this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2026
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If the definition is so open-ended that just that specific part can be have almost diametrally opposite effects depending on how it's interpreted, then it's meaningless and we can only determine what Liberalism really is by looking at the praxis of what it actually does when those who claim to practice it are in power.
The practice of Liberalism is invariably a system were in the more visible and direct ways (mainly the way Justice is enforced) people are given more Liberty than in other systems, yet at the same time that effect is entirelly offset by the second order effects of the resource allocation practices supported by Liberalism and the de facto implementation of the "right to private property" part, since the capture by a few of limited resources systematically restricts the Liberty of most people and the passing of such property from ancestors to descendants keeps such capture (which generally reflects either first-mover advantages or the multiplicative effect of previously held wealth) locked for generations, potentially forever.
I think the plight of Afro-Americans in the US is a wonderful example of how Liberalism in practice works: on one hand Liberals loudly demand equal rights and treatment under the Law for Afro-Americans (this is the visible, positive side), yet at the same time they support and reinforce the very resource allocation systems and interpretation of "right to private property" which keep the poor and downtrodden and their descendants poor and downtrodden, something which in practice seriously affects those who were previously discriminated against, which in America are overwhelmingly Afro-Americans since their ancestors were almost all Slaves: as they were discriminated against including in their access to property, their ancestors did not capture anywhere as many limited resources as the ancestors of those who were not discriminated against, and because how that "right to private property" that the Liberals enforce works, that means that their descendants today are far more likely to be poor, and because of the very system of resource allocation supported by Liberals, poverty means not getting to eat as good food, have access as good healthcare, live in as good housing, sleep in as good beds.
Mistreatment at the hands of the authorities will severely hurt and harm some Afro-Americans at some point of their lives, maybe even for years. Poverty because of "respecting the private property" of those who themselves or their ancestors captured limited resources harms most Afro-Americans 24/7 their whole lives (unsurprisingly, people in poorer areas even have a life expectancy of at least 10 years less than people in richer areas) - overtly Liberals demand "equality" of treatment whilst in practice they support the very systems than locks in the inequality from past discrimination and transform said inequality into life-long suffering.
(To add insult to injury, poverty itself also increases one's likelihood of being mistreated at the hands of the authorities and increases the hurt and harm caused by it)
Liberals claim to want equal treatment for Afro-Americans whilst making sure the very system around them, because of their ancestors having been severely discriminated against, de facto treats them far, far, worse than most others whilst that specific manifestation of injustice (suffering merely because one was born to poor parents) is put forward as "the way things are".
No, it really isn't "the way things are", it's the product of how "right to private property" is interpreted.
I wasn't talking about judging the system, advocating for it or against it.
My entire point was "you can own things" encompasses "no one can take your house" as well as "privitazation of every aspect of public life".
You're arguing against a strawman based on the assumption that a broad principle can't be judged on principle, but must instead be judge on the worst outcomes of the worst implementation of those principles.
Much like how "Democracy" encompasses a wide array of systems that are attempts to implement "people are ultimately in control of the systems that govern their lives". Democracy also has open ended results, and applying the same criteria and judging the concept of Democracy based on observed negative outcomes with positives accounted for leads to the conclusion that people should not be in charge of the systems that govern their lives.
If you invert the principles of liberalism as stated above, you end up with a pretty bleak sounding world that I would not like.
That doesn't mean that I'm a proponent of the specifics of modern free market liberalism.
What's your notion for what a world would look like without a right to own property, no right to self governance, no right to equality before the law, no right to political equality, and no right to liberty?
What I'm hearing you say is that you're opposed to failures to live up to the espoused principles, and opposed to cases where taking one of the principles to an extreme undermines the others. I readily agree. The implementation of how private ownership has been enforced and interpreted has been problematic very, very often. I do not think that means I should have no ability to own things, but rather that we need to make it clear the right isn't absolute to the individual.
It's terminology derived from the conversation surrounding "people" versus "kings", as opposed to "individuals" versus "society". Flipping it around creates friction because an outcome you would accept from a vote and fair trial is different from what you would accept from royal fiat.
My point is that "right to private property" is a far too vague "principle" for something which covers a huge number of often very different situations (from ownership of objects and pets, to that of other people and land), some of which have massive implications on another principle of Liberalism (which is supposedly the main one) - Liberty.
That "principle" alone can nullify everything else in that definition depending on interpretation, making the whole thing flawed because it includes such a massive trap.
I would say that the praxis of how Liberalism is implemented proves that point when it comes to, for example, Land Ownership which is invariably inheritable (which is actually stretching the definition of "right to private property") - something that is key in entrenching wealth (and hence liberty) inbalances across generations - as well as tending towards the highly individualistic "the owner of the land has supreme power over it" and away from accepting limitations to such supreme power when in the common interest (though, granted, in the US there are actually pretty weird cases which are the opposite of it, in the form of the power that Housing Associations have in the US, plus in other countries there are laws that allow Land to be forcefully purchased to, for example, make roads).
Anyways, I'm not saying that Liberalism has "failed to live up to the espoused principles", I'm saying that the combination of principles it is made up of per that definition in Wikipedia does not even add up to a coherent set of principles that can be achieved together because it contains inner contradictions - it cannot live up the espouse principles because if you increase some (most namelly "right to private property") you reduce others ("liberty") - in other words, to have more Liberty for more people you have to limit the rights of private property is various areas (the most obvious in past times was the when treating people as property - i.e. Slavery - whilst nowadays Land Ownership is key in reducing the Liberty of the many because it makes a world were most people are born landless and unable to acquire land).
To use a methaphor, you cannot claim that an assemblage of sprokets setup in such a way that some work against others, is a "machine" for making all the sprokets turn, since it will never be able to do so.
So what would you have instead of the right to private property?
Do you think that government derived from the consent of the governed is equally vague?
I'm not persuaded by the argument that taking one part to the extreme resulting in issues makes the whole thing invalid. To adapt your metaphor, you can press the clutch and shift a car into 1st on the freeway. Many bad things will result. This isn't an argument that cars are fundamentally flawed, but that you shouldn't do the bad thing.
Totally agree. That's not a contradiction to the concept of a right to private property, that's an invitation to a more nuanced discussion about what the management of property should look like in society.
Well, if the principles of Liberalism have to be picked and chosen - "some more of this some less of that" - rather than all being objectives to be maximized, with very different policies and outcomes for a political governing body depending on they picked and chose to maximize and minimize, then that definition itself isn't sufficient to define a Political Ideology.
When you wheel out this definition and claim "this is Liberalism" in the context of politics you're not actually presenting a political ideology, rather you're presenting a bag of ingredients to make political ideologies with, quite a broad range of political ideologies even since some of the ingredients in that bag don't actually work well with each other.
It makes total sense in the context of discussing politics for other people to point out concrete implementations of Liberalism as being "Liberalism", since those things are the actual political ideologies cooked from the Liberalism bag of ingredients, though in all fairness it would be more correct for them to say "this is what's made with with Liberalism" rather than "this IS Liberalism".
Anyway, this circles us around to my original point that when talking about politics you can't just point out to the Wikipedia definition of Liberalism and claim that's the one true definition of Liberalism because what's there is not a political ideology but just a bag of ingredients which can be used in quite arbitrary ways - that's kind of like pointing out at a bag of fruit, sugar, eggs and flour and claiming it's the one true Cherry Cake to dismiss other people pointing at actual cakes.
I don't think there's any ideology that you can unilaterally state "maximize every aspect and you'll be better, you don't need nuance". That's the entire reason why every political philosophy has myriad sects and schools of thought.
Your argument is the same one used to dismiss communism and socialism. In practice, their principles have led to bad outcomes.
It's odd to me to expect a political philosophy to have principles so precise that they don't require nuance when applying them.
My argument is that "Liberalism" is more akin to a domain of politics, such as "Leftwing", than to an actual Political Ideology such as "Socialism".
This is also consistent with the idea that there is a Freedom - Control political axis which is separate from the Left - Right political axis: Liberalism is basically being towards the Freedom side in that axis.
This means that you can't claim there is a real Liberal political ideology and that the various political ideologies which are deemed Liberal are not really Liberal because they're different things: Liberalism is a group of political ideologies defined around freedom and there is no such thing as "the one true implementation of it" because that's not a recipe, just a set of ideas which when combined in different ways and quantities (and, as I think we've both concluded in our discussion here, some of those liberal ideas don't play nice with others or in other words, some freedoms go against other freedoms), give rise to various different Liberal political ideologies.
So you (or whomever started this by pulling out that Wikipedia definition) are absolutely right in saying that the definition presented there is Liberalism and that the people who follow it are Liberals, what IMHO you are wrong in is in claiming that present day Liberals aren't following the "real" Liberalism: if there's one thing made clear from our discussion is that modern political ideologies which implement those ideas in whatever combination and orders and quantities (the examples I've been mainly talking about being those which put Property Rights above Liberty, such as Neoliberalism) are in fact Liberal since the political ideology they follow is a specific implementation of Liberalism.
So yeah, to wrap up the entire discussion, people who believe in modern ultra-capitalist hard-neoliberalism were Property Rights in the most trump Liberty are in fact Liberals -because the most hardcore and capitalist neoliberalism is made up from a specific combination of the principles of Liberalism - but then so are people who believe in Social Democracy because that political ideology too is made up from a (very different) combination of the principles of Liberalism.
This does mean that some Liberals are not in fact hard-right and can even be Leftwing (if, for example, they believe in Social Democracy), but in the present day most Liberals are hard-right because amongst the political ideologies that are made from the principles of Liberalism, Neoliberalism is much more dominant than Social Democracy.