Conservatism And Socialism Essay

Liberalism, conservatism and socialism are different ideological families that include many concepts, ideas, and thoughts. Michael Freeden has came up with four features of ideologies which could be used to analysis these ideological families. These features are proximity, priority, permeability and proportionality. Each of them could explain some aspects of each ideological family.
First of all, “proximity” means that the political concepts only make sense when they are within a particular idea-environment. Liberalism consists of some concepts such as “human beings are rational”, and “a belief in human and social progress”. Its political concepts emphasis on the importance of individuals. However, the core concepts of socialism put an emphasis on the “group” instead of “individuals”. Socialism has a strong emphasis on the relationships between the individuals. It tends to address issues relate to “class”. Proximity shows that the idea environment is important that the concepts relate to “individuals” would only make sense when people are thinking about liberalism. …show more content…
The concepts from liberalism, conservatism and socialism interact with each other. For instance, one simply way to talk about the tradition of liberalism is that it encourages individuals to develop and change to be better that the tradition focuses on the welfare of individuals. The tradition of socialism also encourages to eliminate poverty in order to promote the welfare of human. They are all about to care about humanity. Conservatism does not reject such development. It in fact suggests to have steady and safe development which is not harmful to the society and people. All of them talk about the changes of human, and all of them expose the intentions of expecting the best out of the development of