Ranier Fsadni's and Louis Cilia's articles on liberalism (January 29 and February 14) make interesting reading.

The first, in particular, constitutes an erudite exercise in the clarification of political terms, namely liberalism and Christian democracy, which could well be extended to that other area of confusion in our political discourse in Malta, between socialism and social democracy, which our politicians in the Labour Party (PL) insist on using interchangeably.

It is not correct to identify the beginnings of liberalism, as Mr Cilia does, with "the presumption that state intervention was unnecessary and futile (the doctrine of laissez faire)". This doctrine is true only of one kind of political liberalism.

Nor is Dr Fsadni correct in asserting that liberalism's influence today is restricted to the academia, although liberal political theory is strong in university departments and research institutes in the Western world.

The preoccupation of the intellectual founding father of political liberalism, the English philosopher John Locke, was not with economics at all but with defining an area of individual liberty in the face of the religious intolerance that marked life in the 17th century.

Locke identified three basic areas of protection for individuals from arbitrary state interference, namely to the enjoyment of their life, their property and their freedom.

From Locke we get the political theory of the minimal state; that is, a state that is small and intervenes in the lives of its citizens only to the minimum necessary to protect these freedoms - not as an agency to redistribute their wealth on the basis of some principle of equity. Minimal state theory underpins what we call neo-liberalism today with its unrestricted faith in the free market.

Liberalism grew into a powerful moral theory with Immanuel Kant's notion of the autonomous human agent, that is, one who has the maturity to judge for himself/herself about what is good and what is right but who also recognises a moral obligation to treat the whole of humanity as deserving equal moral consideration.

John Stuart Mill later amplified this understanding of autonomy by distinguishing self- from other-regarding acts and arguing for the non-interference of anyone with the former. Mill emphasised the importance of recognising the consequences of actions in assessing their rightness or wrongness. The protection of individual freedoms was from the start the central liberal preoccupation. Mill's essay On Liberty identified three such freedoms: of lifestyle, of conscience and expression, and of association. The first is integral to the notion of autonomy, the second to the freedom of the press and of artistic, religious and other forms of expression, the third to the existence of political parties, pressure groups, movements, trade unions, etc.

The recognition of these civic freedoms is fundamental to a democracy that does not want to degenerate into a dictatorship of the majority. It signifies respect for persons and tolerance towards cultural, ethnic and sexual difference. It extends this sense of tolerance to the principle that the state must be neutral between all cultures and beliefs in the protection of these freedoms.

Fundamental to liberalism is the view that the individual must be the arbiter of his or her own interests (this is the meaning of autonomy) and free from arbitrary interference in situations where what is at stake are decisions that regard oneself. Liberalism decries cruelty of all kinds, mental or physical, and sets harm to others as its limitation on individual freedom.

Dr Fsadni is wrong to restrict the relevance of liberalism today to academia because liberalism is the political culture that has sustained and continues to sustain modern democracy. It is inscribed in modern democratic constitutions, the American being the first of its kind. This is why academia, namely philosophers (like myself) and social scientists, continue to address it - it has produced some of the richest writings in political theory by the likes of John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas, Robert Nozick, Michael Walzer and Bernard Williams, to mention but a few.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that liberalism today constitutes the moral and political culture of the Western world and its influence extends far beyond. Western states of Anglo-Saxon influence declare themselves liberal democracies.

It is a mistaken to identify liberalism with neo-liberalism. Its other influential branch, which I, for one, ally myself with, aligns itself with social democracy (not socialism). It rejects the neo-liberal notion of the minimal state and supports the politics of state intervention on the free market in the interest of people's welfare. In short, it supports a welfare state that practises distributive or social justice and, therefore, a principle of equality to balance with that of freedom.

The political "centre" that is fashionable today with the collapse of the confrontational politics of right and left, is a liberal centre. The move of the Labour left to the centre and away from socialism in Europe and the US some years ago meant endorsing the market economy (but not surrendering to an unbridled capitalism as Barack Obama has recently shown) and the defence of liberal freedoms. In short, it is not true that liberalism has grown unfashionable in the practical politics of the West. To the contrary the parties of the West have become liberal parties.