First published in 1990, Victorian Liberalism brings together leading political theorists and historians in order to examine the interplay of theory and ideology in nineteenth-century liberal thought and practice.
First published in 1990, Victorian Liberalism brings together leading political theorists and historians in order to examine the interplay of theory and ideology in nineteenth-century liberal thought and practice. Drawing on a wide range of source material, the authors examine liberal thinkers and politicians from Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill to William Gladstone and Joseph Chamberlain. Connections are drawn throughout between the different languages which made-up liberal discourse and the relations between these vocabularies and the political movements and changing social reality they sought to explain. The result is a stimulating volume that breaks new ground in the study of political history and the history of political thought.
Contributors
1. Introduction
2. The legacy of Adam Smith
3. Whigs and
liberals
4. The origin of liberal utilitarianism
5. Bentham and the
nineteenth-century revolution in government
6. J. S. Mill, liberalism, and
progress
7. Herbert Spencer's liberalism from social statics to social
dynamics
8. T. H. Green and the morality of Victorian liberalism
9.
Gladstonianism, the provinces, and popular political culture, 1860-1906
10.
The new liberalism and its aftermath
11. From liberal radicalism to
conservative corporatism Index
Edited by Richard Bellamy