Are Traditions Always Best?

In class we have just finished covering the topic of the major political ideologies in the 19th century. An ideology is  a system of ideas or ideals, especially one that forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy. The three ideologies are liberalism, conservatism, and nationalism.  We started off by creating our own definitions for the words, Liberal, conservative, and nationalism. Then in small groups we made a one minute long project about one of the ideologies based on a document that we read on that ideology. The purpose of this activity was to show that each ideology had a different impact on social and political action.

My group did our presentation on liberalism. we used chatter pix to create our video, having images of john Locke, and Adam smith , two British liberal philosophers explaining what liberalism is , and its impact on social and political action during the 19th century.

This project help to define liberalism because it explained that liberals believe in freedom and equality for humans, and that instead of following tradition that strive to create new systems that benefit the society. We also explained through our presentation that liberals believed in a meritocracy, or a system in which men were rewarded for their hard work, and not their social class. The theory of the invisible hand, and god given natural rights were explained in the video. Liberalism influenced social action because liberals wanted to get rid of all social classes, overall getting rid of hierarchy. Liberalism influenced political action because liberals wanted to make the government more equal so that everyone had a say in how they were being governed.

The other two ideologies of this time period were conservatism and nationalism. Conservatives believed in not changing the systems of the government. Conservatism impacted social and political action because conservatives believed in keeping a monarchy, and not changing the social classes. they didn't want to change the way that the government was run because monarchs wanted to stay in power, in fear of what may happen if they change from their traditional ways. They feared that  chaos and bloodshed would be an outcome of trying to change, and in their opinions monarchy was the best was to run the government. Nationalism also impacted social and political action because they promoted the unification of people of the same culture, language and history, and  they didn't want to have any foreign rulers running their government. unlike how Italy and Germany both were countries that weren't under one single rule, but they had the independence of small states, nationalists believed in having one unified country.