Political Philosophy Part 7: Political Ideologies

Liberalism

The dominant Western political tradition since the Enlightenment. Core commitments: the moral primacy of the individual, equal moral worth, civil and political liberties, limited government, the rule of law, religious toleration, market exchange, and (in most modern variants) representative democracy.

Internal divisions are deep:

• Classical liberalism (Locke, Smith, Mill, Hayek) — Emphasizes negative liberty, limited government, free markets. Modern descendants: many positions in mainstream center-right and libertarian-leaning thought.
• Modern (welfare) liberalism (T.H. Green, Dewey, Rawls) — Holds that liberal commitments require active state intervention to secure the conditions of meaningful liberty: education, healthcare, social insurance. The dominant philosophical strand in 20th-century Anglo-American academic political philosophy.
• Political liberalism (later Rawls, Larmore) — Emphasizes that liberal institutions must be justifiable to citizens holding diverse "comprehensive doctrines" (religious, secular). Liberalism is a political settlement among reasonable disagreement, not a metaphysical doctrine.
• Perfectionist liberalism (Raz) — Rejects the political-liberal restraint; holds that the state may legitimately promote certain conceptions of the good life, provided it does so without coercion of individual conscience.

The internal liberalism debates dominate contemporary academic political philosophy. The classical-vs-modern split also tracks the practical political division between the center-right and center-left in most Western democracies.

Conservatism

Often defined more by temperament than doctrine. Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) gave the founding articulation: societies are organic growths, the product of accumulated tradition, not constructions to be rationally redesigned; abstract reason is a poor guide to political action; the prudent statesman conserves what has worked, reforms slowly when necessary, and is suspicious of grand schemes for human improvement.

This is traditionalist conservatism: emphasis on continuity, institutions, custom, religion, family, locality, and skepticism of abstract universal principles. Modern descendants include Roger Scruton, Patrick Deneen, communitarian thinkers, and many forms of religious traditionalism.

Distinct from this is fusionist or market conservatism, dominant in late-20th-century American politics: a fusion of traditionalist values with classical liberal economics. The combination is theoretically uneasy (free markets are corrosive of traditional communities) but politically powerful.

And distinct from both is national conservatism, prominent in 2026 (Hazony, Vance, Orbán's intellectuals): emphasis on national sovereignty, cultural cohesion, restrictive immigration, skepticism of supranational institutions, and a more interventionist economic policy than fusionist conservatism allowed. Whether this represents a return to pre-fusionist conservatism, a new development, or a slide toward something more troubling is contested.

Socialism & Social Democracy

The 19th century gave socialism its enduring shape: a critique of capitalism as fundamentally unjust (because exploitative, alienating, or wasteful), and a commitment to collective ownership and democratic control of the major means of production.

The 20th century split the tradition.

• Revolutionary Marxism-Leninism sought socialism through the seizure of state power and the abolition of private ownership. The historical record (USSR, Maoist China, Khmer Rouge, etc.) is overwhelmingly catastrophic; few serious thinkers in 2026 defend the model.
• Social democracy (Bernstein, Crosland, the Scandinavian model) accepted markets and liberal democracy while seeking to constrain market outcomes through strong welfare states, progressive taxation, public services, labor protection, and strategic state ownership. The most successful socialist tradition in practice — Northern European countries score very high on virtually every measure of human well-being.
• Democratic socialism goes further than social democracy, seeking the gradual democratization of economic life — worker cooperatives, public ownership of strategic sectors, robust co-determination. G.A. Cohen, John Roemer, Erik Olin Wright are major contemporary theorists.
• Market socialism attempts to combine collective ownership (or at least non-capitalist ownership) with market exchange, addressing the calculation problem that doomed Soviet planning while preserving socialist commitments to equality.

Libertarianism & Anarchism

The radical wing of the liberal tradition, taking the commitment to individual liberty and limited government to its conclusion.

Libertarianism (Nozick, Rand, Hospers, Friedman) defends a minimal state — the "night-watchman state" limited to protection of rights, enforcement of contracts, and national defense. Beyond that, taxation is "forced labor," redistribution is theft, and economic freedom is continuous with personal freedom. The most rigorous philosophical statement is Nozick's, covered in Part 2.

Left-libertarianism (Otsuka, Vallentyne, Steiner) shares the libertarian commitment to self-ownership but adds the Lockean proviso seriously: natural resources are owned in common and their appropriation requires compensation to the dispossessed. The result can be radically egalitarian even from libertarian premises.

Anarchism dispenses with the state entirely. Its philosophical strands diverge sharply: anarcho-capitalists (Rothbard) want voluntary market provision of all current state services; classical and social anarchists (Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, Bookchin, more recently David Graeber) are anti-capitalist as well as anti-state, envisioning federations of voluntary cooperatives. The shared premise is that hierarchical authority is illegitimate and human cooperation can be organized horizontally.

Fascism & the Far Right

Worth treating philosophically because the family of doctrines is real, distinctive, and has returned as a serious political force in the 21st century.

Classical fascism (Italian Fascism, German National Socialism) combined: (1) a mythic conception of the nation or race as the supreme political reality, (2) rejection of liberal democratic procedures in favor of authoritarian leadership, (3) a corporatist economic order subordinating labor and capital to the national interest, (4) cult of strength, hierarchy, and violence, (5) palingenetic mythology — the idea that the nation has fallen and must be reborn through purifying struggle (Roger Griffin's analysis).

Whether contemporary movements are fascist in the classical sense, "post-fascist," "illiberal democratic," or simply nationalist-authoritarian is contested. The honest answer is that family resemblances are present in varying degrees in different cases; the philosophical work is in distinguishing where the resemblances are real and where they are not.

Beyond Left & Right

The single left-right axis is increasingly inadequate. Modern political mapping uses at least two dimensions — typically economic (state-vs-market) and cultural/social (cosmopolitan-vs-traditionalist, liberal-vs-conservative on issues of identity and authority) — and sometimes three or four.

Many of the most consequential 21st-century political positions cross the older lines. The "national-conservative" combines economic interventionism with cultural traditionalism. The "tech libertarian" combines cultural progressivism with market fundamentalism. The "post-liberal left" combines anti-market politics with skepticism of Enlightenment universalism. None of these fit neatly on a single axis.

The deeper philosophical point: political ideologies are constructed; they reflect the political coalitions and conceptual choices of particular times. The building blocks (liberty, equality, authority, recognition) recombine in new ways as circumstances change. Mapping the current configuration is part of the perpetual work of political philosophy.