Liberalism and free individual choice

We take a wide rather than a narrow view of what liberalism is. As we see it, liberalism is a disputatious family of doctrines, which nevertheless share some core principles. These principles are by now – at least in the West – hardly new. But they constitute a radically different way of understanding and organizing the best scheme of human association from the many other understandings that have been produced in the course of human history in Western and other civilizations. While liberal doctrines and practices are at present well established in the West, it should not be forgotten how recently they were threatened with extinction in their heartlands. They are still constantly under attack and are often not well understood, in part because of the tendency to identify liberalism with one or other member of the family only – a tendency that in America makes liberalism out to be a politically leftist doctrine of state welfare and state intervention, while in contemporary France it has become associated with the supposedly laissez-faire policies of recent Anglo-Saxon governments. Part of what we mean by the liberal project, then, is that from a broad historical perspective liberalism is a fairly new and certainly radically different conception of social and political order from its predecessors and subsequent rivals.