What Is Liberalism
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5773401 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Duncan Bell (0000-0002-8886-8888, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 42 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 682-715 |
| Publication date | 2014-06-26 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Political Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0090-5917 • E-ISSN: 1552-7476 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0090591714535103 |
| OpenAlex | W2106307224 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 148 |
Liberalism is a term employed in a dizzying variety of ways in political thought and social science. This essay challenges how the liberal tradition is typically understood. I start by delineating different types of response-prescriptive, comprehensive, explanatory-that are frequently conflated in answering the question "what is liberalism?" I then discuss assorted methodological strategies employed in the existing literature: after rejecting "stipulative" and "canonical" approaches, I outline a contextualist alternative. Liberalism, on this (comprehensive) account, is best characterised as the sum of the arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognised as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, over time and space. In the remainder of the article, I present an historical analysis of shifts in the meaning of liberalism in Anglo-American political thought between 1850 and 1950, focusing in particular on how Locke came to be characterised as a liberal. I argue that the scope of the liberal traditionexpanded during the middle decades of the twentieth century, such that it came to be seen by many as the constitutive ideology of the West. This capacious (and deeply confusing) understanding of liberalism was a product of the ideological wars fought against "totalitarianism" and assorted developments in the social sciences. Today we both inherit and inhabit it
Classical liberalism · Epistemology · Ideology · Liberalism · Meaning (existential) · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Philosophy · Political Science Research and Education · Political Theory and Influence
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Richard Hofstadter's Liberalism Problem
Vacation untouchable – a deconstruction of the liberal ‘right to tourism’
Feminist Preoccupations
Grammars of liberalism
‘When I see what democracy is…’
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Ortega y Gasset, Democracy, and the Rule of the People
Inequality and Democracy
Rhee Syngman’s Protestant theory of liberty
August Ludwig von Rochau and Realpolitik as historical political theory
British imperialism and Southern liberalism
Liberal Democracy From Oxymoron to Celebrated Concept
Backpacking with John Locke
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Context, reception, and the study of great thinkers in international relations
Constantin Frantz and the intellectual history of Bonapartism and Caesarism
The post-progressive liberalism of Carl Becker
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Cosmos-Politanism
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Property, Space and Sacred History in John Locke's Two Treatises of Government
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Pragmatic Utopianism and Race
Liberalism in Search of Itself
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Influence of traditional ethics on the corporate social responsibility reporting of restaurant firms
Testing pragmatic genealogy in political theory
An honest man
The far-right in modern world history
Peace in the Twenty-First Century
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The British Council and British cultural diplomacy 1934-1959
A legal theory for the nation state. Pasquale Stanislao Mancini, Hegelianism and Piedmontese liberalism after 1848
A Research Agenda for the Study of Southeast Asian Liberalisms
Towards a History of Conservative Liberalism in Thailand after the 1932 Siamese Revolution
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Liberalism in Cambodia
The Paradoxes of “Vernacularised” Liberalism in Southeast Asia
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Conscripts of secularism
The environmental counter-history of liberalism
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John Henry Newman, Ecclesiastical Politics, and the Languages of Liberalism
What was moderate about the enlightenment?’ Moderation in eighteenth-century Europe
Mill before Liberalism (parts I and II)
Hegel, Islam and liberalism
Socialist democracy
The Embodied Conservatism of Rudolf Laban, 1919–1926
Interventionary order and its methodologies
Javier Milei, Tiktok y la construcción del patán político
Liberalism, Colonialism and Liberal Imperialism
Tracing the “true liberalism”
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Revisiting the correlates of youth attitudes toward the police
Abysmal jurisprudence
On a Concept of Black Politics
From Gender Trouble to Turned Tables
What's Not in On Liberty
The Chartists and the Constitution
Living as One Wishes” in Athens
John Locke and the Fable of Liberalism
Arguing About Intervention
Republicanism and Civic Virtue in Treatyite Political Thought, 1921–3
Catholicism Meets Liberalism in Eastern Europe
Pragmatism and Prophecy
Really existing liberalism, the bulwark fantasy, and the enabling of reactionary, far right politics1
Defending democracy
| Unique citing works | 148 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 13,45 |
| Citation span | 2015 - 2026 (12) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | Yes |
| Citation types | Neutral: 147 |