British Liberalism Research Articles

Representing Albania in the Travel Writing and Political Commentary of Edith Durham and Aubrey Herbert during the Albanian Path to Independence, c. 1904–1923

Recent imagological scholarship about the Balkans has revised the Balkanism thesis by examining the sympathetic lens through which British liberals viewed the peninsula's Christian and Slavic nationalities following the 1903 establishment of the Balkan Committee. Revisionist historiography has, however, overlooked how non-Christian and non-Slavic communities were represented in Britain beyond overgeneralized orientalist stereotypes of ‘the villainous Turk’. This article aims to correct this imbalance by examining representations of Albania in the travel writing and political commentary of Mary Edith Durham and Aubrey Nigel Henry Molyneux Herbert, Britain's most notable supporters of Albania's national movement in the early twentieth century, who came to sympathize with the country because of their own peripheral position in relation to the British cultural and political mainstream, by virtue of gender and an unfashionably conservative worldview. Focusing on their published travel writing and political commentary between the 1904 publication of Durham's first narrative, Through the Lands of the Serb, and Herbert's untimely death in 1923, this article proposes that they articulated a counter-discourse to liberal writing on south-eastern Europe and that their representations of Albania foregrounded the capacity for self-governance, in contrast to the cultural chaos attributed to the country by liberals.

A New Neoliberal Offensive in South Korea: The Conservative Politics of Rollback and the Disciplining of Organized Labor

ABSTRACT This study explores a series of actions undertaken by South Korea’s President Yoon Suk-yeol to prohibit and reshape customary activities in labor unions. It terms this neoliberal offensive a form of disciplining and explains what has motivated the Yoon administration to adopt this method against organized labor. This policy is associated with South Korean conservatives’ strong impulse to roll back former President Moon Jae-in’s progressive legacy by pushing neoliberalism to its limits. This argument is grounded in Karl Polanyi’s illustration of the Speenhamland episode, in which English liberals’ struggle against the Speenhamland system generated the creeds of the self-regulating market and social disciplines. South Korean conservatives prioritize reversing progressive political initiatives because they have been unable to devise alternative policies due to their constrained institutional capacity. They have dismissed the pro-labor policies of the Moon administration as misguided interventionism. The Yoon administration has alleged that labor unions are the support base of the Moon administration and has implemented three disciplinary measures against them: decontextualization, stigmatization, and requirements for increased transparency. This study shows that neoliberalism shifts the locus of class conflict from workplaces to how workers shape their lifestyles and identities.

A Pragmatic Analysis of Ambiguity in Political Speeches

Investigating ambiguity in political statements is the goal of the current study. More adequately, it clarifies the lexical and structural ambiguities that are used by Vince Cable as a member of the British Liberal Democrats in 2018. The importance of this speech lies in the fact that it discusses the Brexit argument which is about the issue of leaving the European Union for Britain. Moreover, it presents some other crucial issues like racism, immigration, and economy. This paper provides a theoretical background on ambiguity and its relavant types. Two methods are chosen for analysing the data: descriptive (analysing the data descriptively) and statistical (analysing the data statistically by using frequencies and percentages). It is found that the speaker employs lexical ambiguity more than he does with structural ambiguity with percentages that amount to (75%) and (25%), respectively. It is concluded that lexical ambiguity is more appropriate for achieving linguistic ambiguity than structural one.

Explaining the Interventionist Trend of British Liberalism in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: A Lesson in First Principles

Traditionally, scholars have portrayed British popular Liberalism as thoroughly laissez-faire, minarchist, and anti-imperialist before the late nineteenth century. After this point, many scholars claim, popular Liberals broke with their traditional policies for humanitarian and pragmatic reasons by funding social welfare programs, regulating the economy, and endorsing imperialism. This article disagrees, contending instead that British popular Liberalism was never sufficiently committed to classical liberalism. A misguided humanitarian impulse arose within the movement that permitted exceptions to laissez-faire at home and interventionism abroad. Popular Liberals believed that because these exceptions were rare and undertaken in good faith, they did not undermine the movement. However, these initial interventions advocated by popular Liberals established a precedent that was exploited whenever further interventions seemed expedient. In the end, this statist trend destroyed the movement.

"The New Economy and the Old Morality": Reimagining a Liberal Culture in Howards End

Abstract: Attentive to the transmutation of British liberalism as a political philosophy in the early twentieth century, this essay examines how E. M. Forster's Howards End brings together multiple intellectual sources that trouble standard divisions between liberal and conservative affiliations in reimagining a liberal culture. From the root and branch image of the wych-elm to the "sweetness and light" (79) of the grass, and to the "little platoon" (136) of Howards End, the essay offers fresh interpretations of Forster's novel and reconnects his work with a group of thinkers as diverse as Edmund Burke, William Gladstone, Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold, Hobhouse, and John Maynard Keynes.

The New Liberals and Chinese Civilization: Idealist Philosophy, Evolutionary Sociology, and the Quest for a Humanitarian Ethics in Edwardian Britain

It is well known that the leading New Liberals L. T. Hobhouse and J. A. Hobson were critics of the British Empire, and their sympathy with China has been understood as an expression of their anti-imperialism. However, this article argues that this reading is at best one-sided. By examining Hobhouse's and Hobson's ethical and sociological thought, it demonstrates that their Sinophile position drew on a broader concern about the turn-of-the-century moral crisis. Informed by Idealist philosophy, positivism, and evolutionary biology, their quest for a post-Christian ethics led to an appreciation of the harmonic order of Chinese society and its secularism. The leading New Liberals’ earnest study of China on the one hand represented a departure from the Eurocentric position of British Liberals who had seen “stationary” China as a negative object lesson, and on the other anticipated a generation of Liberal/progressive thinkers who were attracted to Chinese culture.

Channelling Ottoman Armenian Refugees During the Hamidian Massacres: Immigration Restrictions and British Liberal Imperial Humanitarianism at Stake (1894–1898)

ABSTRACT This article examines British refuge to Ottoman Armenians in the aftermath of the 1894–1897 Hamidian massacres, an episode absent from the historiography of Britain and refuge, and largely from historical refugee studies. Analysed against the backdrop of the restrictionist Aliens Bills (1894–1905), refuge offered by Britain to tens of thousands of Ottoman Armenians seems a contradiction in terms. This article seeks to go beyond this contradiction and reflects on why and how the British Conservative Prime Minister, originator of the 1894 Aliens Bill when still in the Opposition, actively helped channelling Ottoman Armenians outside of the Ottoman Empire. Rather than encouraging movement to Britain, Salisbury urged to propose a British tradition of welcome more in keeping with current sensibilities in terms of domestic immigration. In so doing, Salisbury first sought to revive a tradition of British refuge as imperial. As it largely failed, he explored alternative, liminal loci (Bulgaria) outside of the formal Empire where British humanitarians, with the official support of the Foreign Office, might provide aid to Ottoman Armenian refugees – in the margins of international law. This case study thus offers new ways of envisaging British refuge in the late nineteenth century.

Max Weber and James Bryce: The Constitution of Responsibility

While much has been written about Max Weber’s “ethic of responsibility,” less has been written about the more general “sense of responsibility” he thought politicians needed and, particularly, its place as a main goal of Weber’s constitutional theory. Here I offer an interpretation of Weber’s constitutional theory as designed to cultivate personal responsibility in rulers. I advance this interpretation by examining an underappreciated influence on Weber—the constitutional writings of James Bryce (1838–1922), the British Liberal historian, Gladstonian statesman, and diplomat. In his arguments for parliamentarism in Germany and later for a plebiscitary presidency, Weber adopted and adapted from Bryce (and, through Bryce, from Woodrow Wilson and Walter Bagehot) a principle that responsible government requires a publicly visible concentration of power subject to effective accountability mechanisms. This principle remains important as a remedy for pathologies of irresponsible government that persist among us today.

The Puzzle of Lionel Robbins: How a Neoliberal Economist Expanded Public University Education in 1960s Britain.

Lionel Robbins (1898-1984) has been identified as one of the leading 'neoliberal' economists of his day. However, his name remains irrevocably linked with the massive state-funded 'social democratic' expansion of higher education recommended by the Robbins Report (1963). This article explores this paradox. Examining Robbins's writings on higher education in the context of his economic thought shows how he blended the liberalism of Adam Smith and J. S. Mill, neoliberal economics, and growing demands for personal choice. For Robbins, the atrocities of the Nazi and Soviet regimes demonstrated how the state armed with new modern technologies could endanger freedom and prosperity. But the 'good society' might wield technology to secure conditions of freedom and choice. Robbins advocated a system of state-subsidized universities based on 'student demand' and which generated social and individual returns. This system would perpetuate what Robbins called the 'creed of freedom': a reimagined interdisciplinary liberal education through which students would understand the importance of their specialism to liberal capitalism. His thought on higher education indicates something of the dynamism of post-war British liberalism and the range of support for higher education expansion. It further counters the impression of the British universities as sites of a static and conservative liberal education.

British Liberalism and the French Invasion of Mexico

AbstractNapoleon III's 1860s intervention in Mexico mystified some British observers. For many others, however, it raised urgent questions about the duties of European civilization and the future of global order. This article argues that the affair forced attitudes toward other European countries' overseas imperial projects into sharp political focus, and that in doing so it revealed incipient shifts in the center of gravity of Victorian liberalism. France's Second Mexican Empire split opinion in the Liberal Party and press, throwing light on wider disputes about the parameters of legitimate imperial intervention, the reach of the principles of nationality and self-determination, the political needs of disordered multiracial polities in less-developed parts of the world, and Europe's proper relations with Spanish America. But most Liberals who engaged with the enterprise condemned it, a fact that lays bare a changing balance of power between what historians have called “liberal imperial” and noninterventionist arguments in the 1860s. The failure of the intervention, moreover, did much to affirm powerful partisan narratives about French politics, which helped to buttress the electoral ascendancy of the Liberal Party.

"We Are All Getting Liberal Now": The Cosmopolitan Critique of British Liberalism in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone

"We Are All Getting Liberal Now": The Cosmopolitan Critique of British Liberalism in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone

Liberalism and the Idea of Just Society

At the beginning of the third century, liberalism was the preferred philosophy. It is not easy to define any political party, as with conservatism. Liberal ideology dates back to the end of the seventeenth century when the political turbulence of England's middle civil wars left the nation in a state of great social upheaval. Following this, the nineteenth century is explored, and significant ideas of ‘classical' and ‘New' liberalism are described. Before the First World War, the limits of British liberalism were already apparent, and its decline was virtually total throughout the interwar period. In light of the demise of Soviet communism in the late 1980s and the subsequent rise of liberal capitalist democracy, we review the rebirth of liberalism. An investigation of some of the current failings of liberalism is conducted, and the authors predict the fate of liberalism.

Itinerant traders: elusive subjects moving at the intersection of historical fields

ABSTRACT This special issue on itinerant trade includes new research on a range of non-fixed traders who engaged in both transnational and smaller-scale moves when trading. Itinerant trading stands at the crossroads of different historiographical fields: it can be studied through the lens of commercial and consumption history, but also as a history of migration and labour, or of the underbelly economy and deviance. More recently, this topic has interested historians of material culture, emotions and folklore. The contributions to this special issue highlight these new directions and important trends in research into itinerant trade. The five contributions explore moving traders in the early modern and modern periods in Britain, the Nordics and across the wider European continent. The articles investigate: the space, temporality and material culture of the saloop stall in early-modern London; female rural petty trading in early twentieth-century Finland; the British Liberal authorities' approach to regulating itinerant trade in late-modern Britain; the geographic, ethnic and cultural backgrounds and networks of itinerant traders in the late-nineteenth century Nordics; and the transnational networks of early-modern peddling in Europe.

Repeal, Revolution, Abolitionism: The Formation of Irish American Identity, 1840–45

Repeal, Revolution, Abolitionism:The Formation of Irish American Identity, 1840–45 Robert O'Sullivan (bio) For James Hoban of Washington, DC, a speaker at the National Repeal Convention for the Friends of Ireland in Philadelphia, Daniel O'Connell's campaign to repeal the British-Irish union of 1801 was the preeminent cause of the nineteenth century. It was also the most deserving of American humanitarian assistance in his judgment. Hoban clearly indicated that "our sympathies may be with Ireland as they were with Greece, with South America, and with the suffering Poles." Hoban expressed the hope that Ireland could become the object of the "heart throbbing which made America send a voice of encouragement to Greece [and] to South America when they were struggling to snap the bonds" that had so long confined their limbs.1 For Irish Americans in the 1840s this comparative framework was integral to the manner in which they advocated for Repeal. Comparisons with and references to the nation-building in Spanish America, Greece, and Poland were a common and even crucial component of Repeal speeches. Irish American Repealers depicted their movement as part and parcel of the global developments that had followed the post-Napoleonic Vienna settlement of 1815.2 Between 1808, with Napoleon's conquest of Spain, and the late 1820s the Spanish Empire in Latin America collapsed in the [End Page 141] face of the revolution led by the "liberator" Simón Bolívar that resulted in the emergence of numerous republics across the continent.3 From 1821 to 1829 Greece waged a protracted war of independence against the Ottoman Empire, with its independent borders finalized in 1832.4 And from 1830 to 1831 Polish nationalists initiated a failed revolution against Russian Tsardom.5 Organs of the American popular press also dedicated extensive coverage to the collapse of Spanish imperialism in Latin America. They found resonances with the story of their own republic and believed themselves to be a central inspiration for Bolívar and his followers.6 Likewise, the Greek and Polish causes gripped the popular imagination, largely though extensive coverage of these causes in these same newspapers.7 From 1840 to 1845, when O'Connell's campaign became a transatlantic phenomenon, Irish American Catholics took advantage of American interest in and remembrance of these causes. American Repealers directly compared their own movement with these momentous global events. These comparisons constituted an inventive rhetorical strategy for pressuring non-Catholic Americans into supporting Repeal. Irish Catholic Repealers sought to connect Repeal with a coherent transnational narrative of oppressed revolutionaries pushing toward national self-government and to situate Repeal at the apex of these post-Napoleonic popular-nationalist movements. Repeal speeches across the United States repeatedly drew on romanticized depictions of the virtuous revolutionary causes of Greece, Poland, and Spanish America. In holding up these heroized and celebrated visions of recent world history, Repealers could explicitly compare [End Page 142] their own cause with the others and could argue that they were worthy of association with romantic heroes like Bolivar, and that Repeal was a key feature of this new age. Repealers drew on these examples to expose the hypocrisy of Americans who had donated liberally to previous humanitarian causes, but who were too timid to do the same when it involved challenging British imperial power in Ireland and elsewhere. Repealers derided the foolishness of those who accepted the logic of British liberals who spoke of a progressive, civilizing imperialism, but who did nothing for those eight millions in the most destitute component of the Union; and they exposed the baseless paranoia of those who played into Britain's hands by raising the alarm that Repeal constituted a foreign, popish conspiracy to entrench papal rule in Ireland, strengthen global Catholicism, and undermine an Anglo-Saxon Protestant vanguard. Irish Americans, it was said, could "discern through these contemptible vaporings the power of British influence, even on the free soil of America."8 Repealers attempted to exploit emerging currents of American national identification as the global center of a new humanitarianism that would expand American values, republicanism, and antimonarchical ideals into the heartlands of the European imperial world.9 According to Repeal rhetoric...

‘That still goes on, doesn't it, in their religion?’ British values, Islam and vernacular discourse

AbstractThis article explores ‘everyday’ or ‘vernacular’ conceptions of Muslims, Islam and their relationship to ‘British values’. Drawing on original data from focus groups in the East of England, it argues that the relationship is typically constructed around a series of binary pairings. Where Islam is held to be traditional, conservative, pious and outmoded, British values are seen as progressive, liberal, secular and modern. This opposition matters for three reasons. First, it is a contingent construction rather than reflection of realities; one that draws upon Orientalist tropes and militates against alternative ways of imagining this relationship. Second, it does important work at the vernacular level in explaining political dynamics, especially successful integration (because of British liberalism) and the failure thereof (because of Islam's traditionalism). Third, its predication on an essentialised claim of difference inflects even competing efforts to story the British values/Islam relationship which tend, we suggest, to reinforce the positioning of Muslims and their values as somehow beyond or external to Britishness.

The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century, by Helena Rosenblatt

Helena Rosenblatt proposes ‘a word history’ (p. 3, emphasis original) of liberalism in three neat acts: its invention in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France, its transformation in mid-nineteenth-century Germany, and its adoption by the USA in the early twentieth century. The methodology is influenced by Quentin Skinner and the Cambridge School and, accordingly, Rosenblatt rigorously contextualises the word ‘liberalism’, interrogating its shifting meanings across time and space. But the book is more than simply a history of the word liberalism: it provides a lucid overview of the development of liberal thought in France, Germany and the USA across the long nineteenth century. However, there are some frustrating omissions and the book is somewhat marred by its author’s insistence on ‘rescuing’ liberalism and restoring its putative core values. The book begins with a chapter on liberalism’s ‘prehistory’ in Ancient Rome and early modern Britain. Here Rosenblatt establishes her vision of liberalism, grounding it in ideas about generosity and duty to the common good as well as freedom. Thereafter the book proceeds chronologically through the long nineteenth century, beginning with the French revolutionary era and its impact on the emergence and spread of liberalism. Rosenblatt’s endpoint is a little less clear, and the final chapter on liberalism becoming a ‘creed’ in the USA condenses the history of twentieth-century liberalism up until the Second World War into just under twenty pages. Throughout the book, the analysis ranges across politics, religion, education and the ubiquitous nineteenth-century ‘social question’; there are also sections on Gladstone and the British Liberal Party alongside the core material from French, German and American political thinkers, leaders and actors. The breadth of the work creates a rather tricky balancing act, however, and the analysis is repeatedly pulled back to French liberalism, the focus of much of Rosenblatt’s previous work. At times, there is a sense that the author cannot quite escape the pull of France, even while insisting on the contribution of often overlooked German liberals, and on the significance of liberalism’s reformulation in the USA.

John Stuart Mill‘s Liberal Reformism and the New Concept of Freedom, Property and Government

The article is devoted to a key moment in the history of British liberalism when, under the influence of the Industrial Revolution, the need arose for a revision of classical liberal teaching. On the border between classical and social liberalism stands the figure of the British philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill who attempted to update the basic tenets of liberal ideology. Taking into account the socio-economic reality of his time, he set out to revise the foundations of liberal ideology, rethinking in modern times the problems of freedom, property and governance by expanding their perimeter in favour of the masses. This article also details Stuart Mill’s concept of individualism and collectivism in the context of freedom and the right to self-determination.

Making the Twain Meet: The Invention of Confucian Religion and Kang Youwei’s Political Theology

ABSTRACT Kang Youwei康有為 (1858–1927) was a late Qing intellectual who pioneered modernization efforts in China during an era of foreign imperialism. In this paper, I trace the way in which he reformed Confucianism to fit into the Protestant category of religion. I then argue that his reformed Confucianism could be understood as offering a political theology. Echoing British liberalism, Kang’s reformed Confucianism adopts the progressive theory of history grounded in divine providence used by British imperialists to justify imperial expansion. I conclude by cautioning against attempts to frame Kang’s reformed Confucianism as a potential successor to Western liberalism.

Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism, by Christopher Taylor

Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism, by Christopher Taylor

In Defence of an Unalienated Politic: a Critical Appraisal of the ‘No Outsiders’ Protests

The trope of the repressive Muslim, obstinately attached to their regressive world views, recalcitrant antagoniser of modernity, has become a thoroughly familiar drama. Redundant spectacles abound: events often highly mediatised, substantiated by conservativism and liberalism alike, deployed as justification for policing, surveillance and invasion. The 2019 protests against the ‘No Outsiders’ LGBT lessons held in Birmingham, England are one such spectacle. Foregoing the dominant portrayal of the protests as an event of Muslim homophobia, I instead examine the social processes that render the event exceptional in the British imaginary and the statecraft it subsequently enables. First, the protests’ production as a spectacular event is analysed through the historical conditions of Europe’s self-constitution through Islam-as-Threat. It is through liberalism’s amnesiac frame, one that erases its imperial and racist culpability, that the sexual exceptionalism that undergirds the spectacle of the protests can be understood. Second, reading the protests ‘sideways’, I argue, reveals how the displacement of homophobia onto Muslims continues liberalism’s tradition of situating its Others as oppositional to its purported gendered and sexual freedoms. In this context, sex education as deradicalisation of Muslim pupils becomes normalised, even as British liberalism disavows racism. Thirdly, the inclusion of queer Muslims as the authentic voice emerging from the cross-sections of queer and Muslim identity is critiqued as a ‘non-performativity’. Rather than offering a relational understanding of queer, Muslim and queer Muslim vulnerabilities, this inclusion elides an intersectional analysis of British homonationalism. I conclude by arguing for ‘an unalienated politics’ that is vigilant to co-optation, refusing to treat queerness as an exceptional site of injury. As such, how can we imagine the ‘queer’ in queer Muslim as a political position that refuses to capitulate to the hierarchisation of the human?