American Liberalism Summary

Summary: Liberalism has recently become pretty dominant politically. In Europe, during the 1970s, a lot of countries shifted politically from hard core right wing views, to more liberal views. A lot of political parties use the world liberal; however, sometimes the term can be used loosely. For the most part, liberalism is associated with people that want equality and that believe in the free market. There are three distinctions to help decipher confusion about liberalism and they are: Justification, Constitution and policy, and Attitudes. However, it is difficult to give liberalism an exact definition because there are so many different traditions. Furthermore, a lot of history courses like to look at the views of Locke and Hobbes to compare

Furthermore, Kant’s views offer a method on how people should behave, and shows some differences in moral relationships. Kant believed that there should be “maxims,” to help make moral law universal. Also, Kant believed that universal laws were put into use by humans through reason, and not by God. Locke believed that universal laws were created by God. People need to be able to understand the internal freedom versus external freedom in order to understand the relationship between politics and morality. Kant believed that people’s rights should be respected, so Kant’s political theory could be labeled as right based. Michael Oakeshott thought of the political community, as an enterprise and civil association. Economic and social liberalism are not conservative. In the ship metaphor, the conservative would believe that something would need to be done to prevent people from drowning; however, the ship could not be deconstructed in the ocean. Conservatives fear any type of radical experiment. Also, conservatives do believe that there is a limited amount of capacity of what humans can take in about society. Conservatives support the free market system, along with that the distribution of goods is in control of

For example, I do not agree with most Conservative views on abortion. Conservatives feel as if abortion is murdering a human being; however, one has to look at the big picture. If a woman is victim of rape or incest, she should be able to have the option of abortion. Even more important, if a woman is at risk of death because of a severe case of preeclampsia, she should be able to convey the option of abortion. However, I do not agree with a lot of liberal views on welfare. I am not saying that I do not think people should help people if they need it; however, people should not have to solely rely on government aid to get by. If one is being helped by government aid, one should have to be out there trying to get some type of job. There needs to be effort shown, we should not let people get away with just relying heavily on government