Notes on the Vicissitudes of Liberalism

Notes on the Vicissitudes of Liberalism

  Liberalism is one of the most important terms in Anglo-American, and more broadly Euro-American political and philosophical discourse. Liberalism has a special purchase for scholars of American cultural studies as intellectual assertions about US adherence to a consistent and thoroughgoing liberalism (often said to be derived from the writings of John Locke) tends to underpin the discourse of American exceptionalism. This short paper explores the historical and conceptual vicissitudes of liberalism, with a particular focus on the contradictions between market liberalism and political liberalism, freedom and equality, liberal universalism and liberal exclusion. It suggests that liberalism is a term whose long-term resilience as a frame of reference for modern politics masks profound shifts and variations in its meaning and uses across space and time. It argues finally that liberalism has no fixed, doctrinal definition, but rather comprises a set of constitutive, and in many ways politically productive, tensions and ambiguities at the heart of what are now referred to as liberal-democratic nation-states.