Encyclopedia of Political Ideologies

Sixteen political traditions, each set out with its founding arguments, its core commitments, the strongest objections raised against it, and its approximate position on the two-axis compass.

• Anarcho-Capitalism — The position that every service currently provided by the state, including law, courts and defence, could and should be supplied by competing private firms in a voluntary market.
• Christian Democracy — A centrist tradition that applies Catholic and Protestant social teaching to public policy, accepting the market economy while insisting it be bounded by obligations to family, community and the vulnerable.
• Classical Liberalism — The Enlightenment doctrine that legitimate government rests on consent, is limited to protecting life, liberty and property, and is bound by law it cannot itself override.
• Conservatism — A disposition, more than a programme, that treats inherited institutions as accumulated practical knowledge and regards abstract schemes of social reconstruction as likely to destroy more than they create.
• Distributism — The argument that productive property — land, tools, workshops, firms — should be owned as widely as possible by ordinary families, rather than concentrated in either corporations or the state.
• Green Politics — A tradition organising politics around ecological limits, arguing that an economy premised on indefinite growth on a finite planet is not a policy error but a structural contradiction.
• Libertarianism — The position that individual liberty is the primary political value, that the state should be confined to protecting rights, and that most of what governments currently do is both unjust and counterproductive.
• Marxism-Leninism — The doctrine, developed by Lenin and codified under Stalin, that socialism is achieved through the seizure of state power by a disciplined vanguard party which then directs the economy centrally on behalf of the working class.
• Minarchism — The position that the state is justified, but only in the narrowest possible form: courts, police and national defence, and nothing else.
• Nationalism — The principle that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that each nation is entitled to govern itself, and that the boundaries of the state should match the boundaries of the nation.
• Ordoliberalism — A German variant of liberalism holding that competitive markets do not arise spontaneously but must be deliberately constructed and continuously defended by a strong state that sets rules without directing outcomes.
• Paleolibertarianism — A strategic fusion of anarcho-capitalist economics with cultural traditionalism, arguing that liberty requires strong voluntary social institutions rather than the dissolution of all inherited norms.
• Social Democracy — The project of achieving substantial economic equality and security through parliamentary means, within a market economy and under liberal constitutional government.
• Social Libertarianism — The position that genuine freedom requires material security as well as the absence of interference, and that an unconditional income floor is the most direct way to provide it.
• Syndicalism — The doctrine that workers should take control of production directly through their own unions, and that the union rather than the party or the state is the proper vehicle of both struggle and future administration.
• Technocracy — The proposition that political decisions should be made by those with relevant expertise, on the grounds that most questions of government have technically better and worse answers that popular opinion is poorly placed to identify.