Liberalism
The and their liberties first: power is legitimate only when limited, grounded in consent and bounded by rights.
1689 – …
A political tradition born with and the English Revolution, which sets the individual, their and their rights at the foundation of political order. Against absolutism, it holds that power derives from the consent of the governed, that it must remain limited and accountable, and that a sphere of private life is by right beyond the reach of the state. gives it its charter with the harm principle; and conceive it as the liberty of the moderns and negative liberty; recasts it in the twentieth century, reconciling basic liberties with social justice. A plural family, from the economic liberalism of to social liberalism, it shares the refusal to sacrifice the individual to the whole.
Institutions serve the and their ends, not the reverse: no one may be sacrificed to the social whole.
To be free is first of all to be unhindered: the law should protect the , not narrow it.
Justification
Liberalism starts from the , not from the social whole: institutions are conceived starting from persons, their choices and their rights, not the reverse. Society is not an organism that would precede its members and subordinate them to its end, but an association in the service of individual ends. Hence the primacy of the rights of the person over the demands of the collective.
Locke, Two Treatises of Government · Mill, On Liberty
Justification
The liberty that classical liberalism foregrounds is first of all : a space where each acts as they see fit without hindrance, which the law should protect rather than restrict. opposes it to the liberty of the ancients, makes it his negative liberty, bounds it by the harm principle alone. Its social wing adds the real means to exercise it, , without giving up the primacy of non-interference.
Constant, The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns (1819) · Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (1958)
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Justification
All its variants agree that there exist rights which limit power and which no majority may abolish at will; they diverge on their grounding, which spreads the current across several paths: prior to the state in , guarantees justified by their in , terms of fair cooperation through deliberation in . The shared refusal is of pure positivism, for which there is no right but what authority decrees.
Locke, Two Treatises of Government · Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971)