The New Liberalism – Journal of Liberal History

Journal of Liberal History For the discussion and research of Liberal, Liberal Democrat and SDP history The New Liberalism By Duncan Brack Type History The disaster of the 1895 election, when the Liberals lost almost a hundred seats, struck a mortal blow at Rosebery’s leadership and pointed to the urgent need for a new direction. Although for some it was the party’s abandonment of its historic principles of self-help, voluntaryism and constitutional reform that lay at fault, to others it was the failure of the party to embrace the new imperialism. A growing number also felt that Liberalism’s failure to formulate an adequate response to the new social problems of industrialisation had undermined its appeal. Although living standards in general had risen throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, society was characterised increasingly by the spread of slums, poverty, ignorance and disease, and the ending of the long mid-Victorian economic boom had removed the belief that economic growth would automatically solve such social problems. Just as the emergence of classical liberalism in the early and mid-nineteenth century was closely linked to the emergence of industrial capitalism, so the development of the ‘New Liberalism’ of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries derived from this further evolution of economy and society. It was to prove a decisive development in the history of British Liberalism, heralding its successful adjustment to the demands of the new industrial age, and enabling the Liberal governments of 1906-14 to lay the foundations of the welfare state Labour was to build on after 1945. Thomas Hill Green was the first of the liberal thinkers to take the growing social inequality into account. Green argued that the unrestrained pursuit of profit had given rise to new forms of poverty and injustice; the economic liberty of the few had blighted the life chances of the many. ‘Negative liberty’, the removal of constraints on the individual, would not necessarily lead to freedom of choice for all. Workers, for example, frequently had little if any choice of employer, and no real choice between working or not working, whereas employers had plenty of choice regarding their employees. The free market therefore often could, and did, lead to exploitation. Green proposed the idea of ‘positive freedom’: the ability of the individual to develop and attain individuality through personal self-development and self-realisation. Since much of the population was prevented from such self-realisation by the impediments of poverty, sickness, unemployment and ignorance, government was justified in taking action to tackle all these conditions. This was not a threat to liberty, but the necessary guarantee of it: ‘our modern legislation then with reference to labour, and education, and health, involving as it does manifold interference with freedom of contract, is justified on the ground that it is the business of the state, not indeed directly to promote moral goodness, for that, from the very nature of moral goodness, it cannot do, but to maintain the conditions without which a free exercise of the human faculties is impossible.’ (Lecture on ‘Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract’, 1888) In this extension of the role of the state, Green was in fact reflecting what was already beginning to be common practice amongst Liberals in local government; Green himself was an Oxford councillor, as well as an academic. ‘The experience of the great towns is encouraging’, stated Joseph Chamberlain in 1885, drawing on his experiences as mayor of Birmingham. ‘By their wise and liberal use of the powers entrusted to them, they have, in the majority of cases, protected the health of the community; they have provided means of recreation and enjoyment and instruction, and they have done a great deal to equalise social advantages.’ Chamberlain’s departure from the Liberal Party the following year in the split over Irish Home Rule did not prevent Liberals following these trains of thought and action. Indeed, since he took many Whigs and major industrialists with him, it may have accelerated their adoption. The Newcastle Programme of 1891 reflected these beliefs, though in an unsystematic way, obscured by attachment to the single-issue causes of the past. The members of the Rainbow Circle , a group of progressive politicians and thinkers who started meeting regularly in the early 1890s to discuss social and labour questions, provided much of the intellectual justification for the New Liberal programme. They included almost all of the major New Liberal writers: L. T. Hobhouse , J. A. Hobson , R. B. Haldane, Charles Trevelyan and Herbert Samuel , and they also had close links with trade union leaders, the new Fabian Society, and the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) formed in 1900. Their creed was a self-conscious departure from the past; as Lloyd George put it in 1908: ‘The old Liberals used the natural discontent ...