1. Các nhà triết học, nhà xã hội học, và các nhà kinh tế của thứ mười tám và đầu thế kỷ XIX xây dựng một chương trình chính trị phục vụ như một hướng dẫn chính sách xã hội đầu tiên ở Anh và Hoa Kỳ, sau đó trên lục địa châu Âu, chủ nghĩa tự do và cuối cùng trong các bộ phận của thế giới có người ở. | Introduction 1. Liberalism The philosophers sociologists and economists of the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth century formulated a political program that served as a guide to social policy first in England and the United States then on the European continent and finally in the other parts of the inhabited world as well. Nowhere was this program ever completely carried out. Even in England which has been called the homeland of liberalism and the model liberal country the proponents of liberal policies never succeeded in winning all their demands. In the rest of the world only parts of the liberal program were adopted while others no less important were either rejected from the very first or discarded after a short time. Only with some exaggeration can one say that the world once lived through a liberal era. Liberalism was never permitted to come to full fruition. Nevertheless brief and all too limited as the supremacy of liberal ideas was it sufficed to change the face of the earth. A magnificent economic development took place. The release of man s productive powers multiplied the means of subsistence many times over. On the eve of the World War which was itself the result of a long and bitter struggle against the liberal spirit and which ushered in a period of still more bitter attacks on liberal principles the world was incomparably more densely populated than it had ever been and each inhabitant could live incomparably better than had been possible in earlier centuries. The prosperity that liberalism had Liberalism A Socio-Economic Exposition created reduced considerably infant mortality which had been the pitiless scourge of earlier ages and as a result of the improvement in living conditions lengthened the average span of life. Nor did this prosperity flow only to a select class of privileged persons. On the eve of the World War the worker in the industrial nations of Europe in the United States and in the overseas dominions of England lived .
