LIBERALISM, CIVIC REFORMISM and DEMOCRACY
- This paper argues that liberalism provides democracy with the experience of civic reformism. Without it, democracy loses any tie-argumentative or practical-to a coherent design of public policy endeavoring to provide the resources for the realization of democratic citizenship. The case for liberalism rests on an argumentative reconstruction of the function it performs before the rise of a world economic order and, more specifically, in the creation of the welfare state after the Second World War. Accordingly, liberalism defines a reformist political program: it is an emancipatory political project by virtue of its struggle for an egalitarian and universalist extension of citizenship rights. This is but a formulation of the modern idea of citizenship, conceived of as a universalizable contract of rights. At the same time, liberalism embraces a socioeconomic emancipatory project that endeavors to provide the conditions, within the institutional framework of modern societies, for the accomplishment of citizenship rights.
- The origins of liberalism in the seventeenth century tell the story of the struggle for recognition of religious tolerance. This early form of pluralism provided the antecedent for the constitutional recognition of civil rights, interpreted in terms of universal adscription. A further step of constitution-building in liberal polities was taken when the universal principles of equality and liberty assumed the status of fundamental rights. That happened under the form of a constitutional program aimed at the improvement of the civil condition. Liberalism as a revolution of rights not only meant the conquest of civil rights by society, but also their extension by constitutional means. Both dimensions, the emancipatory and the egalitarian-universalist, gave form to the original liberalism.
For its later history, liberalism owes as much to its antecedents (situated at the rise of parliamentary assemblies and of the rule of law in the Middle Ages), as to its linkages with the republican tradition of communal self-government (from the seventeenth century onwards), and with the socialist tradition in support for an egalitarian model of society (as from the eighteenth century). Indeed, it is this double tie what determines that the political history of liberalism belongs to the history of modern democracy: a representative democracy but, thereby, pluralist. The tie also explains that the economic history of liberalism cannot be separated from the birth of the welfare state.
In both respects liberalism defines a reformist political program: it is an emancipatory political project by virtue of its struggle for an egalitarian and universalist extension of citizenship rights. This is but a formulation of the modern idea of citizenship, conceived of as a universalizable contract of rights. At the same time, liberalism embraces a socio-economic emancipatory project that endeavors to provide the conditions, within the institutional frame of modern societies, for the accomplishment of citizenship rights. Let us comment on this double characterization.
By : José María Rosales - Universidad de Málaga
Original Sources : http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Poli/PoliRosa.htm
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