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Dictionary definition: liberalism
- Article from:
- The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics
- Author:
Copyright© The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics 2003, originally published by Oxford University Press 2003. (Hide copyright information)
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liberalism
In general, the belief that it is the aim of politics to preserve individual rights and to maximize freedom of choice. In common with
socialism
and
conservatism
, it emerged from the conjunction of the
Enlightenment
, the Industrial Revolution, and the political revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Liberalism retains a faith in the possibilities of improvement in present social conditions, which is related to the idea of
progress
widely accepted in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That idea embraced the prospects for developments in knowledge, in welfare, and in morality. Although the confidence in the prospects for progress in some of these ...