'The Real Question of Freedom': The State, the Church and the Individual, c.1860–1920

Abstract

This essay explores the relationship between the individual, the state and the church. In particular, it considers he ways that a particularly influential group of early twentieth-century state-critics – the English pluralist – grappled with the tension between state authority and individual liberty through a careful engagement with the thought of John Henry Newman. But while English pluralists like J. N. Figgis and Harold Laski admired Newman's critiques of ultramontanism, they could not accept some of Newman's premises, particularly those regarding the conscience, which underlay his rejection of ultramontanism. English pluralism, this essay suggests, was beset by a kind of conceptual confusion which its proponents recognized but could not – or would not – resolve.