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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...

Liberalism By definition, a liberal is one who believes in liberty, but because different people at different times have meant different things by liberty, "liberalism" is correspondingly ambiguous. The word was first heard in a political...

Liberalism as a theory about politics and society upholds freedoms of belief, inquiry, expression, action, association and elections. In liberalism, freedom coalesces with value-commitments to equality, individualism, toleration, pluralism, and...

Liberalism [addendum] The theory of liberalism and political philosophy in general were dramatically revitalized by the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971). In that work Rawls adopts the social contract model of political...

political doctrine that takes the abuse of power, and thus the freedom of the individual, as the central problem of government. For liberals, power is most importantly abused by governments, but it may also be abused by the wealthy; by monarchs,...

Although it is the predominant political ideology in the west, liberalism is a protean doctrine whose meaning can perhaps be conveyed only by the use of adjectives that describe its particular nuances. The two most familiar are social liberalism and...

The liberalism currently active in the Chinese intellectual arena was embryonic in the late 1970s, intertwined with democratic and populist appeals. As it rapidly developed in the early 1990s in parallel with the country’s accelerating...

Liberalism can mean either a particular party creed in a particular time period, especially the late 19th century (the hey-day of Liberalism), or a general social and political attitude and orientation. Historically Liberalism was a middle-class or...

Political and economic doctrine that emphasizes the rights and freedoms of the individual and the need to limit the powers of government. Liberalism originated as a defensive reaction to the horrors of the European wars of religion of the 16th century...

An ideology that suggests that individuals are independent, rational and free to pursue their own interests. This ideology which is to be found in Greek literature achieved prominence in the West with the Enlightenment thinkers, so that it forms the...

Liberality is not giving much but giving wisely....

Liberalism refers to a broad array of related ideas and theories of government that consider individual liberty to be the most important political goal.[1] Liberalism has its roots in the Western Age of Enlightenment. Broadly speaking, liberalism...