Cory DoctorowRight here. The difference between #liberals and #leftists in one sharp graf, in Naomi Klein's forthcoming DOPPELGANGER https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374610326/doppelganger
Bernard Dubuisson@pluralistic In #Belgium, « liberal » means pro-freedom, enterprise-friendly, hassle-free from the burden of State & taxes. So, it’s right wing even though some people make a difference between capitalist (Christmas) and liberal (turkeys). Historically, leftists & liberals have emerged from the same reaction against the dominant catholic party. They parted ways at the end of the nineteenth century but have many times come together on the issue on Church-State separation.
Paranoid Factoid@bernard_dub @pluralistic What side of the aisle did liberals sit at during the French Revolution?
@ParanoidFactoid @pluralistic I'm not sure the concept of liberalism was already there, it seemingly emerged during the Restauration period. But the French don't use the term "liberalism" to describe the right like Belgians do. A closer analogy, although more recent, would probably to be found towards the LibDems in the UK.
@bernard_dub @pluralistic No. Liberalism came from Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, et all. Many of them sat to the left at the Estates Generale, and that's where we get political left vs right. Think Edmund Burke, with his critique of the French Revolution and support of the monarchy as a center piece of conservatism. His thinking goes straight back to Hobbes' Leviathan. That's the right.
@ParanoidFactoid @pluralistic OK, I don't know that much about those origins. But what struck me is that the industrial revolution and its new inequalities, based not on a ruler's excentricities or the Church, but on the means of production, provoked a new chiasm between freedom-fighters. A part of them calling themselves "liberals" promoted the freedom of trade and a weak State, while another part of the progressives followed Marx & stuck to workers rights guaranteed by a heavy State.
@bernard_dub @pluralistic Marx wrote in the mid 19th Century. But these ideas were formed from the early 18th Century. The 17th, if you count free speech.