If it is conceptually possible and practically desirable to contrast the Liberal vision with the emancipator one, it is because, as Laski points out, liberalism “has always taken a negative attitude to social action… it has always preferred to bless individual innovation than to sanction the uniformities sought for by political power…. It has, accordingly, always tended to make an antithesis (as a rule an unconscious one) between liberty and equality. It has seen in the first that emphasis upon individual action for which it is always zealous; it has seen in the second the outcome of authoritarian intervention of which the result, in its view, is a cramping of individual personality. The outcome of this is important. For it has meant that liberalism, though it has expressed itself always as a universal, has, in its institutional result, inevitably been more narrow in its benefit than the society it sought to guide.”
Si es conceptualmente posible y prácticamente deseable contraponer la visión liberal a la visión emancipadora, se debe a que, como señala Laski, el liberalismo “siempre ha adoptado una actitud negativa ante la acción social, nunca sancionó las uniformidades que el poder político buscaba establecer, siempre ha querido, aunque las más de las veces de modo inconsciente, establecer una antítesis entre la libertad y la igualdad, en la igualdad ha visto más bien la intervención autoritaria, que a su ver, conduce en último resultado a la parálisis de la personalidad individual y, aunque siempre pretendió insistir en su carácter universal, siempre se reflejó en instituciones de beneficios demasiado estrechos o limitados para el grupo social al que pretendía conducir”.