The Three Classical Ideologies: Conservatism, Liberalism, And Socialism

Conservatism

Traditional conservatism is an ideology based on the idea to maintain traditional, social and cultural principles. The government’s role in a conservative society is mainly to both preserve and mediate the importance of traditions, traditional values, and often religion.

The reason for this is to protect the people from themselves. According to conservatives, humans are naturally too greedy, aggressive and irresponsible to handle drastic political changes and self-power. Keeping it as it was in the olden days prevents humans from doing stupid and dangerous things to others, themselves, and society as a whole, ensuring a healthy society. The conservatives argue that the world is fine as it is today, and that radical changes have a high risk of making things worse. The disbelief in humans is the biggest difference between conservatism and liberalism.

Conservatism has (ironically) changed drastically over the course of the last 100 years. Conservatism today has much more similarities with liberalism, for example, their view on women’s right to vote, human rights and economics.

Conservative ideas have been documented as early as in the beginning of the 17th century, although it was during the French revolution it really started to take form as a political movement. Edmund Burke was one of the “fathers” of this, due to the release of his book, “Reflections on the revolution in France”, in which he strongly critiqued the French revolution. He thought that the revolution wouldn’t benefit France and its population. He argued that it was very impulsive, and was performed without a plan for the future. Other conservative pioneers were Richard Hooker, the Marquess of Halifax and David Hume.

The conservative ideology lacks an obvious utopia since the main idea behind it is to preserve. Also, different countries have had different values and history, resulting in a different opinion of what to preserve.

Liberalism

The absolute most central liberalistic principle is the freedom of the individual, which the whole ideology is based on. The individual should, in general, be free from taxes, restrictions, and obligations, and should have the right to do basically anything as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. The use of drugs or alcohol, and the exercise of incest, polyamorous weddings or amongst some groups of liberals even bestiality should be up to the individual(s) in question, not the government.

Note that I mentioned that the individual should be free from taxes, restrictions, and duties only in general. Not entirely. According to liberals, the government is a necessary evil. Liberals typically believe that the government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others, but they also think that the government itself can pose a threat to liberty. This, of course, requires a taxation system, but they shouldn’t demand more than absolutely necessary.

Liberals believe in economic freedom and laissez-faire. Anyone should have the opportunity to start a company and to buy anything they want. If a company fails, it’s not the government’s responsibility.

The idea of liberalism has been around for thousands of years. Even amongst the first ever societies, has people demanded the freedom to do whatever they want as long as it doesn’t hurt others. Liberalism today is obviously much more complex, but the idea of individualistic freedom is still highly present. Aristoteles, Thomas Gordon, and Jean le Rond d’Alembert are only a few amongst many great thinkers who have developed liberalism over time.

The liberalism utopia is that everyone has as much freedom and as many possibilities as possible. As long as it isn’t dangerous for anyone’s health, property or freedom of course. A perfect capitalistic society with few restrictions and production should always be automatically regulated after the principles of the free market.

Socialism

The main principle of socialism is the belief in collective responsibility. The government plays a big role and takes many decisions, most preferably for the people’s benefit.

The government puts up many restrictions, for everyone to fit in the socialist society. The high tax rate is meant to assure social and economic safety. The government generally provides free healthcare, infrastructure, education, housing etc. for the population.

The word socialism in today’s meaning began to be used in the 1850’s. Robert Owens was one of the socialistic pioneers. His social reforms and care for his employees came to be known as socialistic.

Due to the industrialization of Europe during the 19th century, lots of factories and other workplaces opened with bad conditions for the workers. This led to socialism (which is supposed to be beneficial for the workers) becoming more and more popular, and the employees started to organize in protest against the factory owners and politicians who ruled. This is why socialism is strongly associated with the working class.

Socialism as an ideology then became much more complex and thought out, with much inspiration from the sociologist Karl Marx.

Socialism today is a big political movement, with the dream of achieving the social utopia… communism (absolute equality for all). The society should be free from capitalism, unequal wages, and classes. All decisions should be taken by direct democratic system.

Different ideologies’ view on the gender equality issue.

These three ideologies, alongside with feminism and ecologism, have different viewpoints on different issues (although I will only cover three of them). One hot topic today, especially amongst youngsters, is gender equality. The feminist movement has grown enormously over the last 50 years. One of the most noticed problems is the gender wage gap. In Sweden, women earn 93% of the men’s total wages. Some ideologies mean that this is because of discrimination against women, some don’t. Almost all ideologies have different opinions on how to solve the supposed problem, when some argue that the wage gap isn’t discriminating.

Feminism

Feminists want a society as statistically equal as possible. They believe that any statistical inequality is caused by discrimination, which leads them into thinking that adjusting the statistics with constraint against the company/sector leads to equality. This method, called quotation, forces companies and other employers to employ according to a “schedule”, making the number of men employed equal to the number of women.

Ecologism

Ecologists wants to do practically the same as feminists since ecofeminism actually is a very big part of ecologism. Regular ecologism doesn’t really have an obvious method or view. What differs ecofeminism and regular feminism is that they concentrate more on how women ought to help the environment. They might also argue that since women earn less, raising taxes for gas and flying could be discriminating against women.

Conservatism

Conservationists definitely don’t agree with feminists and ecologists on this issue. They have a completely different viewpoint. They argue that the biological differences between men and women matter, and that these differences are valid explanation to the wage gap. They also argue that women both historically and scientifically are better suited for housework than a real job. They simply don’t see the wage gap as that much of a problem.

1. https://www.britannica.com/topic/liberalism
2. https://www.britannica.com/topic/conservatism
3. https://www.britannica.com/topic/conservatism/General-characteristics
4. https://www.filosofer.se/burke.html