Bernard Bosanquet and the Legacy of British Idealism (review)

Bernard Bosanquet was one of the intellectual heavyweights of what has variously been termed the School of Green, the British Hegelians, or the British Idealists, and his interests were encyclopaedic. As with many of his colleagues his interests began with the universe, and man's and God's relation to it, and then included ethics, aesthetics, logic, metaphysics, education, moral and political philosophy, social policy, and sociology. Because for the Idealists all experience is a unity, all of his thought was related and thoroughly permeated with the same principles. He was well aware of sharing a common sympathy with the likes of T. H. Green, Edward Caird, and F. H. Bradley and even confessed to expressing the thought of a common mind. In Bernard Bosanquet and the Legacy of British Idealism, William Sweet has collected a formidable array of scholars to dissect these various interests in order to discern what is living and what is dead in Bosanquet's works.

Bosanquet is best known for his political philosophy, particularly the enduring and much maligned Philosophical Theory of the State (1899). as one of the leading figures of the British Hegelians, both politically and philosophically, he became for many the unacceptable face of Idealism. even his friends and admirers agreed that his obtuse philosophical style made his meaning almost impenetrable, yet he was capable of admirable clarity when addressing and applying principles to social questions. The conclusions he drew and the policies he advocated, however, precipitated a not-altogether-deserved reputation for being an opponent of state intervention, an advocate of "self-help" and a free market economy, and of being altogether unfeeling and unsympathetic about the plight of the poor. Famously, he was the target of l. T. Hobhouse's invective against Hegelian state absolutism in The Metaphysical Theory of the State (1917).

Bosanquet's reputation has been in rehab now for some years, and many of the authors in Bernard Bosanquet and the Legacy of British Idealism have been responsible for the success of his rehabilitation. Peter Nicholson, for example, has dispelled the myth that Bosanquet was a realist militarist in international relations, and in this volume he argues with reference to Essays and Addresses (1889) that the abstractness of the principle of state interference outlined in Philosophical Theory of the State is better understood and appreciated when compared with essays in which Bosanquet enters into the details of the legitimate activities of the state vis-à-vis those of individuals and groups. The issue is one not of minimal state activity but of the right sort of state activity—that which does not undermine individual responsibility and enables rather than disables the poor. At a time when we expect the state to do more and more—summed up nicely in Anthony King's term "Administrative Overload"—Bosanquet, in Nicholson's view, provides a valuable corrective by stressing the importance of participatory citizenship and democratic revitalisation.

Even though Bosanquet is often viewed as more resistant to state socialism and more supportive of private property and laissez-faire capitalism than his fellow Idealists, he was nevertheless committed to the same principles by which to judge whether a social ill was best left to individual enterprise or state legislation. He sympathized with neither the subjectivist nor hedonist justifications of the free market because he believed that both rested on an impoverished view of human nature in which individuals are viewed as isolated sentient appropriators driven by demand and motivated by calculating consumption. Such a view neglects the capacity of humans to realise a higher self through participation in art, religion, philosophy, and social morality. The achievement of the elevated life, or highest good, may well be best facilitated by private property and a free market. Indeed, in terms of the individual trajectory in life, private property gives an outward unity and continuity that is necessary for the inward unity of the person's moral life. Bosanquet's support for...