Liberalism gives everyone the freedom of speech – it allows for black people to speak up and voice their opinions

At its heart, the aim of the liberal project is today what it has always been: to build a free, fair, and prosperous society. But liberalism ought never to be confused with mere high-mindedness; it calls for a practical politics, whose ways and means necessarily evolve in response to new conditions and new understandings. A readiness to confront new conditions and absorb the lessons of experience is all the more necessary in a philosophy that asks to be judged by its real effects on human freedom and happiness and the power and peace of nations. Liberalism stands not only for the principle that we all have an equal right to freedom but also for the hypothesis that this is a workable ideal, and that a politics based on liberal principles can produce the power and wealth that make a free society more than a dream.

Liberalism is notoriously difficult to define. the term has been used to describe a sprawling profusion of ideas, practices, movements, and parties in different societies and historical periods. Often emerging as a philosophy of opposition, whether to feudal privilege, absolute monarchy, colonialism, theocracy, communism, or fascism, liberalism has served, as the word suggests, as a force for liberation, or at least liberalization -- for the opening up of channels of free initiative.

As a political philosophy in the Anglo-American world, liberalism has two primary senses. In its broader meaning, it refers to the fundamental principles of constitutional government and individual rights shared by modern liberals and conservatives, though often differently interpreted by them. This tradition of constitutional liberalism -- classical political liberalism -- emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries, culminated in the American and French revolutions, and continues to provide the foundation of the modern liberal state. The classical liberals generally stood for religious liberty, freedom of thought and speech, the division of governmental powers, an independent civil society, and rights of private property and economic freedom that evolved in the 19th century into the doctrine of laissez-faire.

Modern democratic liberalism developed out of the more egalitarian aspects of the tradition and serves as the basis of contemporary liberal politics. The relationship between liberalism in these two phases has been predominantly cumulative: While rejecting laissez-faire economic policy, modern liberalism continues to take the broader tradition of constitutional liberalism as its foundation. That is why it is possible to speak not only of the two separately but also of an overarching set of ideas that unites them.

Yet even within the Anglo-American liberal tradition, intellectuals and reformers have started from different premises about human nature, society, and history and have held different views about many matters of deep importance to them, including religion. Historically, liberalism has been defined by a shared, albeit evolving, body of political principles rather than by agreement on the ultimate grounds on which those principles rest.

One of those shared political principles is an equal right to freedom, where freedom has been successively understood during the past three centuries in a more expansive way: first, as a right to civil liberty and freedom from arbitrary power; then, as a right to political liberty and a share in the government; and finally, as a right to basic requirements of human development and security necessary to assure equal opportunity and personal dignity.