
09-05-2008, 02:43 PM
Classical liberalism is liberalism, but the current collectivists have captured that designation in the United States. Happily they did not capture it in Europe, and were glad enough to call themselves socialists. But no one in America wants to be called socialist and admit what they are.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, and especially after 1930 in the United States, the term liberalism came to be associated with a very different emphasis, particularly in economic policy. It came to be associated with a readiness to rely primarily on the state rather than on private voluntary arrangements to achieve objectives regarded as desirable. The catchwords became welfare and equality rather than freedom. The nineteenth century liberal regarded an extension of freedom as the most effective way to promote welfare and equality; the twentieth century liberal regards welfare and equality as either prerequisites of or alternatives to freedom. In the name of welfare and equality, the twentieth-century liberal has come to favor a revival of the very policies of state intervention and paternalism against which classical liberalism fought. In the very act of turning the clock back to seventeenth-century mercantilism, he is fond of castigating true liberals as reactionary!

Joseph Schumpeter stated, "As a supreme, if unintended compliment, the enemies of the system of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label," implying that social liberals have "stolen" the word and given it a definition opposite its original meaning.

John Scott
09-05-2008, 02:44 PM
In the 1920s, the New York Times criticized "the expropriation of the time-honored word 'liberal'" and argued that "the radical red school of thought...hand back the word 'liberal' to its original owners."

John Scott
09-05-2008, 02:48 PM
The Fascist leader Benito Mussolini opposed classical liberalism: "Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State. It is opposed to classical Liberalism, which arose from the necessity of reacting against absolutism, and which brought its historical purpose to an end when the State was transformed into the conscience and will of the people. Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual."

He sounds like a modern Liberal.

m42
09-06-2008, 11:32 AM
A liberal by any other name....