Ideologies Part I: Epistemology and the Liberal Tradition

When Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams in 1813, he reflected on their decades-long correspondence and the fundamental disagreements that had once made them bitter political enemies. “The same political parties which now agitate the U.S. have existed thro’ all time,” Jefferson wrote. “Whether the power of the people, or that of the aristoi should prevail, were questions which kept the states of Greece and Rome in eternal convulsions.”¹

Jefferson understood something crucial: beneath the surface-level disputes about specific policies lay deeper questions about human nature, the origins of authority, and the proper relationship between individual and collective. These weren’t merely political disagreements—they were philosophical ones. Adams believed humans required guidance from natural aristocrats of virtue and talent; Jefferson believed ordinary citizens possessed sufficient reason to govern themselves. They could compromise on specific legislation, but they couldn’t both be right about the fundamental nature of political legitimacy.

This is what ideology means: a coherent framework of beliefs about how society should be organized, built on foundational premises about human nature, rights, liberty, and authority. Ideologies answer the questions that parties ignore and systems leave unexamined. They provide the “why” beneath the “what.”

In the previous article (Parties: The Coalitions That Seek Power), we explored how parties are pragmatic coalitions that shift positions based on electoral math. Ideologies are different. They are belief systems that remain internally consistent even when politically inconvenient. A classical liberal doesn’t stop believing in property rights because redistribution polls well. A socialist doesn’t abandon worker ownership because markets are efficient. An ideology’s coherence comes from its foundational premises, not from its electoral viability.

But here’s the complication: the same words—”liberal,” “conservative,” even “freedom”—have meant radically different things at different times, because they’ve been claimed by people operating from incompatible ideological premises. Understanding contemporary politics requires understanding not just what these ideologies claim, but why they claim it—what assumptions about human nature and society lead to such different conclusions.

This article begins a two-part exploration of ideological frameworks. Part I examines the epistemological foundations of ideological thinking and traces the liberal tradition from its classical origins through its transformation into modern progressivism. Part II (next in this series) will explore conservatism, socialism, libertarianism, and other competing traditions, showing how each answers the foundational questions differently.

The Foundations: What All Ideologies Must Answer

Every coherent ideology must address certain foundational questions. The answers to these questions determine everything else.

1. What is human nature?

Are humans fundamentally rational, capable of self-governance and moral reasoning? Or are they passionate, tribal, requiring external guidance and constraint? Are they blank slates shaped by environment, or do they possess inherent qualities that resist transformation?

Classical liberals from Locke forward believed humans possess reason sufficient for self-governance. Conservatives from Burke forward believed humans are passionate creatures whose reason is limited and must be supplemented by tradition and custom. Progressives believed human nature could be improved through education and proper social organization. These different premises lead to radically different conclusions about the proper scope of government.

2. What are rights, and where do they come from?

Are rights natural—existing prior to government, inherent in human beings by virtue of their humanity? Or are rights social constructions—created by communities, granted by governments, evolving with society’s capacity to secure them?

The American founding rested on natural rights theory: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”² Government doesn’t grant these rights; it secures them. Progressive ideology rejected this framework: rights evolve as society’s productive capacity grows. The “right” to healthcare or education doesn’t exist in a pre-industrial society because society cannot provide them. Rights depend on social organization.

This disagreement isn’t semantic—it has profound implications. If rights are natural, government oversteps whenever it violates them. If rights are social, government’s role is to determine which rights society can and should provide.

3. What is liberty?

Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958) distinguished between negative and positive liberty.³ Negative liberty is freedom from interference—the absence of coercion. You are free to the extent that others (including government) don’t prevent you from acting. Positive liberty is freedom to achieve certain ends—the capacity to realize your potential. You are free to the extent that you possess the resources and opportunities to flourish.

Classical liberals emphasize negative liberty: freedom means non-interference. Progressives emphasize positive liberty: freedom means capability. A person without healthcare, education, or economic security lacks real freedom, regardless of whether government is actively restraining them. These competing definitions of liberty produce opposite conclusions about government’s proper role.

4. Is government a necessary evil or a positive good?

Classical liberals and libertarians view government as inherently dangerous—a necessary evil that must be constrained because power corrupts and concentrated power corrupts absolutely. The best government is the smallest government consistent with protecting rights.

Progressives and many conservatives view government as a positive instrument for achieving collective goods. Government isn’t merely a night watchman preventing violence; it’s an expression of community will, capable of solving social problems, providing for the common welfare, and realizing human potential.

5. Should society prioritize individual autonomy or collective flourishing?

When individual choices conflict with collective welfare, which takes priority? Libertarians say individual autonomy—people should be free to make even foolish choices. Socialists say collective welfare—individual choices that harm the community can be constrained. Conservatives split the difference: tradition and community norms should guide behavior, but heavy-handed state intervention should be avoided.

These five questions—human nature, rights, liberty, government’s purpose, and individual vs. collective—form the bedrock of ideological thinking. Different answers produce different ideologies.

But before we examine how different traditions answer these questions, we must address an even more fundamental issue: How do we know which answers are correct? Is this an empirical question or a logical one? This epistemological foundation shapes everything that follows.

Epistemology and Ideology: How We Know What We Know About Social Organization

How do we know which system of social organization works? Is this an empirical question—something we discover through observation and experiment? Or is it a logical question—something we deduce from first principles about human nature and action?

This epistemological divide cuts across ideological lines and explains why debates persist despite centuries of historical evidence. Different ideologies don’t just disagree about values (freedom vs. equality, individual vs. collective). They disagree about the nature of knowledge itself—about what kind of reasoning is valid when analyzing social phenomena.

The Praxeological Method:

Ludwig von Mises developed what he called “praxeology”—the logic of human action—most fully elaborated in his magnum opus Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949).⁴ Mises argued that economics isn’t fundamentally an empirical science like physics or chemistry. It’s a logical science derived from one self-evident axiom: humans act purposefully.

“Human action is purposeful behavior,” Mises wrote. “Or we may say: Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego’s meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person’s conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life.”⁵

From this axiom—which cannot be denied without performative contradiction (denying it is itself purposeful action)—Mises deduced the entire structure of economic theory. Time preference, marginal utility, the impossibility of interpersonal utility comparisons, the theory of money, the business cycle—all flow logically from the nature of purposeful action, not from empirical observation.

This doesn’t mean observation is irrelevant. We observe the world to understand where praxeological principles apply and what the specific historical circumstances are. But the principles themselves are known a priori—prior to and independent of experience. They’re logically true given the nature of action, just as geometric theorems are logically true given the axioms of geometry.

Why This Matters for Ideology:

Consider Mises’ famous socialist calculation argument, first presented in “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” (1920) and developed throughout Human Action.⁶ Mises argued that rational economic calculation requires market prices, which require private property in the means of production, which require genuine exchange between separate owners. Without private property, there can be no genuine prices. Without genuine prices, there can be no rational allocation of resources. Therefore, socialism—defined as collective ownership of the means of production—cannot rationally calculate how to use resources efficiently.

This isn’t an empirical claim that “socialism hasn’t worked historically” (though Mises would agree with that observation). It’s a logical claim about what’s possible. The historical failures of Soviet central planning, Cuban state control, Venezuelan socialism—these aren’t evidence for the calculation argument. They’re illustrations of what the calculation argument predicted must occur.

A progressive economist might respond: “But look at successful mixed economies! Sweden, Denmark, Norway have extensive government planning and redistribution, and they’re prosperous.” The praxeologist responds: “Those aren’t socialist economies in the relevant sense—they retain private property and market prices for most productive resources, so rational calculation remains possible. They redistribute income, but they don’t abolish the market mechanism that enables calculation.”

The disagreement runs deeper than evidence. It’s about whether economic questions are answered through empirical observation (how have different systems performed historically?) or logical deduction (what is logically possible given the nature of human action and economic calculation?).

Two Approaches to Social Knowledge:

The Empiricist/Positivist Approach:

Most modern social science—and most progressive ideology—operates from an empiricist or positivist framework. Knowledge comes from observation. We form hypotheses, test them against data, and revise our theories based on results. If socialism “works” in some cases (produces prosperity, equality, or other desired outcomes), then socialism is viable. If markets produce inequality or instability, then we need government intervention.

This approach treats social organization as an engineering problem: observe the system, identify failures, design interventions, test results, iterate. John Dewey’s instrumentalism exemplifies this: “The best guarantee of collective efficiency and power is liberation and use of the diversity of individual capacities in initiative, planning, foresight, vigor and endurance... The reactionary... holds that the maintenance of genuine law and order is possible only by the imposition of the will and authority of the few.”⁷ For Dewey, we discover what works through experimentation and intelligent problem-solving, not through deduction from abstract principles.

The Praxeological/A Priori Approach:

The Austrian school—Mises, Hayek, Rothbard—and the classical liberal tradition generally argue that economic principles are known through logical deduction from the nature of human action. We can’t “test” whether marginal utility theory is true by running experiments, because it’s logically entailed by the fact that humans act to achieve preferred states. We can’t “test” whether socialist calculation is possible, because the argument is about logical coherence, not empirical performance.

F.A. Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945) extended this reasoning: the problem of economic organization isn’t primarily about allocating known resources to achieve known ends. It’s about how to use knowledge that exists dispersed among millions of individuals, much of it tacit and never articulated. Central planning fails not because planners lack computing power (though they do), but because the relevant knowledge cannot be centralized—it’s practical, contextual, constantly changing, and often inexpressible in the form needed for central direction.⁸

This is a logical argument about the nature of knowledge and decision-making, not an empirical claim about historical performance. Even if we could point to a “successful” centrally planned economy (in some metrics), the praxeologist would respond: “Success in what terms? Without market prices, how do you know resources are being used efficiently rather than wastefully? You’re measuring outputs, but you can’t measure opportunity costs—what else those resources could have produced in alternative uses.”

The Epistemological Divide in Practice:

This epistemological difference shapes ideological debates in profound ways:

On Healthcare:

Empiricist approach: “Canada, UK, and France have single-payer or heavily regulated healthcare. They achieve universal coverage at lower cost than the U.S. This proves government-run healthcare can work.”

Praxeological approach: “Those systems achieve coverage by suppressing the price mechanism and rationing through waiting times and government determination of who receives what care. They appear cheaper because they’re suppressing price signals that would reveal true scarcity. The ‘success’ is measured in coverage statistics, but you can’t measure the innovations not developed, the treatments not provided, the drugs not created because market incentives were eliminated.”

On Minimum Wage:

Empiricist approach: “Studies show that moderate minimum wage increases don’t reduce employment as predicted. The theory that minimum wages cause unemployment is therefore empirically falsified.”

Praxeological approach: “The law of demand—when price increases, quantity demanded decreases—is logically entailed by purposeful action. People substitute away from things that become more expensive. If minimum wage studies don’t find employment effects, the question is what else adjusted: hours, benefits, working conditions, hiring standards, capital substitution, geographic mobility, or measurement error. The logical principle remains true; the empirical challenge is identifying all margins of adjustment.”

On Inequality:

Empiricist approach: “Rising inequality correlates with various social ills—lower social mobility, worse health outcomes, political instability. We should redistribute to reduce inequality.”

Praxeological approach: “Correlation isn’t causation, and the question is whether redistribution achieves stated goals without unintended consequences. Taxation distorts incentives, reduces capital formation, and requires expanding government power. Even if current inequality is unjust (perhaps due to past government intervention like cronyism), the solution is removing privileges, not creating new intervention that will itself be captured by the powerful.”

Why Ideological Debates Persist:

If economics were purely empirical, ideological debates would have been settled long ago. We’d have run experiments, observed outcomes, and converged on the “correct” system. But two centuries after the Industrial Revolution—after witnessing capitalism, socialism, mixed economies, welfare states, command economies, and everything in between—ideological disagreement remains as fierce as ever.

The praxeological perspective explains why: We’re not just disagreeing about what history shows. We’re disagreeing about what’s logically possible, about the nature of knowledge and calculation, about whether social organization is an engineering problem or a logical constraint.

A socialist looks at Soviet failure and thinks: “They made mistakes—too authoritarian, too centralized, insufficient technology. Democratic socialism with modern computing and genuine worker control could succeed.” The praxeologist responds: “The calculation problem isn’t about authoritarianism or computing power. It’s about the logical impossibility of rational resource allocation without private property and market prices. No amount of democracy or technology solves a logical impossibility.”

A progressive looks at Nordic social democracies and thinks: “See, government intervention produces prosperity, equality, and high living standards.” The praxeologist responds: “Those countries preserve markets and private property for most production, so they avoid the calculation problem. They redistribute wealth generated by capitalist production. The question is whether that redistribution is sustainable long-term, or whether it’s consuming capital accumulated during earlier periods of freer markets.”

These aren’t disputes that data can resolve, because they’re disputes about what the data means—about what’s logically possible versus what’s merely historically contingent.

Mises on Ideology:

Mises himself addressed the role of ideology in Human Action. He distinguished between two meanings: ideology as a neutral term for any system of ideas about proper social organization, and ideology as a pejorative term for false consciousness or motivated reasoning.⁹

In the neutral sense, everyone has an ideology—a framework for understanding how society should be organized. These ideologies can be more or less logically consistent, more or less rooted in sound praxeological reasoning. But ideology itself is inescapable. We can’t approach questions of social organization without some theoretical framework, some understanding of how human action works, some beliefs about what’s possible and desirable.

The question isn’t whether to have an ideology—it’s whether your ideology is logically coherent and consistent with praxeological principles. Mises believed classical liberalism was the only ideology fully consistent with praxeological reasoning. Socialism, he argued, rested on praxeological errors—misunderstanding the nature of economic calculation, the role of prices, the function of profit and loss. Interventionism (the mixed economy) suffered from internal contradictions—each intervention created problems that seemed to demand further intervention, until the system either collapsed or evolved toward full socialism or back toward markets.

A Caution About Certainty:

The praxeological method, properly understood, provides certainty about logical relationships with humility about predictions. We know with certainty that minimum wages create unemployment pressure—employers, all else being equal, who must pay more than labor is worth for a function to be performed, will employ less labor. But we can’t predict how much unemployment or which margins will adjust, because that depends on countless contextual factors and preferences we can’t know in advance.

We know with certainty that socialist calculation is impossible in principle—without private property, there can be no genuine market prices; without prices, there can be no rational calculation. But we can’t predict exactly when or how socialist economies will fail, because they can continue for considerable time by consuming previously accumulated capital, relying on black markets, or copying prices from remaining capitalist economies.

Praxeology provides the logic; history provides the illustrations. But confusing the two—thinking praxeology predicts specific historical events, or thinking history falsifies praxeological principles—misunderstands the method.

Think about your own approach to political questions: When someone proposes a new policy, do you instinctively ask “has this worked elsewhere?” (empiricist) or “is this logically consistent with how human action works?” (praxeological)? Do you think evidence can settle economic debates, or do you think deeper logical principles constrain what’s possible regardless of what appears to work temporarily? Your answer reveals your epistemological commitments, which shape everything else about your political thinking.

Classical Liberalism: The Ideology of Limited Government and Natural Rights

With these epistemological foundations in mind, we can now examine specific ideological traditions. We begin with classical liberalism—the ideology that dominated Anglo-American political thought from the Glorious Revolution through the 19th century, and that provided the intellectual foundation for the American founding.

Classical liberalism emerged from the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, and the Enlightenment. Its foundational text is John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689), written to justify the overthrow of James II and establish principles of legitimate authority.¹⁰

Core Premises:

Human nature: Humans possess reason and are capable of self-governance. They are also self-interested, which isn’t a defect but a feature—self-interest, properly channeled through market exchange and limited government, produces social benefit. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” captured this insight: individuals pursuing their own interests, guided by market prices, serve the public good more effectively than if they intended to serve it.¹¹

Rights: Natural rights exist prior to government. Locke’s famous trinity: life, liberty, and property. “Every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his” (Second Treatise, Chapter V, §27).¹² Government exists to secure these pre-existing rights, not to grant them. This is the crucial distinction: if rights precede government, then government authority is limited to protecting those rights. Any government action that violates natural rights—even if democratically authorized—is illegitimate.

Liberty: Negative liberty—freedom from coercion. “Freedom of men under government is, to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, where the rule prescribes not; and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man” (Second Treatise, Chapter IV, §22).¹³ You are free when others don’t prevent you from acting as you choose, within the bounds of not violating others’ rights. Government’s role is to secure this freedom, not to enable positive capabilities.

Government: A necessary evil, formed by consent to protect rights that existed in the state of nature. Locke’s social contract theory posited that individuals in a pre-political state of nature possessed rights but lacked organized protection for them. They consented to form government specifically and solely to secure those rights more effectively. Government’s legitimacy derives from this consent, and its authority is limited to protecting life, liberty, and property. When government exceeds these bounds or systematically violates rights, resistance becomes justified—even revolution, as the American colonists would later demonstrate.

Social organization: Voluntary association and market exchange. Society can organize itself spontaneously through individual choices and contracts. Government intervention distorts these natural arrangements and should be minimized. This spontaneous order principle—that complex social coordination emerges from individual action without central direction—became central to classical liberal thought and was later developed extensively by Hayek.¹⁴

American Application:

Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is pure classical liberalism: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”¹⁵ Government doesn’t create rights; it secures them. Its powers are limited to those necessary for that purpose. When government becomes “destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”

Madison’s constitutional architecture in Federalist No. 51 reflects classical liberal premises about human nature and power: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”¹⁶

Government is dangerous because humans aren’t angels—they’re self-interested and susceptible to corrupting influence of power. The solution isn’t to find better people to govern (though character matters), but to design institutions that constrain power through separation, checks and balances, federalism, and enumerated powers. The Constitution’s entire structure embodies classical liberal skepticism about concentrated authority.

Classical liberals supported:

• Strict construction of constitutional powers

• Property rights as fundamental and nearly absolute

• Free trade and laissez-faire market economy

• Minimal taxation (primarily tariffs and excise taxes, not income tax)

• State and local governance over federal centralization

• Individual liberty in personal and economic matters

• Non-intervention in foreign affairs (Washington’s Farewell Address warning against “entangling alliances”)

• Hard money (gold or silver standard) rather than fiat currency

• Minimal standing army in peacetime

Key Thinkers: John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Frédéric Bastiat, Jean-Baptiste Say, Richard Cobden, John Bright, Herbert Spencer (early work)

Modern Remnants: Classical liberalism as a coherent political force has largely disappeared from American party politics. Neither major party consistently advocates for strict constitutional limits, minimal government, and maximum individual liberty in both economic and personal spheres. The ideology influenced 19th-century Democrats like Grover Cleveland (who vetoed pension bills and federal aid as unconstitutional) and Republicans like Calvin Coolidge (who believed “the chief business of the American people is business” and that government should facilitate rather than direct economic activity).¹⁷ But these figures represent a dying tradition rather than living political force.

Its closest contemporary heir is libertarianism, which we’ll examine in Part II, though with important differences in emphasis and philosophical foundation.

Consider your instincts about government power: When you hear about a new government program, is your first reaction skepticism about government competence and concern about expanding authority? Do you believe people should be free to make their own choices even if those choices seem unwise to others? Do you think property rights are fundamental—that what you earn through your labor belongs to you by right, and taxation is a necessary evil rather than a positive good? Do you instinctively prefer local to federal authority, private to public solutions, voluntary to coercive action? If so, you may be operating from classical liberal premises, whether or not you identify with that label.

The Transformation of Liberalism: From Negative to Positive Liberty

The word “liberal” underwent one of the most dramatic reversals in political vocabulary. How did the ideology of limited government become the ideology of active government? How did Jefferson’s liberalism transform into Franklin Roosevelt’s? Understanding this transformation is essential for making sense of contemporary political language.

The shift began in the late 19th century as intellectuals confronted industrialization’s consequences: concentrated corporate power, urban poverty, child labor, dangerous working conditions, economic instability. Classical liberalism’s answer—voluntary association and market competition would eventually solve these problems—seemed inadequate to many observers. If market forces created these conditions, why would market forces solve them? And how long must people suffer while waiting for spontaneous correction?

The Intellectual Reconceptualization:

A new generation of thinkers, influenced by German idealism and British reformers, reconceptualized liberty itself. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859) represented a transitional work. Mill defended individual freedom from state interference with arguments that classical liberals would recognize: “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.”¹⁸ But Mill’s later work, particularly Principles of Political Economy (1848), acknowledged that poverty and lack of education constrained freedom as much as legal restrictions.¹⁹ A person too poor to eat, too uneducated to reason, too economically dependent to resist employer demands—was this person really free?

T.H. Green’s lecture “Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract” (1881) made the case explicitly: “We shall probably all agree that freedom, rightly understood, is the greatest of blessings; that its attainment is the true end of all our effort as citizens. But when we thus speak of freedom, we should consider carefully what we mean by it... If I have given a true account of that freedom which forms the goal of social effort, we shall see that freedom of contract, freedom in all the forms of doing what one will with one’s own, is valuable only as a means to an end.”²⁰

That end: positive liberty—the actual capacity to develop and exercise one’s faculties. Negative liberty (absence of coercion) is insufficient if people lack the material, educational, and social conditions to exercise meaningful choice. Green argued that true liberalism requires government action to create conditions for human flourishing, not just absence of restraint.

Leonard Hobhouse’s Liberalism (1911) completed the theoretical transformation in Britain, arguing that the state has a duty to secure for all citizens the conditions of self-development.²¹ This “New Liberalism” maintained liberal commitment to individual freedom but redefined freedom as positive capability rather than mere absence of coercion.

American Progressivism:

This reconceptualization reached America through the Progressive movement of the early 20th century. Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life (1909) called for abandoning Jeffersonian individualism in favor of Hamiltonian nationalism—using federal power to achieve democratic ends.²² The classical liberal fear of concentrated government power was obsolete, Croly argued, given the reality of concentrated corporate power. Only strong national government could counterbalance private economic power and secure genuine liberty for ordinary citizens.

Woodrow Wilson’s Constitutional Government in the United States (1908) argued that the Constitution must be reinterpreted as a “living” document adaptable to modern conditions rather than a fixed constraint on government power.²³ The founders’ 18th-century understanding couldn’t bind the 20th century. Society had changed; constitutional interpretation must change with it.

Wilson explicitly rejected the founding generation’s view: “The makers of our Federal Constitution read Montesquieu with true scientific enthusiasm. They were scientists in their way—the best way of their age—those fathers of the nation. Jefferson wrote of ‘the laws of Nature’—and then by way of afterthought—’and of Nature’s God.’ These were the heyday of the ‘laws of Nature’... But we of the present generation are not hampered by the limitations which the Fathers would have admitted.”²⁴

This represented a fundamental epistemological shift. Classical liberals believed natural rights and constitutional limits were timeless truths, knowable through reason and binding on all generations. Progressives believed rights and constitutional meaning evolved with social conditions. What seemed like a narrow interpretive dispute actually reflected incompatible views about the nature of rights, knowledge, and political authority.

John Dewey’s Liberalism and Social Action (1935) completed the intellectual transformation in America: “Earlier liberalism regarded the separate and competing economic action of individuals as the means to social well-being as the end... We cannot continue the confusion inherited from the past between the idea of liberty and of unrestricted individual action. There is no such thing as liberty in general; liberty, so to speak, in the singular. Liberties exist; they are plural.”²⁵

Liberty in the abstract meant nothing, Dewey argued. Concrete liberties—to education, healthcare, economic security—required positive government action. The classical liberal emphasis on limiting government had become obsolete. Modern liberalism required activist government creating conditions for human development.

Franklin Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights:

The transformation reached its political apex with FDR’s “Second Bill of Rights” speech (1944). Roosevelt argued that the founders’ Bill of Rights had “proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.” Political rights meant nothing without economic security. He proposed a new bill of rights including:

• “The right to a useful and remunerative job”

• “The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation”

• “The right of every family to a decent home”

• “The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health”

• “The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment”

• “The right to a good education”²⁶

These weren’t natural rights existing in a pre-political state of nature. They were social goods that advanced societies should provide. They required not just government restraint (negative liberty) but active government provision (positive liberty). This represented the complete inversion of classical liberalism: government’s purpose wasn’t merely to secure pre-existing rights but to actively create conditions for human flourishing.

Core Premises of Modern Progressivism:

Human nature: Humans are capable of improvement through proper social organization, education, and material security. Environment shapes character more than inherent nature. With the right conditions—good schools, economic opportunity, healthcare, safe communities—human potential can be realized. Classical liberalism’s pessimism about human nature and power was misplaced; properly directed through expertise and democratic accountability, government can solve social problems.

Rights: Positive rights that evolve with society’s capacity. Rights aren’t timeless abstractions but concrete goods that societies with sufficient productive capacity should guarantee. As society becomes wealthier, more things become rights. In an agricultural society, the right to healthcare makes no sense—there is no healthcare to provide. In an advanced industrial society, healthcare becomes a right because society can provide it. Rights are thus historically contingent rather than natural and unchanging.

Liberty: Positive liberty—freedom requires capability, not just absence of coercion. Berlin notes that positive liberty asks “What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?” while negative liberty asks “What is the area within which the subject—a person or group of persons—is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?”²⁷ Progressives prioritize the former. Real freedom means having actual ability to pursue opportunities, which requires material security, education, and social support.

Government: A positive instrument for collective problem-solving and social improvement. Government isn’t just securing pre-existing rights; it’s actively creating conditions for human flourishing. Expertise and administration can solve social problems more effectively than spontaneous order. Specialists studying social problems, designing interventions, and managing programs can achieve outcomes that uncoordinated individual action cannot. This faith in expert administration became central to progressive ideology.

Social organization: Requires planning, regulation, and redistribution to correct market failures and ensure equitable outcomes. Markets produce inequality and instability; they fail to account for externalities; they leave some people without means for decent life. Concentrated economic power is as dangerous as concentrated political power and must be counterbalanced. Progressive policy should regulate corporate power, redistribute wealth, provide social insurance, and actively manage economic activity to serve public purposes.

Progressives supported:

• Living Constitution interpretation allowing adaptation to modern conditions

• Expansive federal authority through broad reading of Commerce Clause and spending power

• Administrative state and expert management (independent agencies, regulatory bodies)

• Economic regulation and antitrust enforcement

• Social insurance programs (Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance)

• Progressive taxation and redistribution

• Civil rights legislation and anti-discrimination laws

• Labor protections and union support

• Public education and universal access to higher education

• International cooperation and multilateral institutions

Key Thinkers: T.H. Green, L.T. Hobhouse, John Stuart Mill (later work), Herbert Croly, Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, John Maynard Keynes, John Rawls, Cass Sunstein

Contemporary Expression: Modern Democratic Party’s center-left coalition, policy intellectuals in universities and think tanks, advocates for expanding social insurance and regulation, supporters of activist government addressing climate change, inequality, and social problems.

The Praxeological Critique:

From a praxeological perspective, progressivism rests on epistemological errors. Mises and Hayek argued that the “fatal conceit” of progressivism is believing that society can be rationally planned and managed.²⁸ The knowledge required to coordinate complex social systems doesn’t exist in any centralized location—it’s dispersed among millions of individuals, much of it tacit and contextual. Central planners cannot possess this knowledge, so their interventions inevitably produce unintended consequences and distortions.

Moreover, the positive rights framework contains logical problems. If healthcare is a right, who has the duty to provide it? If no one voluntarily becomes a doctor, can doctors be conscripted? If education is a right, can teachers be forced to teach? Positive rights seem to require either assuming willing providers or accepting coercion of providers—neither of which classical liberals could accept.

But progressives respond: These are empirical questions about policy design, not logical impossibilities. We’ve seen that social insurance, public education, and regulated markets can work reasonably well. Nordic countries demonstrate that extensive social provision is compatible with prosperity. The praxeological critique rests on abstract logic divorced from actual functioning systems.

This exchange illustrates the epistemological divide: praxeologists argue from logic about what’s possible; progressives argue from observation about what’s worked. Neither can fully convince the other because they’re operating from incompatible frameworks for evaluating knowledge claims.

Consider your own reaction to this transformation: Do you see it as abandoning true liberalism in favor of something fundamentally different, or as adapting liberal principles to modern conditions? When progressives call themselves “liberal,” do you think they’re stealing the term or legitimately evolving it? Your answer reveals not just your values but your epistemological commitments—whether you believe political principles are timeless truths or historically contingent adaptations.

A Note on the Meaning of “Liberal”

The terminological confusion is worth addressing explicitly, since “liberal” now means opposite things in American versus European contexts, and opposite things in contemporary versus historical usage.

Classical liberalism (18th-19th centuries): Limited government, individual rights, free markets, constitutional constraints. This is what “liberal” meant to Jefferson, Madison, and 19th-century reformers who fought against monarchy, aristocratic privilege, and mercantilism.

Modern American liberalism (20th century onward): Active government, positive rights, regulated markets, social provision. This is what “liberal” means in contemporary American political discourse—the ideology of the Democratic Party’s center-left.

European liberalism (still): Retains more classical liberal meaning. European “liberal” parties generally favor free markets, limited government, and individual liberty. What Americans call “liberalism,” Europeans call “social democracy.”

Neoliberalism (late 20th century): Yet another variant, emphasizing market-oriented reforms, deregulation, free trade, but not necessarily minimal government. Associated with Reagan, Thatcher, and the Washington Consensus. Both the left and right critique “neoliberalism,” but for opposite reasons.

This semantic chaos isn’t pedantry—it’s a genuine obstacle to clear thinking. When someone says “I’m a liberal,” you cannot know what they mean without further context. Do they mean Jefferson’s liberalism or Roosevelt’s? Negative liberty or positive liberty? Limited government or active government?

Throughout this series, we use “classical liberal” to mean the 18th-19th century tradition of limited government and natural rights, and “progressive” or “modern liberal” to mean the 20th century tradition of active government and positive rights. This terminological precision matters because the two traditions, despite sharing a name, rest on incompatible premises about rights, liberty, and government.

Bridging to Part II

We’ve now established the epistemological foundations of ideological thinking and traced the liberal tradition from its classical origins through its transformation into modern progressivism. The shift from negative to positive liberty, from natural rights to social rights, from minimal government to active government—this represents one of the most significant ideological transformations in Western political thought.

But liberalism—in either its classical or progressive forms—is not the only ideological tradition. In Part II, we’ll examine the competing frameworks:

Conservatism emerged as a reaction to the French Revolution’s attempt to reorganize society according to abstract reason, emphasizing tradition, organic development, and the limits of human rationality. Yet American conservatism faces a unique paradox: how to be “conservative” in a nation founded on liberal Enlightenment principles that rejected tradition and hierarchy?

Socialism challenged the classical liberal celebration of private property and markets, arguing that capitalism produces exploitation and alienation. But socialism itself divides into incompatible strands: revolutionary vs. democratic, centrally planned vs. market socialist, authoritarian vs. libertarian.

Libertarianism represents the most consistent application of classical liberal principles about individual liberty and limited government—asking whether even minimal government can be justified, and whether society could function through purely voluntary cooperation.

We’ll also examine communitarianism, Christian democracy, integralism, and civic republicanism—traditions that challenge liberalism’s individualism from different angles.

Finally, we’ll return to the American founding itself, showing how the Hamilton-Madison-Jefferson debates were fundamentally ideological conflicts, not merely tactical disagreements. These founders operated from incompatible premises about human nature, federal power, and constitutional interpretation—premises that remain contested today.

Throughout Part II, keep the epistemological framework from this article in mind. When you encounter ideological claims, ask: Is this a logical argument from praxeological principles, or an empirical argument from observed outcomes? Is this about values (what we should prioritize), or about possibilities (what’s logically coherent)? Different ideologies not only answer these questions differently—they often disagree about which questions are meaningful.

The goal isn’t to convert you to any particular ideology. It’s to provide analytical tools for understanding your own premises and evaluating others’ arguments. When you understand that people reach opposite conclusions because they start from different foundations—different views about human nature, rights, liberty, and the nature of knowledge itself—you can engage in substantive debate rather than talking past each other.

Part II will complete the ideological framework, showing how these competing traditions answer the foundational questions we’ve posed. Then, in Articles 4-8, we’ll examine how economic systems relate to ideologies, how populism cuts across ideological lines, and finally—how to plot political figures on a two-axis spectrum based on their actual policies rather than their rhetoric.

Partial Bibliography (Part I)

¹ Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to John Adams, June 27, 1813. Founders Online, National Archives. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-06-02-0216

² Continental Congress. Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.

³ Berlin, Isaiah. “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958). In Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford University Press, 1969.

⁴ Mises, Ludwig von. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. Yale University Press, 1949. Liberty Fund edition, 1996. Available at: https://mises.org/library/human-action-0

⁵ Ibid., p. 11.

⁶ Mises, Ludwig von. “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” (1920). In Collectivist Economic Planning, ed. F.A. Hayek. George Routledge & Sons, 1935. Available at: https://mises.org/library/economic-calculation-socialist-commonwealth

⁷ Dewey, John. Liberalism and Social Action. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1935, p. 56.

⁸ Hayek, F.A. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (1945): 519-530. Available at: https://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw.html

⁹ Mises, Human Action, Chapter 10: “Exchange Within Society,” Section 3: “The Division of Labor.”

¹⁰ Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government (1689). Ed. Peter Laslett. Cambridge University Press, 1988.

¹¹ Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Ed. Edwin Cannan. Modern Library, 1937, Book IV, Chapter II.

¹² Locke, Two Treatises, Second Treatise, Chapter V, §27.

¹³ Ibid., Second Treatise, Chapter IV, §22.

¹⁴ Hayek, F.A. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”

¹⁵ Declaration of Independence, 1776.

¹⁶ Madison, James. Federalist No. 51 (1788). In The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter. Penguin Classics, 2003.

¹⁷ Coolidge, Calvin. Speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Washington, D.C., January 17, 1925.

¹⁸ Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty (1859). Ed. Elizabeth Rapaport. Hackett Publishing, 1978, Chapter I.

¹⁹ Mill, John Stuart. Principles of Political Economy (1848). Ed. Jonathan Riley. Oxford University Press, 1994.

²⁰ Green, T.H. “Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract” (1881). In Works of Thomas Hill Green, Vol. 3, ed. R.L. Nettleship. Longmans, Green, and Co., 1888.

²¹ Hobhouse, L.T. Liberalism (1911). Oxford University Press, 1964.

²² Croly, Herbert. The Promise of American Life. Macmillan, 1909.

²³ Wilson, Woodrow. Constitutional Government in the United States. Columbia University Press, 1908.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 54-56.

²⁵ Dewey, John. Liberalism and Social Action. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1935, p. 35-37.

²⁶ Roosevelt, Franklin D. “State of the Union Address” (January 11, 1944). Available at: http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/archives/address_text.html

²⁷ Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” p. 121-122.

²⁸ Hayek, F.A. The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. University of Chicago Press, 1988.

[Complete bibliography combining Parts I and II will appear at the end of Part II]