Classical radicalism

rdf:langString Classical radicalism

rdf:langString Radicalism (from French radical, "radical") or classical radicalism was a historical political movement representing the leftward flank of liberalism during the late 18th and early 19th centuries and a precursor to social liberalism, social democracy and modern progressivism. Its earliest beginnings were found in Great Britain with the Levellers during the English Civil War, and the later Radical Whigs. During the 19th century in the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and Latin America, the term radical came to denote a progressive liberal ideology inspired by the French Revolution. Historically, radicalism emerged in an early form with the French Revolution and the similar movements it inspired in other countries. It grew prominent during the 1830s in the United Kingdom with the Chartists and Belgium with the Revolution of 1830, then across Europe in the 1840s–1850s during the Revolutions of 1848. In contrast to the social conservatism of existing liberal politics, radicalism sought political support for a radical reform of the electoral system to widen suffrage. It was also associated with republicanism, liberalism, left-wing politics, modernism, secular humanism, anti-militarism, civic nationalism, abolition of titles, rationalism, secularism, redistribution of property, and freedom of the press. In 19th-century France, radicalism had emerged as a minor political force by the 1840s as the extreme left of the day (in contrast to the socially-conservative liberalism of the Moderate Republicans and Orléanist monarchists and the anti-parliamentarianism of the Legitimist monarchists and Bonapartists). By the 1890s, the French radicals were not organised under a single nationwide structure, but rather they had become a significant political force in parliament. In 1901, they consolidated their efforts by forming the country's first major extra-parliamentary political party, the Republican, Radical and Radical-Socialist Party which became the most important party of government during the second half (1899 to 1940) of the French Third Republic. The success of the French Radicals encouraged radicals elsewhere to organize themselves into formal parties in a range of other countries in the late 19th and early 20th century, with radicals holding significant political office in Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. During the interwar period, European radical parties organized the Radical Entente, their own political international. Before social liberalism and socialism emerged as mainstream political ideologies, radicalism was in a leftist political position similar to social democrats or socialists in modern politics. As social democracy emerged as a distinct political force in its own right, the Radical movement was split between alignment with the centre-right conservative liberal movement or joining up with the social democrats. In many European countries the Radical parties either split (as in Denmark, where Venstre undertook a conservative-liberal rebranding, while Radikale Venstre maintained the radical tradition as part of a reformist coalition with the Social Democrats), took up a new orientation or dissolved. After the Second World War, the European Radicals were largely extinguished as a major political force except in Italy, Scandinavia and their French heartland. However, Latin America, where social democracy never took root as in Europe, retains a distinct indigenous Radical tradition.