Politics is full of slippery words, but none is harder to pin down than ‘liberal’. In America, to be a liberal is to be on the left of the political spectrum; in many parts of Europe, the opposite is the case. In Britain, it all depends on which words you use in combination with 'liberal' and whether or not you capitalise the initial letters. Most perplexing of all is Denmark, where the Liberals are the main party of the centre-right, but whose name in Danish – Venstre – literally means ‘Left’.
But if the terminology is confusing, then the ideology is even worse. Because, as Wilfred McClay explains in a brilliant essay for First Things, the philosophy of liberalism is riven with contradictions:
The second and newer kind of liberalism "saw the achievement of a high degree of equality as the essential precondition for the exercise of any meaningful political liberty":
Crucially, the first kind of liberalism still survives in the form of a "fundamental commitment to the ideal of the autonomous self, boundless in its desires, and the self-legitimating creator of its own values." Thus we live in a world of "bureaucratic individualism" – a "logic-defying hybrid" composd of an anything-goes "personal realm" and an "organisational realm" dominated by the centralised state:
Anyone who thinks that the idea of the Big Society (or whatever you wish to call it) is irrelevant, should consider just where our existing model of society is heading. (Hint: handcarts may be involved).