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A Fear of Democracy Runs Through Conservatism

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Tom Chapman
A2 Political Theory DATE \@ "d MMMM y" 20 September 2015

A Fear of Democracy Runs Through Liberalism
A2 Political Theory

A fear of Democracy runs through Liberalism. Do Liberal individuals fear the hand of the state and the will of the people? Are Liberals fearful of what the ruling majority may impose on them or are they perfectly happy bending the knee to the authority of the state and the decisions of the masses, if only to preserve their own civil liberties and rights?
To assess if this is the case or not we must first understand a rather complicated question; what is Liberalism? Liberalism can be traced back to the decline of Feudalism in the 18th Century and the revolutions of both France (1789) and the USA (1765) where we saw two states try to shake off the ruling class and enter a new era of enlightenment where there was, generally, consensus ruling. Liberalism then comes to the fore front of Political thinking around the period of the Industrial Revolution in Britain and Europe in the 19th Century which led to many people rising through the ranks and creating a form of social mobility linked with Liberal ideas of self rule and governance. It’s this Industrial Revolution period where we see Liberalism take it’s first form - what we now call classical Liberalism. Classical Liberals believe in the idea of negative freedoms where by each person is able to both thrive and fail in society, this goes hand in hand with the idea of maintaining state intervention to a minimal, laissez faire rule. This idea of negative freedoms caused a rift in Liberal thinking with many prominent minds believing this was not the best way to run a society. This chasm in liberal thinking it was gave birth to the idea of Modern Liberalism, a more refined and fairer system in comparison to the classic view of Liberalism. Modern Liberals believed in the idea of the

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