We have not finished with the semantic confusion

LIBERALISM

AMERICAN

by Alain Laurent

Ed. The Belles Lettres, 271 pages,

21 euros.

It is an extraordinary paradox that the epithet of liberal became an insult to the United States as well as France. Elle but is a completely different sense of share and of the Atlantic, and it took the history of the word know well avatars to ce result. For Americans, the "liberals" are men from left, contaminated by the socialistic temptation to Europeans, constituting a threat to the independence of individuals against the State and the functioning of a competitive economy. In France, the Liberals, willingly baptised ultra-liberal, embody a right accused of wanting to the death of the welfare State and is ready to sacrifice the social act of bronze of the market. While the French rejected a European Constitution suspected to the bed of liberalism, Americans opposed the candidature for the Presidency of a John Kerry that his opponents had found nothing better than to him bringing the epithet of "liberal".

It is to illuminate the emergence of this startling contradiction dedicated Alain Laurent retracing the history of liberalism on the two continents. While the meaning of the word appeared, initially, plain and simple, it shows how are born schools following a pendulum movement draught sometimes right, sometimes to the left of the political spectrum. This resulted in a growing confusion behind which the historian trying to reveal the tensions which have shaken as well the political actors as theoreticians. They are rooted in the difficulty that there has always been to design the coexistence between the two terms of the freedom-equality couple. If liberalism that can be taken as Orthodox has always been a tendency to favour the defence of freedom, the inequalities caused by laissez-faire were outraged those who then wanted to establish neo-liberalism which theses were those of European democracy. They are the ones who, therefore, have monopolized in the United States the name of "liberalism", practicing what Alain Laurent described as a gigantic operation of diversion.

Semantic confusion

It was therefore inevitable that those who continued to oppose increasing control of the State are fighting to rehabilitate the founding principles of liberalism. But, as the word was captured by their opponents, remained them other result than to use others: they proclaimed "conservatives", that is resolved to preserve the authentic values of liberalism of the origins.

If Alain Laurent mainly interested in describing the episodes of this lexical chairs set in the context of the United States, his concern to preserve orthodox sense the word liberalism can also enlighten some European disputes. It takes to target those of our political scientists who are, like the Americans, attempted to reconcile socialism and liberalism. In their view, socialism would be understood liberalism. They readily demonstrate that it is of liberal thinking on public good that was born the welfare State and even estimate that it is in the program of empowerment of the socialism that liberal ideas can find a new force. In short, they believe, with Monique Canto-Sperber, that "socialism can give body to liberal ideas." In doing so, they could do nothing, fears the author, that succumb to the illusion that was the American "liberals".

We have not finished with the semantic confusion. He would continue the game, that our European Liberals are trying to convince reluctant voters that liberalism is only one true socialism, on the grounds that economic freedom is the safest factor in social progress.