Chapter 10 - Radicalism, Gladstone, and the liberal critique of Disraelian ‘imperialism’

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Within the multiform and sometimes contradictory web of ideas labelled ‘liberalism’ in Victorian England there was an important strand of thinking best described as popular radicalism. It emerged in the eighteenth century, finding its first full expression in the work of Paine, and ended with Hobson and Brailsford in the early twentieth century, at which point it was subsumed in what passed in Britain for Marxism. In the grand narrative of radicalism the world was divided – to use James Mill's and Bentham's dramatic language – between the ‘Many’ and the ‘Few’. The Many were the carriers of freedom in religion, in politics and in the sphere of the market; the Few were the traditional autocratic elite who, through privilege and monopolies, controlled and exploited the Many. Until late in the nineteenth century the core of the Few was the landed class, but it also embraced a cluster of interests including the military, the established church, businesses dependent on aristocratic favour, the London professional and political elites and the key institutions of the City of London that had financed the revolution after 1688. The elite controlled the state and taxation and used it to drain the wealth of the ‘producing classes’ – small capitalists and workers alike – to further its own interests.