Policy Knowledge: New Liberalism

Abstract

New Liberalism, a contrast term, refers to a movement in social knowledge, public philosophy, state policy, and social practice underway internationally between the 1880s and the 1940s, intended to address the ‘social question’ raised by instabilities and inequities of modern Western capitalism, and to provide new thinking about relationships between state, economy, and society. New liberals addressed a range of contested issues, among them business cycles and unemployment, rights and conditions of labor, wages and distribution of income and wealth, the limits of property rights, industrial organization and corporate reorganization, family welfare and gender roles, public administration, and issues of immigration and race. Deep divisions over the substance and implications of new empirical and theoretical knowledge on these subjects led to a branching of new liberalism into two distinct new liberal movements elaborated over several decades – a statist-democratic strand of reform thought born in the 1880s, and an opposing, corporate-voluntarist alternative that came together around the turn of the century. The account here identifies five phases in the bifurcated development of new liberalism: (1) market failure and the drive for new social knowledge, (2) conflicting approaches to framing the social question, (3) the ‘turn’ to social insurance, (4) liberal statism and New Deal planning, and (5) the containment of statist liberalism.