What is Liberalism?
Notes from John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971), courtesy of Darrell Huwe, Ohio University
First Principle: Liberty
“Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.”
Second Principle: Wealth
Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both:
(a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with the just savings principle, and
(b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.
What is Neoliberalism?
From David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005)
David Harvey argues that neoliberalism is instantiated by “deregulation, privatization, and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision.” It is “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices.”