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Paleoliberalism

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Paleoliberalism is a somewhat obscure term for extreme liberalism. The (slightly more common) adjectival form, paleoliberal is defined by The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, as "Extremely or stubbornly liberal in political matters." Because liberalism itself has several different meanings, this definition carries some ambiguity.

The term is often used to refer to an extreme or "unreconstructed" exponent of American liberalism. For example, Brian Doherty writing in Reason in 1997 used the term to refer to Richard Gephardt in his opposition to Clinton's free trade policies. [#endnote_Doherty] [#endnote_Gresser] [#endnote_Sullivan]

According to Michael Lind, in the late 1960s and early 1970s many "anti-Soviet [American] liberals and social democrats in the tradition of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey and Henry ("Scoop") Jackson… preferred to call themselves 'paleoliberals'"; according to Lind, roughly this group of people later became known as the neoconservatives. [#endnote_] [#endnote_Nash]

There is another usage of the term with some currency on blogs, Internet discussion groups, etc. in the United States. The term is roughly interchangeable with libertarianism, also called classical liberalism by some of its adherents. [#endnote_blog]

The term "paleoliberalism" was also used by Alexander Rüstow, to describe ardent laissez-faire liberals like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Rüstow himself was a German Ordoliberal (neoliberal). [#endnote_Henry]

Notes

  1.   Doherty, "Swap Meat".
  2.   Gresser, "Trade Myths", Sullivan, "Good Choice. Bad Speech", and "Hunger Stalks N.J. Suburbs" (on the site of TimesWatch.org) also use the word in this sense.
  3.   Lind, "A Tragedy of Errors".
  4.   Nash, "A Cold War Paleoliberal".
  5.   A typical example of use in a blog is [lowercase liberty: paleoliberalism] (posted September 20, 2005, retrieved December 20, 2005) by B.K. Marcus. The article [Paleoliberalism] on the Libertarian Wiki uses this meaning of the term, but provides no references.
  6.  

References

See also

 


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