Liberalism: The Life of an Idea by Edmund Fawcett (review)

Edmund Fawcett’s Liberalism: The Life of an Idea makes a major contribution to our understanding of a concept that, for two centuries, has been central to Western political and cultural thought and practice. The result of enormously wide-ranging scholarship, the book nevertheless has a narrative vibrancy and lack of jargon that make it very easy to read. It is organized into a substantial introduction, which lays out its broad approach, followed by four chronological parts: “The Confidence of Youth (1830–1880),” “Liberalism in Maturity and the Struggle with Democracy (1880–1945),” “Second Chance and Success (1945–1989),” and “After 1989.” The introduction, part one, and much of part two are especially valuable for Victorianists. Nevertheless, the whole of the book can be read for insights that usefully add to recent work on the relations between nineteenth-century thought and the contemporary world, especially those addressing the ongoing impact of neoliberalism in Western polities.

The main value of the book as a contribution to our understanding of liberalism lies in its breadth and its approach. It is broad not only historically, but also geographically. Each part (and the thematic chapters within each part) takes up a series of pertinent and related issues across four nation-states: the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the United States. It does this through a focus on individual thinkers or political figures in each of the countries. Thus, for example, chapter 3, “Liberalism in Practice: Four Exemplary Politicians,” has sections on Abraham Lincoln, Édouard René de Laboulaye, Eugen Richter, and William Gladstone. Using individuals to represent specific sets of concerns in distinct national traditions allows him to trace out the similarities and differences within liberalism across national boundaries at any given time.

The geographical breadth offers rich suggestions, especially for Victorianists: nineteenth-century liberals read each other’s work voraciously. Cross-channel and cross-Atlantic visits were the norm for many of them, and their solutions to perceived problems were often articulated as responses to or modifications of what other liberals were arguing. In this context, another of the book’s virtues is Fawcett’s grasp of the broader political contexts within which specific liberal concerns and practices were articulated. His discussion of marginalism in chapter 7 (“The Economic Powers of the Modern State and Modern Market”), for example, is significantly enhanced by the way he locates it in nuanced accounts of governmental and political machinations.

Fawcett spells out his overall approach in the preface and introduction. Asking what kind of thing liberalism is, he replies that it is “a modern practice of politics,” which arose in the years after 1815. This practice, he claims, “has a history, practitioners and outlook to guide them” (xii). Although notions we typically associate with liberalism (such as liberty) can be traced back well before the post-Napoleonic period, Fawcett’s concern with liberalism as a “practice of politics” enables him to avoid the problem of how far back we have to go to establish origins. He argues that in the years of unprecedented political and social upheaval following the Napoleonic Wars, liberal practice was all about finding “a foothold of stability” that was informed by “a search for an ethically acceptable order of human progress among civic equals without recourse to undue power” (xiii, xv). This outlook was shaped by four guiding principles: a belief that society is inherently conflictual, a distrust of power, faith in human progress, and a respect for people. Fawcett is alive to what he calls “the cross-currents and inner tensions” of these guiding ideas, and his account retains a suppleness throughout the introduction and the substantive chapters, particularly in the way he distinguishes various liberal practitioners’ positions from related conservative and socialist positions (14). Conceiving of liberalism as a practice of politics with an outlook guided by four principles that, in any given instance, are in tension also allows him to avoid “partitioning it into distinct ‘liberalisms’” (26).

This is a book...