What does “liberalism” actually mean?

Many of those who attack liberalism have failed to define their terms.

Politics has become a sprawling battlefield of straw men. Too often, participants are debating imaginary versions of their opponents, attributing views to them that they do not hold, or interpreting their positions in the most ungenerous possible way. Increasingly, the concept of liberalism is taken a battering from across the political spectrum, and it seems as though in many cases the source of the animosity might be definitional rather than conceptual.

For instance, in America the term “liberal” has become synonymous with the left, whereas in Australia the Liberal Party leans towards the right. Some of those who identify as “liberal” have promoted some of the most illiberal policies in living memory, from calling for laws to restrict freedom of speech to championing the erosion of women’s rights to single-sex spaces. If those who claim the term “liberal” for themselves are embodying its opposite, we can be sure that the confusion is widespread.

The first thing to say about liberalism is that there has never really been a unanimously agreed definition, which is why it is incumbent on those of us who defend its values to be clear about what precisely we are defending. Liberal thinkers often hold incompatible views, and the most common forms – classical liberalism, social liberalism, economic liberalism and neoliberalism – cannot be readily consolidated into a harmonious belief-system.

The more utilitarian aspects of social liberalism, for instance, with their emphasis on collective responsibility for the vulnerable and the underprivileged, are inconsistent with neoliberalism and its prioritisation of free-market capitalism. In his book The Once and Future Liberal, Mark Lilla uses the term “identity liberalism” to denote the form of evangelism now known as “wokeness”.  Such a worldview is about as far away from classical liberal values as can be imagined.