Covenants without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire

Chapter 1
OXFORD LIBERALISM AND THE RETURN OF PATRIARCHY
IN 1938, GILBERT MURRAY ARGUED IN Liberality and Civilization that liberalism was "not a doctrine; it is a spirit or attitude of mind . . . an effort to get rid of prejudice so as to see the truth, to get rid of selfish passions so as to do the right."1 Murray had suggested something similar fifty years earlier, while a young fellow at Oxford in 1888. In an unpublished speech to the Russell Club, he suggested that the foundational logic of what he described as the "new liberalism" was an emerging consensus that something other than self-interest--something other than what Murray then called "that negative way the old Liberals got their enthusiasm"--must motivate liberal social theory.2 Murray's consistency on this matter demonstrates the profundity of his belief that liberalism ought to be understood as an essentially spiritual and deeply selfless approach to politics and to life, an antidote, in fact, to almost all the problems of modernity. In the final analysis, it was this faith in liberalism as essentially transformative (a faith shared by Zimmern) that would map out the contours of Murray's political theory and shape his approach to internationalism. It would also lead to future charges of utopianism.
And yet Murray's particular formulation of liberalism was hardly particular. It was, rather, conditioned by a reformist tradition within British liberalism, associated most directly with T. H. Green and his students and colleagues at Oxford, a tradition that arose out of what these earlier thinkers perceived as a deep crisis within liberal theory. For scholars such as Green, Bernard Bosanquet, Edward Caird, David Ritchie, John Muirhead, and Henry Jones, the kind of economic and political liberalism long associated with the Locke, Smith, Ricardo, and Bright had, by the mid-nineteenth century, brought about positive political change only at the cost of generating massive economic disparities, widespread poverty, and appalling working conditions for millions. These disparities had themselves led not only to class conflict but also to the rise of socialism and its "absolute negation" of the individual.3 For Green and his colleagues, liberalism could weather this crisis only if it were rearticulated in "constructive" terms.4 Such a constructive, new liberalism would seek to combine an appreciation for individualism and laissez-faire economics with a theory of moral responsibility. It would stretch liberal political theory to encompass both a notion of freedom and a commitment to the common good. Ultimately, it would explain why individuals in a liberal society should care about one another and about their community.
And in this quest, the Oxford liberals were not alone. Many of their contemporary liberal brethren (including John Stuart Mill and the American Progressives) also sought to move liberalism in a more social direction. What distinguished the first generation of Oxford liberals (those who had worked and studied with Green) both from a slightly later cohort of "new liberals" and from other socially oriented liberals in Britain (particularly those associated with Cambridge at the turn of the century) was their explicit decision to look for philosophical remedies to a perceived liberal crisis within Hegelian idealism.
While the extent to which nineteenth-century liberals embraced Hegel has been disputed, historians have long acknowledged the presence of what Charles Taylor has termed an "oddly transposed variety" of Hegelianism in the social theory of thinkers like Green, Bosanquet, and Ritchie.5 Many contemporary scholars of this particular form of idealist liberalism argue that these thinkers drew upon Hegelian logic specifically to theorize a more proactive role for the state in a liberal society.6 Likewise, these scholars see the turn of many idealist liberals toward organicism in the later half of the nineteenth century as a means through which idealistically inclined liberal theorists could naturalize the moral state, and, in essence, smuggle Hegel into liberal political thought.
This chapter takes a slightly different approach to the relationship between Hegelian state theory and the social philosophy of the idealist liberals, and, in so doing, casts a different light on some of the more fundamental discrepancies at work in the Murray's and Zimmern's liberalisms. I maintain that what motivated the Oxford liberals' move toward the organic was not merely a philosophical need to justify Hegel's state theory but, more importantly, a liberal desire to avoid excessive state authority.