Liberalism has been fundamental to the making of the modern world, at times shaping basic assumptions as to the nature of the political, and in other cases existing as a delimited political project in contention with others. Across its long history, liberal projects have taken a diverse range of forms, which resist easy reduction to a single logic or history. This diversity, however, has often escaped anthropological attention. In this introduction to our special section on Grammars of Liberalism, we briefly trace this historical diversity, interrogate anthropological approaches to conceptualising liberalism and offer a broad framework for studying liberalism that remains attentive to both continuity and difference. First, we argue for attention to how the political claims made by liberal projects unfold at the levels of values, their interrelations (morphology) and the underlying rules governing the expression and combination of values, and their intelligibility as liberal (grammar). Second, we argue for empirical attention to how values are expressed and liberal projects assembled across different social forms. We argue that this approach enables anthropology to grasp the diversity of liberal political projects and subject positions while still allowing scholars to approach liberalism critically and to interrogate its underlying logics.

中文翻译：

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自由主义的语法

自由主义一直是现代世界形成的基础，有时塑造关于政治性质的基本假设，有时则作为与他人竞争的有限制的政治项目而存在。纵观其悠久的历史，自由主义项目采取了多种形式，难以简化为单一的逻辑或历史。然而，这种多样性常常逃过人类学的关注。在我们关于自由主义语法的特别部分的介绍中，我们简要地追溯了这种历史多样性，询问了将自由主义概念化的人类学方法，并为研究自由主义提供了一个广泛的框架，该框架仍然关注连续性和差异。首先，我们主张关注自由主义项目提出的政治主张如何在价值观层面展开，它们的相互关系（形态）和支配价值表达和组合的基本规则，以及它们作为自由主义（语法）的可理解性。其次，我们主张对价值如何表达和自由项目在不同社会形式中的组合进行实证关注。我们认为，这种方法使人类学能够掌握自由主义政治项目和学科立场的多样性，同时仍然允许学者批判性地接近自由主义并质疑其潜在逻辑。