Liberalism/Conservatism
NOTE: Although the following article has not been revised for this edition of the Encyclopedia, the substantive coverage is currently appropriate. The editors have provided a list of recent works at the end of the article to facilitate research and exploration of the topic.
"Is (or was) Blank a liberal?" The precise reply to this question inevitably begins with a throat-clearing preface such as, "It all depends on the period you have in mind—and the place. Are you speaking of someone in nineteenth-century England, the United States during the Franklin Roosevelt New Deal days, contemporary Great Britain, continental Europe, or contemporary U.S.A.?"
For Americans nurtured on the "liberal" tradition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democratic party, the significance of the L word was quite clear. The private business establishment, left to its own devices, had brought about the economic collapse of 1929. "Rugged individualism" had demonstrated its inadequacies even for many rugged individualists themselves. Almost two-thirds of a century after that collapse, the Great American Depression still retains the power to evoke terrifying memories of mass unemployment, bank failures, small business bankruptcies, soup kitchens, and popular ditties like "Brother can you spare a dime?" These were all nostalgic but chilling reminiscences of the desolation to which "nonliberal," or "conservative," social, economic, and political policies had led.
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