Within a certain political ideology, you will have divergent paths taken over time which take the core principles of the given ideology and apply it in different fashions to reach very different outcomes. Yet, it is still ultimately derived from the same tenets of the ideology as any other diversion.
Modern liberalism is not an example of this scenario. Modern liberalism is not a sub-division of liberalism with any remaining meaningful attachment to the core of liberalism. This leads to the question, what exactly are the core features of liberalism? The most important feature, as Heywood states, is the “primacy of the individual,” followed by freedom, reason, justice (not equality, but justice), and toleration. Modern liberalism does not hold true to these tenets, first and foremost for its lack of focus on “the primacy of the individual.”
Liberalism is an ideology based on the individual and freedom. Freedom is the ability to think and act as one wishes and individualism, the main belief of liberals, is the idea that there is supreme importance of the individual over society or the collective. Modern Liberalism attempts to maintain its attachment to the ideology in terms of freedom, though modern liberalism focuses on positive freedom as opposed to negative freedom. Positive freedom is a perverted mutation of the true meaning of freedom, and is more antonymous than synonymous with freedom.
Positive freedom is conveniently defined as the achievement of autonomy, and the ability of self mastery, or self-realization. In contrast, negative freedom is the freedom of choice. Negative freedoms include the right to bear arms, to speak freely, and to practice whichever religion one wants. These freedoms do not place burdens onto other people, but maximize the liberty of the individual up until the point in which it begins to interfere with another’s right or freedom ("The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins" Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes). Positive freedoms on the other hand are, by definition, place a burden on another. Positive freedom does not increase peoples circle of liberty, because for every purported right to a new “freedom” comes the attached detriment of a freedom lost. The “freedom” to have health care is the lost freedom, for a doctor at least, to provide healthcare for a consensually agreed upon price. The “freedom” to welfare support requires the abusive coercion of the government in denying other people of their freedom to their earned wages. Positive freedom provides no additional liberty, and therefore does not deserve the title of a “freedom.”
“Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one," so stated Thomas Paine. Thomas Paine is alluding to the idea, which Milton Friedman would agree with, that a political system characterized by consensual free market agreements between private parties is not only more just, but provides more freedom, than from a society in which the government, ruled by a majority, mandates what is altruistic, and uses coercion (laws and a police force) to destroy all alternatives. The larger the government, the less liberal a society becomes, this was true in 1800, and it is true today.
Modern liberalism represents an ideology of coercion, tyrannical controls by a majority for a proposed altruistic utopian ideal of equality that has left freedom and individualism so far in its wake that it has departed from the ideological foundation from which it considers itself derived.
"A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both." Milton Friedman
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