Social liberalism
Social liberalism or progressive liberalism is a political philosophy and variety of liberalism that endorses social justice, social services, a mixed economy, and the expansion of civil and political rights, as opposed to classical liberalism which favors limited government and an overall more laissez-faire style of governance. While both are committed to personal freedoms, social liberalism places greater emphasis on the role of government in addressing social inequalities and ensuring public welfare.
Social liberal governments address economic and social issues such as poverty, welfare, infrastructure, healthcare, and education using government intervention, while emphasising individual rights and autonomy.
Economically, social liberalism is based on the social market economy and views the common good as harmonious with the individual's freedom. Social liberals overlap with social democrats in accepting market intervention more than other liberals; its importance is considered auxiliary compared to social democrats. Ideologies that emphasize its economic policy include welfare liberalism, New Deal liberalism and New Democrats in the United States, and Keynesian liberalism. The world has widely adopted social liberal policies.
Social liberal ideas and parties tend to be considered centre to centre-left, although there are deviations from these positions to both the political left or right. In modern political discourse, social liberalism is associated with progressivism, a left-liberalism contrasted to the right-leaning neoliberalism, and combines support for a mixed economy with cultural liberalism.
Cultural liberalism is an ideology that advocates the freedom of individuals to choose whether to conform to cultural norms. In American usage, the term Social liberalism may also refer to American progressive stances on sociocultural issues, such as reproductive rights and same-sex marriage, in contrast with American social conservatism. Cultural liberalism is often referred to as social liberalism because it expresses the social dimension of liberalism; however, it is not the same as the broader political ideology known as social liberalism. In American politics, a social liberal may hold either conservative or progressive views on fiscal policy.
Origins
United Kingdom
By the end of the 19th century, downturns in economic growth challenged the principles of classical liberalism, a growing awareness of poverty and unemployment present within modern industrial cities, and the agitation of organised labour. A significant political reaction against the changes introduced by industrialisation and laissez-faire capitalism came from one-nation conservatives concerned about social balance and the introduction of the famous Education Act 1870. However, socialism later became a more important force for change and reform. Some Victorian writers—including Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold—became early influential critics of social injustice.John Stuart Mill contributed enormously to liberal thought by combining elements of classical liberalism with what eventually became known as the new liberalism. Mill developed this philosophy by liberalising the concept of consequentialism to promote a rights based system. He also developed his liberal dogma by combining the idea of using a utilitarian foundation to base upon the idea of individual rights. The new liberals tried to adapt the old language of liberalism to confront these difficult circumstances, which they believed could only be resolved through a broader and more interventionist conception of the state. Ensuring that individuals did not physically interfere with each other or merely by impartially having formulated and applied laws could not establish an equal right to liberty. More positive and proactive measures were required to ensure that every individual would have an equal opportunity for success.
New Liberals
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a group of British thinkers known as the New Liberals made a case against laissez-faire classical liberalism. It argued in favour of state intervention in social, economic and cultural life. What they proposed is now called social liberalism. The New Liberals, including intellectuals Thomas Hill Green, Leonard Hobhouse and John A. Hobson, saw individual liberty achievable only under favourable social and economic circumstances. In their view, the poverty, squalor, and ignorance in which many people lived made it impossible for freedom and individuality to flourish. New Liberals believed through collective action coordinated by a strong, welfare-oriented and interventionist state could alleviate these conditions.The Liberal governments of Henry Campbell-Bannerman and H. H. Asquith, mainly thanks to Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Prime Minister David Lloyd George, established the foundations of the welfare state in the United Kingdom before World War I. The comprehensive welfare state built in the United Kingdom after World War II, although primarily accomplished by the Labour Party's Attlee ministry, was significantly designed by two Liberals, namely John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge.
Historian Peter Weiler has argued:
Although still partially informed by older Liberal concerns for character, self-reliance, and the capitalist market, this legislation nevertheless marked a significant shift in Liberal approaches to the state and social reform, approaches that later governments would slowly expand and that would grow into the welfare state after the Second World War. What was new in these reforms was the underlying assumption that the state could be a positive force, that the measure of individual freedom... was not how much the state left people alone, but whether he gave them the capacity to fulfill themselves as individuals.
Germany
The term "Social Liberalism" may have first been employed by Max Stirner in his primary work, The Ego and its Own, used to ridicule Socialism.In 1860s Germany, left-liberal politicians like Max Hirsch, Franz Duncker, and Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch established trade unions—modelled on their British counterparts—to help workers improve working and economic conditions through reconciliation of interests and cooperation with their employers rather than class struggle. Schulze-Delitzsch is also the founding father of the German cooperative movement and the organiser of the world's first credit unions. Some liberal economists, such as Lujo Brentano or Gerhart von Schulze-Gävernitz, established the Verein für Socialpolitik in 1873 to promote social reform based on the historical school of economics and therefore rejecting classical economics, proposing a third way between Manchester Liberalism and socialist revolution in the 1871-founded German Empire.
However, the German left-liberal movement fragmented into wings and new parties over the 19th century. The main objectives of the left-liberal parties—the German Progress Party and its successors—were free speech, freedom of assembly, representative government, secret and equal but obligation-tied suffrage, and protection of private property. At the same time, they were strongly opposed to creating a welfare state, which they called state socialism. The main differences between the left-liberal parties were:
- The national ambitions.
- The different substate people's goals.
- Free trade against Schutzzollpolitik.
- The building of the national economy.
The National-Social Association, founded by the Protestant pastor Friedrich Naumann also maintained contacts with the left liberals. He tried to draw workers away from Marxism by proposing a mix of nationalism and Protestant-Christian-value-inflected social liberalism to overcome class antagonisms by non-revolutionary means. Naumann called this a "proletarian-bourgeois integral liberalism". Although the party could not win any seats and soon dissolved, he remained influential in theoretical German left-liberalism.
In the Weimar Republic, the German Democratic Party was founded and came into an inheritance of the left-liberal past and had a leftist social wing and a rightist economic wing but heavily favoured the democratic constitution over a monarchist one. Its ideas of a socially balanced economy with solidarity, duty, and rights among all workers struggled due to the economic sanctions of the Treaty of Versailles, but it influenced local cooperative enterprises.
After 1945, the Free Democrats included most of the social liberals, including Naumann and Brentano disciple Theodor Heuss who became the first party chairman and the first Federal President of West Germany. Other social liberals joined the Christian Democratic Union of Germany. Until the 1960s, post-war ordoliberalism was the model for Germany. It had a theoretical social liberal influence based on duty and rights.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the Free Democratic Party was dominated by conservative liberals, national liberals and classical liberals. However, in the 1970s, the party was briefly influenced by progressive and social liberal ideas which culminated in the 1971 Freiburg Thesis programme. Among other things, the party committed itself to "self-determination", "democratization of society", a "reform of capitalism" and a form of ecoliberalism which prioritized "environmental protection over profit and personal gains". In 1977, the social liberal era came to an end with the more economically liberal Kiel Thesis programme effectively setting the party back on a classical liberal course.
As the Free Democrats discarded social liberal ideas in a more conservative and economically liberal approach, some members left the party and formed the social liberal Liberal Democrats in 1982. Other social liberals have found a new home in Germany's Green party Alliance 90/The Greens.