What does it mean to be "liberal"

[Meadmaker]

Good point.

 

[JamesDillon]

Sorry to drag this back from the dead, but I was reading an essay by Tom Nagel last night that I thought shed some light on the difficulty in pinning down a definition of "liberal" and why Americans and Europeans tend to view it differently:

'Liberalism' means different things to different people. The term is used in Europe by the left to castigate the right for blind faith in the value of an unfettered market economy and insufficient attention to the importance of state action in realizing the values of equality and social justice.... In the United States, on the other hand, the term is used by the right to castigate the left for unrealistic attachment to the values of social and economic equality and the too ready use of government power to pursue those ends at the cost of individual freedom and initiative. Thus, American Republicans who condemn the Democrats as bleeding-heart liberals are precisely the sort of people who are condemned as heartless liberals by French Socialists.

Thomas Nagel, "Rawls and Liberalism," in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, Samuel Freeman ed. (2003).

 

[Meadmaker]

Doesn't anyone use the term with good connotations anymore?

I suppose I would be more likely to be condemned by French Socialists than American Republicans. I'm not all that familiar with French politics, but my guess is that the right wing in France isn't all that right wing, and that those French right wingers are inded what I would call liberal, and I would say it's a good thing. That, however, is only a guess. I'm not sufficiently acquainted to say for sure.