What Is Liberalism?

The premise both parties share, and the word that hides it

Most American Christians who call themselves conservative would deny being liberals, and by the definition they use, they are right. This paper uses an older and more exact one. Liberalism is the belief that men are born free and equal, so that no one holds authority over another except by his consent, and it is the political order built on that belief. Defined that way, it is the premise under both American parties. We set out the premise, ask where it came from, what truth it twists, and where it leads, and then ask who holds it. We close with why the definition matters. A word that means “anyone to my left” measures distance from the speaker rather than belief, and a premise no one names keeps moving the country while both parties argue over each step.

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Two meanings of one word

In American speech the word liberal points left. A liberal is a Democrat who wants more government, a conservative is a Republican who wants less, and the two words are defined as opposites. By that usage a conservative cannot be a liberal, and the question in our title has an easy answer.

The word did not start there. In the nineteenth century a liberal was a man who wanted free trade, limited government, and religious liberty, and Britain’s Liberal Party was built on that program. In the 1930s Franklin Roosevelt claimed the American word for the New Deal. Herbert Hoover protested that the New Deal had distorted it and lost the argument, and the men who held to the older program came to be called conservatives. Friedrich Hayek, who held to it himself, warned American readers of The Road to Serfdom in 1956 that in their usage the word “often means very nearly the opposite” of what it had meant. The label moved. The premise underneath it stayed where it was.

Political philosophy uses the word for that premise, and so do we. In None Gives What He Has Not we called liberalism “the order that grounds authority in consent.” This paper states the belief behind that order, shows that both American parties stand on it, and explains what a country loses when it no longer has a word for it.

The premise

The shortest statement of liberalism is one sentence: men are born free and equal. The National Assembly of France wrote it almost word for word into the first article of its Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” The American Declaration of Independence had said it thirteen years earlier in its own terms, that “all men are created equal” and that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The fullest statement is a century older, in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689).

Locke begins from the condition men are in by nature, before any government exists. It is “a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.” It is also a state of equality, “wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another” (§4). Both words need care, because the obvious reading of each is wrong.

Free does not mean free of all law. Locke’s free man is bound by the law of nature, which Locke held to be God’s law. Free means free of every other man’s authority, so that no one is born under another’s command. Locke knew that children are not born ruling themselves. They are born to freedom rather than in it, he answered: “we are born free, as we are born rational; not that we have actually the exercise of either” (§61). A parent’s rule over a child, on his account, “is but a temporary one” (§55).

Equal does not mean equal in ability or worth. Locke grants that “age or virtue may give men a just precedency,” that “excellency of parts and merit may place others above the common level,” and that birth may bind some men to honor others (§54). The equality he means is equality “in respect of jurisdiction or dominion one over another,” which he calls “that equal right, that every man hath, to his natural freedom, without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man” (§54). No one is born with a right to rule another.

From the two words one conclusion follows, and Locke drew it: “Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent” (§95). If no man is born under authority and no man is born holding it, every authority among men has to be made, and the only material available is agreement. Jonathan Boucher, the Loyalist rector, named the order of the argument for his Maryland congregation in 1775. The “popular notion, that government was originally formed by the consent or by a compact of the people,” he said, “rests on, and is supported by, another similar notion … that the whole human race is born equal.” Consent is the conclusion. Free and equal is the nut.

Everything else called liberal is an application of these three lines or an argument over how to apply them.

What follows

The premise produces the political creed most Americans were taught as patriotism. Each article of it follows by a short step.

Government by consent. If no one is born with authority, a government’s authority has to be granted by the governed. The Declaration gives this as the reason governments exist: “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Government for rights. Men who consent to government consent for a purpose, and Locke names it: “the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name, property” (§123). Government protects what each man held before it existed. It is a hired guard, not a father.

Limited government. Men can grant only what they have, since “no body can transfer to another more power than he has in himself” (§135). A government that reaches past its grant acts without authority, and the people keep “a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative” (§149).

Conscience outside the state’s reach. If the magistrate holds a grant from the people for the protection of property, religion lies outside his commission. Locke drew that line in A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). The care of souls, he argued, was never committed to the magistrate by God. “Nor can any such power be vested in the magistrate by the consent of the people,” he went on, since no man can leave his salvation to another man’s choice. Thomas Jefferson reduced the rule to a test in 1785: “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” The test counts injury to a man’s person and property. It has no category for what is owed to God.

The harm principle. John Stuart Mill carried the premise from the state to the whole of society in On Liberty (1859): “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.” A man born free of every authority he did not choose owns his choices about himself.

A conservative reading that list will recognize most of his own platform. The first four are the core of the American right: consent of the governed, property, limited government, and religious liberty. The fifth is invoked by the left when the subject is sex and by the right when the subject is guns, taxes, or the schooling of children. All five are liberal conclusions.

Where it came from

We ask three questions of every idea: where it came from, what truth has been twisted to produce it, and where it leads.

The history is short to state. Sir Robert Filmer, who wrote against the idea in the 1630s and 1640s, said it “was first hatched in the schools,” meaning the scholastic theologians who taught that God gives power to the community and the community hands it to a ruler. Locke, answering Filmer, took God out of the transfer, made each man the original holder of the power, and turned consent from the channel of authority into its source. The American founders wrote Locke’s version into the charter of a nation. None Gives What He Has Not traces that line step by step.

The deeper origin is older than any school. The first command in Scripture was given to the man before he had agreed to anything (Gen. 2:16–17), and the first sin was the refusal of it. What the serpent offered was not pleasure or wealth. It was standing under no law except one a man chooses for himself. Filmer saw the connection and said so: “the desire of liberty was the first cause of the fall of Adam.” Locke did not teach men to rebel against God, and he kept God’s law above every free man. What he taught was that no human authority binds a man without his agreement. Scripture calls the human authorities over us God’s ordinance, since “the powers that be are ordained of God” (Rom. 13:1), and a premise that sets aside an ordinance because it was not chosen has started down the serpent’s road, whatever it keeps for the moment. Section 06 follows it the rest of the way.

What truth it twists

An error that lasts is built from a truth. Liberalism is built from three.

Freedom. Scripture calls men free and means it: “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John 8:36). The freedom Christ gives is freedom from sin, and it runs toward obedience: “Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness” (Rom. 6:18). Peter puts freedom and subjection in one breath: “As free, and not using your liberty for a cloke of maliciousness, but as the servants of God. Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king” (1 Pet. 2:16–17). Biblical freedom is freedom to serve God in the place he puts a man, under the authorities he sets over him. Liberalism keeps the word and reverses its direction, so that freedom becomes the absence of any authority a man did not choose.

Equality. Scripture teaches an equality deeper than any liberal claim. Every man bears God’s image (Gen. 1:27), God “is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34), and the law gave one judgment for the stranger and the native (Lev. 24:22). In Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female” (Gal. 3:28). The apostle who wrote that verse also wrote “Children, obey your parents in the Lord” (Eph. 6:1) and “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers” (Rom. 13:1), and he saw no conflict, because equal standing before God has never meant equal office among men. Liberalism takes equality of worth and turns it into equality of authority. None Gives What He Has Not answers that move at length.

Consent. Consent has a real place in Scripture. Rebekah was asked before she went to be Isaac’s wife (Gen. 24:57–58), and a marriage begins with a vow. But a man who marries consents to enter a relation whose terms God set, and his consent neither writes those terms nor ends them: “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matt. 19:6). The couple consents. God joins. Liberalism makes consent the author of the relation instead of the door into it, and once consent writes the terms, the relation lasts as long as the consent does.

Where it leads

Locke’s free man lived “within the bounds of the law of nature.” The premise did not stay inside those bounds, because a premise is not a stopping place. It is a rule, and a rule applies to every case it covers. This one says that an authority the person under it did not consent to has no right to command, and the history of the liberal order since 1776 is that rule reaching, one at a time, each authority that was never chosen.

Each step was resisted when it came, and each was argued from the same premise. American conservatism now defends the first three as its own inheritance and has made its peace with the fourth, and section 08 shows the fifth moving the same way. The Casey sentence is where Locke’s road ends. His free man lived within the law of nature. The Court’s free man defines his own meaning. Scripture records the first offer of that freedom, and the serpent made it: “ye would be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5).

What is a liberal

With the premise defined, the person follows. A liberal is anyone who holds that men are born free and equal, so that authority over them is legitimate only by their consent. Which party he votes for does not enter into it.

By that definition both American parties are liberal, and the long fight between them is a fight inside liberalism. They share a question, what free and equal people would agree to, and divide over the answer. The Harvard philosopher John Rawls built A Theory of Justice (1971) on that question, asking what principles free persons, placed in a position of equality, would accept if none of them knew his place in society. The founders asked a version of it in 1776. The answers differ. The question and the premise do not.

A man who answers yes holds the premise. He is a liberal of the right, which is what the American word conservative now describes. The quiz on this site puts twenty such statements, each from a man who held his position without apology. A reader who calls himself a conservative and lands in the Liberal corner has not been misread. He has been read by the older definition.

How the word moves

The definition in common American use is relative. A liberal is anyone to the speaker’s left. A relative definition measures distance, not belief. It locates the other man by reference to the speaker, and a distance changes when either end moves. Two men can stand on the same premise a step apart and call each other liberal and conservative in perfect sincerity.

That is how a country moves without anyone deciding to move it. Each generation’s conservative stands about where the last generation’s liberal stood. He calls that ground conservative because it lies to the right of the new liberal, and he calls the next step liberal because it lies to his left. By the relative definition he is right both times, and the line has moved both times. What he never examines is the premise, because his definition of a liberal names a position, and a premise is not a position. It is what produces the positions, and left unexamined it produces the next one.

The left works the same instrument from the other end. To a speaker on the left the far right is anyone to his right, so ground the center held a generation ago acquires a name that places it outside respectable opinion. Joseph Overton of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy described a window, the range of policies the public accepts as legitimate at a given time. Loose definitions are how the window slides without anyone noticing that the frame around it has not changed.

This is also why the conservative loses the argument over each step. He resists a conclusion while holding the premise his opponent reasons from, so every case he makes against the new step can be answered from ground he has already granted. Marriage shows the pattern in our own time. In 1969 Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, signed the law that let one spouse end a marriage without proving fault, and marriage became, in law, a relation that lasts as long as consent lasts. In 2015 the Supreme Court reasoned from the same ground in Obergefell: if marriage rests on the choice of autonomous persons, the law has no reason to ask which persons are choosing. Justice Anthony Kennedy, whom Reagan appointed, wrote the opinion. In 2024 the Republican platform kept a line about “the Sanctity of Marriage” and dropped the language, carried in its 2016 platform, defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Each step came by a Republican’s signature, a Republican appointee’s pen, or a Republican convention. The movement did not wait for the left to win. It advanced through conservatives who held the premise and contested its conclusions one at a time.

Hayek, writing as a liberal in 1960, saw the same thing from outside. Conservatism can slow what it resists, he argued, but “it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving.”

A fixed definition stops the drift because it does not move with the speaker. Defined by its premise, liberalism stands where it stood in 1689, and a reader can measure his own position against it however far the parties have traveled. A ship that fixes its position by the ship beside it can drift a hundred miles without noticing, because the other ship drifted too. A ship that takes its bearing from north knows where it is. That is why this site is built on a compass and not on a line. The line between left and right measures the distance between two ships. The second axis, whether authority answers to consent, points north.

Four objections

“Christians love freedom, and liberalism means freedom.” Both use the word, and they do not mean the same thing by it. Scripture’s freedom is freedom from sin for the service of God (section 05). Liberalism’s is freedom from every authority a man did not choose. Peter’s sentence holds the difference: “As free … but as the servants of God” (1 Pet. 2:16).

“Conservatives conserve. That is the opposite of liberalism.” Conserving is not a premise. It is an attitude toward whatever already exists, and what the American conservative conserves is the founding, whose first statement of principle is the liberal premise. A man who conserves a liberal order is a liberal who prefers it slower. The question is never whether a man conserves. It is what he is conserving, and section 08 shows that the answer changes every generation.

“America was founded by Christians.” Many of the founders were Christians, and many Christians fought for the founding. This paper is not about the faith of the men. It is about the premise of the documents, and the documents state it: governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” A Christian can sign a liberal document, and the document still says what it says.

“If both parties are liberal, the word is too broad to mean anything.” A word means something when it separates one thing from another. This one separates liberalism from the other answers men have given about authority: that it descends from God through fathers and rulers, that it belongs to a class, or that no authority is legitimate at all. Our Compass places those answers in four corners, and liberalism holds one. What the word does not separate is Democrats from Republicans. That is the finding, not a defect in the word.

Where the definition stops

A definition that covers both parties invites misuse, so its limits should be as plain as its claim.

It is not an insult. Calling a man a liberal by this definition says what premise he holds. It says nothing about his courage, his sincerity, or his faith. Most American Christians learned the premise as patriotism, and almost none were taught to examine it.

It does not make every liberal conclusion false. Some conclusions the premise produces can be reached from Scripture by another road. Rulers are under law, and the king of Israel was to copy out the law and read it all his days (Deut. 17:18–20). Judges were to favor neither the poor nor the mighty (Lev. 19:15). A Christian should hold these for Scripture’s reasons, because a conclusion held for the premise’s reasons gives way when the premise moves on.

It does not tell anyone how to vote. Both parties hold the premise, so the definition cannot choose between them. None Gives What He Has Not takes up what the vote itself expresses.

It stands or falls on one claim. If men are in fact born free of every human authority they did not choose, liberalism is true and this site is wrong. Scripture says otherwise. The first authority a man meets, he meets at birth, and the commandment that governs it was given before he could consent to anything: “Honour thy father and thy mother” (Exod. 20:12). A reader who rejects this paper’s conclusion should reject it there.

Texts and editions

The Holy Bible, King James Version (1611), for the New Testament.

The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament, trans. Sir Lancelot Charles Lee Brenton (London: Samuel Bagster and Sons, 1844), for the Old Testament.

Robert Filmer, Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings (written 1630s–1640s; printed 1680), ch. 1.

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689), Second Treatise §§4, 54, 55, 61, 95, 123, 135, 149; A Letter Concerning Toleration, trans. William Popple (1689).

Jonathan Boucher, “On Civil Liberty, Passive Obedience, and Non-Resistance” (preached 1775), in A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution (London, 1797).

Declaration of Independence (1776).

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Paris, 1785), Query XVII.

Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (16 January 1786). Massachusetts Constitution, Article of Amendment XI (1833).

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), art. 1.

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London, 1859), ch. 1, and The Subjection of Women (London, 1869), ch. 1.

G. K. Chesterton, “Our Note Book,” Illustrated London News, 19 April 1924.

California Family Law Act, Stats. 1969, ch. 1608, approved by the Governor 4 September 1969.

Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 851 (1992).

Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644, 665 (2015).

Republican Party Platform (2016). 2024 Republican Party Platform.

F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, foreword to the 1956 American paperback edition; “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” postscript to The Constitution of Liberty (1960).

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971), §3.

Mackinac Center for Public Policy, “The Overton Window.”

Published by Beyond Left and Right. The New Testament is quoted from the King James Version and the Old Testament from Brenton’s translation of the Septuagint. Locke’s Second Treatise follows the 1764 edition. Filmer and the Letter Concerning Toleration are quoted in modernized spelling, and Boucher follows the text used in None Gives What He Has Not. Hayek is quoted in brief, and Rawls and Overton are paraphrased. Correspondence: contact@beyondleftandright.com