Liberalism

Lane Kenworthy, The Good Society
November 2024

Liberalism has three core principles.1 First, our concern in seeking the good society and the good life ought to be the wellbeing of individuals, not the wellbeing of a group (race, class, nation, religion).2 Second, every person, regardless of their lineage, place of birth, age, sex, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, or other features over which they have little or no control, is equally deserving of rights, respect, and the opportunity to develop and pursue informed preferences.3 Third, science — the use of evidence and reasoning to assess beliefs — should play a key role in guiding our views and actions.4

Liberalism’s principles push us toward a host of orientations, temperaments, institutions, and policies.5 These make it easier to achieve a variety of desirable outcomes.6

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LIBERALISM FACILITATES GOOD OUTCOMES

Freedom

Liberalism’s emphasis on individuals and individual opportunity leads to a strong commitment to Individual liberty.7 This liberty has a “negative” component and a “positive” one.8 Negative liberty is the absence of external intervention that prevents you from doing certain things or forces you to do certain things. Within limits, your neighbor or employer or mayor or parliament isn’t allowed to restrict your speech or your religious preference.

Positive liberty refers to conditions and supports that facilitate individuals’ formation and pursuit of goals. Schools, families, a decent income floor, healthcare, job search assistance, and much more get us closer to a society in which individual autonomy is actively, rather than passively, supported — in which we understand freedom as capabilities rather than simply the absence of restrictions.9

Although progress has been partial and uneven, individual freedom has increased significantly over time.10

Knowledge

Science enables us to understand how things work. For liberalism, that should play a key role in informing our beliefs and actions, and perhaps also our values.

To support and promote science, liberalism encourages a society to value universal schooling, an autonomous scientific community, and an independent media that can help to convey the findings of science to the public.

One of the most important things we learn from science is that there is much we don’t know. Humility — an appreciation for the limits of our knowledge and for our fallibility — is therefore a key tenet of liberalism.

This in turn has implications for societal institutions and practices. We can’t be certain what the best way to flourish is — what values, preferences, and institutions are better than others — so it’s wise to allow people to do what they want as long as that doesn’t impede others’ ability to do so. We can’t know what civil society groups or organizations will produce the best results, so it’s wise to allow any and all. We can’t know who will make the best decisions, so democracy, rather than lineage or perceived expertise, is the smartest approach to choosing political decision makers (see below). Government won’t always make the best choices, so it’s smart to have some checks and balances. We can’t know the best way to allocate resources, so it’s a good idea to use markets rather than government planning to coordinate economic activity (again, see below). We can’t be sure about god, so it makes sense to allow freedom of religion.

Democracy

Liberalism makes democracy the preferable form of government. Democratic government consists of free and fair elections, roughly equal opportunity for each citizen to influence policy making, and majority rule. Because there are diverse beliefs and preferences and because we seldom can be certain we know who will be best at making important decisions or what those decisions should be, a democratic form of government is the safest bet. Democracy enables people to change the decision makers if things aren’t going well or if preferences shift.

Policymakers can make mistakes, so liberalism favors a government structure with checks and balances. Liberalism “makes the idea of fallibility into a political practice by trying not to have too much power concentrated in one place or part of the system.”11 Dispersing power also encourages policymakers to deliberate. And checks and balances foster a more incremental approach to change (see below).

For the same reason, liberalism recommends having a government bureaucracy (“administrative state”) that is nonpartisan — that is, not directly tied to a particular political group or party.

Liberalism depends upon laws. Given that we seldom can be sure we know the truth and humans are fallible, it’s helpful to have formal rules that set out a framework for what people can and can’t do and what the government can and can’t do. Effective application of laws typically requires independent courts and judicial review.

Formalized individual rights are helpful.12 Individuals should have freedom of thought, speech, religious preference, association, peaceful assembly, and more that can’t, except at the extremes, be abridged by other private actors or by government. These freedoms of individuals should be established as rights that require a supermajority or temporary extreme circumstances to abridge.

For democracy, a key individual right is the right to protest. This too follows from the recognition that people, their organizations, and their elected leaders will sometimes make bad decisions, perhaps even evil ones. “The horrors of colonialism,” for example, “remain a constant reproach to the liberal tradition…. Yet, over the centuries, the fallibilism central to liberalism has sponsored within it a corrective conscience. The atrocities can come from within the liberal order — and so does the urge to correct them. Not just the specific protests but also the idea of protest as a constant living alternative to injustice is a particularly liberal one…. The urge to commit atrocities is standard to all human systems; the institutionalized urge to amend them is not.”13

None of these features of democracy ensure that all individuals will be treated equally, that people will have full opportunity to achieve their goals, and that bad governmental decisions will be recognized and corrected. No political system is perfect. But liberal democracy has tended to perform better in these respects than anything else we’ve devised.

Economic prosperity

It would be reasonable to presume that the only way to effectively coordinate the buying and selling of goods and services is via planning. In a planned economy, an agency decides what entities will produce which goods and services, in what quantities, and at what prices — and perhaps also which people will perform which roles in the production. This kind of planning is commonplace within companies. We also observe it in economic sectors that are run by government, such as K-12 schooling and health care.

But for an entire economy, markets tend to work better.14 A market is a decentralized form of coordination in which each producer chooses a price at which to sell their service or good and buyers decide whether or not to purchase it. In response to buyers’ decisions, sellers adjust the price and/or quantity and/or quality of their products.

Prices turn out to be a very useful source of information.15 If a company producing a good or service observes that too few people are purchasing at the price it has set, it can reduce the price in order to increase sales. It also might try to figure out ways to improve efficiency in its operations, or to improve the quality of the product, so that it can increase sales at the lower price or sell enough at a higher price. Similarly, buyers facing prices they’re unwilling or unable to pay may look for other sellers; or they might try to find ways to earn more money in order to pay the higher price; or they might choose to purchase alternatives. The sum of these independent decisions turns out, in many instances, to yield a significant degree of order, efficiency, and dynamism.

This result is even more remarkable in that markets don’t require people to act altruistically. For the most part, individuals and organizations pursuing their own material self-interest will end up acting in ways that result in an orderly and relatively efficient process.

There have been attempts to use planning to coordinate economic activity across an entire economy. With modern computing power, the logistics of doing this are feasible. But economy-wide planning has proved inferior to markets. Planned economies have tended to respond less rapidly to changes in economic conditions and preferences. They’ve been less effective at generating innovation and increases in productivity. And they’ve tended to be used only by authoritarian governments.16

Concluding that markets are an effective way to coordinate an economy is not the same thing as saying that markets are better at everything. Nor is it to suggest that even where markets are most effective they must therefore be used. For some services and goods, such as health care and education, markets may not be as useful as other forms of coordination, and in any case we might prefer to limit their use.

Inclusion

People differ in all kinds of ways — age, appearance, beliefs, values, preferences, and much more. Liberalism requires us to accept this diversity. As a result, liberalism is highly conducive to tolerance. Liberalism, says Francis Fukuyama, “can be understood as an institutional solution to the problem of governing over diversity, or, to put it in slightly different terms, of peacefully managing diversity in pluralistic societies. The most fundamental principle enshrined in liberalism is one of tolerance: you do not have to agree with your fellow citizens about the most important things, but only that each individual should get to decide what they are without interference from you or from the state.”17

Inclusion involves more than tolerance. Inclusion requires similar treatment by key institutions (schools, the legal system, etc.) and by other groups, opportunity to participate fully in society, and embrace as part of the community. But while tolerance doesn’t get us all the way to inclusion, it is a critical component.

Openness

Because it presumes all humans are equally worthy, liberalism encourages us to care about the wellbeing of people outside our national borders. In foreign policy, we opt first for peaceful coexistence, though an evidence-based approach says we must also be prepared to use force.18 We favor an approach to trade that is open to foreign-made goods and services.19 And we lean toward generosity in allowing in-migration of people from other nations, especially those who seek improved political, economic, or social conditions.20

Order

Liberal democracy has proved to be, to this point in history, the political structure best suited to achieving order. It helps to ensure order by providing a context in which people with differing needs and wants can resolve their disagreements peaceably, in which disputes can be settled without resorting to physical force. It lowers the temperature of politics. Adam Gopnik puts this point in the following way: “The greatest service of [liberal democratic] politics isn’t to enable the mobilization of people who have the same views; it’s to enable people to live together when their views differ. Politics is a way of getting our ideas to brawl in place of our persons…. Politics, as opposed to pure power grabs, involves an acceptance of the truth that these conflicts can never be cured but only contained, and made as peaceable as humanly … possible. Politics is stress. The objective of practicing it should be to keep the stress from turning into cardiac arrest.”21

Consider just one example from contemporary America: speech on college campuses. Harmful speech — a false advertising claim for a pharmaceutical, shouting “fire” in a crowded space, hate speech — can and should be prevented. But whether a particular type of speech crosses over the line should be decided by an appropriate governing body. When students on the left or the right take it upon themselves to block a speaker from getting to the podium, or shout her down once she’s reached it, they forget that the other side can do the same thing. Who gets to speak on college campuses then comes to hinge on which side can shout the loudest or show up with the most bodies.

Liberal democracy also fosters sympathy and compassion for those on the losing side of economic and social change — people whose jobs get automated out of existence, who are members of a formerly-hegemonic religion, who live in a place experiencing population exodus, whose traditionalist cultural views are in decline. And it provides mechanisms that give such people a voice and an opportunity to influence policies and institutions. This encourages losers to stay in the game, instead of opting out or trying to overthrow the game itself.

A potential threat to order for any political structure is military attack. At first glance, it’s seems reasonable to expect that liberal democratic governments will be militarily inferior to authoritarian ones. However, that hasn’t been the case historically, partly because liberal democracy, when complemented by a market-based economy, has proved conducive to innovation and technological advance. In addition, liberal democratic governance creates incentive and opportunity to identify errors and correct them, so it’s less likely to make calamitous mistakes.22

Happiness

Liberalism contributes to happiness in three ways.23 One is liberalism’s support for democratic government, markets, and science, which tend to be good for economic growth and affluence. There is a strong positive relationship, observed among individuals and among countries, between income and life satisfaction. That relationship weakens as income gets higher, but it does seem to continue.

A second is individual freedom and economic opportunity. Persons who feel they have the freedom to choose what to do with their life tend to be happier.

Third, people tend to be happier in societies with “individualist” rather than “collectivist” value orientations. This refers to cultural norms that encourage people to think of themselves as autonomous individuals as opposed to norms that encourage conformity or obedience to authority.

CRITICISMS OF LIBERALISM

A standard critique of liberalism by political authoritarians is that liberal democracy yields slow and inefficient decision making. That’s very likely true when compared to autocracy. Yet in crisis situations — war, natural disaster, economic depression — governments in liberal democracies often have responded quickly and effectively. And as noted earlier, liberal democracy tends to have other advantages, such as innovation, improvement, and correction of mistakes, that more than outweigh its sometimes cumbersome decision-making process.

A common critique from the left is that liberalism favors small government. This is a misunderstanding, though it’s one fostered by more than a few of liberalism’s proponents. Liberalism’s core tenets of individual liberty and equal worth of persons do require some limits on government power. But liberalism treats the optimal size and reach of government as an empirical question rather than a principle. If the evidence were to indicate that very big government — government that owns most of the property, operates organizations in most sectors of the economy, taxes and spend three-quarters of GDP, and heavily regulates private businesses — does the best job of promoting freedom, capabilities, and flourishing for all, then a liberal approach would favor very big government.

Another common criticism from the left is that liberalism permits enormous inequalities of income and wealth, as we see for example in the United States. This is correct. Because it tolerates diverse preferences and capabilities, liberalism will tend to prioritize equal opportunities and capabilities over equal outcomes. At the same time, liberal democracy is quite amenable to egalitarian outcomes, as we observe in the Nordic countries and some other western European nations.24 And it’s worth noting that in recent decades the worldwide distribution of income has been getting more equal, not more unequal.25

Communitarians and social conservatives frequently argue that liberalism destabilizes, and thereby erodes, family and community.26 By privileging individual freedom and choice, liberalism encourages people to leave their family or community in search of educational opportunity, economic gain, or heightened happiness. And liberalism tends to weaken ethical principles, norms, institutions, and traditions that bind people together. This too is certainly true. And yet what this criticism mostly consists of is a mourning for lost community rather than an argument in favor of some nonliberal alternative. Once we recognize that married people should be permitted to divorce, we can’t very well return to the previous marital regime, and there is no sensible case for forcing people to remain in the town where they grew up or requiring that they adhere to a particular religious doctrine.27 Moreover, there is an important way in which liberalism facilitates community: by allowing and enabling people to choose their family, their friends, their place of work, their neighborhood, their voluntary associations, and their online groups, liberalism promotes ties and connections that may be more likely to endure.28

A related criticism contends that liberalism is self-destructive. By privileging individual freedom, in this view, liberalism erodes the social and economic infrastructure — families, neighborhoods, community organizations, labor unions — that contribute to people’s capabilities. Individuals are left helpless to confront relentlessly competitive markets and an all-powerful government (“state”).29 Though it has a grain of truth, this critique too is wrong, because it overlooks the ways in which governments in modern liberal democratic capitalist nations promote the capabilities of individuals and cushion the risks they face. This is the bulk of what governments in liberal democracies do. And the evidence suggests it tends to work fairly well, albeit by no means perfectly. For example, in the rich democratic countries that have the biggest governments — measured as the expansiveness and generosity of public goods, services, and insurance programs — around 95% of people say they are satisfied when asked “Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?” Those countries also tend to have comparatively high levels of economic security, employment, opportunity, and life satisfaction.30

LIBERALISM’S PATH TO PROGRESS

Acknowledging that people hold diverse beliefs and preferences and emphasizing that we seldom can be certain we know the best way, liberalism pushes us to favor gradual, incremental change.31

Amartya Sen notes, sensibly, that thinking and debating about an “ideal” society distracts from the more important task of improving on what currently exists. There is no optimal, achievable good society. There is only better and worse. Our aim should be to do better, not to achieve perfection.32

Adam Gopnik puts it this way: “What is liberalism, then? A hatred of cruelty. An instinct about human conduct rooted in a rueful admission of our own fallibility and of the inadequacy of our divided minds to be right frequently enough to act autocratically. A belief that the sympathy that binds human society together can disconnect us from our clannish and suspicious past. A program for permanent reform based on reason and an appeal to argument, aware of human fallibility and open to the lessons of experience. An understanding that small, open social institutions, if no larger than a café or more overtly political than a park, play an outsized role in creating free minds and securing public safety. A faith in rational debate, rather than inherited ritual, and in reform, rather than either revolution or reaction.”33

Ultimately, though, a liberal approach to change bows to the evidence. We assess the historical record and try to figure out what’s been most likely to yield genuine progress. If incremental change has tended to be the most effective, then it should be our default path.

  1. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859; John Rawls, Political Liberalism, Columbia Press, 1993; Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, Oxford University Press, 1999; Sen, The Idea of Justice, Harvard University Press, 2009; William A. Galston, Liberal Pluralism, Cambridge University Press, 2002; Galston, The Practice of Liberal Pluralism, Cambridge University Press, 2005; Paul Starr, Freedom’s Power: The True Force of Liberalism, Basic Books, 2007; Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014; Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022; Michael Freeden, Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2015; Andrew Reeve, “Liberalism,” in A Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics and International Relations, edited by Garrett W Brown, Iain McLean, and Alistair McMillan, Oxford University Press, 2018; Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism, Basic Books, 2019. ↩︎
  2. This is “humanism.” ↩︎
  3. “A liberal society protects human dignity by granting citizens an equal right to autonomy. The ability to make fundamental life choices is a critical human characteristic. Every individual wants to determine their life’s goals: what they will do for a living, whom they will marry, where they will live, with whom they will associate and transact, what and how they should speak, and what they will believe. It is this freedom that gives human beings dignity, and unlike intelligence, physical appearance, skin color, or other secondary characteristics, it is universally shared by all human beings.” Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents, pp. 8-9. ↩︎
  4. This third principle is less often explicit in discussions of liberalism than the other two. It is sometimes expressed as rationality, political rationalism, or secularism. ↩︎
  5. These aren’t unambiguous; there is disagreement within liberalism. Freeden, Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction. ↩︎
  6. See also Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now, Viking, 2018. ↩︎
  7. Mill, On Liberty. ↩︎
  8. Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, Oxford University, 1958. ↩︎
  9. Sen, Development as Freedom. ↩︎
  10. Lane Kenworthy, “Affluence and Progress,” The Good Society; Kenworthy, “Personal Freedom,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  11. Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism, p. 191. ↩︎
  12. Lane Kenworthy, “Human Rights,” The Good Society ↩︎
  13. Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism, p. 192. ↩︎
  14. Lane Kenworthy, “Economic Growth,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  15. Friedrich Hayek, “The Price System as a Mechanism for Using Knowledge,” American Economic Review, 1945. ↩︎
  16. Janos Kornai, Contradictions and Dilemmas: Studies on the Socialist Economy and Society, MIT Press, 1983; Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism, George Allen and Unwin, 1983. ↩︎
  17. Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents, p. 7. ↩︎
  18. Lane Kenworthy, “Military Intervention Abroad,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  19. Lane Kenworthy, “Trade,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  20. Lane Kenworthy, “Migration,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  21. Adam Gopnik, “Can’t We Come Up with Something Better Than Liberal Democracy?,” The New Yorker, 2022. ↩︎
  22. Noah Smith, “Western Democracies Are Actually Pretty Good at War,” Noahpinion Substack, June 19, 2025. ↩︎
  23. Lane Kenworthy, “Happiness,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  24. Lane Kenworthy, “Income Distribution,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  25. Kenworthy, “Income Distribution,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  26. Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda, Crown, 1993; Robert D. Putnam with Shaylyn Romney Garrett, The Upswing, Simon and Schuster, 2020. ↩︎
  27. The Economist, “Freedom and Community: The Politics of Restoration,” 1994. ↩︎
  28. “Even the supposed loss of secure community is in itself a chimera. In my experience, no orthodox marriage on a Greek island is celebrated with as much solemnity and ceremony combined as is a gay marriage on Fire Island in New York. (Gay marriages tend to be extremely well produced.) Liberalism constitutes countless communities of common feeling. They’re just not those of a church or synagogue or mosque. From the devotees who travel to Comic-Con impersonating Chewbacca, to those who travel to Skepticon impersonating Christopher Hitchens, liberalism is full of community. They make friends and lovers along the way — very much in the spirit of medieval pilgrims headed to Canterbury. No, liberalism is dense with community; it simply makes new, nontraditional kinds of community. For that matter, online communities where fetishist speaks to fellow fetishist are as alive with gossip as any idealized country store.” Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism, pp.137-38. ↩︎
  29. Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community, Oxford University Press, 1953; Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, Yale University Press, 2018. ↩︎
  30. Lane Kenworthy, “Social Democratic Capitalism,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  31. Charles E. Lindblom, “The Science of ‘Muddling Through’,” Public Administration Review, 1959; Daniel Chirot, You Say You Want a Revolution? Radical Idealism and Its Tragic Consequences, Princeton University Press, 2020; Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox, Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age, Oxford University Press, 2023. ↩︎
  32. Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice, Harvard University Press, 2009. See also Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism. ↩︎
  33. Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism, p. 80. ↩︎