Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

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James Thompson

discussions of liberty, though they do suggest some of the potential dangers

in doing so.

Berlin’s sketch of ‘positive’ liberty details a variety of conceptions of

liberty rang ing from autonomy and self-realisation to political participation.

These are, as we shall see, importantly distinct kinds of claims that are not

best understood as species of positive liberty. Quentin Skinner has offered

strong evidence that negative accounts of liberty need not deﬁne liberty

purely in terms of the absence of restraint, and that what he calls neo-Roman

theories of liberty cast political participation and vigilance as essential to

the maintenance of the free state, without which liberty was extinguished

(Skinner 1998,p.18, 2002). The emphasis placed in some histories of

republicanism on the view that liber ty was the obverse of domination,

rather than interference, further reveals the limited purchase of Berlin’s

famous contrast for comprehending the complexity of histor ical accounts

of liberty (Pettit 1997,pp.21–41). Berlin’s insistence that liberty should

not be confused with the conditions of its exercise draws a sharp divide

between economic and political liberty. In Berlin’s terminology, defenders of

‘effective’ liberty mistook considerations about the conditions of liberty for

contributions to its deﬁnition (Berlin 2002b, p. 169). However, this division

is far from clear, and was forcefully contested by many late nineteenth-

and twentieth-century advocates of state intervention to enhance liberty.

Historical reconstruction is thus hampered by undue reliance upon Berlin’s

account.

Mill’s paean to liberty has often been taken as a deﬁnitive statement of

mid-century opinion. In On Liberty, Mill distinguished between self- and

other-regarding actions. Liberty in self-regarding action was crucial to the

development of individuality and progress. Mill acknowledged the extent

of other-regarding actions, but argued that restrictions on liberty were jus-

tiﬁed only where these harmed others (or perhaps the interests of others).

He did not, however, offer in On Liberty an exhaustive analysis of harmful

actions, nor was the book intended as a comprehensive account of his views

on the related but distinct question of state action (Mill 1989b, pp. 14–15,

94, 95–6). Mill’s purpose in On Liberty was to assert the value of liberty

and, in particular, to demonstrate the threat posed by the development of

mass opinion to the social diversity on which progress depended. Mill con-

trasted social conformity with the virtues of vigorous individuality, energetic

activism and rational self-fashioning – attributes close to, but subtly differ-

ent from, those celebrated in contemporary accounts of ‘character’ (Mill

1989b, pp. 61, 63–5). This preference is equally evident in his recasting of

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utilitarianism, through the distinction between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ plea-

sures (Mill and Bentham 1987,pp.276–83). It is not, consequently, pre-

existing wants that necessarily demand satisfaction, since the cultivation of

higher pleasures is crucial to the maximisation of utility and the attain-

ment of progress. Liberty fosters individuality, and with it, progress. The

value of ring-fencing self-regarding actions is the space this creates for the

development of the ‘higher’ pleasures. These goods are the preserve of

the autonomous and rational individual, capable of reﬂecting upon and

progressively revising his or her own ends (Skorupski 1998,pp.43, 45). The

protection of individuals from interference in their own projects serves the

larger goal of fostering those virtues essential to the enjoyment of higher

pleasures (Jones 2000,p.31).

Mill’s distinction between self- and other-regarding actions means that his

discussion of the former in On Liberty needs to be supplemented by his view

of liberty with regard to the latter. Mill attributed great importance to active

citizenship in fostering the individuality of the populace by ‘strengthening

their active faculties, exercising their judgment, and giving them a familiar

knowledge of the subjects with which they are thus left to deal’. Mill argued

that ‘these are not questions of liberty’, as deﬁned in On Liberty, but pro-

ceeded to warn that ‘without these habits and powers a free constitution can

neither be worked nor preserved; as is exempliﬁed by the too-often transi-

tory nature of political freedom in countries where it does not rest upon a

sufﬁcient basis of local liberties’ (Mill 1989b, pp. 109–10). This recognition

of the signiﬁcance, and demands, of maintaining ‘political freedom’ was

ampliﬁed in the Considerations on Representative Government, where Mill dis-

coursed upon the educative value of political participation and its necessity

for the preservation of what he terms ‘free government’. Mill insisted that

‘the most important liber ty of the nation’ is ‘that of being governed only

by laws assented to by its elected representatives’ and commends that ‘pop-

ular suffrage which is essential to freedom’ (Mill 1977b, pp. 377, 432, 527).

For Mill, civil and political liberties were complementary (Urbinati 2002,

p. 12;UrbinatiandZakaras2007). He argued in The Subjection of Women

that, after material necessities, ‘freedom is the ﬁrst and strongest want of

human nature’, and that social duty and freedom were mutually reinforcing

in civilised communities which embraced ‘the liberty of each to govern his

conduct by his own feelings of duty, and by such laws and social restraints as

his own conscience can subscribe to’ (Mill 1989b, p. 212). Finally, freedom

could and indeed must be enjoyed by all, as ‘the freedom of one has no

solid security but in the equal freedom of the rest’ (Mill 1977b, p. 610).

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Mill’s view that political par ticipation and the freedom to pursue one’s

own ends were parts of a whole resonated widely in mid-Victorian Britain.

Rooted in radical accounts of aristocratic power and the value of ‘indepen-

dence’, popular liberalism in the 1860sand1870s attributed great impor-

tance both to widespread involvement in politics, not least through the

suffrage, and to reducing the scope of the feudal state. The former was

regarded as essential to achieving the latter. Popular conceptions of liberty

prized self-determination, for both persons and nations, and sought the

creation of a polity that fostered equally the values of political participation

and personal independence. These kinds of concerns are also apparent in

the conceptions of liberty upheld by advanced liberals, and embodied in

some of the arguments about political reform in the 1860sand1880s.

Debate about enfranchisement between the 1850sand1880s was com-

plex and exhibited a variety of approaches to drawing the boundaries of the

electorate. Many of the arguments were conducted in terms of the relation-

ship between taxation, property and representation, or through the more

radical but equally traditional appeal to alleged ancient constitutional pro-

prieties. The positions propounded by Robert Lowe and William Gladstone

provided prominent targets in the debate. Many of the university liberals

who contributed to Essays on Reform in 1867 were concerned to counter

Lowe’s utilitarian case against reform by urging the superior credentials of a

wider suffrage for producing good government. Gladstone’s moral case for

incorporating those ﬁt to exercise the vote both reinforced and reﬂected a

broader preoccupation with ‘character’ as the prerequisite for possession of

the suffrage. Millian links were made between liberty and the vote. Radi-

cals such as G. J. Holyoake connected freedom with assent, whether direct

or indirect, to the laws and compared the voteless to slaves (Biagini 1992,

p. 258). The contributors to Essays on Reform offered a range of arguments

for extending the franchise. Dicey’s essay on the balance of classes argued

that belief in ‘free government rests ultimately on the conviction that a

people gains more by the experience, than it loses by the errors of liber ty’,

and Kinnear’s account of redistribution charged oligarchical government

with destroying freedom by subordinating the many to the authority of the

few (Guttsman 1967,pp.65, 99).

In recent years, the perfectionist aspects of Mill’s view of liberty have

come into increasing focus (Biagini 1996b, pp. 36–7; Jones 2000,pp.36–

7;Ryan1998,p.519). Mill’s insistence that opinions should be subjected

to active criticism was integral both to his arguments for free speech and

to his account of the pursuit of the good (Ryan 1998,p.509;Urbinati

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Modern liberty redeﬁned

2002). It was, though, essential for Mill that individuals should be allowed

to follow their own conception of the good, though the nature and extent

of Mill’s pluralism, given his utilitarian allegiances, has proved intensely

controversial (Mill 1989b, p. 16). These aspects of Mill’s thought have led

many commentators to describe his account of liberty as, at least in part, a

‘positive’ one (Jones 2000,p.36;Pyle1994, p. xiii; Ryan 1998,p.509). Mill’s

attitude to less developed societies, along with his advocacy of self-criticism

and engaged debate, presumed that it was a certain kind of individual whose

pursuit of the good would be protected by the liberty principle. Much of

the wide-ranging criticism of Mill’s position in On Liberty distinguished,

in deeply un-Benthamite fashion, between liberty and licence (Pyle 1994;

Rees 1978). These commentaries, which often utilised the language of

‘character’ and stressed the importance of shared values, reveal the limited

pluralism of much mid-century liberalism. Value pluralism, whilst some-

times apparent, for instance in the work of Acton, did not occupy the

central position that it came to assume in much twentieth-century lib-

eralism (Acton 1907b). Perfectionist positions were correspondingly more

popular. Acton himself married recognition of the importance of variety,

embracing advocacy of the multinational state, with a moralised conception

of liberty as the ‘reign of conscience’ (Watson 1994,p.61).

Many of the most common criticisms of Mill’s On Liberty were elaborated

with great vigour by Fitzjames Stephen (Stephen 1873a). In Liberty, Equality,

Fraternity Stephen emphasised the interconnectedness of persons and the

imperious demands of morality in the face of human weakness and division.

Stephen upheld an especially strenuous conception of manliness in which

‘to be less strong is to be less of a man’ (Stephen 1873a, p. 221). Deeply

impressed by Hobbes’ theory of language, Stephen argued that the only

meaningful deﬁnition of liberty was ‘absence of restraint’ (Stephen 1873a,

p. 172). Such liberty was, however, ‘a big name for a small thing’ (Stephen

1892,p.64), merely a question of ‘who wants to do what, by what restraint

he is prevented from doing it, and for what reason it is proposed to remove

that restraint’ (Stephen 1873a, p. 182). For Stephen, liberty depended upon

power, and was not an end in itself. Mill’s enthusiasm for diversity was

misplaced, and his belief that liberty was compatible with utilitarianism

mistaken. Stephen offered a rebuke to Mill from one ‘trained in the school

of Locke, Bentham and Austin’ (Stephen 1873a, p. 196).

The Millian rejoinder to Fitzjames Stephen was delivered by John Morley

(Morley 1873, 1874). Predictably, Morley fastened on Stephen’s presentation

of liberty as a negation, countering that Mill rightly championed liberty ‘as

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one of the most powerful positive conditions of attaining the highest kind

of human excellence’ (Morley 1873,p.238). Less predictably, Morley also

criticised Stephen’s methodology, complaining that ‘he does not practice

the historic method’ (Morley 1873,p.252) but treats society like a mathe-

matical puzzle. Morley was not, in fact, entirely enamoured of the historical

method, arguing that in practice it had encouraged a debilitating for m of

relativism by focusing attention on how beliefs arose rather than whether

they were true. His appeal to the historical method against Stephen reﬂects

the mid-century prestige accorded the comparative approach, which was

increasingly conﬂated with evolutionary perspectives. Stephen had in fact

cited the foremost exponent of the historical method, his mentor Henry

Maine, and had attacked Mill precisely for his overly sanguine use of his-

tory. Yet Stephen, like Morley, while acknowledging the historical method

as distinguishing the nineteenth century from the eighteenth, insisted on

the need for rigorous reason and moral vision in the conduct of politics.

The reception of Mill’s work provides a crucial backdrop to the emer-

gence of idealist accounts of liberty later in the century. The relationship

between Mill and the idealists has often been obscured by their tendency

to attack his individualism and, consequently, to challenge his account of

harming the interest of others. These accounts, in turn, propagated a partic-

ular view of the sharpness and character of the divide between mid-century

and later conceptions of liberty. Real differences certainly existed between

Mill and the idealists, and the latter’s accounts of Mill are an important part

of their work, but these should not be taken as wholly adequate accounts

of ideas of liberty in the period. This point can be developed by a consid-

eration of the most inﬂuential and signiﬁcant of the idealists, namely T. H.

Green.

Green was one of the suspects rounded up by Berlin in his account of

‘positive’ liberty (Berlin 2002b, pp. 180, 196). Recent work has, however,

done much to demonstrate the complexities of Green’s perspective (Brink

2003,pp.82–3; Kelly 2006; Nicholson 1990,pp.116–22). In his discussion

of the different senses of freedom, Green described three forms of freedom:

formal, juristic and real. The ﬁrst of these simply denoted the freedom of

the will in moral matter s. The second referred to society’s recognition of

formal freedom, which was essentially a matter of law in nineteenth-century

Britain. The law provided and protected equal juristic freedom for all by

guaranteeing certain legal rights, but did not, generally speaking, enforce

particular actions. Real freedom in contrast must be exercised to be enjoyed,

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and required self-realisation through participation in the common good

(Green 1885–8, ii,pp.308–33). Green’s afﬁnities with Kant are manifest in

his focus upon the good will as constitutive of real freedom, and in his highly

inclusive account of the moral community.

His Aristotelian perfectionism

is apparent in his insistence that only through the process of self-realisation,

which was only possible in the polity, could real freedom be attained (Brink

2003,pp.44–50; Kelly 2006,p.530). His Hegelian and Pauline debts are

evident in his historicist and immanentist account of the content of the

common good (Boucher and Vincent 2001; Vincent and Plant 1984,pp.6–

18).

Green’s absolute idealism underwrites his belief in the harmony of

interests evident in his proposed identity between self-realisation and the

common good (Nicholson 1990,pp.54–64).

Green’s championing of real freedom led him to insist that ‘when we

speak of freedom as something to be so highly prized, we mean a pos-

itive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing

or enjoying’ (Green 1885–8, iii,p.371). It is this stress upon freedom

as dependent upon a positive power to act that was most signiﬁcant in

late nineteenth-century debates. The broader signiﬁcance and response to

Green’s views can best be understood by addressing the issue of effective

freedom, which played a key, if controversial, role in liberal argument in the

period.

In his introduction to Samuel’s restatement of liberal principles of 1902,

Herbert Asquith argued that freedom ‘in its true meaning’ could not be con-

ﬁned to the removal of constraints, as ‘the true signiﬁcance of Liberty’ lay

in enabling individuals ‘to make the best use of faculty, opportunity, energy,

life’. This realisation, he suggested, was apparent in liberalism’s new empha-

sis upon ‘education, temperance, better dwellings, an improved social and

industrial environment’ (Samuel 1902, p. x). The claim that social reform

extended opportunity, and thus increased freedom, was central to new lib-

eral argument. L. T. Hobhouse argued that ‘freedom to choose and follow

an occupation, if it is to become fully effective means equality with others

in the opportunities for following such occupation’ and made repeated use

of the notion of effective liberty (Hobhouse 1911,p.32). His fellow new

liberal J. A. Hobson proclaimed that the creation of ‘equal opportunities for

1 There is a valuable discussion of Green’s relationship to Kant in Brink 2003,pp.92–107.

2 On Green and religion, see De Sanctis 2005, which emphasises his ‘Puritanism’, and Leighton 2004

for a reading that downplays the importance of the German theological tradition of Strauss and

Baur.

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self-development’ expressed ‘a fuller appreciation and realisation of indi-

vidual liberty’ (Hobson 1974, p. xi). This emphasis on liberty as equality

of opportunity proved highly controversial. Edwardian individualists por-

trayed such reformism as a socialist betrayal of liberty, denying that absence

of material resources constituted a lack of liberty.

Moralised conceptions of liberty certainly could, but need not, sup-

port more extensive conceptions of state action. Hobhouse’s relationship

to Green was complex, but his developmental understanding of liberty

presumed the existence of ‘a possible ethical harmony’ (Hobhouse 1911,

p. 129). Both Hobhouse and Hobson deﬁned rights and duties in terms of

the demands of the common good. It is important, though, to recognise that

perfectionist and activist accounts of liberty did not necessitate advocacy of

enhanced state action. Differences over effective freedom often had greater

implications for views of the state. Green’s emphasis upon liberty as capacity

was invoked in accounts of liberty in terms of equality of opportunity, but

this move was resisted by some idealists, like Bosanquet, who championed

a highly moralised conception of liberty (Bosanquet 1923,pp.116–41). In

order to comprehend better these disputes, it is necessary to investigate

changing liberal views of the ends of government.

The debates about reform in the 1860s reveal the continued purchase of

notions of ‘good government’ in liberal argument. This ubiquitous phrase

requires, however, some scrutiny to determine its meaning. As historians

like Parry have demonstrated, the governing ethos of mid-century

liberalism cannot be deﬁned exclusively in terms of laissez-faire (Parry 1993,

pp. 195–227). Good government was required to embody and encourage

a virtuous society (Stephen 1862, Stephen 1873b). Arguments about the

relationship between church and state were centrally concerned with how

best to encourage Christian morality (Parry 1986). Widespread support for

a limited, if not minimalist, approach to central government rested upon

the notion that character was chieﬂy fostered in civil society and local

government. Legislation to enforce contracts or bankruptcy laws established

the requisite responsibility to ensure good and bad character received their

just rewards (Hilton 1988). These moral arguments could be combined

with economic arguments that emphasised the progressive credentials of

market society. Adherence to the moral economy of free trade appealed on

a number of grounds. Free trade promised a reduction in the power of the

landed interest through cheaper food, but it also embodied a broader vision

of a purged and moralised state (Trentmann 2008). Acclaim for Gladstonian

budget-making reﬂected the common liberal view that free and fair trade

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Modern liberty redeﬁned

were identical, and that a socially just balance between indirect and direct

taxation was founded on the economically beneﬁcial reduction of tariffs

(Biagini 1992).

Whilst fostering liberty was always central to liberal accounts of the

ends of government, it was never the sole aim. The suppression of harm

provided a signiﬁcant argument for state action, whose scope advanced

liberals repeatedly sought to extend (Hobhouse 1911,p.92). Radicalism,

particularly in the hands of Joseph Chamberlain, advocated social reform by

appeal to the greatest happiness of the greatest number (Biagini 1992,p.267;

Taylo r 1992,p.56). Such rhetoric was not, of course, invariably accompa-

nied by rigorous utilitarian analysis, but it was precisely the looser egalitarian

and consequentialist dimensions of utilitarianism that proved its most

signiﬁcant legacy. Explicit argument about justice became more apparent

in the later part of the period. Utilitarians from Mill to Sidgwick addressed

the issue, but it was the new liberal theorists, concerned about poverty

and inequality, for whom its demands loomed largest (Mill and Bentham

1987,pp.314–38; Sidgwick 1891,pp.107–18). For writers like Hobhouse,

the requirements of justice limited the extent to which the interests of

individuals could be sacriﬁced for the g reater good, and distinguished his

approach to the common good from that of thoroughgoing utilitarianism

(Hobhouse 1911,pp.72–3). The publication of Spencer’s volume on

justice in 1890 supplied a further impetus to a developing discussion about

justice, equally apparent in the writings of Sidgwick. Turn-of-the-century

debates about taxation, poverty and redistribution are illuminated by

examination of the long-standing and persistent dispute over the land

question.

Radical assailants of the status quo drew upon an established critique

of aristocratic control of land (Taylor 2004). For centuries, it was argued,

aristocrats had enclosed the common land of the people, and ﬂouted the

biblical insistence on common ownership. Plebeian hostility to the Game

Laws expressed, particularly in its more confrontational forms, a communi-

tarian understanding of rightful ownership (Biagini 1992,pp.87–93, 56–7).

Land ownership was highly concentrated in Victorian Britain, and reﬂected

a history of dubious appropriation and restrictive inheritance laws. Oppo-

sition to the existing regime of ownership united many liberals, extending

beyond the ranks of plebeian activists. The popularity of Henry George’s

proposals for land taxation, and the advocacy of land nationalisers, reveal

the resonance of such arguments (George 1879;Taylor2004). The notion

of rent, developed by political economists, was widely taken to suggest that

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James Thompson

the proﬁts of land ownership were unearned.

In the last quarter of the

century, the status of urban land proved increasingly controversial, with

radicals frequently attributing huge increases in site values to social

development rather than the actions of owners. The concepts of rent, and

the unearned increment, were applied by new liberals to other sources of

wealth, notably shares, in ways that echoed traditional contrasts between

the productive and the idle.

Criticism of the prevailing distribution of land and property drew upon

established classics in political thought. Locke’s account of appropriation,

sometimes regarded as a cornerstone of liberal individualism, could have

more radical implications, as new liberals like Hobhouse noted (Hobhouse

1913). The focus upon labour as the source of property claims, and the

requirement to limit appropriation in the light of the claims of others,

were mobilised to challenge the status quo. Radicalism had long presented

property as essential to the independence upon which a just political order

depended (Stedman Jones 1983a). Such arguments were traced back to the

Aristotelian emphasis upon the necessity of private property for the develop-

ment of individuality, and their redistributive implications correspondingly

emphasised. Incarnationalist theology, with its focus on building heaven

on earth, fostered an appreciation of theological arguments for common

entitlement, at least in conditions of scarcity, which were similarly used to

highlight the travails of the landless and the dangers of oligarchical control of

resources (Gore 1913). Liberal defences of the existing distribution did not

disappear, but the issue of land posed particular problems for such accounts,

apparent in the support of some individualists for land nationalisation, and

the difﬁculties experienced by those, like Spencer, who sought, abandoning

his earlier radicalism on this issue, to protect the status quo on grounds of

justice. Widespread support for free trade in land, modiﬁcation of inher-

itance and the establishment of commons demonstrates the enduring and

changing appeal of land reform to late Victorian and Edwardian liberals.

These debates embodied a wider set of arguments about state action, which

require further attention.

Collini has drawn a clear distinction between the extent of state action

in Victorian Britain and the basis upon which it was justiﬁed. He

argues that the record of legislative and government interference must be

3 The work of Henry George, and the doctrine of rent, proved highly controversial. On the relationship

between George and the socialism of the 1880s, see Wolfe 1975. On Fabian ideas about rent, see

Bevir 1989. For new liberal approaches, Clarke 1978 and Collini 1979 are helpful.

4 On the idea of the surplus due to the community, see Hobhouse 1911,p.194.

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Modern liberty redeﬁned

distinguished from the terms of debate, since mid-centur y laissez-faire prin-

ciples were concerned with the grounds rather than the extent of state action

(Collini 1977,p.239). Liberal preference for self-help, whether individual

or collective, over government action, rested as much on moral as economic

arguments (Collini 1979,pp.29–30). Anatomies of mid-century liberalism

have rightly come to emphasise the organic, rather than atomistic, character

of its individualism, but this needs to be combined with acknowledgement

of liberal recognition of communities, apparent in attitudes to redistribu-

tion of seats, and praise for associationalism (Jones 2000,pp.2–3). Municipal

activism was accordingly more congenial than central government interven-

tion, which awakened fears of centralised bureaucracy. Centralisation was

often identiﬁed with the imperialist excesses of the Second Empire, and

held to undermine the sociological underpinnings of liberty in the dispersal

of power, destroyed by Bonapartism in France. Similarly, analyses of the

dangers of bureaucracy were frequently illustrated with Prussian examples

(Parry 2001). Some mid-century liberals, including Bagehot, observed that

British celebration of localism, while an essential antidote to worship of the

state, could be excessive (Bagehot 2001,p.182; Fitzjames Stephen 1873b).

Acclaim for associational and civic activism importantly inﬂected attempts

to defend an enhanced role for central government. The development of

such arguments was also shaped by the acceptance of exceptions to the

general preference for societal over state solutions.

Much ink has been spilt outlining the increasing limitations to laissez-

faire principles within political economy, particularly in the work of Mill

(Collini 1977; Hollis 1983). Mill was concerned in particular to demon-

strate the range of state action that was non-coercive. He noted the role

that government could play in fostering rather than dictating outcomes, not

least by the provision of information. He distinguished between comple-

mentary and exclusive state services. Famously, he detailed those valuable

services, such as lighthouses, that would not be offered by a market of self-

interested agents but would beneﬁt all. His awareness of non-optimising

market behaviour informed his discussion of state regulation of working

hours (Mill 1965a, pp. 937, 968, 956–8). Mill’s sympathy towards peasant

proprietorship, his use of public beneﬁt arguments, and his recognition

of national differences, notably between England and Ireland, provided

much support for radicalism on the land question (Readman 2008). Millian

political economy examined the strengths and weaknesses of laissez-faire

on the basis of a hedonistic psychology and a utilitarian benchmark. The

latter could, however, support various degrees of state action, depending

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