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Abstract

To survive into the 21st century, senior executives must develop within there company proactive and integrated approach to business risk assessment and control.

A Business risk management framework must integrate risk management strategies, policies, measures, monitoring process and control to reject unacceptable risk and reduce the political risks to an acceptable level. It must also support the allocation of resources to the best opportunities for returns in relation to risk assumed. One way to manage political risk is to buy political risk insurance. Organizations that have international operations use this type of insurance to mitigate their risk exposure as a result of political instability. There are indices that provide an idea of the risk exposure an organization has in certain countries. For instance, an index of economic freedom ranks countries based on how political interference impacts business decisions in each country.

Political Philosophy is the study of these and other matters, more generally the firstthe relationship between individuals and society. Sometimes the subject is nicely encapsulated in the question "how are we to live?" That is: given that few people live entirely alone, we may ask how best to govern our interactions. What responsibilities do we have to each other? Can we do as we please? Is society more important than the individuals that make it up? Political philosophy doesn't exist in a vacuum, though; the answers we might give will depend in turn on our ethical ideas, as well as what kind of world we think we live in and what we may consider the purpose of our time here, if anyHistorical Considerations.

There have been so many political theorists and theories over the years that we cannot hope to cover them all here. Instead we'll look at a few representative and important notions that vexed wiseacres of the past.

Introduction

The word "philosophy" comes from the Greek philosophia, which literally means "love of wisdom". Philosophy is the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline. Political philosophy is the study of human social organization and of the nature of man/woman in society. It is the study of such topics as politics, liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of a legal code by authority. There are a wide variety of political philosophies. Such as: Socialism, Capitalism, Liberalism, Conservatism, Anarchism, Communism, Monarchism, Democracy and Fascism.There are a wide variety of political philosophies, of which we can only consider a few here. Well look at some of the philosophical aspects only. The standard division runs as follows

Socialism:- A great many political ideas may come under the broad banner of socialism, but generally speaking there is an economic decision that the ownership and planning the use of the means of production should be held centrally and publicly in some way, rather than privately. Often this is based on a critique of capitalism, but the idea is that the former method is more ethical or beneficial to people living under such arrangements. It is important to remember that not all socialists have a red hue and live under the beds of decent, right-thinking people.Liberalism:- It is a political orientation which favors the social progress by implementing law and reform rather than revolution. It is the belief in the importance of equal rights and liberty. This ideology began in the 18th century, which was a movement to self government and away from aristocracy. Aristocracy is a government form in which the best qualified rule.Conservatism:- It is a political and social philosophy that promotes retaining traditional social institutions. A person who follows the philosophies of conservatism is referred to as a traditionalist or conservative.Some conservatives seek to preserve things as they are, emphasizing stability and continuity,

Anarchism:- Generally defined as a political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, or harmful or, alternatively, as opposing authority or hierarchical organization in the conduct of human relations.

Communism:- Communism is a distinct socio-political philosophy that is willing to use violent means to attain its goal of a classless society. Monarchism:- Which based on the belief that political power should be concentrated in one person who rules by decree. A monarchist is an individual who supports this form of government, independent from the person, the monarch.Capitalism:- It is an economic system that is based on private ownership of the means of production and the creation of goods or services for profit. Other elements central to capitalism include competitive markets, wage labor and capital accumulation.Democracy:- Democracy is a form of government in which all eligible citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Democracy allows people to participate equallyeither directly or through elected representativesin the proposal, development, and creation of laws.

Abraham Lincoln said Democracy is the government of the people, by the people, for the people.Fascism:- The term Fascism was first used of the totalitarian right-wing nationalist regime of Mussolini in Italy (192243); the regimes of the Nazis in Germany and Franco in Spain were also Fascist. Fascism tends to include a belief in the supremacy of one national or ethnic group, contempt for democracy, an insistence on obedience to a powerful leader, and a strong demagogic approach

Nowadays many of the issues in political philosophy now turn or are dependent in many ways upon economic analysesthe best way to provide and allocate resources being an example. Nevertheless, these may themselves have been influenced by political and philosophical ideas, so there is interdependence at play between them. To ignore either is problematic: we need to know the best way to achieve our aims, but we also have to decide what to aim for in the first place and what forms of solution we are inclined to accept. Political risk is a type of risk faced by investors, corporations, and governments. It is a risk that can be understood and managed with reasoned foresight and investment. Prof. Stephen Kobrinclassifies political risk as: Macro risk and Micro risk.Macro risk refers to adverse actions that will affect all foreign firms, such as expropriation or insurrection, whereas micro risk refers to adverse actions that will only affect a certain industrial sector or business, such as corruption and prejudicial actions against companies from foreign countries.The concept of political risk in international business is based on the existence of possible threats to the firm from political instability and lawlessness in the area of investment. Once a firm leaves the basically standardized world of domestic business law, the global environment is much more fluid; most states can use many levers of power to extract more resources from the investing firm. Political risk not only affected a specific business or class of business. But also affecting an entire country or region, and include such things as currency devaluation.

Philosophy:-

The word "philosophy" comes from the Greek philosophia, which literally means "love of wisdom".

Philosophy is the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline.Political Philosophy:-

Political philosophy is the study of human social organization and of the nature of man/woman in society. It is the study of such topics as politics, liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of a legal code by authority.

Political philosophy can also be understood by analyzing it through the perspectives of metaphysics, epistemology and axiology.A good definition for Political Philosophy is found only after determining what is politics, which is a sticky question to begin with. Politics could be defined as "the question of how to distribute a scarce amount of resources 'justly. This is, essentially, the way in which people obtain, keep, and exercise power. Political philosophy, then, is the study of the theories behind politics. These theories may be used to gain power or to justify its existence.

Mostly, however, they have been used to justify or legitimate the existence of contemporary political structures by appealing to "rationality," "reason," or, among others, "natural law."

Plato's Republic is a good starting point for political philosophy, however, it's really a treatise on education. It starts out by trying to define Justice (one of Kenneth Burke's "God Terms"). In it, he makes an argument for a sort of acetic life-style by, through a standard Platonic dialogue, laying out a minimally functional society. He then, somewhat periodically, responds to the question of luxury by outlining how to 'justly' lay out a state that will accommodate luxuries for the entitled (a state that looks very similar to Sparta). It's a good starting place, because it lays out his conception of Justice, which, inevitably, is based on his theory of the forms, which is a similar basis of conceptions of natural law.

Skipping a few thousand years and many important texts, we get to Nicolo Machiavelli's The Prince, which was written in 1513 and published, after his death, in 1532. Machiavelli lived in Florence under the Medici family's rule. During a brief period of reform, the Medicis were chased from power, and Machiavelli became a diplomat. When the Medicis returned, Machiavelli was basically exiled. One reason he might have written The Prince was to try to return to public life in Florence. This book is often criticized for its moral relativism, and, in an inadequate summarization, that power defines moral action.

Moving along, we can get to the social contract theorists, namely Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Charles Montesquieu, and Baruch Spinoza. This, of course, will be a brief and incomplete treatment of them, but it's a starting place. Hobbes' theory is mostly found in his book Leviathan. In it, he defines the state of nature (the prepolitical society) as a place where life is "nasty, brutish, and short." It's important to understand that Hobbes was writing after the Thirty Years War (a religious conflict between, primarily, the English Protestants and the Spanish Catholics), so he had a very pessimistic view of Human Nature. He basically thought that man, left to its own devices, would war against itself, hence the above quotation.

From that, Hobbes had a view that society with a state, at its worst, was better than having no state at all, so he concluded that any state action would be justified if for no other reason than that it is a modus vivendi, a lesser evil. The crux of this, and all social contract theory, is that the citizen has a sort of contract with the state in which people give up some autonomy to make their lives better. For Hobbes, this autonomy was given up to protect life at its most fundamental level.

Locke, however, has an entirely different notion. His view of the state of nature (the pre-political society) is much nicer. Basically people will respect each other and not infringe on another's person or property. If someone does, then the aggressed has the natural right to rectify the situation, and anyone else who witnesses an aggressor has the duty to help the aggresses. Locke concedes that property disputes will eventually be numerous enough that this would be time consuming, and in the general interest, people will form a state in order to have someone else protect their property and persons--basically to settle disputes--out of convenience. Much of this is laid out in The Second Treatise on Government. It's important to note that much of the U.S. constitution is based on Locke's political philosophy.

Political Philosophies:-

There are a wide variety of political philosophies, of which we can only consider a few here. Well look at some of the philosophical aspects only. The standard division runs as follows:Socialism:-A great many political ideas may come under the broad banner of socialism, but generally speaking there is an economic decision that the ownership and planning the use of the means of production should be held centrally and publicly in some way, rather than privately. Often this is based on a critique of capitalism, but the idea is that the former method is more ethical or beneficial to people living under such arrangements. It is important to remember that not all socialists have a red hue and live under the beds of decent, right-thinking people.

There are degrees to which socialism is preferred to some form of market economy. Given the failure of some attempts to control economies centrally, some have instead opted to allow a market to operate while maintaining control of certain areas that may be seen as fundamental, such as health services, travel networks and so on.

The principle philosophical difficulty for socialism is how to distribute resources fairly. If we hope to give to people according to their needs, what do we mean by a need? How do we distinguish between true and false claims of need from people? Moreover, if we don't continue to impose controls on the distribution of these resources, wouldn't they eventually become unequally distributed?

In the face of such problems, it is often useful to ask what we're aiming at with a political philosophy: if the answer for socialism is a more just or fair world then even if these concepts prove impossible to attain, we may still choose to at least try.

Anarchism:-Anarchism has been defined many ways by many different sources. The word anarchism is taken from the word anarchy which is drawn from dual sources in the Greek language. It is made up of the Greek words av (meaning: absence of [and pronounced "an"] and apxn (meaning: authority or government [and pronounced "arkhe"]). Today, dictionary definitions still define anarchism as the absence of government. These modern dictionary definitions of anarchism are based on the writings and actions of anarchists of history and present. Anarchists understand, as do historians of anarchism and good dictionaries and encyclopedias, that the word anarchism represents a positive theory. Exterior sources, however, such as the media, will frequently misuse the word anarchism and, thus, breed misunderstanding.

A leading modern dictionary, Webster's Third International Dictionary, defines anarchism briefly but accurately as, "a political theory opposed to all forms of government and governmental restraint and advocating voluntary cooperation and free association of individuals and groups in order to satisfy their needs." Other dictionaries describe anarchism with similar definitions. The Britannica-Webster dictionary defines the word anarchism as, "a political theory that holds all government authority to be unnecessary and undesirable and advocates a society based on voluntary cooperation of individuals and groups." Shorter dictionaries, such as the New Webster Handy College Dictionary, define anarchism as, "the political doctrine that all governments should be abolished."

These similar dictionary definitions of anarchism reflect the evolution of the theory of anarchism made possible by anarchist intellectuals and movements. As a result, dictionary definitions, although fair, only reflect watered down definitions of the word anarchism. Professor Noam Chomsky, in fact, has refuted the definition, as written in the New American Webster Handy College Dictionary, describing anarchism as a "political doctrine." According to Chomsky, "...anarchism isn't a doctrine. It's at most a historical tendency, a tendency of thought and action, which has many different ways of developing and progressing and which, I would think, will continue as a permanent strand of human history." Other modern definitions of anarchism are thoroughly explained, not as a word, but as a history of movements, people and ideas. The Encyclopedia of the American Left, in fact, gives a three page history of anarchism, yet does not once define the word.

Prior to the existence of the word anarchism people used the term "Libertarian Socialism," which meant the same thing as anarchism. Libertarian socialism was used largely by Mexican radicals in the early eighteenth century. William Godwin was the first proclaimed anarchist in history and the first to write about anarchism. He was born in 1756 in Weisbech, the capital of North Cambridge shire. He later married feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and had a daughter, Mary Shelley - author of Frankenstein. Godwin published a book called Political Justice in 1793 which first introduced his ideas about anarchism, Godwin was forgotten about, however, and after his death Pierre Joseph Proud on became a leading anarchist figure in the world. His book What is Property? Incorporated greater meaning to the word anarchism; anarchism became not only a rejection of established authority but a theory opposing ownership of land and property as well.

Anarchism fully blossomed as a defined theory when Russian anarchists Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) and Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921 started to write and speak. Bakunin had a major influence in the world and introduced anarchism to many people. Kropotkin was one of the many people inspired by Bakunin. Kropotkin wrote many books on anarchism, including Muitual Aid, Fields Factories and Workshops, and The Conquest of Bread, and greatly aided in the evolution of the theory of anarchism. Kropotkin wrote the first adept encyclopedia definition of anarchism in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1910. His definition was fifteen pages long. He started the definition by introducing the word anarchism as:

the name given to a principle of theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government - harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of the needs and aspirations of a civilized being, In a society developed on these lines, the voluntary associations which already now begin to cover all fields of human activity would take a still greater extension so as to substitute themselves for the state of its functions.

Following Kropotkin, Leo Tolstory furthered the ideas which make up the meaning of the word anarchism. Tolstoy introduced Christian anarchism (rejecting church authority but believing in God) and broadened anarchism's meaning. Tolstoy, in favor of the growth of anarchism, wrote "The anarchists are right in the assertion that, without Authority, there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions."

As the 20th century emerged anarchism began to peak and the definition of anarchism became concrete with the growth of new anarchist writers and movements. The execution and imprisonment of eight anarchists in Chicago in 1886 sparked anarchism's growth in the United States. The "Haymarket Eight" flourished anarchists such as Voltairine de Cleyre and Lucy Parsons. Parsons was born into slavery and later became an anarchist and an ardent speaker and working class rebel; the Chicago police labled Parsons, "...more dangerous than a thousand rioters." Emma Goldman also became a part of the anarchist movement due to the Chicago Martyrs. Described as a "damn bitch of an anarchist," Goldman also broadened the meaning of anarchism and introduced the greatest and most important ideas of anarchist feminism in history which prevail, as a result of Goldman, to this day.

Emma Goldman's life long comrade, Alexander Berkman, played a major part in helping to define the word anarchism. He wrote a book called ABC of Anarchism which defined and describes anarchism and is still read today. Berkman wrote, "Anarchism means you should be free; that no one should enslave you, boss you, rob you, or impose upon you. It means you should be free to do the things you want to do; and that you should not be compelled to do what you do not want to do."

Anarchism was put into action by giant movements throughout history which proved its definition was more than theoretical. The communal efforts of anarchism were seen in the Paris Commune in the early 19th century; the revolutionary organizing of Mexican working class rebels was proven possible by anarchists such as Ricardo Flores Magon and revolutionaries like Emiliano Zapata, and the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 proved anarchists' capability of creating anarchism within small sectors of the world. Certainly today we can see anarchism in action in places like Mondragon, Spain, where anarchists are working in collectives and trying to live free of authority.

Although the word anarchism is understood by many in its classic sense (that defined by dictionaries and by anarchists of history), the word is often misused and misunderstood. Anarchism, because of the threat it imposes upon established authority, has been historically, and is still, misused by power holders as violence and chaos. As anarchist historian George Woodcock put it, "Of the more frivolous is the idea that the anarchist is a man who throws bombs and wishes to wreak society by violence and terror. That this charge should be brought against anarchists now, at a time when they are the few people who are not throwing bombs or assisting bomb throwers, shows a curious purblindness among its champions." The claim that anarchism is chaos was refuted long ago by Alexander Berkman when he wrote:

I must tell you, first of all, what anarchism is not. It is not bombs, disorder, or chaos. It is not robbery or murder. It is not a war of each against all. It is not a return to barbarianism or to the wild state of man. Anarchism is the very opposite of all that.

These refutations of stereotypes associated with anarchism are sometimes trampled by the popular misuse of the word anarchism. It is not uncommon for a Middle Eastern nation in the midst of U.S.-imposed turmoil to be labeled by the media as "complete anarchy," a phrase which undermines the true definition of the word anarchism and all those who toiled, and who do toil, to make the word anarchism mean what it does today.

Modern anarchists still work hard to help anarchism maintain its validity and history. Anarchism today is being used to find solutions to the problems of power; not just state power, but corporate power and all immediate forms of domination among individuals and organizations. Anarchists such as L. Susan Brown have introduced ideas such as existential individualism, while other anarchists remain loyal to anarcho-syndicalism and class struggle. Anarchism has also been spread around the world through music and bands such as Crass, introducing anarchism and anti-speciesism and urging self-sufficiency among workers and community members. Other anarchists such as Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, an ex-Black Panther, are introducing new means of organizing and directly challenging racism. Furthermore, anarchism has become integrated into ecological issues thanks in part to eco-anarchist ideas and freethinking organizations such as Earth First! Also, we see anarchists working to keep anarchism, in theory and practice, alive and well around the world with anarchist newspapers such as Love and Rage in Mexico and the United States, anarchist book publishers such as AK Press in the U.S. and the U.K., and political prisoner support groups such as the Anarchist Black Cross.

As documented, the word anarchism has a long history. Although the word is simply derived from Greek tongue, the philosophy and actions of anarchists in history and present give the word anarchism proper definition. Dictionary definitions, as quoted, are sometimes fair to anarchism, but far from complete. The misuse of the word anarchism is unfortunate and has been a problem anarchists have had to deal with for the last century. Because of the misuse of anarchism, the simple dictionary definitions of anarchism, and the different interpretations of anarchism the word can take on many meanings, but the truly accurate meaning of the word anarchism can be found in anarchist history, anarchist writings and anarchist practice.

Communism:-Before we answer the question, What is Communism? it may be good to first compare it to communism with a small c. The system of thought called communism is an ideology summarized in the neat-sounding maxim, From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. A study of communism could lead one into the fascinating and divergent attempts throughout history by groups to walk in the light of the above principle -- attempts both secular and religious, some benign and some malignant.

Like the big elephant examined by the group of blind men in the old Indian story, our understanding of communism would vary greatly depending on which portion of the beast we touch. But if we think of communism as that bulky beast of the jungle with many strange parts, Communism with a capital C would be the tusk- perceived as a sharp and dangerous spear by its fearful examiner.

Modern day Communism is based on the writings of two German economists, Karl Marx and Fred rich Engels, who answered the question What is Communism? in their collaboration, The Communist Manifesto published in 1848. In it they declare that many problems in society are due to the unequal distribution of wealth. To bring about happiness and prosperity for all, the distinctions between the rich and poor of society must be eliminated. And since the rich will never give up their goods or status voluntarily, a rebellion of the poor -- the working class -- is necessary.

Thus, Communism is a distinct socio-political philosophy that is willing to use violent means to attain its goal of a classless society. If capitalism is defined as a social system based on individual rights (and individual wealth), then communism is its direct opposite. Communism believes in equality through force. In its system, individual rights are ground to powder and used to build its idol of absolute government control. It is indeed like the tusk of the elephant. It is sharp. It is dangerous. And it has gored millions of men in its rage through history.

Communism embraces atheism and dismisses religion as the opiate of the masses, a system designed by the rich and powerful to keep the poor in their place.

But Communisms quest for a classless society is bound to fail. As Frank Zappa, 60s rock star, succinctly said, Communism doesnt work because people like to own stuff. Furthermore, someone has to hold the money bag even in a communist-style society. And whoever holds the bag becomes not only a target for those looking on but for the subtle interior demons of pride, avarice, and self-preservation.

If there will always be the poor, then there will always be the rich. There will always be division, the haves and the have-nots, and any attempt to establish a classless society this side of heaven, particularly through the violent and godless ways of Communism, is destined to frustration and failure.Monarchism:-

Monarchism is a system based on the belief that political power should be concentrated in one person who rules by decree. A monarchist is an individual who supports this form of government, independent from the person, the monarch.

In this system, the Monarch may be the person who sits on the throne, a pretender, or someone who would otherwise inhabit the throne but has been deposed.

In 1687-88, the Glorious Revolution and the overthrow of King James II established the principles of constitutional monarchy, which would later be worked out by Montesquieu and other thinkers. However, absolute monarchy, theorized by Hobbes in the Leviathan (1651), remained a dominant principle. In the 18th century, Voltaire and others encouraged "enlightened absolutism", which was embraced by the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II and Catherine II of Russia.

Absolutism continued to be the dominant political principle of sovereignty until the 1789 French Revolution and the regicide against Louis XVI, which established the concept of popular sovereignty upheld by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Monarchy began to be contested by the Republican principle. Counterrevolutionaries, such as Joseph de Maistre or Louis de Bonald, sought the restoration of the Ancien Rgime, divided in the three estates of the realm, and the divine right of kings.

Following the ousting of Napoleon I in 1814, the Coalition restored the Bourbon Dynasty in pushing Louis XVIII to the French throne. The ensuing period, called the Restoration, was characterized by a sharp conservative reaction and the re-establishment of the Roman Catholic Church, supported by the ultramontanism movement, as a power in French politics. After the 1830 July Revolution and the overthrow of Charles X, the legitimist branch was defeated and the Orleanss, gathered behind Louis-Philippe, accepted the principle of constitutional monarchy.

The Spring of Nations in 1848 then set the signal for a new wave of revolutions against the European monarchies.

World War I and its aftermath saw the end of three major European monarchies, the Russian Romanov dynasty, the German Hohenzollern dynasty and the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg dynasty. In Russia, the 1917 February revolution resulted in the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the establishment of Bolshevik Russia and a civil war between the Bolshevik Red Army and the monarchist White Army from 1917 to 1921.

The rise of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 saw an increase in support for monarchism, however efforts by Hungarian monarchists failed to bring back a royal head of state, and the monarchists settled for a regent, Admiral Mikls Horthy, to represent the monarchy until it could be restored. Horthy was regent from 1920 to 1944. In Germany a number of monarchists gathered around the German National People's Party which demanded the return of the Hohenzollern monarchy and an end to the Weimar Republic. The party retained a large base of support until the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.

With the arrival of Communism in Eastern Europe by 1945, the remaining Eastern European monarchies such as the Kingdom of Romania, the Kingdom of Hungary, the Kingdom of Bulgaria and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia were all abolished and replaced by socialist republics.

The aftermath of World War II also saw the return of monarchist and republican rivalry in Italy, in which a referendum was held on whether Italy should remain a monarchy or become a republic. The republican side won the referendum (by a narrow margin) and the modern Republic of Italy was created.

Monarchism as a political force internationally has substantially diminished since the end of the Second World War, though it had an important role in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and also played a role in the modern political affairs of Nepal. Nepal was one of the last states to have had an absolute monarch, which continued until King Gyanendra of Nepal was peacefully deposed in May 2008 and Nepal became a federal republic. One of the world's oldest monarchies was abolished in Ethiopia in 1974 with the fall of Emperor Haile Selassie.

Capitalism:- Capitalism is an economic system that is based on private ownership of the means of production and the creation of goods or services for profit. Other elements central to capitalism include competitive markets, wage labor and capital accumulation. There are multiple variants of capitalism, including laissez-faire, welfare capitalism and state capitalism. Capitalism is considered to have been applied in a variety of historical cases, varying in time, geography, politics, and culture. There is general agreement that capitalism became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. Competitive markets may also be found in market-based alternatives to capitalism such as market socialism and co-operative economics.Economists, political economists and historians have taken different perspectives on the analysis of capitalism. Economists usually emphasize the degree to which government does not have control over markets (laissez faire), as well as the importance of property rights. Most political economists emphasize private property as well, in addition to power relations, wage labor, class, and the uniqueness of capitalism as a historical formation The extent to which different markets are free, as well as the rules defining private property, is a matter of politics and policy. Many states have what are termed mixed economies, referring to the varying degree of planned and market-driven elements in a state's economic system. A number of political ideologies have emerged in support of various types of capitalism, the most prominent being economic liberalism.

Liberalism:- Liberalism (from the Latin liberalis) is a political philosophy or worldview founded on the ideas of liberty and equality. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally they support ideas such as free and fair elections, civil rights, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, free trade, and a right to life, liberty, and property.

Liberalism first became a distinct political movement during the Age of Enlightenment, when it became popular among philosophers and economists in the Western world. Liberalism rejected the notions, common at the time, of hereditary privilege, state religion, absolute monarchy, and the Divine Right of Kings. The early liberal thinker John Locke is often credited with founding liberalism as a distinct philosophical tradition. Locke argued that each man has a natural right to life, liberty and property and according to the social contract governments must not violate these rights. Liberals opposed traditional conservatism and sought to replace absolutism in government with democracy and the rule of law.

The revolutionaries in the American Revolution, the French Revolution and other liberal revolutions from that time used liberal philosophy to justify the armed overthrow of what they saw as tyrannical rule. The nineteenth century saw liberal governments established in nations across Europe, Latin America, and North America.

During the beginning of the twentieth century some countries adopted totalitarian, non-liberal regimes, such as Fascism, Nazism and Communism. In other countries classical liberalism became less popular and gave way to social democracy and social liberalism. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "In the United States liberalism is associated with the welfare-state policies of the New Deal program of the Democratic administration of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt, whereas in Europe it is more commonly associated with a commitment to limited government and laissez-faire economic policies.

Words such as liberal, liberty, libertarian, and libertine all trace their history to the Latin liber, which means "free". One of the first recorded instances of the word liberal occurs in 1375, when it was used to describe the liberal arts in the context of an education desirable for a free-born man. The word's early connection with the classical education of a medieval university soon gave way to a proliferation of different denotations and connotations. Liberal could refer to "free in bestowing" as early as 1387, "made without stint" in 1433, "freely permitted" in 1530, and "free from restraint"often as a pejorative remarkin the 16th and the 17th centuries.

In 16th century England, liberal could have positive or negative attributes in referring to someone's generosity or indiscretion. In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare wrote of "a liberal villains" who "hath... confect his vile encounters". With the rise of the Enlightenment, the word acquired decisively more positive undertones, being defined as "free from narrow prejudice" in 1781 and "free from bigotry" in 1823.In 1815, the first use of the word liberalism appeared in English. By the middle of the 19th century, liberal started to be used as a politicized term for parties and movements all over the world.

Liberalism as a political movement spans the better part of the last four centuries, though the use of the word liberalism to refer to a specific political doctrine did not occur until the 19th century. Perhaps the first modern state founded on liberal principles, with no hereditary aristocracy, was The United States of America, whose Declaration of Independence states that "all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights". A few years later, the French Revolution overthrew the hereditary aristocracy, with the slogan "liberty, equality, fraternity", and was the first state in history to grant universal male suffrage.

Some argue that Liberalism started as a major doctrine and political endeavor in response to the religious wars gripping Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. In any case, the intellectual progress of the Enlightenment, which questioned old traditions about societies and governments, eventually coalesced into powerful revolutionary movements that toppled archaic regimes all over the world, especially in Europe, Latin America, and North America. Liberalism fully exploded as a comprehensive movement against the old order during the French Revolution, which set the pace for the future development of human history.

The emergence of the Renaissance in the 15th century helped to weaken unquestioning submission to the institutions of the Middle Ages by reinvigorating interest in science and in the classical world.In the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation developed from sentiments that viewed the Catholic Church as an oppressive ruling order too involved in the feudal and baronial structure of European society. The Church launched a Counter Reformation to contain these bubbling sentiments, but the effort unraveled in the Thirty Years' War of the 17th century. In England, a civil war led to the execution of King Charles I in 1649. Parliament ultimately succeededwith the Glorious Revolution of 1688in establishing a limited and constitutional monarchy. The main facets of early liberal ideology in Britain emerged against the backdrop of these events. The American colonies had been loyal British subjects for decades, but they declared independence from rule under the monarchy in 1776 as a result of their dissatisfaction with lack of representation in the governing parliament overseas, which manifested itself most directly and dramatically through taxation policies that colonists considered a violation of their natural rights. The American Revolution was primarily a civil and political matter at first, but escalated to military engagements in 1775 that were largely complete by 1781. The 1776 United States Declaration of Independence drew upon liberal ideas of unalienable rights to demonstrate the tyranny of the British monarchy, and justify a complete denial of its legitimacy and authority, leading to the creation of a self-determining and sovereign new nation. After the war, the new nation held a Constitutional Convention in 1787 to resolve the problems stemming from the first attempt at a confederated national government under the Articles of Confederation. The resulting Constitution of the United States settled on a republic with a federal structure. The United States Bill of Rights quickly followed in 1789, which guaranteed certain natural rights fundamental to liberal ideals. The American Revolution predicated a series of drastic socio-political changes across nations and continents, collectively referred to as the "Atlantic Revolutions", of which the most famous is probably the French Revolution.

Three years into the French Revolution, German writer Johann von Goethe reportedly told the defeated Prussian soldiers after the Battle of Valmy that "from this place and from this time forth commences a new era in world history, and you can all say that you were present at its birth". Historians widely regard the Revolution as one of the most important events in human history, and the onset of the Revolution in 1789 is considered by some to mark the end of the early modern period.

The march of the women on Versailles in October 1789 was one of the most famous examples of popular political participation during the French Revolution. The demonstrators forced the royal court back to Paris, where it would remain until the proclamation of the First Republic in 1792.

The French Revolution is often seen as marking the "dawn of the modern era, and its convulsions are widely associated with "the triumph of liberalism". For liberals, the Revolution was their defining moment, and later liberals approved of the French Revolution almost entirely"not only its results but the act itself," as two historians noted.The French Revolution began in May 1789 with the convocation of the Estates-General. The first year of the Revolution witnessed, among other major events, the Storming of the Bastille in July and the passage of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in August.

The next few years were dominated by tensions between various liberal assemblies and a conservative monarchy intent on thwarting major reforms. A republic was proclaimed in September 1792. External conflict and internal squabbling significantly radicalized the Revolution, culminating in the "Reign of Terror", led by Robespierre. After the fall of Robespierre and the radical Jacobins, the Directory assumed control of the French state in 1795 and held power until 1799, when it was replaced by the Consulate under Napoleon.

Napoleon ruled as First Consul for about five years, centralizing power and streamlining the bureaucracy along the way. The Napoleonic Wars, pitting the heirs of a revolutionary state against the old monarchies of Europe, started in 1805 and lasted for a decade. Along with their boots and Charleville muskets, French soldiers brought to the rest of the European continent the liquidation of the feudal system, the liberalization of property laws, the end of seigniorial dues, the abolition of guilds, the legalization of divorce, the disintegration of Jewish ghettos, the collapse of the Inquisition, the permanent destruction of the Holy Roman Empire, the elimination of church courts and religious authority, the establishment of the metric system, and equality under the law for all men. Napoleon wrote that "the peoples of Germany, as of France, Italy and Spain, want equality and liberal ideas, "with some historians suggesting that he may have been the first person ever to use the word liberal in a political sense. He also governed through a method that one historian described as "civilian dictatorship," which "drew its legitimacy from direct consultation with the people, in the form of a plebiscite". Napoleon did not always live up the liberal ideals he espoused, however. His most lasting achievement, the Civil Code, served as "an object of emulation all over the globe, "but it also perpetuated further discrimination against women under the banner of the "natural order".

The march of the women on Versailles in October 1789 was one of the most famous examples of popular political participation during the French Revolution. The demonstrators forced the royal court back to Paris, where it would remain until the proclamation of the First Republic in 1792.

The French Revolution is often seen as marking the "dawn of the modern era, "and its convulsions are widely associated with "the triumph of liberalism". For liberals, the Revolution was their defining moment, and later liberals approved of the French Revolution almost entirely"not only its results but the act itself," as two historians noted.The French Revolution began in May 1789 with the convocation of the Estates-General. The first year of the Revolution witnessed, among other major events, the Storming of the Bastille in July and the passage of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in August.

The next few years were dominated by tensions between various liberal assemblies and a conservative monarchy intent on thwarting major reforms. A republic was proclaimed in September 1792. External conflict and internal squabbling significantly radicalized the Revolution, culminating in the "Reign of Terror", led by Robespierre. After the fall of Robespierre and the radical Jacobins, the Directory assumed control of the French state in 1795 and held power until 1799, when it was replaced by the Consulate under Napoleon.

Napoleon ruled as First Consul for about five years, centralizing power and streamlining the bureaucracy along the way. The Napoleonic Wars, pitting the heirs of a revolutionary state against the old monarchies of Europe, started in 1805 and lasted for a decade. Along with their boots and Charleville muskets, French soldiers brought to the rest of the European continent the liquidation of the feudal system, the liberalization of property laws, the end of seigniorial dues, the abolition of guilds, the legalization of divorce, the disintegration of Jewish ghettos, the collapse of the Inquisition, the permanent destruction of the Holy Roman Empire, the elimination of church courts and religious authority, the establishment of the metric system, and equality under the law for all men. Napoleon wrote that "the peoples of Germany, as of France, Italy and Spain, want equality and liberal ideas,"with some historians suggesting that he may have been the first person ever to use the word liberal in a political sense. He also governed through a method that one historian described as "civilian dictatorship," which "drew its legitimacy from direct consultation with the people, in the form of a plebiscite". Napoleon did not always live up the liberal ideals he espoused, however. His most lasting achievement, the Civil Code, served as "an object of emulation all over the globe, "but it also perpetuated further discrimination against women under the banner of the "natural order".

General Toussaint Overture, inspired by the French Revolution led revolutionary forces during the Haitian Revolution that ended slavery in Haiti and resulted in the creation of the short-lived Haitian Republic - the first self-governing independent black state in the Americas.

Liberals in the 19th century wanted to develop a world free from government intervention, or at least free from too much government intervention. They championed the ideal of negative liberty, which constitutes the absence of coercion and the absence of external constraints. They believed governments were cumbersome burdens and they wanted governments to stay out of the lives of individuals. Liberals simultaneously pushed for the expansion of civil rights and for the expansion of free markets and free trade. The latter kind of economic thinking had been formalized by Adam Smith in his influential Wealth of Nations (1776), which revolutionized the field of economics and argued that the "invisible hand" of the free market was a self-regulating mechanism that did not depend on external interference. Sheltered by liberalism, the laissez-faire economic world of the 19th century emerged with full tenacity, particularly in the United States and in the United Kingdom.

The relatively laissez-faire liberal economy of the Industrial Revolution and rise of living standards allowed an increasingly larger number of parents to avoid sending their children to work.

Politically, liberals saw the 19th century as a gateway to achieving the promises of 1789. In Spain, the Liberals, the first group to use the liberal label in a political context, fought for the implementation of the 1812 Constitution for decadesoverthrowing the monarchy in 1820 as part of the Trienio Liberal and defeating the conservative Car lists in the 1830s. In France, the July Revolution of 1830, orchestrated by liberal politicians and journalists, removed the Bourbon monarchy and inspired similar uprisings elsewhere in Europe.

Depiction of Romanian revolutionaries during the Revolutions of 1848.

Frustration with the pace of political progress, however, sparked even more gigantic revolutions in 1848. Revolutions spread throughout the Austrian Empire, the German states, and the Italian states. Governments fell rapidly. Liberal nationalists demanded written constitutions, representative assemblies, greater suffrage rights, and freedom of the press. A second republic was proclaimed in France. Serfdom was abolished in Prussia, Galicia, Bohemia, and Hungary. Metternich shocked Europe when he resigned and fled to Britain in panic and disguise.

Eventually, however, the success of the revolutionaries petered out. Without French help, the Italians were easily defeated by the Austrians. Austria also managed to contain the bubbling nationalist sentiments in Germany and Hungary, helped along by the failure of the Frankfurt Assembly to unify the German states into a single nation. Under abler leadership, however, the Italians and the Germans wound up realizing their dreams for independence. The Sardinian Prime Minister, Camillo di Cavour, was a shrewd liberal who understood that the only effective way for the Italians to gain independence was if the French were on their side. Napoleon III agreed to Cavour's request for assistance and France defeated Austria in the Franco-Austrian War of 1859, setting the stage for Italian independence. German unification transpired under the leadership of Otto von Bismarck, who decimated the enemies of Prussia in war after war, finally triumphing against France in 1871 and proclaiming the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, ending another saga in the drive for nationalization. The French proclaimed a third republic after their loss in the war, and the rest of French history transpired under republican eyes.

Just a few decades after the French Revolution, liberalism went global. The liberal and conservative struggles in Spain also replicated themselves in Latin American countries like Mexico and Ecuador. From 1857 to 1861, Mexico was gripped in the bloody War of Reform, a massive internal and ideological confrontation between the liberals and the conservatives. The liberal triumph there parallels with the situation in Ecuador. Similar to other nations throughout the region at the time, Ecuador was steeped in turmoil, with the people divided between rival liberal and conservative camps. From these conflicts, Garca Moreno established a conservative government which was eventually overthrown in the Liberal Revolution of 1895. The Radical Liberals who toppled the conservatives were led by Eloy Alfaro, a firebrand who implemented a variety of sociopolitical reforms, including the separation of church and state, the legalization of divorce, and the establishment of public schools.

Although liberals were active throughout the world in the 19th century, it was in Britain that the future character of liberalism would take shape. The liberal sentiments unleashed after the revolutionary era of the previous century ultimately coalesced into the Liberal Party, formed in 1859 from various Radical and Whig elements. The Liberals produced one of the most influential British prime ministersWilliam Ewart Gladstone, who was also known as the Grand Old Man. Under Gladstone, the Liberals reformed education, disestablished the Church of Ireland (with the Irish Church Act 1869), and introduced the secret ballot for local and parliamentary elections. Following Gladstone, and after a period of Conservative domination, the Liberals returned with full strength in the general election of 1906, aided by working class voters worried about food prices. After that historic victory, the Liberal Party shifted from its classical liberalism and laid the groundwork for the future British welfare state, establishing various forms of health insurance, unemployment insurance, and pensions for elderly workers.This new kind of liberalism would sweep over much of the world in the 20th century.

The 20th century started perilously for liberalism. World War I proved a major challenge for liberal democracies, although they ultimately triumphed, along with Communism, over the monarchies. The war precipitated the collapse of older forms of government, including empires and dynastic states. The number of republics in Europe reached 13 by the end of the war, as compared with only three at the start of the war in 1914.This phenomenon became readily apparent in Russia. Before the war, the Russian monarchy was reeling from losses to Japan and political struggles with the Cadets, a powerful liberal bloc in the Dumb. Facing huge shortages in basic necessities along with widespread riots in early 1917, Czar Nicholas II abdicated in March, ending three centuries of Romanov rule and allowing liberals to declare a republic. Under the uncertain leadership of Alexander Kerensky, However, the Provisional Government mismanaged Russia's continuing involvement in the war, prompting angry reactions from the Petrograd workers, who drifted further and further to the left. The Bolsheviks, a communist group led by Vladimir Lenin, seized the political opportunity from this confusion and launched a second revolution in Russia during the same year. The communist victory presented a major challenge to capitalism as a core component of liberalism. As some manifestations of communism historically resulted in totalitarian regimes, mainstream liberalism has shied away from association with communism. However, the economic problems that rocked the Western world in the 1930s proved even more devastating, leading to fundamental reforms in some of the aims of the liberal state.

The Great Depression fundamentally changed the liberal world. There was an inkling of a new liberalism during World War I, but modern liberalism fully hatched in the 1930s as a response to the Depression, which inspired John Maynard Keynes to revolutionize the field of economics. Classical liberals, such as economist Ludwig von Mises, posited that completely free markets were the optimal economic units capable of effectively allocating resourcesthat over time, in other words, they would produce full employment and economic security. Keynes spearheaded a broad assault on classical economics and its followers, arguing that totally free markets were not ideal, and that hard economic times required intervention and investment from the state. Where the market failed to properly allocate resources, for example, the government was required to stimulate the economy until private funds could start flowing againa "prime the pump" kind of strategy designed to boost industrial production.

The social liberal program launched by President Roosevelt in the United States, the New Deal, proved very popular with the American public. In 1933, when Roosevelt came into office, the unemployment rate stood at roughly 25 percent. The size of the economy, measured by the gross national product, had fallen to half the value it had in early 1929.The electoral victories of Roosevelt and the Democrats precipitated a deluge of public works programs. Despite this, by 1936 the level of unemployment had only fallen to around 10 percent (when counting persons on work relief as employed) or 17 percent (when counting persons on work relief as unemployed).Deficit spending sparked by World War II eventually pulled the United States out of the Great Depression. From 1940 to 1941, government spending increased by 59 percent, the gross domestic product skyrocketed 17 percent, and unemployment fell below 10 percent for the first time since 1929.By 1945, after vast government spending, public debt stood at a staggering 120 percent of GNP, but unemployment had been effectively eliminated. Most nations that emerged from the Great Depression did so with deficit spending and strong intervention from the state.

The protests at the Berlin Wall in 1989 that resulted in its fall, the end of single-party state rule in East Germany, and the reunification of Germany in the form of a liberal democracy.

Protest against the World Bank in Indonesia. Neoliberal economic policies pursued by international institutions since the 1970s and 1980s have provoked strong criticism and protest, especially in developing or underdeveloped countries that have been pressured by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund to privatize parts of their economy and remove protectionist measures, in order to gain IMF assistance.

The economic woes of the period prompted widespread unrest in the European political world, leading to the rise of fascism as an ideology and a movement that heavily criticized liberalism. Broadly speaking, fascist ideology emphasized elite rule and absolute leadership, a rejection of equality, the imposition of patriarchal society, a stern commitment to war as an instrument of natural behavior, and the elimination of supposedly inferior or subhuman groups from the structure of the nation. The fascist and nationalist grievances of the 1930s eventually culminated in World War II, the deadliest conflict in human history. The Allies prevailed in the war by 1945, and their victory set the stage for the Cold War between communist states and liberal democracies. The Cold War featured extensive ideological competition and several proxy wars. While communist states and liberal democracies competed against one another, an economic crisis in the 1970s inspired a temporary move away from Keynesian economics across many Western governments. This classical liberal renewal, known as neoliberalism, lasted through the 1980s and the 1990s, bringing about economic privatization of previously state-owned industries. However, economic troubles in the early twenty-first century have prompted resurgence in Keynesian economic thought. Meanwhile, nearing the end of the 20th century, communist states in Eastern Europe collapsed precipitously, leaving liberal democracies as the only major forms of government. At the beginning of World War II, the number of democracies around the world was about the same as it had been forty years before. After 1945, liberal democracies spread very quickly. Even as late as 1974, roughly 75 percent of all nations were considered dictatorial, but now more than half of all countries are democracies. However, liberal democracies still confront several challenges, including the proliferation of terrorism and the growth of religious fundamentalism. The rise of China is also challenging Western liberalism with a combination of authoritarian government and capitalism.

Liberalism has drawn both criticism and support in its history from various ideological groups. For example, some scholars suggest that liberalism gave rise to feminism, although others maintain that liberal democracy is inadequate for the realization of feminist objectives. Liberal feminism, the dominant tradition in feminist history, hopes to eradicate all barriers to gender equalityclaiming that the continued existence of such barriers eviscerates the individual rights and freedoms ostensibly guaranteed by a liberal social order. British philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft is widely regarded as the pioneer of liberal feminism, with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) expanding the boundaries of liberalism to include women in the political structure of liberal society. Less friendly to the goals of liberalism has been conservatism. Edmund Burke, considered by some to be the first major proponent of modern conservative thought, offered a blistering critique of the French Revolution by assailing the liberal pretensions to the power of rationality and to the natural equality of all humans. Conservatives have also attacked what they perceive to be the reckless liberal pursuit of progress and material gains, arguing that such preoccupations undermine traditional social values rooted in community and continuity. However, a few variations of conservatism, like liberal conservatives, expound some of the same ideas and principles championed by classical liberalism, including "small government and thriving capitalism".

Some confusion remains about the relationship between social liberalism and socialism, despite the fact that many variants of socialism distinguish themselves markedly from liberalism by opposing capitalism, hierarchy and private property. Socialism formed as a group of related ideologies in the 19th century such as Christian socialism, communism (with the writings of Karl Marx) and anarchism, and these ideologies as with liberalism and conservatism fractured into several major movements in the following decades. Marx rejected the foundational aspects of liberal theory, hoping to destroy both the state and the liberal distinction between society and the individual while fusing the two into a collective whole designed to overthrow the developing capitalist order of the 19th century.

Social democracy, an ideology advocating progressive reform of capitalism, emerged in the 20th century and was influenced by socialism. Yet unlike socialism, it was neither collectivist nor anti-capitalist. Broadly defined as a project that aims to correct, through government reformism, what it regards as the intrinsic defects of capitalism by reducing inequalities, social democracy was also not against the state. Several commentators have noted strong similarities between social liberalism and social democracy, with one political scientist even calling American liberalism "bootleg social democracy" due to the absence of a significant social democratic tradition in the United States that liberals have tried to rectify. Another movement associated with modern democracy, Christian democracy, hopes to spread Catholic social ideas and has gained a large following in some European nations. The early roots of Christian democracy developed as a reaction against the industrialization and urbanization associated with laissez-faire liberalism in the 19th century. Despite these complex relationships, some scholars have argued that liberalism actually "rejects ideological thinking" altogether, largely because such thinking could lead to unrealistic expectations for human society.

Conservatism:- Conservatism (Latin: conservare, "to retain") is a political and social philosophy that promotes retaining traditional social institutions. A person who follows the philosophies of conservatism is referred to as a traditionalist or conservative.

Some conservatives seek to preserve things as they are, emphasizing stability and continuity, while others oppose modernism and seek a return to "the way things were". The first established use of the term in a political context was by Franois-Ren de Chateaubriand in 1819, following the French Revolution. The term, historically associated with right-wing politics, has since been used to describe a wide range of views.

Edmund Burke, an Anglo-Irish politician who served in the British House of Commons and opposed the French Revolution, is credited as one of the founders of conservatives in Great Britain. According to Hail sham, a former chairman of the British Conservative Party, "Conservatism is not so much a philosophy as an attitude, a constant force, performing a timeless function in the development of a free society, and corresponding to a deep and permanent requirement of human nature itself."Forms of Conservatism:-

Liberal conservatism:- It is a variant of conservatism that combines conservative values and policies with classical liberal stances. As these latter two terms have had different meanings over time and across countries, liberal conservatism also has a wide variety of meanings. Historically, the term often referred to the combination of economic liberalism, which champions laissez-faire markets, with the classical conservatism concern for established tradition, respect for authority and religious values. It contrasted itself with classical liberalism, which supported freedom for the individual in both the economic and social spheres.

Over time, the general conservative ideology in many countries adopted economic liberal arguments, and the term liberal conservatism was replaced with conservatism. This is also the case in countries where liberal economic ideas have been the tradition, such as the United States, and are thus considered conservative. In other countries where liberal conservative movements have entered the political mainstream, such as Italy and Spain, the terms liberal and conservative may be synonymous. The liberal conservative tradition in the United States combines the economic individualism of the classical liberals with a Burkean form of conservatism (which has also become part of the American conservative tradition, such as in the writings of Russell Kirk).

A secondary meaning for the term liberal conservatism that has developed in Europe is a combination of more modern conservative (less traditionalist) views with those of social liberalism. This has developed as an opposition to the more collectivist views of socialism. Often this involves stressing what are now conservative views of free-market economics and belief in individual responsibility, with social liberal views on defense of civil rights, environmentalism and support for a limited welfare state. This philosophy is that of Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Refined. In continental Europe, this is sometimes also translated into English as social conservatism.

Conservative liberalism

Conservative liberalism is a variant of liberalism that combines liberal values and policies with conservative stances, or, more simply, the right wing of the liberal movement. The roots of conservative liberalism are found at the beginning of the history of liberalism. Until the two World Wars, in most European countries the political class was formed by conservative liberals, from Germany to Italy. Events after World War I brought the more radical version of classical liberalism to a more conservative (i.e. more moderate) type of liberalism.

Libertarian conservatism:- Libertarian conservatism describes certain political ideologies within the United States and Canada which combine libertarian economic issues with aspects of conservatism. Its five main branches are Constitutionalism, paleolibertarianism, neolibertarianism, small government conservatism and Christian libertarianism. They generally differ from pale conservatives, in that they are in favor of more personal and economic freedom.

Agonists such as Samuel Edward Konkin III labeled libertarian conservatism right-libertarianism.In contrast to pale conservatives, libertarian conservatives support strict laissez-faire policies such as free trade, opposition to any national bank and opposition to business regulations. They are vehemently opposed to environmental regulations, corporate welfare, subsidies, and other areas of economic intervention. Many of them have views in accord to Ludwig von Mises. However, many of them oppose abortion, as they see it as a positive liberty and consider abortion to violate the non-aggression principle because abortion is aggression toward the unborn. Fiscal conservatism:- Fiscal conservatism is the economic philosophy of prudence in government spending and debt. Edmund Burke, in his 'Reflections on the Revolution in France', argued that a government does not have the right to run up large debts and then throw the burden on the taxpayer:It is to the property of the citizen, and not to the demands of the creditor of the state, that the first and original faith of civil society is pledged. The claim of the citizen is prior in time, paramount in title, superior in equity. The fortunes of individuals, whether possessed by acquisition or by descent or in virtue of a participation in the goods of some community, were no part of the creditor's security, expressed or implied. The public, whether represented by a monarch or by a senate, can pledge nothing but the public estate; and it can have no public estate except in what it derives from a just and proportioned imposition upon the citizens at large.

Green conservatism:- It is a term used to refer to conservatives who have incorporated green concerns into their ideology. One of the first uses of the term green conservatism was by former United States Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, in a debate on environmental issues with John Kerry. Around this time, the green conservative movement was sometimes referred to as the crunchy con movement, a term popularized by National Review magazine and the writings of Rod Dreher. The group Republicans for Environmental Protection seeks to strengthen the Republican Party's stance on environmental issues, and supports efforts to conserve natural resources and protect human and environmental health.National and traditional conservatism

Main articles: National conservatism and Traditional conservatism

National conservatism is a political term used primarily in Europe to describe a variant of conservatism which concentrates more on national interests than standard conservatism as well as upholding cultural and ethnic identity, while not being outspokenly nationalist or supporting a far-right approach.[citation needed] In Europe, national conservatives are usually eurosceptics.National conservatism is heavily oriented towards the traditional family and social stability as well as in favor of limiting immigration. As such, national conservatives can be distinguished from economic conservatives, for whom free market economic policies, deregulation and fiscal conservatism are the main priorities. Some commentators have identified a growing gap between national and economic conservatism: "most parties of the Right [today] are run by economic conservatives who, in varying degrees, have marginalized social, cultural, and national conservatives." National conservatism is also related to traditionalist conservatism.

Traditionalist conservatism is a political philosophy emphasizing the need for the principles of natural law and transcendent moral order, tradition, hierarchy and organic unity, agrarianism, classicism and high culture, and the intersecting spheres of loyalty. Some traditionalists have embraced the labels "reactionary" and "counterrevolutionary", defying the stigma that has attached to these terms since the Enlightenment. Having a hierarchical view of society, many traditionalist conservatives, including a few Americans, defend the monarchical political structure as the most natural and beneficial social arrangement.

Cultural and social conservatism:- Cultural conservatives support the preservation of the heritage of one nation, or of a shared culture that is not defined by national boundaries. The shared culture may be as divergent as Western culture or Chinese culture. In the United States, the term cultural conservative may imply a conservative position in the culture war. Cultural conservatives hold fast to traditional ways of thinking even in the face of monumental change. They believe strongly in traditional values and traditional politics, and often have an urgent sense of nationalism.Social conservatism is distinct from cultural conservatism, although there are some overlaps. Social conservatives believe that the government has a role in encouraging or enforcing what they consider traditional values or behaviors. A social conservative wants to preserve traditional morality and social mores, often through civil law or regulation. Social change is generally regarded as suspect.

A second meaning of the term social conservatism developed in the Nordic countries and continental Europe. There it refers to liberal conservatives supporting modern European welfare states.

Social conservatives (in the first meaning of the word) in many countries generally favor the pro-life position in the abortion controversy and oppose human embryonic stem cell research (particularly if publicly funded); oppose both eugenics and human enhancement (transhumanism) while supporting bioconservatism; support a traditional definition of marriage as being one man and one woman; view the nuclear family model as society's foundational unit; oppose expansion of civil marriage and child adoption rights to couples in same-sex relationships; promote public morality and traditional family values; oppose atheism, especially militant atheism, secularism and the separation of church and state; support the prohibition of drugs, prostitution, and euthanasia; and support the censorship of pornography and what they consider to be obscenity or indecency. Most conservatives in the U.S. support the death penalty.

Religious conservatism:-See also: Religious right (disambiguation), Christian Right, and Fundamentalist Islam

Religious conservatives principally seek to apply the teachings of particular religions to politics, sometimes by merely proclaiming the value of those teachings, at other times by having those teachings influence laws.Progressive conservatism:-Progressive conservatism incorporates progressive policies alongside conservative policies. It stresses the importance of a social safety net to deal with poverty, support of limited redistribution of wealth along with government regulation to regulate markets in the interests of both consumers and producers. Progressive conservatism first arose as a distinct ideology in the United Kingdom under Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli's "One Nation" Toryism.There have been a variety of progressive conservative governments. In the UK, the Prime Ministers Disraeli, Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan and present Prime Minister David Cameron are progressive conservatives. The Catholic Church's Rerum Novarum (1891) advocates a progressive conservative doctrine known as social Catholicism. In the United States, the administration of President William Howard Taft was progressive conservative and he described himself as "a believer in progressive conservatism" and President Dwight D. Eisenhower declared himself an advocate of "progressive conservatism". In Germany, Chancellor Leo von Captives promoted a progressive conservative agenda called the "New Course". In Canada, a variety of conservative governments have been progressive conservative, with Canada's major conservative movement being officially named the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada from 1942 to 2003. In Canada, the Prime Ministers Arthur Meighen, R.B. Bennett, John Diefenbaker, Joe Clark, Brian Mulroney, and Kim Campbell led progressive conservative federal governments.Democracy:- Democracy is a form of government in which all eligible citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Democracy allows people to participate equallyeither directly or through elected representativesin the proposal, development, and creation of laws.

Abraham Lincoln said Democracy is the government of the people, by the people, for the people.Types of Democracy:i. Anticipatory democracy is a theory of civics relying on democratic decision making that takes into account predictions of future events that have some credibility with the electorate. The phrase was coined by Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock and was expanded on in the 1978 book Anticipatory Democracy, edited by Clement Bezold.

Other well-known advocates of the anticipatory approach include Newt Gingrich, Heidi Toffler, K. Eric Drexler, and Robin Hanson. They all advocate approaches where the public, not just experts, participate in this "anticipation".ii. Bioregionalism democracy is a political, cultural, and ecological system or set of views based on naturally defined areas called bioregions, similar to coercions. Bioregions are defined through physical and environmental features, including watershed boundaries and soil and terrain characteristics. Bioregionalism stresses that the determination of a bioregion is also a cultural phenomenon, and emphasizes local populations, knowledge, and solutions.Bioregionalism is a concept that goes beyond national boundariesan example is the concept of Cascadian, a region that is sometimes considered to consist of most of Oregon and Washington, the Alaska Panhandle, the far north of California and the West Coast of Canada, sometimes also including some or all of Idaho and western Montana. Another example of a bioregion, which does not cross national boundaries, but does overlap state lines, is the Ozarks, a bioregion also referred to as the Ozarks Plateau, which consists of southern Missouri, northwest Arkansas, the northeast corner of Oklahoma, southeast corner of Kansas.Relationship to environmentalism of Bioregionalism:

Bioregionalism, while akin to environmentalism in certain aspects, such as a desire to live in harmony with nature, differs in certain ways from classical, 20th century environmentalism.

According to Peter Berg, bioregionalism is proactive, and is based on forming a harmony between human culture and the natural environment, rather than being protest-based like the original environmental movement. Also, while classical environmentalists saw human industry as the enemy of nature and nature as a victim needing to be saved; bioregionalisms see humanity and its culture as a part of nature, focusing on building a positive, sustainable relationship with the environment, rather than a focus on preserving and segregating the wilderness from the world of humanity.

iii. Economic democracy is a socioeconomic philosophy that proposes to shift decision-making power from corporate shareholders to a larger group of public stakeholders that includes workers, customers, suppliers, neighbors and the broader public. No single definition or approach encompasses economic democracy, but most proponents claim that modern property relations externalize costs, subordinate the general well-being to private profit, and deny the polity a democratic voice in economic policy decisions. In addition to these moral concerns, economic democracy makes practical claims, such as that it can compensate for capitalism's claimedly inherent effective demand gap.

Economic democracy is described as an integral component of an inclusive democracy, in Takes Fotopoulos' Towards An Inclusive Democracy as a stateless, moneyless and market less economy that precludes private accumulation of wealth and the institutionalization of privileges for some sections of society, without relying on a mythical post-scarcity state of abundance, or sacrificing freedom of choice.Inclusive democracy list three preconditions: Demotic self-reliance, demotic ownership of the means of production, and co federal allocation of resources.Demotic self-reliance involves radical decentralization and self-reliance, rather than of self-sufficiency.

Demotic ownership of productive resources leads to the politicization of the economy, the real synthesis of economy and polity. This happens because economic decision making is carried out by the entire community, through assemblies, where people make the fundamental macroeconomic decisions which affect the whole community, as citizens, rather than as vocationally oriented groups e.g. workers, as e.g. in participatory economics. Workers would also participate (in vocationally oriented groups) in their respective workplace assemblies, in a process of modifying/implementing the Democratic Plan and in running their own workplace.

Co federal allocation of resources is required because much remains to be decided at the regional/national/supra-national level. However, delegates (rather than representatives) with specific mandates from the assemblies are involved in a confederal demotic planning process which, in combination with vouchers, effects the allocation of resources in a co federal inclusive democracy.

iv. Sociocracy democracy is a system of governance, using consent-based decision making among equivalent individuals and an organizational structure based on cybernetic principles. The most recent implementation of sociocracy by Gerard Endenburg, also known as Circular Organizing, was developed as a new tool for governance of private enterprise, but has been adopted in many different kinds of organizations including public, private, and non-profit and community organizations as well as professional associations.Advantages of Sociocracy Democracy: Consent as defined and practiced in sociocratic organizations is claimed to be a more efficient and effective decision-making method than autocratic decision-making, because it builds trust and understanding. The process educates the participants about the needs of the other members in doing their work effectively as well as their psychological and social needs as human beings. In addition to reducing friction, the well-defined, information-based, and highly disciplined process helps the group stay focused and move swiftly through examining an issue and actual decision-making. The main advantages of adopting the sociocratic approach have been extensively studied, especially in collaboration with Professor Georges Romme (at Maastricht University respectively Eindhoven University of Technology); see for example: Romme & Endenburg (2006).Sociocratic principles are now applied around the world. These include corporations, small businesses, nursing homes, colleges, ecovillages and co housing communities, private schools, and international professional and educational membership organizations. Examples of this variety are organizations such as the Boeddhistische Omroep Stitching, the Buddhist Broadcasting Foundation, (BOS) in the Netherlands; Living Well - an award-winning long-term health care center in Vermont; The Eco-Village of Loudoun County in Virginia - a co housing community; Creative Urethanes - a manufacturer of skateboard wheels and urethane parts in Winchester, Virginia. Sociocratic principles have also been applied in higher education, for example, the School of Media, Culture, and Design of Woodbury University, Burbank, California; Institute Francais, University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, and others.

Fascism:-The term Fascism was first used of the totalitarian right-wing nationalist regime of Mussolini in Italy (192243); the regimes of the Nazis in Germany and Franco in Spain were also Fascist. Fascism tends to include a belief in the supremacy of one national or ethnic group, contempt for democracy, an insistence on obedience to a powerful leader, and a strong demagogic approach.The four Basic Principle of Fascism:

It would take me a while to define Fascism in my own words so this article explains it for you in a very simple way.

Absolute power of the State: The Fascist state is a glorious, living entity that is more important than any individual. All individuals are part of the State, but the State is greater than the sum of its parts. All individuals must set aside their own needs and supplicate themselves to the needs of the State. There is no law or other power that can limit the authority of the State.

Survival of the fittest: A Fascist state is only as glorious and powerful as its ability to wage wars and win them. Peace is viewed as weakness, aggression as strength. Strength is the ultimate good and ensures the survival of the State.

Strict social order: Social classes are strictly maintained in order to avoid "mob rule" or any hint of chaos. Chaos is a threat to the State. The State's absolute power and greatness depends on the maintenance of a class system in which every individual has a specific place, and that place cannot be altered.

Authoritarian leadership: To maintain the power and greatness of the State requires a single, charismatic leader with absolute authority. This all-powerful, heroic leader maintains the unity and unquestioning submission required by the Fascist state. The authoritarian leader is often viewed as a symbol of the State.

Some people use "fascist" to describe any authoritarian person or government. But as you can see, authoritarianism is only part of the philosophy. Communism under Stalin was an authoritarian political philosophy, too; but Fascism is directly opposed to Communism (along with democracy, liberalism, humanism and rationalism). Aside from the above principles, a Fascist state also typically promotes a private economy that submits to government regulation; immediate (and often violent) submission of any opposing views; the ethnic dominance of its own people and the lower status of outsiders.

While politicians and Conservative pundits seem more than willing to make a connection between a socio-political philosophy like fascism and a religion-based philosophy like Islamic fundamentalism, scholars are much less quick to cross that bridge. "Religious fascism," sometimes called "clerical fascism," has been a subject of debate since the latter term was coined to describe what some viewed as the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Mussolini regime. Some people saw the Church as a supporter of Fascism in Italy. Since religion can be so closely tied to ethnicity, many scholars have found philosophical similarities between political fascism and religious fundamentalism. On the other hand, the word is not exactly morally neutral in its contemporary usage. "Fascist" has become a common slur -- a blanket term used to mean "really bad guy." Making a connection between a particular religion and fascism can be a dangerous undertaking considering fascism's current connotation and the inherent difficulty in defining any singular fascist philosophy.

Risk:-

It is the potential that a chosen action or activity (including the choice of inaction) will lead to a loss (an undesirable outcome). The notion implies that a choice having an influence on the outcome exists (or existed). Potential losses themselves may also be called "risks". Almost any human endeavor carries some risk, but some are much more risky than others.Political Risk:-

Political risk is a type of risk faced by investors, corporations, and governments. It is a risk that can be understood and managed with reasoned foresight and investment.

Broadly, political risk refers to the complications businesses and governments may face as a result of what are commonly referred to as political decisionsor any political change that alters the expected outcome and value of a given economic action by changing the probability of achieving business objectives.. Political risk faced by firms can be defined as the risk of a strategic, financial, or personnel loss for a firm because of such non market factors as macroeconomic and social policies (fiscal, monetary, trade, investment, industrial, income, labor, and developmental), or events related to political instability (terrorism, riots, coups, civil war, and insurrection). Portfolio investors may face similar financial losses. Moreover, governments may face complications in their ability to execute diplomatic, military or other initiatives as a result of political risk.

A low level of political risk in a given country does not necessarily correspond to a high degree of political freedom. Indeed, some of the more stable states are also the most authoritarian. Long-term assessments of political risk must account for the danger that a politically oppressive environment is only stable as long as top-down control is maintained and citizens prevented from a free exchange of ideas and goods with the outside world.

Understanding risk as part probability and part impact provides insight into political risk. For a business, the implication for political risk is that there is a measure of likelihood that political events may complicate its pursuit of earnings through direct impacts (such as taxes or fees) or indirect impacts (such as opportunity cost forgone). As a result, political risk is similar to an expected value such that the likelihood of a political event occurring may reduce the desirability of that investment by reducing its anticipated returns.

There are both macro- and micro-level political risks. Macro-level political risks have similar impacts across all foreign actors in a given location. While these are included in country risk analysis, it would be incorrect to equate macro-level political risk analysis with country risk as country risk only looks at national-level risks and also includes financial and economic risks. Micro-level risks focus on sector, firm, or project specific risk.

Types of political Risk:-

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