By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
Liberalism, in general, and liberalism economical, in particular, they comprise a set of premises about human action and the production of wealth that articulated (and still articulates) as a philosophical doctrine. Thus, liberalism in economics is not dissociated from its philosophical and political aspects. The main authors of classical liberalism, that is, the one that developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, are:David Hume , Adam Smith , David Ricardo , Jeremy Bentham and Wilhelm Humbolt .
The principles basics of liberalism are about the defense of the free market, the right to private property, the freedom of individual action - which presupposes the guarantee of individual freedoms by the State -, the non-intervention of the State in the market, economic competitiveness and the generation of wealth.
The exaltation of free and wage labor, in the context of the 18th century, made liberal ideology one of the pillars of political manifestations against the forms of slavery that were still in force at that time. Liberalism also shares the main idea that human economic experience has scarcity as a rule, the constant factor of not having the resources necessary for survival, so that such resources can only be generated through the production of wealth and work.
The defense of individual freedom and the possibility of undertaking and developing a business that is competitive within the laws of the market are one of the most dear premises to liberalism. The idea of equality, for a liberal, is even closely associated with this type of freedom. Equality can only apply where the guarantees of free labor and free competition apply. By cultivating this perspective, liberalism was and still is constantly attacked by collectivist ideologies such as communism and economic fascism (in the original sense, elaborated by Mussolini).
To liberalism, therefore, the terrain of representative democracy and the Democratic State of Law, guarantor of its premises, is fundamental. A state that is too statist or authoritarian – whether on the right or on the left – does not fit liberal aspirations. The direct association that is made between economic liberalism and the capitalist system, often highlighted by the opinions of the political left, sometimes reduces liberal democratic premises to a “nebulous mechanism of systemic exploitation”.
At the turn of the 19th century and during the 20th century, liberalism was revisited by different currents, both philosophical and strictly economic. One of the liberal sympathizers is the leading representative of the Austrian School of Economics, Ludwig Von Mises. Mises has a central work for understanding liberal economics and the tradition that followed it. It is entitled “Liberalism in the Classical Tradition”. In this work, Mises defines liberalism as follows (attacking the ideologies that try to reduce it to the scheme of “capitalist exploitation”):
“Liberalism is the most comprehensive concept. It comprises an ideology that encompasses all of social life. The ideology of democracy comprises only the domain of social relations that refer to the constitution of the state. The reason why liberalism necessarily requires democracy as a political corollary has been demonstrated in the first part of this book. Showing why all anti-liberal movements, including socialism, are also, necessarily, anti-democratic is a task for investigations that seek to undertake an exhaustive analysis of the character of such ideologies. ” (Von Mises, Ludwig. Liberalism in the classical tradition . São Paulo:Instituto Ludwig Von Mises Brazil, 2010. p 35)
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