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Can you expand on your definition of liberalism a little? It seems like you're defining liberalism by how the word is used collquially in the public context but

Can you expand on your definition of liberalism a little? It seems like you're defining liberalism by how the word is used collquially in the public context but I took the parent to mean liberalism as in the academic concept realated to philosophy, political science, and international relations theory.

mistermann 6y ago
This seems good enough I suppose: https://www.britannica.com/topic/liberalism https://www.britannica.com/topic/liberalism Liberalism, political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics. Liberals typically believe that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others, but they also recognize that government itself can pose a threat to liberty. As the revolutionary American pamphleteer Thomas Paine expressed it in Common Sense (1776), government is at best “a necessary evil.” Laws, judges, and police are needed to secure the individual’s life and liberty, but their coercive power may also be turned against him. The problem, then, is to devise a system that gives government the power necessary to protect individual liberty but also prevents those who govern from abusing that power. I'm speaking more so I think from the perspective of the implementation of liberalism, which is fairly closely tied to managing the affairs of human beings. So in doing so, we have conversations about the nature of society (events, rules, rights, procedures, fairness, speech, etc) and try to come up with an arrangement that maximizes outcomes for "all" people, generally speaking. The point I was trying to make was with respect to "...liberalism has been having a really hard time lately dealing with...precisely because it ignores feelings about groups...", in that "feeling about groups" is not (precisely) the only thing it ignores. We ignore many variables, including many we consider unimportant (like feelings), and likely also some that we're not even aware of (unknown unknowns).

mistermann 6y ago

This seems good enough I suppose: https://www.britannica.com/topic/liberalism https://www.britannica.com/topic/liberalism Liberalism, political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics. Liberals typically believe that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others, but they also recognize that government itself can pose a threat to liberty. As the revolutionary American pamphleteer Thomas Paine expressed it in Common Sense (1776), government is at best “a necessary evil.” Laws, judges, and police are needed to secure the individual’s life and liberty, but their coercive power may also be turned against him. The problem, then, is to devise a system that gives government the power necessary to protect individual liberty but also prevents those who govern from abusing that power. I'm speaking more so I think from the perspective of the implementation of liberalism, which is fairly closely tied to managing the affairs of human beings. So in doing so, we have conversations about the nature of society (events, rules, rights, procedures, fairness, speech, etc) and try to come up with an arrangement that maximizes outcomes for "all" people, generally speaking. The point I was trying to make was with respect to "...liberalism has been having a really hard time lately dealing with...precisely because it ignores feelings about groups...", in that "feeling about groups" is not (precisely) the only thing it ignores. We ignore many variables, including many we consider unimportant (like feelings), and likely also some that we're not even aware of (unknown unknowns).