From First Things
Speaking very broadly, there are two basic ways we can understand liberalism. The first, and
older, emphasizes the protection and empowerment of individuals and institutions over against encroachment and invasion by the sovereign political power. In that sense, it should be seen as a healthy response to the threat of absolutism. It is a modern view, coeval with the emergence of ideas of constitutionally limited government, natural rights, a free-market economy, private property, civil liberties, and, above all, with a robust sense of individualism, in both its political and metaphysical meanings.
Liberalism in this sense is above all a doctrine upholding the independence and supreme value of the individual person as a free agent who bears fundamental rights that exist prior to and independently of government. Hence it regards the ultimate source of authority for all legitimate forms of government as the consent of the governed, as expressed in and through representative institutions. For what other source could possibly be compatible with the equality and free agency attributed to each individual person?
This understanding of liberalism may also extend to encompass a high degree of social tolerance, religious disestablishment, pluralism, individualism, and the like, along with an Enlightenment optimism about the possibility of steady and certain progress in the world, given the proven capacity of human ingenuity to ameliorate the hard conditions of life. This is the liberalism we associate with John Locke, the American Founders, and the John Stuart Mill of On Liberty (1859). It well reflects the concept of “negative” liberty made famous by Isaiah Berlin—a form of liberty that seeks above all else to protect the individual from coercion and to minimize the incursion of others into the zone of individual privacy.
That first kind of liberalism proved insufficient in the eyes of visionary and committed social reformers, who proposed to replace it with a far more sweeping and ambitious formulation. They offered a new liberalism that saw the achievement of a high degree of equality as the essential precondition for the exercise of any meaningful political liberty and that was severely critical of individualism as an atomizing force that underwrites social selfishness, wasteful inefficiency, and inattention to the common good. The older liberalism’s commitment to the primacy of formal rights rendered it blind to the substantive difficulty faced by those who had to exercise their rights under conditions of persistent social and economic disadvantage. They did not intend to be bound by any such formalism.
The goal of liberalism, they believed, was still ultimately about the establishment of a society of free and equal citizens. But the means of achieving that goal were changing dramatically. Thus began the transformation of what had been a philosophy of limited government into a philosophy of expansive and activist government, though undertaken still in the name of liberalism, still with the same intention of preserving the same goods.