Liberalism has been criticized from almost every direction. Some critics say it goes too far, some that it does not go far enough, and some that its whole picture of the human person is mistaken. A fair understanding needs to hear them at their strongest, and to hear how liberals answer.

Conservative critics

Conservatives, beginning with Edmund Burke in the 1790s, argue that liberalism treats society as if it were built from abstract rights and individual choices, ignoring the traditions, institutions and inherited loyalties that actually hold people together. In this view, liberal freedom slowly dissolves the families, churches and communities that teach the self-discipline and virtue a free society depends on.

Liberal reply: liberals answer that free societies have proven remarkably good at sustaining voluntary communities, that traditions worth keeping can survive being freely chosen, and that the alternative, using state power to enforce one way of life, is exactly what produced the wars of religion.

Socialist and Marxist critics

Socialists argue that liberal freedom is often only formal: equal on paper, unequal in reality. Karl Marx, in “On the Jewish Question” (written in 1843), argued that liberal rights treat people as isolated, self-interested individuals, separated from one another, and leave the economic power of property owners untouched. The French novelist Anatole France captured the complaint with irony in 1894: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” Equal rights mean little, the critic says, without the material means to use them.

Liberal reply: egalitarian liberals largely accept the point and answer it with public education, social insurance and Rawls's difference principle. Classical liberals add that societies which abolished liberal rights in the name of economic equality produced neither freedom nor equality.

Communitarian critics

In the 1980s, philosophers such as Michael Sandel, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor and Michael Walzer, later called communitarians, challenged the picture of the self in liberal theory. Sandel argued that Rawls assumes an unencumbered self, a person who exists prior to and apart from their commitments. But we are partly made by our communities: our families, nations, faiths and histories shape who we are, and some obligations are not chosen.

Liberal reply: Rawls later clarified that his theory was political, not a full account of human nature. Liberals also note that communities can be oppressive, and that the freedom to question and leave them is what protects their members.

Feminist and other critics

Feminist critics have argued that the liberal split between public and private life hid injustice inside the family from political scrutiny. Others point out that many early liberals excluded women, people without property and colonized peoples. Mill himself worked for decades for the East India Company and limited his liberty principle to societies he considered advanced.

Liberal reply: liberals answer that these exclusions betrayed liberal principles rather than following from them, and that it was liberal ideas of equal rights that critics used to overturn them. Mill's own The Subjection of Women (1869) argued for full legal equality between the sexes.

The neutrality question

A last critique runs through many of the others. Liberalism claims to be neutral among ways of life, but critics argue it is not: it favors individual choice, mobility and questioning over tradition, obedience and rootedness. Many liberals now concede that liberalism is not perfectly neutral, but argue it is fairer than the alternatives, since it gives every way of life the most room possible consistent with the same room for others.

Worked example: one law, four critics

Imagine a country passes a law making it easy for adults to end their marriages quickly, without proving fault. A liberal defender says: adults should be free to leave relationships they no longer want, and the state should not force anyone to stay. How might each critic respond?

• A conservative might say marriage is not just a private contract but an institution that protects children and binds generations together. Making it easy to dissolve weakens it for everyone, including couples who would have worked through hard times.
• A socialist might say formal freedom to divorce means little to a spouse who has no income of her own. Without economic support, she may be free on paper but trapped in practice.
• A communitarian might say the law treats spouses as unencumbered individuals, when marriage is precisely a commitment that changes who you are and what you owe.
• A feminist might note that before such reforms, the private family was often shielded from scrutiny, and that easier exit protected many women from abusive marriages. She might also share the socialist's concern about economic dependence.

Notice that the critics do not all point the same way. The conservative wants less individual choice; the socialist and feminist may want more real choice backed by resources; the communitarian questions the framing. Liberals, in turn, might combine easy divorce with child support rules and social protections. Seeing which critique applies, and why, is more useful than declaring liberalism simply right or wrong.