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Liberalism - Coggle Diagram
Liberalism
Core ideas and princples
Individualism
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People should not be treated as means to an end, but ends in on themselves.
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Tolerenance is an important idea within liberalism and it is the idea that people should be willing to accept values, customs and beliefs with which one disagrees.
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Tolerence is underpinned in the Voltaire quote "I desest what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
John Stuat Mill argued that society needed a 'free market of ideas' so the best ideas could be debated and flourish, Mill argued that this 'free market' was threatend by democracy and the assumption that the majority is right.
Freedom
Negertive freedom -- this is the freedom from interfence by other people. I.e freedom from external constraints.
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Liberals believe in liberty/freedom, but that this is not unlimted and that people don't have the freedom to deprive other people of freedom.
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Liberals believe the state has a role in protecting freedom, John Locke said "the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom ... where there is no law, there is no freedom.".
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Limitted governemnt
Limitted government -- this is the idea that the government is prevented from acting as it wishes by checks and balances and seperation of powers.
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Liberals believe in a bill of rights that sets out what each citizen is entitiled to within the state, this helps prevent the expansion of government's power.
Liberals support the idea of federalism as it helps ensure that when government must act, it is done closer to the people. This further weakens any one section of governemnts power.
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Classical liberals argue that this idea of limited government should extend into the economic sphere as they embrace laissez-faire capitalism.
Laissez-faire capitalism -- this is an economic system organised by the market, where goods are produced for exchange and profit (i.e pure, free market capitalism).
Power tends to corrupt, aboslute power corrupts Lord Acton
Reason and rationalism
Rationalism -- instead of relying on customs, tradiations or superstions, people try to explain the world using reason and research.
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Liberal democracy
Since the 19th century most liberals have supported the conecpt of liberal democracy, this involves:
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Social contract -- this is key to the idea of liberal democracy and is the idea that people agree to give up some rights in exchange for security.
This was important before the birth of democracy and early liberals like Locke argued that people have a right to revolt against government should it break the social contract.
Some liberals have feared the idea of the tryany of the majority that could lead to attacks on minoity rights and the infringement of some people's individualism.
John Staut Mill argued that to curb the infleunce of the uneducated masses (who may not vote rationally) the illterate should not be able to vote and the well educated should be able to vote more than once.
Direct opposition to democracy is not present in liberalism today (either in modern liberals or classical liberals around today).