The New Liberalism

Liberal Social Theory in Great Britain, 1889-1914

Peter Weiler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315524238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This title, first published in 1982, explores the new Liberalism - the great change in Liberalism as an ideology and a political practice that characterised the years before the First World War - and examines the idea that the new Liberals successfully overcame the need they saw in the 1890's to make Liberalism more socially reformist. This title will be of interest to students of social and political history.

Chapter Five THE NATION AND THE NEW LIBERALISM

DOI: 10.4324/9781315524252-5

It may be that without the pressure of social forces, political ideas are still born: what is certain is that these forces, unless they clothe themselves in ideas, remain blind and undirected.

--Isaiah Berlin

The Economic Problem, as one may call it for short, the problem of want and poverty and the economic struggle between classes and nations, is nothing but a frightful muddle, a transitory and an unnecessary muddle.

--John Maynard Keynes

By 1912 it seemed to progressive Liberals that the Liberal government had succeeded in creating a programme of social legislation that accurately and imaginatively expressed the “progressive” ideas that had concerned them for more than two decades. At the same time, the term “new Liberal” had become the common term for both this legislation and the position of the most advanced Liberal journalists and thinkers. The new Liberalism, then, can be seen as the culmination of the progressive or ‘new radical’ ideas that originated in the late eighteen eighties and early nineties. The leading advocates of the new Liberalism - H. W. Massingham, C. P. Scott, J. A. Hobson, and L. T. Hobhouse - are the same men who edited and wrote for the Chronicle, the Guardian, and the Progressive Review. But the new Liberalism is more than just another name for their “Progressivism.” The reforms of the 1906–14 government extended and clarified the previous ideas of the progressive Liberals, and as the specific legislation was passed, they became increasingly aware of more extended and radical implications in their own position. Their function during the Liberal government was not to innovate specific legislation, but rather to convince the majority of the party of the need for reform, and to consider such questions as the eventual direction the Liberal party should take, and the moral and philosophic justification for new Liberal legislation. Thus, although they did not create specific legislative programmes, they provided the best articulation of the new Liberalism.

The most important journal for the dissemination of new Liberal ideas was the Nation, which succeeded the Speaker in 1907. All of the major new Liberal journalists and theorists were directly or indirectly connected with it. Its writers included Hobson, Hobhouse, C. F. G. Masterman, J. L. Hammond, former editor of the Speaker, H. N. Brailsford, and F. W. Hirst, “the one surviving disciple of Bright and Cobden.”¹ It was edited by H. W. Massingham, whose spirit and beliefs dominated the journal. “There is no doubt,” wrote Leonard Woolf, “that he was a first class editor in that somehow or other he impressed his personality on those who wrote for him and what they wrote.”² The Nation’s circulation was small, only a few thousand, but it was recognized at the time as the most responsible and influential journal of the new Liberalism. It was the mouthpiece for the “advanced guard” of the party. Through its weekly lunches, at which prominent public figures were often present, it provided a convenient meeting place for advanced Liberals inside the government and for social reformers of all kinds. “We spent hours talking at the Nation lunch of the way in which if we had the chance we would shatter this sorry scheme of things and remould it nearer to our heart’s desire,” wrote C. F. G. Masterman.³ Through these lunches and through the presence in the government of C. F. G. Masterman, as well as through personal friendships, the group of advanced Liberals centered around the Nation had direct contact with the Liberal administration. It is the most important source for the attitudes and ideas of the new Liberals during the Liberal government of 1906–14.

In October, 1907, the Nation published an article which set forth the challenges and difficulties facing the Liberal Government:

For the first time in the history of English Liberalism, leaders with a powerful support of the rank and file have committed themselves with zeal and even passionate conviction to promote a series of practical measures which, though not closely welded in their immediate purport, have the common result of increasing the powers and resources of the State for the improvement of the material and moral conditions of the people.⁴

The extent of these measures constituted a “revolution,” acknowledged the Nation. But “the real revolution is in the minds of men.” The challenge to the Liberal party was to accept the reality of that revolution and to fulfill in legislative action the social promise of its programme. The greatest difficulty to meeting the challenge lay in “rallying round them the genuine support of the Liberal ‘centre’ in Parliament and the nation.”⁵ The recognition of the necessity for “revolutionary” social legislation and the need to convince the center of the party to agree to reform are two themes that run through the pages of the Nation from 1907 until the outbreak of World War I.

If the Radical policy of social reconstruction is to be effective in this country the lack of intelligible formulation of principles must be remedied. The real difficulties must be met; the right limits of State and municipal collectivism must be laid down … whether efficiency of labour can be got out of public enterprise … whether the tendency of such Socialism will be to dwarf individuality and to make for a dead level of humanity .… Then there is the group of not less serious questions relating to taxation .… The timidity of the Liberal centre is based primarily upon fears engendered by these questions which imperatively demand intelligible answers, if the Liberal Party hopes to press forward with energy and confidence along the path of social reconstruction to which it is formally committed, and upon which its future as a party depends.⁶

Both the hopes that the Liberal party would “press forward” along the “path of social reconstruction” and the fears for its “future existence as a party” if it failed to effect that reconstruction were the direct result of the election of 1906. Before the election advanced Liberals had been concerned with furthering progressive causes through propaganda and through an alliance with Labour, but after 1906, the Liberal party seemed to represent the first feasible opportunity to put progressive policies into practice, and the success or failure of the Liberal government became of prime importance.⁷

The initial response to the Liberal victory of 1906 was a feeling of expectancy among progressive Liberals. The Speaker wrote hopefully that the Liberal government would “lay the foundations for a real democracy.”⁸ The size of the victory was due to an unusual combination of issues which allowed the Liberals not only to win heavily among their traditional supporters, but also to carry elements of the electorate who had never voted Liberal and who were never to vote Liberal again in such large numbers, particularly the manual workers of Lancashire and the agricultural labourers. The main issue was Free Trade, an issue which divided the Unionists, but united the Liberals and gained them valuable rural support.⁹ The nonconformists, angered over the Conservative Election Act of 1902, campaigned vehemently for the Liberals, at a time when they were at the peak of their voting strength. Home Rule was not a divisive issue. The Irish were satisfied with vague promises of reform, while the middle class English voter was not faced with the unsavory prospect of voting for Home Rule. As a result, according to Herbert Gladstones’s estimate, Irish voters in England helped swing almost 100 constituencies to the Liberals. Also, the secret alliance with the Labour Representation Committee allowed the Liberals to cheat the logic of the electoral system, preventing three-cornered contests and gaining seats for a Labour ally in areas which might have gone Tory. Thus the size of the Liberal victory was the result, not of the appeal of a positive programme of social reform, but of a combination of circumstances largely outside Liberal control. Moreover, the size of the victory was deceptive; the Liberals won 71% of the seats, but polled only 49.5% of the vote.

Although the Liberal victory had been based on a combination of disparate interests and the national issue of Free Trade, the progressive Liberals preferred to see the election as a triumph for the forces of social reform and a portent of a progressive future. While the Guardian, for example, recognized that the Liberal success had been primarily a victory for Free Trade, the Speaker claimed it as a victory for social reform. “The great bulk of the majority vote at the last election,” wrote H. W. Massingham, “was not given on Free Trade alone but on a policy of constructive reform, which is now thoroughly ripe for execution.”¹⁰ The Speaker was equally optimistic about the Liberal majority in parliament. “The new House of Commons represents a zeal for reform, a determination to use the power of the State for improving the common lot of its members, a grasp of the thousand ways in which good and just government touches the life of the people, to which the country has long been a stranger.”¹¹ But the election of 1906 was open to further interpretation, and other progressive Liberals saw the election of the Liberal government as more than an opportunity for the progressive forces in the party; for them it was the last chance for the party to meet the crisis of the social question.

Progressive Liberals had been closely attuned to working class demands ever since the early 1890’s; through Ramsay MacDonald and their connections with the Fabians, they were conscious of the potential political strength of the labour movement. For these journalists, the task before the Liberal party was to develop a programme of concrete social reform which could attract working class votes. “I think,” wrote Masterman, “that if the Liberal party fails to satisfy these [working class] demands, it will dwindle and presently fall into impotence, as the Liberal parties on the Continent have dwindled and fallen into impotence; because they failed rightly to interpret the signs of their times.”¹² And the Guardian wrote that “the future of Liberalism can be assured only if it fills the place that was left vacant for the Social Democrats to fill in Germany.”¹³ The “signs of the times” that Masterman wrote about and that progressive Liberals had observed since the 1890’s came into even clearer focus with the election: Labour had won an unexpected victory, electing 29 independent (L.R.C.) candidates and 24 Lib-Labs. The fear among progressive Liberals, therefore, was that the Liberal party would be squeezed out between the Tories and the growing Labour party.¹⁴ Despite a middle class bias in the franchise, the electorate was still over half working class, and this working class vote was thus the largest single group to whom the Liberals could appeal. This fear that the Liberal party would be replaced by Labour indicates the extent to which progressive Liberals in 1907 still felt strong allegiance to the Liberal party. But it is also an indication of their ambivalent attitude toward Labour.

The main cause for the progressive Liberal’s distrust of the Labour party during the 1906–14 government lay in the identification of Labour with socialism and class war. In this regard, their idea of socialism was mythological. They identified socialism with total state ownership of all production and saw the result of this “socialism” in a mass bureaucracy and the ending of individual initiative.¹⁵ And they reflected the idea of “class war” as “simply sterile.”¹⁶ Their rejection of militant socialism and their feeling that Labour was concerned with only the problems of the working class led them to the contention that the Liberal party was “the one organised English party which stands for serious and far-reaching but not revolutionary reform.”¹⁷ Their attitude toward Labour and “socialism” demonstrates the extent to which they remained in the middle class Liberal tradition. They were Liberals because the Liberal party was a “middle party,” “teaching that property has duties as well as rights.”¹⁸ Thus the Liberal party could appeal both to t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Original Page
• Copyright Original Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• The New Liberalism
• The Transition from the Old to the New Liberalism, 1870–1889
• Progressive Opinion and the Liberal Party, 1892–95
• The Search for a Progressive Party
• The Nation and the New Liberalism
• L. T. Hobhouse
• J. A. Hobson
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index