Bernard Bosanquet and the Legacy of British Idealism (review)

In recent years "British" Idealism has been subject to sweeping re-evaluation and rehabilitation. The essays collected here by Will Sweet compare Bernard Bosanquet's ideas and arguments with those of Idealists and non-Idealists alike, and establish that Bosanquet (1848–1923) was far more clear-headed and insightful than denunciations of the "Idealist school" by Moore, Russell, C. D. Broad, Harold Prichard, and A. J. Ayer suggest. Sweet observes in his introduction that Bosanquet has long remained in the shadows of T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley, that Bosanquet was a prolific writer who shaped philosophical debates across the English-speaking world for decades, and that estimations of his social theory and political philosophy, and to a lesser extent his metaphysics, have diverted attention from his contributions to logic and aesthetics.

Essays by Sandra M. den Otter, Peter Nicholson, and Kevin Sullivan deal directly with Bosanquet's social philosophy. Bosanquet was engaged from the 1880s in work with the Charity Organisation Society, an association that set the tone of late Victorian and Edwardian debates over British poverty. He and his wife served on the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws (1905–1909), against whose majority statement—cautioning against such direct assistance to the poor as might undermine their personal responsibility and "character"—the Fabian socialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb issued their famous minority report. Bosanquet's major statement of social policy as political philosophy was The Philosophical Theory of the State (1899), a book maligned by conservatives and liberals, as well as by some socialists. Den Otter relates Bosanquet's social work to his political philosophy, but in the process she neglects to emphasize a major point put forth in her book, British Idealism and Social Explanation (1996), namely, that the Idealists' articulations of a "character" ideal had an impact across the ideological spectrum of late Victorian-Edwardian thought—witness the Fabians' pledge to implement policies encouraging the optimum development of character in each and all.

State action, according to Bosanquet, promotes, or should promote, a moral end, the best life, and expressly, the best life for all. But the state can act in ways that hamper achievement of the best life. It is not possible, Nicholson suggests, to conclude that Bosanquet actually improves upon arguments of Green and Bradley. The value of Bosanquet's claims about rights, duties, and state (as opposed to private) action lies in their nuances. It is no simple matter for the individual to fulfill the duties of his or her role because individuals cannot often foresee consequences of their actions for themselves and others. It is all the more difficult to calculate the effect of state actions, which apply categorically (i.e., to persons in a given situation) or universally. Bosanquet insists on the state's responsibility to achieve the best life for its citizens, but he ultimately advocates a principle of individual initiative expressed by Gandhi: become the change you wish to see in the world. Kevin Sullivan reconciles Bosanquet's ideas about self-realization or self-fulfillment to "perfectionism" (pace Thomas Hurka) and compellingly demonstrates Bosanquet's relevance to recent debates over entitlement, justice, and welfare. He concludes that, while Bosanquet validated private property, the "classical liberal defense of the free market . . . relies on a bogus conception [to Bosanquet] of the highest good" (238).

Andrew Vincent demonstrates that, whereas Idealist contemporaries tended to dismiss the maturing discipline of sociology as excessively empirical and shot through with dubious claims about "laws" governing the social organism, Bosanquet took seriously Emile Durkheim's attempts to explain the springs of social life, though he registered doubt that sociology could transcend philosophy or render it obsolete. Essays by James Allard, Phillip Ferreira, and Fred Wilson comment on Bosanquet's logic. They concur that Bosanquet's logic differs in certain respects from Hegel's (a false equation of Russell's), that his defense of deductive logic (against J. S. Mill) and use of inference are important, and that...