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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...

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...