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If Wilhelmine left liberalism was being ground inexorably between left and right then Schleswig-Holstein might be expected to exemplify the process of decay. The area's liberal political and economic traditions were threatened from left and right. Altona had been an SPD stronghold since the 1880s. Kiel, which for years had elected the liberal notable Albert Hänel to the Reichstag, from 1903 returned the equally archetypal figure of trade union leader Carl Legien with an unassailable majority. The SPD also attracted support in small towns and amongst rural labourers. Even the relative weakness of the Conservatives in Schleswig-Holstein was deceptive, for the province's National Liberal Party often proved the functional equivalent of a right-wing party. Left liberals in Schleswig-Holstein depended on rural as well as urban voters. They were also able to attract support from the right, even in run-off elections where the SPD had already been eliminated.

This book analyses the function and form of politics in Wilhelmine Germany against differing social backgrounds. If views of the Wilhelmine state have been shrouded in persistent, powerful tradition, the same is equally true for German liberalism, which has generally been studied through ideas and individuals. This book investigates ideas and attitudes which led Wilhelmine Germans to embrace or reject left liberal politics. Prominent left liberals, like Theodor Barth, are assessed not just as figureheads but as parliamentarians, campaigners, and leading influences in regional and local society. Yet to understand how left liberalism operated in party politics, its successes and failings as a political movement, requires additional perspectives. This study reconsiders German liberal politics and shows that left liberal politics reflected the contradictions of social integration and political contention in the last decade of Wilhelmine Germany.

This chapter focuses on left liberal ideals and attitudes. What did left liberals stand for? Not much is the usual answer. Ideological decline, a continual erosion of liberal substance, lies at the centre of interpretations of left liberal failure in Germany. There are two strands to the story. The first is the debasement of ideology: the glittering tenets of democracy, militia, and social harmony increasingly tarnished by monarchism, militarism, and market economics. Wilhelmine left liberals, it is argued, failed to live up to the ideals of their early nineteenth-century precursors. The second concerns the dissolution of a social base. It claims left liberalism succumbed to socio-economic inevitability, not just to infections of nationalism and imperialism, or left liberal leaders' sins of omission and commission. Identification with the nation-state, market economy, artistic and scientific achievement, urban society, municipal government, and other aspects of Wilhelmine Germany was crucial to the character of left liberalism.

Who were the left liberals? No political grouping in Imperial Germany, anti-Semitic splinter groups apart, had a comparable history of splits and short-lived mergers. These disruptions were partially bridged by continuity of personnel and tradition. The label ‘left liberal’ was itself a product of diversity. It included North German groups who generally called themselves Freisinnige. However, most South German left liberals, reflecting a greater openness and attachment to radical political reform, referred to themselves as Democrats. Left liberal, as used here and by contemporaries, was an umbrella term to cover the political terrain between the National Liberals and the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD). There remains the need for a more detailed and accurate assessment of left liberal sociology. Two features emerge from an analysis of left liberal social composition. The first is the clear correlation between party and social hierarchy. The second is the wide, but correspondingly shallow spread of left liberal support. Left liberalism was also a party of minorities.

The importance of organization, or more precisely the lack of it, to German liberalism has long been recognized. The general opinion is that the left liberals were not quite so ineffective as the National Liberals, but still suffered by not having the sort of powerful mass organizations which were at the disposal of the labour movement, political Catholicism, or Agrarian Conservatism. However, organization and agitation were far from being the poor relations of Wilhelmine politics. Even critics did not deny the importance of ‘machine politics’. Despite having the smallest and least funded formal organization, the left liberals proved capable of mounting forceful election campaigns, which even opponents recognized as being amongst the most powerful in Germany. Clearly, there was still a place for Honoratioren in the mass politics of Wilhelmine Germany. A shift of focus from formal to informal organization is required for an analysis of the most important left liberal response to the growing demands for money, men, and effort placed on political parties in Wilhelmine Germany. Here the role of newspapers was central.

Silesia, like Baden and Schleswig-Holstein, was to be found at a geographical extremity of imperial Germany. In contrast to its more industrialized and Protestant western neighbour, Silesia was not seen by government, political parties, and observers as being in the forefront of the electoral battle for or against social democracy. However, if the mould of politics in Silesia was not broken, both the issues and style of politics had altered considerably. The economic, social, and confessional variety of Silesia, together with the strength of local political traditions make the province an excellent testing ground of the extent and content of ‘new politics’. Unlike Baden, Schleswig-Holstein, and most of Wilhelmine Germany, Silesia was a region in which all of the major parties were serious contenders in elections, although the National Liberals were somewhat under-represented. The merit of analysing the path of political change where conditions to an extent militated against it applies not only to Silesia as a whole, but Lower Silesian left liberalism in particular.

The writings of Michael Freeden contain a sustained engagement with the history of twentieth-century liberalism. John Atkinson Hobson (1858–1940) emerges from Freeden’s narrative as an early (and unsung) hero, whilst John Rawls (1921–2002) is portrayed as a late (and overpraised) villain. This chapter reassesses that stark contrast in the context of the discussion of utopia to be found in the writings of these two thinkers. There are undoubtedly some significant differences between Hobson and Rawls (not all of which redound to the advantage of the former), but they share a willingness to engage in ideal description provided it is suitably tempered by ‘realism’. This shared reaction might be said to exemplify the position of left liberals, who lack the outright hostility towards utopianism found in some other strands of liberalism (such as the ‘cold-war liberalism’ of Isaiah Berlin and others).

This chapter considers John Rawls' conception of ideal theory, with particular emphasis on the implications of problems of feasibility for normative political philosophy and market democracy's institutional guarantees. It defends Rawls' general view of ideal theory, first by explaining why the objection to market democracy—that even if market democratic institutional forms appear attractive in theory, they are unlikely to deliver the goods in practice and so are defective for that reason—has little force when applied against the idealism of left liberalism. It then examines why such arguments are equally ineffective when trained against the idealism of free market fairness. It also analyzes Rawls' idea of “realistic utopianism” before concluding by asking whether market democratic regimes that treat economic liberty as constitutionally basic can realize all the requirements of justice as fairness.