ABSTRACT
Liberalism is a well-established theory and tradition, yet an inexact concept. While ideologists and philosophers of liberalism may each subscribe to what they regard to be clear and uncontentious accounts of their creed, the analysis of liberalism is often split between unpacking the diversity of its forms and advocating an ideal-type single version, whether “comprehensive” or minimal. It is thus instructive to explore liberalism as a label for a set of political and philosophical views and arguments that does not denote a single ideational phenomenon, but may be interpreted as an assembly of family resemblances, of Venn diagrams, or even as an umbrella term for different epistemologies and ideologies. Liberalism embraces ideological and philosophical positions possessing the heuristic and classificatory features that discharge the delivery of necessarily simplified understandings of the world, but it also conceals within it a considerably divergent set of beliefs and political understandings, attesting to the pluralist and polyvalent nature of political thought and to the potential problems of imposing precise categories on the messiness of ideological entities.
