Liberty can never be won through tyranny or dictatorship, or even through being granted from above. Liberty is a conquest, a self-conquest, which is preserved only through the continual exercise of one’s faculties and individual autonomies.
For liberalism, and hence for socialism, observance of the liberal method, that is, the democratic method, of entering the political contest is fundamental. This is the method that in its essence is utterly permeated with the principle of liberty. It can be summed up in a single-word: self-government. The liberal method intends peoples and social classes, like individuals, to administer their affairs by using their own capacities, without coercion or paternalistic intervention. Its great pedagogical virtue consists in making sure that there exists a climate that compels all men to exercise their highest faculties, in putting in place institutions that induce them to participate actively in social life. It bears as its fundamental premise the principle that the free conviction of the majority, just as it is the best way to arrive a truth, is also the best means of guaranteeing social progress and protecting liberty. On the political level, it can be defined as a complex of rules of the game that all the parties in contention commit themselves to respect, ruled intended to ensure the peaceful coexistence of citizens, social classes, and states; to restrain competition, which is inevitable and indeed desirable, within tolerable limits; to permit the various parties to succeed to power in turn; and to guide the forces of innovation that will arise from time to time into legal channels.
More than a system of political mechanics, it is intended to be a sort of pact of civility to which men of all faiths bind themselves in order to salvage the attributes of their own humanity out of the struggle. For all that it is not susceptible of a rigid definition, it could be said to be crystallized in the principle of popular sovereignty, in the system of representative government, in respect for the rights of minorities (in practice, the right to opposition), in the solemn recognition of a few fundamental rights of the person that have been definitely accepted by the modern conscience (freedom of thought, freedom to meet, freedom of the press, freedom of organization, freedom to vote, and so on), and in the explicit disavowal of recourse to violence.
Carlos Rosselli, Liberal Socialism (1930)