Liberalism: Gains and Limitations

Abstract

The author regards liberal ideology and doctrine as a significant and fundamental stage in human political conscience development that has indubitable progressive value, but at the same time, certain historical limitations. According to the author, the basic liberal postulates, that each human being is born free having the ability to reason by birth and the potential to reasonably use his freedom, while each man can use his freedom in full only if he owns some property, have universal and imperishable value, but are in need of a number of vital supplements. Contemporary forms of liberalism, while retaining the connection with basic postulates, still have deviated from its essence and have turned into the forms of modified essence distorting all the positive issues historically created by liberalism and turning into degradation constructs of proto- and quasi liberalism. On the one hand, it has lead to discrediting of the image of liberalism itself and alienating the people, on the other hand, it allowed its more reactionary opponents to speak of the fallaciousness of the values and basic postulates of this universal ideology. Thus we have to ask what the issue of “exhaustiveness of liberalism” shall mean: the exhaustiveness of its market and postmodernist forms, or the exhaustiveness of its basic postulates, and also how we could overcome this exhaustiveness, - by denying the values of Liberty, Reason and the necessity of man’s economic independence; or by denying the exaggeration of the consumer society value and transition to the society of knowledge and creation.