Your Library Matters: Are Libraries Liberal or Conservative?
May 2026
Bruce Newell, Helena
In these partisan political times, it’s easy to overlook the ethical or philosophical meaning of the words liberalism and conservatism. These twinned terms had meaning before they were tied to a political theory or party. Liberalism was linked to the idea of individual liberty or freedom. Conservatism was bound to a skeptical view of change and strongly valuing traditions. When stripped of partisan, social, or economic overtones, liberalism and conservatism taken together offer libraries complimentary lenses for more fully understanding their roles in their communities.
Libraries are the product of a body politic possessing the sometimes antagonistic impulses of individual liberty and social continuity. Libraries, through books (etc) and programming help users explore both the bounds of their freedom and the best of the human story, a narrative itself formed and bound by these two complementary, indispensable philosophies.
In the Wikipedia we read that liberalism speaks to individual rights (freedom) while conservatism is all about preserving institutions and values (continuity):
“Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property, and equality before the law.”
“Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy and ideology that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values.”
Libraries preserve the past, strive to identify what’s valuable in the present, and carry forward our best stories into the future. This is libraries’ conservative mission. At the same time libraries serve the public good by helping their users thrive. This is an intrinsically liberal impulse.
Libraries, like any institution, find it challenging to identify mile markers to use in evaluating their progress. Looking at libraries’ liberal reasons for being, we can ask ourselves, are we helping our users be free and happy? [1] And at the same time, looking at our conservative mandates, are we preserving the past and ensuring that our users (and tomorrow’s users) have ready access to the most important stories of humanity’s shared past?
Libraries were formed by and are in support of both liberal and conservative philosophies. Great libraries reflect and celebrate the complexities and contradictions inherent in a free, diverse, and heterogeneous society. We can use these two philosophical lenses, liberalism and conservatism, to help us understand the degree to which we are providing our communities with a great library.
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[1] Happiness in the sense that Aristotle, Jefferson, or Locke would have understood it; as in “…certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
A copy of this essay and others in this series can be found at: Montanans For Libraries, https://montanansforlibraries.org/support-libraries