liberal humanism

"I use the term 'liberal humanism' to denote the ruling assumptions, values and meanings of the modern epoch. Liberal humanism, laying claim to be both natural and universal, was produced in the interests of the bourgeois class which came to power in the second half of the seventeenth century. There are, of course, dangers in collapsing the historical specifities and the ideological differences of three centuries into a single term. Liberal humanism is not an unchanging, homogeneneous, unified essence, and the development, often contradictory, of the discourses and institutions which sustain it, deserves detailed analysis. But there are alternative dangers in a specificity which never risks generalization.....To find in Locke, for instance ... a liberalism and a humanism with still recognizable constitute elements of twentieth-century common sense is not to deny the importance of the specific location of Locke's texts in the 1690s on the one hand, or the subsequent and continuing debates and divisions within liberal humanism on the other...." - Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy

 

A modern school of thought that applies to both natural and universal principles. A static, changing philosphy that applies to literature

 

This picture represents liberal humanism because its complicated and hard to understand but it still has a very clear, succint meaning.... that I'm still learning myself

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