Why the word liberal means opposite things in America and Europe
Say liberal in the United States and most people hear centre-left, pro-welfare politics. Say it in Europe or Australia and it often means the reverse: free markets, low taxes and limited government. The gap exists because classical liberalism, the older creed, kept its name in some places and lost it in others.
Classical liberalism, historically called Whiggism and sometimes English liberalism, champions free markets and laissez-faire economics alongside civil liberties under the rule of law. It stresses individual autonomy, limited government, economic and political freedom and free speech, and it is warier than social liberalism of taxation, social programmes and state involvement in private life, favouring deregulation instead.
The label itself is a retronym. Before the Great Depression and the rise of social liberalism, people simply spoke of economic liberalism; the classical tag was added later to separate nineteenth-century liberalism from its interventionist successor. The ideas took shape in the early eighteenth century, drawing on sixteenth-century roots, and helped underpin the American Revolution. Contributors included John Locke, Montesquieu, David Hume and Thomas Paine, and the economics leaned heavily on Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and on belief in natural law. Twentieth-century champions such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman are sometimes grouped separately as neoclassical liberals.
At its core lay a new picture of society, neither the conservative image of a nation as one family nor the later sociological view of society as tangled networks. Following Thomas Hobbes, classical liberals held that people create governments to protect themselves from one another. Following Smith, they believed everyone gains when each person may pursue their own economic interest: workers seek the best-paying employer, the profit motive delivers goods people want at prices they will pay, and both labour and capital earn the most they can. They opposed what became the welfare state and argued for a minimal state.
That mix scrambles the usual left-right map. Its defence of economic freedom looks right-wing, yet it tends to reject protectionism. Its defence of civil liberties resembles the modern left, yet its individualism makes it suspicious of collective group rights. Critics note that it resisted labour's group rights while accepting corporate ones, producing unequal bargaining power. In the United States it is often treated as close kin to libertarianism.
Source: Classical liberalism
