Walter Bagehot and Liberal Realism

Extract

In the decline of his life, a disappointed man might well ask himself what destiny would have held in store for him if at some crucial juncture of his maturity he had accepted the earnest advice of a solicitous friend or even of a keen-sighted foe. Today liberalism is confronted with a similar question. It is on the defensive in all parts of the Western world except in the United States. Even there its position is deceptive. Perhaps it survives tenuously under the artificial protective canvas of postwar inflation. Today one can hardly question this threatened eclipse of liberalism. Because of this foreboding, disturbing questions haunt the liberal. What deficiency in liberalism is leading to the abandonment of its tenets throughout Europe? Was there counsel offered and ignored in the past which might have retarded the infirmities of age?

The answer to the first question has long been apparent. Yet in practice contemporary liberalism, both of the progressive and nineteenth-century varieties, has never assimilated its essential meaning. Following the French Revolution and the English Reform Act, liberalism began its long history of divorcing theory from practice. In the splendor of Victorian industrial success, this separation was not driven into the consciousness either of the intellectual leaders or of the people. But with the tension, domestic and international, of the eighties, liberals themselves, like T. H. Green and then Hobhouse, undertook the task of correcting some of the glaring discrepancies between the doctrine and the reality. In the light of the basically abstract character of liberalism, these collectivist renovations now appear like amateurish tinkering with a vastly complex apparatus.

Liberal doctrine had indeed long been suffering from a negative attitude toward the state. But this was simply a diagnostic symptom of an even deeper defect: liberalism's unconscionable indifference to the material conditions of society, and its ensuing failure to put its theories to the test of the social reality.