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Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various and often mutually warring views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion, constitutional government and privacy rights. Liberalism is frequently cited as the dominant ideology of modern history.

Liberalism became a distinct movement in the Age of Enlightenment, gaining popularity among Western philosophers and economists. Liberalism sought to replace the norms of hereditary privilege, state religion, absolute monarchy, the divine right of kings and traditional conservatism with representative democracy, rule of law, and equality under the law. Liberals also ended mercantilist policies, royal monopolies, and other trade barriers, instead promoting free trade and marketization. Philosopher John Locke is often credited with founding liberalism as a distinct tradition based on the social contract, arguing that each man has a natural right to life, liberty and property, and governments must not violate these rights. While the British liberal tradition has emphasized expanding democracy, French liberalism has emphasized rejecting authoritarianism and is linked to nation-building. (Full article...)

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The National Liberal Party–Brătianu (Romanian: Partidul Național Liberal-Brătianu, PNL; also known as Georgiști - "Georgists", from the name of their leader, Gheorghe I. Brătianu) was a right-wing political party in Romania, formed as a splinter group from the main liberal faction, the national liberals. For its symbol, PNL-Brătianu chose three vertical bars, placed at equal distance from each other. The Georgists' official voice was Mișcarea, a journal that supported an eponymous publishing house; notably, Mișcarea published art chronicles contributed by the writer Tudor Arghezi.

The National Liberal Party–Brătianu was active between June 15, 1930 and January 10, 1938. Notable members of the group, other than its founder Brătianu, included the historians Ștefan Ciobanu, Constantin C. Giurescu, Scarlat Lambrino, Constantin S. Nicolăescu-Plopşor, Petre P. Panaitescu, Victor Papacostea, and Aurelian Sacerdoţeanu, the geographer Simion Mehedinți, the novelist Mihail Sadoveanu, the actor and poet Mihail Codreanu, the linguist Alexandru Rosetti, the jurist Paul Negulescu, the Romanian Army general Artur Văitoianu, and the lawyer Mihai Antonescu; it was primarily intellectual in appeal, and was especially involved in recruiting members of social and cultural elites, whom it placed at the top of its political hierarchy. (Full article...)

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Berlin in 1983

Sir Isaiah Berlin OM CBE FBA (24 May/6 June 1909 – 5 November 1997) was a Russian-British social and political theorist, philosopher, and historian of ideas. Although he became increasingly averse to writing for publication, his improvised lectures and talks were sometimes recorded and transcribed, and many of his spoken words were converted into published essays and books, both by himself and by others, especially by his principal editor from 1974, Henry Hardy.

Born in Riga (now the capital of Latvia, then a part of the Russian Empire) in 1909, he moved to Petrograd, Russia, at the age of six, where he witnessed the revolutions of 1917. In 1921, his family moved to the UK, and he was educated at St Paul's School, London, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 1932, at the age of twenty-three, Berlin was elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. In addition to his own output, he translated works by Ivan Turgenev from Russian into English, and during World War II, worked for the British Diplomatic Service. From 1957 to 1967, he was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1963 to 1964. In 1966, he played a role in creating Wolfson College, Oxford, and became its founding President. Berlin was appointed a CBE in 1946, knighted in 1957, and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1971. He was President of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. He also received the 1979 Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defence of civil liberties, and on 25 November 1994, he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws at the University of Toronto, for which occasion he prepared a "short credo" (as he called it in a letter to a friend), now known as "A Message to the Twenty-First Century", to be read on his behalf at the ceremony. (Full article...)

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John Locke John Stuart Mill T. H. Green John Dewey Norberto Bobbio John Rawls David Lloyd George Jeremy Bentham

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— Norberto Bobbio, Liberalism and Democracy, 1985.

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General images

The following are images from various liberalism-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1Pamphlet calling for a protest of economic policy in 1983 following the economic crisis (from Neoliberalism)
Image 2John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty greatly influenced 19th-century liberalism (from Liberalism)
Image 3Per capita income during the Great Depression (from Neoliberalism)
Image 4The Great Depression, with its periods of worldwide economic hardship, formed the backdrop against which the Keynesian Revolution took place (the image is Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother depiction of destitute pea-pickers in California, taken in March 1936). (from Liberalism)
Image 5GDP per capita in Chile and Latin America 1950–2010 (time under Pinochet highlighted) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 6Execution of José María de Torrijos y Uriarte and his men in 1831 as Spanish King Ferdinand VII took repressive measures against the liberal forces in his country (from Liberalism)
Image 7United States incarceration rate per 100,000 population, 1925–2014 (from Neoliberalism)
Image 8Franklin D. Roosevelt (from Liberalism)
Image 9John Milton's Areopagitica (1644) argued for the importance of freedom of speech. (from Liberalism)
Image 10Builders in West Berlin, 1952 (from Neoliberalism)
Image 11John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of modern times and whose ideas, which are still widely felt, formalized modern liberal economic policy. (from Liberalism)
Image 12Julius Faucher (from Liberalism)
Image 13Unemployment in Chile and South America (1980–1990) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 14Benjamin Constant, a Franco-Swiss political activist and theorist (from Liberalism)
Image 15The 2017–2018 Russian protests were organized by Russia's liberal opposition. (from Liberalism)
Image 16Friedrich Hayek (from Neoliberalism)
Image 17John Locke was the first to develop a liberal philosophy, including the right to private property and the consent of the governed. (from Liberalism)
Image 18Mary Wollstonecraft, widely regarded as the pioneer of liberal feminism (from Liberalism)
Image 19The iconic painting Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix, a tableau of the July Revolution in 1830 (from Liberalism)
Image 20Chilean (orange) and average Latin American (blue) rates of growth of GDP (1971–2007) (from Neoliberalism)
Image 21Noam Chomsky's 1999 book Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order is an open critique of neoliberalism and the American economic structure (from Neoliberalism)
Image 22Raif Badawi, a Saudi Arabian writer and the creator of the website Free Saudi Liberals, who was sentenced to ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes for "insulting Islam" in 2014 (from Liberalism)
Image 23Madame de Staël (from Liberalism)
Image 24Gustave de Molinari (from Liberalism)
Image 25As a liberal nationalist, K. J. Ståhlberg (1865–1952), the President of Finland, anchored the state in liberal democracy, guarded the fragile germ of the rule of law, and embarked on internal reforms. (from Liberalism)
Image 26Montesquieu, who argued for the separation of the powers of government (from Liberalism)
Image 27U.S. President Bush, Canadian PM Mulroney, and Mexican President Salinas participate in the ceremonies to sign the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). (from Neoliberalism)
Image 28Monument to the liberals of the 19th century in Agra del Orzán neighborhood, La Coruña, Galicia, (Spain) (from Liberalism)
Image 29T. H. Green, an influential liberal philosopher who established in Prolegomena to Ethics (1884) the first major foundations for what later became known as positive liberty and in a few years, his ideas became the official policy of the Liberal Party in Britain, precipitating the rise of social liberalism and the modern welfare state (from Liberalism)
Image 30Sismondi, who wrote the first critique of the free market from a liberal perspective in 1819 (from Liberalism)
Image 31Member nations of the International Monetary Fund (from Neoliberalism)
Image 32Ludwig Erhard (from Neoliberalism)
Image 33The European Union–Mercosur free trade agreement, which would form one of the world's largest free trade areas, has been denounced by environmental activists and indigenous rights campaigners. (from Neoliberalism)
Image 34Wealth inequality in the United States increased from 1989 to 2013. (from Neoliberalism)