Liberalism is a concept which believes in freedom and in granting equal rights to all. Liberalism is the by- product of rationalism. Liberals believe in ideas such as democracy, freedom of speech and expression, free and fair elections, human rights, capitalism and freedom of religion. John Locke who was a liberal thinker is often credited with propagating liberalism as a philosophical tradition. Liberalism gained ground in the age of enlightenment when the liberals came all out to oppose assumptions on which the earlier governments were based like absolute monarchy and the divine rule of the king.
In the words of Morris Raphael Cohen, “Liberalism is an attitude rather than a set of dogmas - an attitude that insists upon questioning all plausible and self-evident propositions, seeking not to reject them but to find out what evidence there is to support them rather than their possible alternatives.” Liberalism regards life as an adventure in which we must take risks in new situation, in which there is no guarantee that the new will always be the good or the true, in which progress is a precarious achievement rather than inevitability.
