Graham Wallas and Liberal Democracy

Abstract

During his lifetime (1858–1932) Graham Wallas's pioneering contributions to the study of politics were widely acknowledged. Thus, his Human Nature in Politics (1908) was rightly acclaimed as a turning point in British and American political science, away from the study of political institutions and toward the study of political behavior. With his later works, notably The Great Society (1914), Our Social Heritage (1921) and The Art of Thought (1926), Wallas's influence spilled over into other fields of social inquiry provoking a chain of serious debates among the pundits of various disciplines. And the term “Great Society,” by which Wallas meant a complex, mechanized industrial society, the monster-child of the Industrial Revolution, became a household phrase in the 1930's among the New Deal liberals in the United States, where, according to historian Samuel Eliot Morison, he had been the most influential English political philosopher since Herbert Spencer.