Word Finder - liberalism

definition

The quality of being liberal.

definition

Any political movement founded on the autonomy and personal freedom of the individual, progress and reform, and government by law with the consent of the governed.

definition

An economic ideology in favour of laissez faire and the free market (related to economic liberalism).

In Spain and Portugal, and also in Belgium, a Liberalism inimical to the Church was in power.

The quarrel between Liberalism and Clericalism was, however, not ended.

The consistent firmness with which he adhered to the cause of constitutional liberalism during the many changes of his times gained him the highest respect of his countrymen, by whom he was styled the Aristides of the French tribune.

His extreme liberalism prevented his opposing the spread of Socialist doctrines preached far and wide by Benjamin Constant.

For years he and his friends educated public opinion by issuing innumerable pamphlets in which the new Liberalism was eloquently expounded.

The Liberalism which he displayed as a member of Parliament and developed greatly in a crowded after-life was unlike the conventional Radicalism of the period.

Governor Miguel de la Torre, who ruled the island with vice-regal powers during the second period of Ferdinand's absolutism, sternly repressed all attempts at liberalism, and made the island the resort for loyal refugees from the Spanish mainland.

His parliamentary career was marked by the same wide and candid liberalism as his private life.

He had outgrown his early Liberalism and become the chief panegyrist of the house of Hohenzollern.

During his years of imprisonment he, like many others of his countrymen, was converted to liberalism on the French model.

To many minds the papacy thus came to represent a unifying principle, as opposed to the disruptive tendencies of Liberalism and Nationalism, and the papal monarchy came to be surrounded with a new halo, as in some sort realizing that ideal of a " federation of the world " after which the age was dimly feeling.

But Ancillon's reputed liberalism was of too invertebrate a type to survive the trial of actual contact with affairs.

By the German public, to whom Ancillon was known only through his earlier writings and some isolated protests against the "demagogue-hunting" in fashion at Berlin, his advent to power was hailed as a triumph of liberalism.

On the 26th of June the diet was dissolved, nothing having been done but to reveal the widening gulf between the principle of monarchy and the growing forces of German Liberalism.

The nickname cartridge-prince (Kartdtschenprinz) bestowed upon him during the troubles of 48 was undeserved; but he was notoriously opposed to Liberalism and, had he followed his own instincts, he would have modified the constitution in a reactionary sense.

It is noticeable that in 1894 when this motion was introduced it was lost; a striking instance of the decay of Liberalism.

The programme required the support of a Christian-Conservative tendency; it was to defend positive and historical law against Liberalism, and the rights of the individual states against the central power.

This reunion of the Conservatives became the nucleus of a great reaction against Liberalism.

A similar movement began among the Protestants after the commercial crisis of 1873, which forms an epoch in German thought, since it was from that year that men first began to question the economic doctrines of Liberalism, and drew attention to the demoralization which seemed to arise from the freedom of speculation and the influence of the stock exchangea movement which in later years led to some remarkable attempts to remedy the evil by legislation.

A minister, Rudolph Todt, and Rudolph Meyer criticized the moral and economic doctrines of Liberalism; his writings led to the foundation of the ChristlichSoziale-Arbeilerverein, which for a few years attained considerable notoriety under the leadership of Adolph Stocker.

He had no sympathy with political liberalism, but throughout his long reign of forty-two years, with a constant interchange of ministries and many ministerial crises, he never had a serious conflict with the states-general, and his ministers could always count upon his fair-mindedness and an earnest desire to help them to further the national welfare.

He was himself a strange incarnation at once of " doctrinaire liberalism and the old Habsburg autocracy.

On the 3rd of March, Kossuth, in the diet at Pressburg, delivered the famous speech which was the declaration of war of Hungarian Liberalism against the Austrian system.

The proclamation on the 26th of February 1861 of the new constitution for the whole monarchy, elaborated by Anton von Schmerling, though far from satisfying the national aspirations of the races within the empire, at least gave Austria a temporary popularity in Germany; the liberalism of the Habsburg monarchy was favourably contrasted with the " reactionary " policy of Prussia, where Bismarck was defying the majority of the diet in his determination to build up the military power of Prussia.

Both the new Clerical Club and the remainder of the Conservatives were much affected by the reaction against the doctrines of economic Liberalism.

The old party of the Right was, however, also broken up; side by side with forty-one Clericals there were twenty-eight Christian Socialists led by Dr Lueger, a man of great oratorical power, who had won a predominant influence in Vienna, so long the centre of Liberalism, and had quite eclipsed the more modest efforts of Prince Liechtenstein.

In 1860 he was summoned to the remodelled Reichsrat by the emperor, who next year nominated him a life member of the Austrian upper house (Herrenhaus), where, while remaining a keen upholder of the German centralized empire, as against the federalism of Sla y s and Magyars, he greatly distinguished himself as one of the most intrepid and influential supporters of the cause of liberalism, in both political and religious matters, until his death at Graz on the 12th of September 1876.

But Auersperg's fame rests almost exclusively on his political poetry; two collections entitled Spaziergdnge eines Wiener Poeten (1831) and Schutt (1835) created a sensation in Germany by their originality and bold liberalism.

A Liberal Unionist, however, could only be elected by Conservative votes, and he had made himself objectionable to a large section of the party by his independent attitude on various questions, on which his Liberalism outweighed his party loyalty.

It flattered his vanity to pose before the world as the dispenser of benefits; but his theoretical liberalism was mated with an autocratic will which brooked no contradiction.

A revolutionary conspiracy among the officers of the guard, and a foolish plot to kidnap him on his way to the congress of Aix-la-Chapelle, are said to have shaken the foundations of his Liberalism.

Miquel had entirely given up his Liberalism, and aimed at practical measures for improving the condition of the people irrespective of the party programmes; yet some of his measures - such as that for taxing "Waarenhauser" (stores) - were of a very injudicious nature.

Added to this there was still in the background the veteran statesman to whom Liberalism owed an unequalled obligation.

At this time he composed his Notes on Virginia, a semistatistical work full of humanitarian liberalism.

He had been brought up in the strictest principles of the Evangelical school, but at Rugby he fell under the influence of Arnold and Tait, and his acquaintance with Maurice and Kingsley finally gave his opinions a direction towards Liberalism.

Ruge was a leader in religious and political liberalism, but did not produce any work of enduring importance.

As a politician he was one of the leaders of modern Liberalism, and though always loyal when appeals were made to patriotism, such as government demands for the army, he remained obdurate on constitutional questions; and he resolutely opposed the reactionary policy of the Prussian Conservatives.

From that date forward two parties wrestled for supremacy in Europe, to which may be given the familiar names of Liberalism and Conservatism, the party of progress and the party of established institutions.

He worked with might and main for the continuation of the old theocracy, but before he died it had given way before an increasing Liberalism - even Yale was infected with the Episcopalianism that he hated.

Neither from official Liberalism nor from the press did he receive support; even the Republican National was opposed to him because of his championship of labour.

He is remembered chiefly as an energetic opponent of Polish national aspirations, of extreme Liberalism, of the system of public instruction based on natural science, and of German political influence.

The 16th of June had been fatal to the idea of an independent Bohemia, fatal also to Pan-Slav dreams. To the Czechs the most immediate peril now seemed that from the German parliament, and in the interests of their nationality they were willing to join the Austrian government in the struggle against German liberalism.

This is generally regarded as the beginning of the reaction against economic liberalism by which he and his party were to be deprived of their influence.

While still a young man he had been affected by the wave of liberalism then spreading all over Italy, and soon after his marriage he began to conspire mildly against the Bourbon government.

The historical bent thus given to the drama was continued by the versatile Mendes Leal, by Gomes da Amorim and by Pinheiro Chagas, who all however succumbed more or less to the atmosphere and machinery of ultra-Romanticism, while the plays of Antonio Ennes deal with questions of the day in a spirit of combative liberalism.

At least it made their traditional religion possible for those many French Catholics who clung passionately to the benefits the Revolution had brought them; and had it prevailed, it might have spared France and the world that fatal gulf between Liberalism and Catholicism which Pius IX.'s Syllabus of 1864 sought to make impassable.

Doctrinally they stood not so much for a theology as for a refusal of theology, and, rejecting the practical liberalism of Paul, became the natural heirs of those early Judaizers who had caused the apostle so much annoyance and trouble.

In the "United Debating Society," which afterwards developed into the "Union," he distinguished himself as a zealous advocate of liberalism.

The result has been the development within the Established Church of a most startling diversity of doctrine and ritual practice, varying from what closely resembles that of the Church of Rome to the broadest Liberalism and the extremest evangelical Protestantism.

He took a leading part in ventilating the Bulgarian and Armenian "atrocities," and his combative personality was constantly to the fore in support of the campaigns of Gladstonian Liberalism.