Margins of Disorder: New Liberalism and the Crisis of European Consciousness (review)

Virginia Woolf's memorable date of "on or about December 1910"—not a reference to the general election of that month but to the transformation of human relations—suggests that the Edwardian era was the scene of momentous cultural change rather than simply polarizing political conflict. Thus the challenge was not to decide which side one was on but to understand and channel the change. Gal Gerson's Margins of Disorder: New Liberalism and the Crisis of European Consciousness is a rigorous and wide-ranging study of the efforts of new liberal thinkers to respond constructively to their times. The new liberalism, which embedded the individual within the community and envisioned a larger mediating role for the state in society, is usually conceived of as a Liberal vanguard that sought a middle way between social-imperialist Conservatism and social-democratic Labourism. The new liberalism's four most prominent figures were the political philosopher L. T. Hobhouse, the political economist J. A. Hobson, the social reformer C. F. G. Masterman, and the social theorist Graham Wallas. New liberals enjoyed a measure of practical influence: the Liberal government borrowed from their ideas and rhetoric while developing the welfare state before World War I.

Gerson takes us beyond this programmatic and party-political horizon to a still wider and more fundamental philosophical concern with the individual and the social, the particular and the universal, the biological and the cultural. In addition to the "gang of four," Gerson's group of new liberals and their interlocutors includes such scholars and writers as C. Delisle Burns, Frances Cornford, A. C. Haddon, Jane Harrison, Gilbert Murray, H. W. Nevinson, and J. M. Robertson. Gerson gives us a rich and nuanced view of new liberalism's complexity as an unfolding philosophy from the late Victorian to the interwar eras, its many-sided dialogue with rival philosophical systems and emerging academic disciplines, and its influence on the way we think now.

Margins of Disorder is composed of twenty short yet dense chapters, organized into four parts. Gerson begins by historicizing the new liberalism in the wake of the nineteenth-century positivist fragmentation of the Enlightenment project and the fabled fin-de-siècle revolt against reason. Drawing on the exemplary openness of John Stuart Mill's Victorian liberalism, the new liberalism undertook the task of recuperating a progressive, rationalist, and metadisciplinary project. It proceeded not in isolation but on contested terrain shared with Fabian collectivism and neo-Hegelian Idealism. While the effort of putting back together the shattered pieces of post-Enlightenment knowledge was a wager on some ultimately intelligible and ethical order, it also meant conceding ground to Fabians and idealists and coming to terms with ongoing and discrepant developments in the social and life sciences.

Gerson goes on to explore in considerable detail the engagement of new liberals with sociology and social psychology, genetics, and the study of Greek antiquity. The massification of urban-industrial society, the rise of workers' and women's movements, and the popular politics of nation and empire inspired new interpretations of the sources and dynamics of individual and collective behavior. Committed to the possibilities of democracy and reform, the new liberals resisted the pessimism of elitists and authoritarianism of moralists and came instead to the view that the interplay of psychological, social, and institutional forces could strengthen rather than weaken the organization of society. In short, repression was not the answer; integration could be achieved by forms of regulation that took the local and the plural as their starting points. The challenge of mass psychology had a parallel in evolutionary biology's shifting view of life: the displacement of a progressive Darwinian paradigm easily applied to social development by a much more random and uncertain Mendelian model. Undeterred, new liberals saw in genetics and the concomitant philosophical innovation of Bergson's élan vital the renewing power of choice as well as chance. The same latitudinarian...