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An examination of J. S. Mill's ideational legatees offers a useful insight into ideological variation, since later liberals constantly alluded to Mill as a yardstick by which to measure their own attainments; we thus face a tradition consciously absorbed and recreated by a new generation of ideological consumers, employing common points of reference to forge a sense of ideological community through expanding horizons. The Millite paradigm of the previous chapter becomes pivotal not merely as a preference of the analyst of ideologies, but because so many shapers of liberalism believed Mill to be pivotal; assessment of their contributions on the basis of that perception is methodologically justified, and moreover, from the historical perspective, a period offering instances of both ideological continuity and change is optimally suited to studying ideological diversity and conceptual mutability. In answer to the question of how the core concepts of liberty, individualism, progress, rationality, the general interest, sociability, limited, and responsible power fared in the hands of the Millite succession, it is contended in this chapter that they all remained constituents of the liberal core, but that some underwent redecontesting owing to changing scientific fashion, new sets of ethico‐cultural beliefs, and specific events that made their mark on ideological assumptions. The final feature of liberalism—structural tolerance—was a key facilitator in that process, allowing critical distancing from the modernist project with which liberalism was associated. The eight sections of the chapter are: (a) The idealist liberalism of T. H. Green; (b) Perimeter practices and adjacent aftermaths; (c) The new liberalism: the evolution of an ideology (d) The changing adjacencies of liberty; (e) The organic analogy; (f) Fleshing out the new liberal morphology; (g) State, group, and society: the German case; and (h) state, group, and society: the French case.

From the vantage point of the end of the twentieth century, the author has selected four case‐studies of clusters of thought claiming to be liberal, in order to perform the twofold task of assembling the units of liberalism into an identifiable structure, and of testing concrete instances against whatever dominant morphological configuration may emerge. First, there is what is misleadingly known as classical liberalism, an early‐ to mid‐nineteenth‐century creed associated in Britain with J. S. Mill; some of its tenets are examined while being careful not to fall into the trap of assigning lexical correctness to its conceptual definitions and merely secondary or derivative status to its successors. Second, there are versions of reformist (or new) liberalism, such as those associated with T. H. Green, the British new liberalism, and their German and French counterparts; here, an assessment is made of both the question of family continuity and the boundary problems these permutations have, particularly with socialism; the analysis of new liberalism is taken further in the next chapter. Third, there is a recent genre of philosophical liberalism, much in fashion in the American academic world but achieving success abroad through the prominence of American political philosophy; an inquiry is made into whether this school produces a possibly innovative but stipulative model and whether it is reconcilable with mainstream American liberal traditions; the ideological elements in this philosophical position are also examined; the analysis of philosophical liberalism is taken further in Ch. 6. Finally, there is a variant broadly known as libertarianism, with both nineteenth‐century and contemporary instances; an exploration is made of its claim to be representative of a (or the) legitimate strand of liberalism, and of the extent to which it is situated within or outside the accepted boundaries of liberalism; the analysis of libertarianism is taken further in Ch. 7.

The current liberal order is fading and has failed to deliver on some of its most fundamental promises. Yet, rather than taking flight from liberal order, this book suggests that liberal orders in the past always have been historically constituted and institutionally contested. Although liberal order's current crisis is not disputed, it suggests that the crisis has partly been constituted by the specific account of liberal order offered by ‘new liberalism’, which in its quest for a scientific method has shorn liberalism — and with it liberal order — of its critical and normative potential. The observation places liberal order's alleged crisis in a new light, where attention to liberal values and ordering practices invite consideration of those aspects of liberal order that are resilient and enduring.

This chapter talks about how a distinct neoliberal worldview was built on the foundations of the critique of New Deal liberalism and social democracy synthesized in the writings of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Karl Popper. The adrenaline generated by the neoliberal movement and its ideas in the Conservative and Republican parties radically changed the political and economic life of both the United States and Great Britain. The chapter also shows how neoliberal ideas developed a sharper focus and an icy coherence. Neither Milton Friedman's intelligent loquaciousness nor Ronald Reagan's warm sentiments could disguise a philosophy that was built on a cold and abstract individualism, yet the vision was still very much a utopian one, centered on a fantasy of the perfect free market.

Freeden’s work on the history of British liberal thought has famously highlighted the ideological links between liberals and socialists in Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Freeden’s account has much to commend it, this chapter suggests that his focus on the influence of British liberalism on socialists should be balanced by an appreciation of the corresponding influence of British socialism on liberals. To make this case, the chapter examines the attitudes of new liberal intellectuals to the social ownership and control of industry. It investigates the ideas about social ownership found in the writings of J. A. Hobson and L. T. Hobhouse before the First World War; it musters evidence of left-liberal enthusiasm for industrial democracy in the years following 1918; and it outlines the serious consideration given to socialist planning by William Beveridge, the apparent epitome of a centrist liberal, in the 1930s and 1940s.

This chapter describes the contours and limits of the political settlement in Great Britain and the United States in the middle of the twentieth century. It shows how at the heart of both New Deal liberalism and the British Liberal and Labour reforms was a happy conception of the state so long as its power was in the hands of an enlightened and expert policy elite. The famous Brain Trust around Franklin Roosevelt and the progressive liberal civil service personified by Beveridge and Keynes fit exactly this notion of top-down reform for the benefit of society as a whole. The progressive liberal project was not revolutionary; it was born of a desire to preserve and defend liberal democracy and the capitalist system.

This chapter examines liberal social policies. The connection between liberalism and municipal socialism has often been commented upon. There has been an increasing trend to view the liberal realisation of municipal socialism as the German counterpart of liberal social reform in other countries, such as ‘New Liberalism’ in Britain. These observations, however, have been based largely on the measures taken by liberals in municipal government, without a corresponding analysis about the political context in which these measures were taken. The discussion shows for Frankfurt that there were three competing theories of municipal socialism. Those following the first conducted social enquiry and social policy in a non-political context. The second had a more paternalist and anti-socialist thrust and is without doubt the one which most municipal liberals in Germany subscribed to. The third was a progressive vision aiming to integrate workers socially and politically.

The first part of this chapter discusses the imperial and intellectual career of Jan Christian Smuts, the long-serving prime minister of South Africa, looking particularly at his connections to, and adoration of, England. It argues that Smuts was both an ethical radical, close to the spirit of the early social democrats and New Liberals of the early C20, and a fierce proponent of white supremacy. The second part of the chapter takes the story to the 1950s and 1960s and reconstructs the response in England to his death.

This chapter moves from the mass public to the halls of Congress. Paralleling the previous chapter, it describes the ideological evolution and continuing diversity of Southern senators and representatives, focusing again on their positions on economic issues. Using an item response theory (IRT) model similar to that used to estimate mass conservatism, this chapter shows that between the 1930s and 1940s Southern members of Congress (MCs), like the Southern white public, turned sharply but incompletely against New Deal liberalism. By the mid-1940s, Southern Democrats in Congress had come to occupy a pivotal position on economic issues midway between non-Southern Democrats and Republicans, giving them outsized influence over national policymaking in the wake of the New Deal. The chapter illustrates these developments with three of the four policy areas which Chapter 3 examines at the mass level. Moreover, taking proper account of the ideological diversity of Southern MCs requires treating them as a collection of individuals, not a reified bloc. This chapter therefore analyzes Southern Democrats (along with other MCs) as individuals with possibly distinct preferences.

This introduction sets the stage for the explorations that follow in subsequent chapters of the book. It traces the emergence of shared perfectionist values across fascism, imperialism, and liberalism during the beginning years of the twentieth-century. Gandhi shows how the new imperialisms and new liberalisms of the era became unlikely allies in the elaboration of ultimately totalitarian values, through a shared ethos of self-elevation and cultivation. Yet this normative ethics subtends the alternative practices—“on the other side of perfection”--at the heart of The Common Cause. The chapter highlights M. K. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj as a cue for democratic imperfectionism and calls, in a final section, for a postcolonial cynicism committed to an ethics of non-sovereignty or becoming common.

This chapter focuses on three developments in the mid- to late 1930s that together helped bring civil rights into mainstream liberals' program. The first is African Americans' emergence as a potential source of votes for northern Democrats. The second key change is the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which pushed for a new interpretation of New Deal liberalism that included civil rights as a component. The third change arose as a response to the first two developments: southern Democrats emerged as key opponents of further extension of the New Deal. These changes brought about a new set of political battle lines, in which a coalition of southern conservatives and Republicans opposed the “ardent New Dealers” of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, African Americans, and other urban liberals.

This chapter describes the pivotal substantive differences between idealist and non-idealist social thought. Also examined are the divergent images held in the idealist and non-idealist thought of ordinary people as agents in everyday life and of freedom, tutelary direction and moral progress. The exact relationship of influence between idealists and New Liberalism has been variously described in scholarly research. The key point is that both academic idealism and modified theories of social evolution, whether mixed together or not, provided modes of idealist social thought, defined broadly, that New Liberalism absorbed into its intellectual framework.

In the 1880s and 1990s, a “new journalism” emerged in Britain and America. “New journalism” is an appropriately elastic label for a wide array of new forms and practices associated with increasing commercialization and popularization of the daily newspaper. These new styles flourished in London and New York, but newspapers in other cities contributed too. The “new journalism” that originated in the growing industrial cities on both sides of the Atlantic brought a new perspective on urban political economy, often overlooked. Because of their role in the civic lives as well as the political and commercial lives of their cities, newspapers were often drawn into an ideological transformation from classic economic liberalism to a more collectivist municipal progressivism. To illustrate the contribution of the daily newspaper to the evolving political economy of the late nineteenth-century city, this chapter offers a close comparison of two remarkable cities: Manchester and Chicago.

This chapter uses the city of New York as a case study of the challenges facing liberals as they struggled to tailor their social policies to a political culture often hostile to public aid to the indigent. It traces the interaction of liberal policy making and the fortunes of those on the margins of society over the second half of the twentieth century. The chapter examines efforts to reform the behavior of the homeless as well as campaigns to renovate the areas in which they lived. New York liberalism shaped the development of urban renewal programs, substance abuse treatment programs, and mental health reform, and studying homelessness through that lens lends insight into an understanding of both liberal compassion and its limits.

Liberals and socialists variously accommodated their politics to evolutionary ideas. While historians have noted that liberals embraced social Darwinist ideas to advance either individualist laissez-faire or a collectivist social imperialism, there was a significant middle ground. By the 1870s most liberals embraced evolution to advance a progressive collectivist new-liberalism. Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley debated the merits and limits of laissez-faire in this crisis of liberal identity. Socialists were also divided on the politics of evolution and of the Malthusian elements of Darwinism in particular. The anti-Malthusianism that many radicals had brought with the movement coloured the socialist revival of the 1880s and 1890. Marxists like Henry Hyndman were also anti-Malthusian. Lamarckism proliferated throughout their various conceptions of social change. Prominent members of the Fabian Society were exceptions to this trend; embracing Malthus they built their conception of socialism around the management of societies resources.

This chapter argues that rank- and-file northern Democrats in the House of Representatives also responded to activist and constituent pressure for civil rights by the late 1930s and early 1940s. These locally rooted politicians proved willing to take on southern Democrats and party leaders by signing discharge petitions that extricated civil rights bills from obstructionist committees, forcing the measures to the House floor. Prior to the late 1930s, northern Republicans had outpaced northern Democrats in their civil rights support. Northern Democrats showed increased civil rights support by the end of the 1930s, displacing northern Republicans as the leading advocates of civil rights during World War II. The Democrats most supportive of civil rights came from the highly urban, unionized areas that were most associated with New Deal liberalism, while the smaller number of GOP supporters tended to come from atypical districts for the party. The gap between the parties was substantial from the mid-1940s onward.