The New Liberals and Chinese Civilization: Idealist Philosophy, Evolutionary Sociology, and the Quest for a Humanitarian Ethics in Edwardian Britain

Abstract

It is well known that the leading New Liberals L. T. Hobhouse and J. A. Hobson were critics of the British Empire, and their sympathy with China has been understood as an expression of their anti-imperialism. However, this article argues that this reading is at best one-sided. By examining Hobhouse's and Hobson's ethical and sociological thought, it demonstrates that their Sinophile position drew on a broader concern about the turn-of-the-century moral crisis. Informed by Idealist philosophy, positivism, and evolutionary biology, their quest for a post-Christian ethics led to an appreciation of the harmonic order of Chinese society and its secularism. The leading New Liberals’ earnest study of China on the one hand represented a departure from the Eurocentric position of British Liberals who had seen “stationary” China as a negative object lesson, and on the other anticipated a generation of Liberal/progressive thinkers who were attracted to Chinese culture.

Introduction

Against the high tide of European imperialism, L. T. Hobhouse wrote in 1911, “the awakening of the Orient, from Constantinople to Pekin, is the greatest and most hopeful political fact of our time.”¹ This exceptional sympathy with Asian peoples was shared by J. A. Hobson, the other standard-bearer of the “New Liberalism,” who, in his seminal work Imperialism, brought up the possibility that “the maintenance of these younger and more unstable [Western] civilizations depends upon unlocking the treasure house of the wisdom of the East.”² These approving remarks may be dismissed by skeptics as either courteous compliments or superfluous by-products of the New Liberals’ anti-imperialist project. However, as this article will show, Hobhouse's and Hobson's joint sympathy with Chinese civilization/culture derived from a profound concern for the turn-of-the-century spiritual crisis.³ Informed by Idealist philosophy, positivism, and evolutionary biology, their quest for a post-Christian ethics led to an appreciation of the harmonic order of Chinese society and its secularism. The leading New Liberals’ earnest study of China thus represented an extraordinary episode of the British liberal/progressive tradition that has not yet been acknowledged by intellectual historians.

Since the “rediscovery” of the New Liberalism in the 1970s, excellent works have shown how the New Liberals utilized biological theories and Idealist philosophy to justify state-driven social reform within the framework of Liberalism.⁴ Yet, by labeling their thought as “the ideology of social reform,” this approach also reveals its limits.⁵ For, while Hobson and Hobhouse were political theorists and social reformers in their own right, to invent an opportune ideological construct was not the only mission pursued by them, and arguably not even the one closest to their hearts. Especially in the case of Hobhouse, the first professor of sociology appointed in Britain, a focus solely on his political thought obscures his greater intellectual aspiration.⁶ This becomes clear when we read the firsthand account of Hobhouse's thought by his protégé and biographer, Morris Ginsberg. Ginsberg divided his mentor's scheme of work into four parts, namely “comparative psychology and sociology,” “ethics and social philosophy,” “theory of knowledge,” and “theory of reality.”⁷ Within Hobhouse's grandiose multidisciplinary edifice, political theorizing may indeed occupy a special room (under the department of ethics and social philosophy).⁸ But it looks less important when compared to the high-minded quest for a synthetic theory explaining how world history had been shaped by the interplay between human consciousness and society, and for “an empirically founded conception of a self-directing humanity” to form the basis of a universally valid “humanitarian ethics.”⁹

More recently, significant attention has been turned to the New Liberals’ views on imperialism and internationalism, though the one-sidedness of treating them as political thinkers has hardly been remedied. Eminent scholars have worked to show how ‘liberal imperialism’, especially that espoused by J. S. Mill, became untenable among a new generation of Oxford-educated Liberals in fin de siècle Britain. Works by Peter Cain, Jeanne Morefield, and Duncan Bell independently examine the shift in judgment by placing it in the context of the crisis of Liberal politics from the 1880s onwards.¹⁰ This crisis emerged from the failure of the Irish Home Rule bills, the growing calls for tariff reform, and the limitations of laissez-faire policy in dealing with structural social problems. Against this backdrop, Hobson and Hobhouse, among other “liberal internationalists” (as opposed to “liberal imperialists”), concluded that jingoistic imperialism not only damaged the ideals of self-government and free trade but also distracted the public attention from social reform at home, as the chief reactionary force against progressive politics.¹¹

The current article is not intended to controvert the general narrative of the rises and falls of imperialist thinking in the liberal tradition. It does, however, aim to show the limitations of reading the thought of the major liberal thinkers primarily through the lens of political theory and political history. At least in the case of the leading New Liberals, their political thought was interwoven with their views of ethics, science, and evolution. Their intellectual development should not be seen merely as a response to the political conundrums of turn-of-the-century Britain. In this respect, Gregory Claeys's thought-provoking study of British positivists has unveiled Comte's vision of human progress as a source of inspiration for the New Liberals.¹² In a similar vein, this article seeks to show that the leading New Liberals’ Sinophilia was associated not so much with the theoretical concerns regarding Liberalism as with Hobson's and Hobhouse's quest for a cosmopolitan secular ethics.

This article provides a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of Hobson's and Hobhouse's worldview, by contextualizing their writings on China within the turn-of-the-century spiritual crisis and the controversies over ethics and nature. It begins by identifying the inception of the pair's intellectual journey, namely the Oxford of the 1870s and 1880s, where the Idealist philosophy of T. H. Green markedly shaped their social and ethical outlook. The second section discusses how Hobhouse's and Hobson's ethical thought developed in the midst of vehement debates about the relationship between ethics and nature in the 1890s. As will become clear, their anti-imperialist writings during this period should be understood as part of a broader intellectual project to replace social Darwinist ethics with quasi-Idealist ethics, which was characterized by cosmopolitan pacifism. I argue that it was their hope to use empirical evidence to support the latter ethics that ignited their interest in China, and, as the third section shows, led them to brand the burgeoning discipline of sociology as a comparative science of ethics. In the final section, with a close reading of Hobson's Imperialism and Hobhouse's innovative, though now seldom read, Morals in Evolution, I will show how an inadvertent affinity between Idealist philosophy and Confucian ethics resulted in their acclaim of the latter as the precursor to the humanitarian ethics which they proposed as central to the future well-being of humankind.

Idealist Ethics and its Discontents

Hobson and Hobhouse belonged to the late Victorian generation who lost their faith in Christianity and were in search of a surrogate ethics for a society which was becoming ever more militant and class-ridden.¹³ Both grew up in middle-class Anglican families; both became left-wing Liberals, and both gave up their Christian faith, either before or during their undergraduate studies at Oxford (Hobson, 1876–80; Hobhouse, 1883–7).¹⁴ The unfledged scholars shared feelings of guilt about their privileged existence and anxieties following their rebellion against the prevailing moral–religious authority, feelings that generated the drive behind their intellectual quest. As we shall see, this ethical concern was omnipresent throughout their lives and scholarship.¹⁵

Hobson's and Hobhouse's first effort to deal with this ethical anxiety was philosophical. In the Oxford of the 1870s and 1880s, the most penetrating and heartfelt voice on the disturbing zeitgeist was that of the saint-like Idealist philosopher T. H. Green.¹⁶ Green put a moralistic interpretation on the mounting social problems following the Second Industrial Revolution, such as poverty, crimes, and antagonism between classes.¹⁷ According to him, these miseries ultimately stemmed from the “prevalent divorce between reason and faith.”¹⁸ More specifically, Green accused atheist utilitarians’ felicific calculus of unlawfully sanctioning the “illusory” pursuit of bodily pleasure, and claimed that Herbert Spencer misapplied evolutionary biology to human ethics, the result of which afforded “a pretext to [people's] selfishness for ignoring conscience altogether.” To this “moral anarchy” created by the “naturalistic” ethics, Green invoked Idealist philosophy as an “antidote.”¹⁹

Utilizing the philosophical methods and ideas of Kant and Hegel, among others, Green sought to “find a rational basis for a higher morality” and thus to resolve the ostensible conflict between reason and faith.²⁰ As his disciple R. L. Nettleship reflected, Green attracted a generation of Oxford students precisely because he acted as the prophet “who saw … in the simplest utterances of faith the deepest truths of reason, and who believed physical law to be an expression of the same intelligence as the forms of thought and the principles of morality.”²¹

How did Green work out this reconciliatory solution? His revisionary scheme—which, as we shall see, largely shaped the leading New Liberals’ ethical view and thus deserves our full attention—can be explicated by three points. First, in opposing the scientific–materialist worldview, Green reiterated the spiritual nature of the world, not by reverting to dogmatic theologies, but by reflecting on the human mind. He argued that, with a careful analysis of “human conduct,” of “the motives which it expresses, the spiritual endowments implied in it, the history of thought, habits, and institutions through which it has come to be what it is,” one could confirm that a “moral dynamic” guaranteed the growth of everyone's conscience from within.²² This “eternal consciousness,” as Green called it, could be regarded as a personal God, though it was not “a terrible outward power, forcing us we know not whither, but … one of whom we may say that we are reason of his reason and spirit of his spirit; who lives in our moral life.”²³ This immanent and accessible God guaranteed both the unity of this world and the possibility of human perfection.²⁴ As such, Green claimed to find a rational basis for faith in God and for human conscience while canceling out the mystic Christian dogmas, such as original sin and the incarnation.²⁵

This metaphysical unity corroborated the second tenet of Green's project: the immanent God ensured not only the unity of this world but “a good common to all men,” which did not entail conflicts of interests. This “common good” lay in every individual's pursuit and possession of good character.²⁶ As Green explained, “the only good which is really common to all who may pursue it, is that which consists in the universal will to be good—in the settled disposition on each man's part to make the most and best of humanity in his own person and in the persons of others.”²⁷ He thus argued that the relationship between individual and collective was not conflicting, as classical Liberals had assumed, but interdependent: what was truly good to one person must at the same time be good to others and thus to society as a whole. More importantly, Green used the idea of the common good to articulate “freedom in the positive sense”; that is, real freedom was not merely the absence of compulsion, but meant “a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying and that, too, something that we do or enjoy in common with others.”²⁸ Put another way, only by devoting themselves to the common good could people obtain their real freedom.

The conviction of the common good and people's potential to achieve it brings us to the third theme of Green's philosophy; that is, his teleological view of human progress. Green interpreted progress as “the widening of the range of persons conscious of themselves as sharing in a common good” and the expanding recognition “of a brotherhood of mankind and a duty to humanity.”²⁹ History was a journey through which human beings gradually realized “the life of the good neighbour and honest citizen” before attaining a genuine “enthusiasm of humanity.”³⁰ The universal dedication to benevolence and compassion was thus the end of human history. In this way, Green gave a moralistic flavor to the idea of progress and refused to see history as an endless series of struggles for existence.

Among the three tenets developed by Green—namely the spiritual unity of the world, the interdependence of individual freedom and the common good, and human history as collective moral progress—it is well known that Hobson and Hobhouse were greatly indebted to the second. In fact, Hobson employed the following quote from Green to encapsulate the spirit of the New Liberalism:

When we measure the progress of a society by its growth in freedom, we measure it by the increasing development and exercise on the whole of those powers of contributing to social good with which we believe the members of the society to be endowed; in short, by the greater power of the citizens as a body to make the most and best of themselves.³¹

The leading New Liberals invoked Green's notion of positive freedom to discredit the laissez-faire principle, and to advocate for state intervention in forging an ethical society. It is also noticeable that, by accepting the assumption of the possibility of a common good, Hobson and Hobhouse had no difficulty in subscribing to the Idealist/moralist interpretation of human progress (on which see further below).

What Hobson and Hobhouse found disappointing was Green's first tenet—the spiritual unity of the world—“evidenced” by Green's conjecture about human mind and the eternal consciousness. In their eyes, Green only paid lip service to scientific studies and reduced all natural and social phenomena to the work of an ethical spirit. It was evident to both of them that human beings were part of nature, and that human behaviors were subject to, though not determined by, physical and biological laws.³² As Hobson later argued, “the tendency to interpret social organization exclusively in terms of ethical ends, and as existing simply for ‘the realization of an ethical order’” was “unwarranted.” For the “men who form or constitute a Society … enter body and soul, they carry into it the inseparable character of the organic life, with all the physical and spiritual activities and purposes it contains.”³³ Likewise, reflecting on his undergraduate days at Oxford, Hobhouse revealed that “though attracted by T. H. Green's social and ethical outlook I could not see in his metaphysics a valid philosophical solution.”³⁴ Green's ignorance of science limited his achievement in settling the conflict between reason and faith.

However, Hobhouse continued, “It occurred to me … that Green's ‘Spiritual Principle’ might represent an ‘empirical’ rather than a ‘metaphysical’ truth.”³⁵ As we shall see, in many ways, the two maverick thinkers’ intellectual careers can be summarized as an unceasing effort to verify the Idealist dicta of the common good and moral progress by scientifically studying society and ethics.³⁶

Debating evolution and ethics at the high tide of imperialism: cosmopolitan pacifism and China

Hobson's and Hobhouse's dissatisfaction with paradigmatic Idealist reasoning and their appetite for the nascent social sciences meant that the university establishment could hardly appreciate their genius.³⁷ After graduation, Hobson worked successively as journalist and schoolmaster, before moving to London to teach economics for university extension courses in 1887, as his interest in the discipline grew significantly. He would devote himself exclusively to studying and writing from 1897.³⁸ As for Hobhouse, he managed to secure a college fellowship at Oxford, but a ten-year experience of teaching philosophy only fed his disillusion with the university. After publishing a philosophical work attacking the Idealist epistemology, like Hobson he made a drastic career shift in 1897, leaving Oxford to join the Manchester Guardian as a leader writer, with an aim of freely pursuing experimental work in social sciences.³⁹ This section thus examines the intellectual and political context of the 1890s which drove the pair to consider European imperialism and social Darwinism as major obstacles to social progress, and the scientific studies of human evolution, including that of non-European civilizations, as a solution to the spiritual maladies.

Throughout the 1890s, the controversy over the relationship between ethics and nature remained vigorously debated among prominent intellectuals. On the one hand, Green's rejection of naturalistic ethics gained support from a renowned scientist, T. H. Huxley. In his 1893 Romanes Lecture entitled “Evolution and Ethics,” Huxley dismissed social Darwinism as “reasoned savagery,” while insisting that “the ethical progress of society” depend on “combating” the course of nature.⁴⁰ On the other hand, Spencer's view—the unity of nature and humanity—had tremendous purchase in turn-of-the-century Britain. This is testified by the phenomenal popularity of Benjamin Kidd's Social Evolution of 1894. Kidd's “science of human society” argued that human evolution was subject to biological laws, though the struggle in human society was less between individuals than between races and nations. Thus, in opposition to Spencer's individualist principles, Kidd called for legislation to guarantee “equal social opportunities,” and reiterated the critical function of supernatural religion as “super-rational sanctions” which acted to subordinate rational, self-seeking individuals to the interests of race.⁴¹ In his view, the superiority of modern democracy and Christianity in bringing “all the members of the community into the rivalry of life on a footing of equality of opportunity” warranted the imperial expansion of the Western races.⁴²

Some of Green's disciples also shifted to using evolutionary biology to support the Idealist social vision. They resorted to “naturalistic” arguments to define the boundaries between individual and social responsibility, and to acknowledge the transitional importance of competition and natural selection in achieving the common good.⁴³ In fact, D. G. Ritchie, “the most brilliant pupil of Green,” came to a conclusion which was not far from Kidd's, as he declared that, in the name of progress, Europe's imperial conflict and conquest, whether in settler colonies or in nonwhite colonies, were morally justified.⁴⁴

Hobson and Hobhouse, both believing in naturalistic ethics, were unimpressed by Huxley's dichotomous view of ethics and nature.⁴⁵ What is remarkable is that the pair emerged also as ardent critics of Kidd and Ritchie, the naturalistic theorists.⁴⁶ Admittedly, Hobson's and Hobhouse's dissatisfaction with social Darwinist ethics was derived not from its implications on the domestic front, but from their deep-seated faith in the unity of the human species that transcended all differences and rivalries of races. For one thing, Kidd and Ritchie, like Hobson and Hobhouse, endorsed the use of state power in securing equal opportunity among citizens. For another, years before they developed discourses to connect imperial expansion with the degeneration of domestic politics in the wake of the South Africa War (1899–1902), Hobson and Hobhouse already held a view of human progress which was characterized by cosmopolitan pacifism.⁴⁷ It is noticeable that aligning with Green's faith in the common good and brotherhood of humankind, they had denounced racial struggle and imperial competition even before identifying their morbid impact at home.⁴⁸

In his 1895 review of Kidd's Social Evolution, Hobson urged the replacement of Kidd's “quantitative progress” with a “qualitative” view of progress which keeps down “quantity of life with the direct object of limiting the proportion of energy which goes into the baser struggles of war and industry, in order that a larger proportion may be devoted to … [the production of] high and varied mental and moral caliber.”⁴⁹ The worth of a race, Hobson argued, should be “determined by its contribution to the larger total of humanity, which again is a tributary to the vast cosmic life.”⁵⁰ At around the same time, he became affiliated with a group of London-based progressive thinkers (known as the Rainbow Circle) in producing a short-lived magazine, the Progressive Review. Alongside other anti-imperialist contributors, including William Clarke and James Ramsay MacDonald, Hobson published anonymously one of his earliest articles on imperialism, entitled “The Ethics of Empire.” In the article, he concluded that “the only ethical defence of empire” was “that it contributes to the elevation of humanity, to the fulfilment of a rational cosmic plan.”⁵¹ In other words, Hobson repudiated European imperialism because that worldview had worked to derail the cosmopolitan progress of human spirituality.

Similarly, Hobhouse's cosmopolitan pacifism had been pronounced in the early 1890s. In his first book, The Labour Movement of 1893, Hobhouse declared, “The [labour] movement in each nation helps the progress of the whole … in raising herself England is raising the world with her.”⁵² The relationships between nations/races were not conflictual but reciprocal. This is also why he agitated for acknowledging international humanitarian crises, such as the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1894 and 1896.⁵³ Challenging the prevailing social Darwinist ethics which laid a false veneer over retrogressive imperialism was thus a driving force for Hobson's and Hobhouse's decisions in 1897 to devote themselves fully to scholarship.⁵⁴ For them, what was desirable was a new naturalistic ethics that substituted cosmopolitan pacifism for social Darwinism, the root of Europe's “moral degradation.”⁵⁵

Hobson's and Hobhouse's strategy for developing this alternative evolutionary ethics was revealed by an editorial in the Progressive Review in 1897. The article observed that “mere nationalism” had been “the great reactionary agent” against the trend toward “cosmopolitanism” since the French Revolution. All forward progress, it argued, depended upon three potential forces, namely “the aggregation of capital, the combinations of labour, and the conjunction of the Occident and Orient.”⁵⁶ Hobson and Hobhouse were, of course, no capitalists, and their temperaments and upbringings distanced them from the grassroots labor movements.⁵⁷ Perhaps unsurprisingly, their efforts were concentrated on the third solution: they wanted to get human civilization back on the cosmopolitan track by using empirical evidence from both East and West to verify a universal pacifist ethics. This is where China came into the picture.

Given the historical circumstances of the late 1890s, it was understandable why China attracted particular attention from Hobson and Hobhouse. After Japan defeated China in 1894, the “scramble for Chinese concessions” was ignited and the unprecedented opportunities offered by the massive market in China were fervently discussed in the West.⁵⁸ The meticulous calculation of power and interest was notably mingled with a hysterical anxiety about the “yellow peril,” a social Darwinist idea that was propagated by Charles Pearson's 1893 best seller National Life and Character.⁵⁹ This Sinophobic sentiment reached its climax when the Boxer Uprising erupted in 1899 and the Western powers occupied Beijing in reaction. Thus, alongside the Boers, the Chinese would have appeared to Hobson and Hobhouse as the most obvious victims of social Darwinist ethics, which Hobson declared to rest “on a series of illusions regarding actual facts and tendencies.”⁶⁰

Hobson and Hobhouse believed that the disclosure of the empirical “facts” about what was going on in China would help to vitiate social Darwinist ethics. As we shall see, on the one hand they presented China as a case showing that civilization could proceed in a peaceful way, and that progress did not necessarily entail the jingoistic fervor and monetary greed of European imperialism. On the other, they used the example of China to testify to the possibility of a cosmopolitan evolution of a pacifist and altruistic ethics. The rest of this section will show how the pair utilized China to debunk the myth of Europe's civilizing mission and social Darwinism, while the next two sections will investigate the significance of China in the development of evolutionary sociology and its use as evidence for a “humanitarian ethics.”

In Imperialism, Hobson acclaimed China's instinctive and time-honored pacifism, which contrasted with the short-sightedness of Europe's calculative imperialists and capitalists:

Possessing in their enormous area of territory, with its various climatic and other natural conditions, its teeming industrial population, and its ancient, well-developed civilization, a full material basis of self-sufficiency, the Chinese, following a sound instinct of self-defence, have striven to confine their external relations to a casual intercourse. The successful practice of this policy for countless centuries has enabled them to escape the militarism of other nations … [and guaranteed] the peaceful customary life of the great mass of little self-sufficing industrial villages of which the nation is composed.⁶¹

While Hobson was pessimistic about the fate of China in the event of European aggression, he reckoned that China's reluctance to interact with Europe had revealed the barbaric nature of imperial expansion. The Opium Wars, the “menace, cajolery, and bribery” used to secure material interests, the unscrupulous extension of “extra-territoriality,” all exposed the “commercial origin” of European imperialism and the “hollowness” of the civilizing myth.⁶² Imperialism in the Far East was by no means, as social Darwinists falsely claimed, a force of human progress.

Even the moral teachings of ancient China yielded insights into the hypocrisy of imperialism. When explaining the origin of the disastrous South African War, Hobhouse quoted at length a celebrated piece of the Analects, which, in his eyes, made the 2,500-year-old Chinese classic “quite apposite at the beginning of the twentieth century.” In this conversation between Confucius and his two former disciples (who had become eminent politicians), “the Master” treated with contempt their justifications for preemptive military operations, and castigated them as “framing explanations” for the appetite for power. In what followed, as Hobhouse interpreted it, Confucius brought home the “permanent and universal truth” that “domestic misgovernment is the true occasion of these foreign adventures”—echoing his own thesis that imperialism was a reaction to progressive reform.⁶³

In contrast to the jejune and aggressive European empires, China was thus construed by Hobson and Hobhouse as a time-honored, self-contained, and decentralized nation whose sages were prophetic about the evil of imperialism, and whose pacifist character laid bare the brutality of regressive Europe.⁶⁴ However, there was a more fundamental reason for their interest: China provided lucid evidence for an alternative evolutionary ethics. To appreciate this strand of argument, we must investigate the evolutionary sociology which Hobson and Hobhouse aspired to invent at the turn of the century.

Evolutionary sociology and the comparative study of world civilizations

Hobson's and Hobhouse's anti-imperialist contentions were so powerful and well known that people tend to overlook the fact that these arguments belonged to a greater intellectual project which was to develop a new science of social and moral evolution. As a matter of fact, Hobson and Hobhouse helped found the British Sociological Society in 1903, and their seminal scholarship was intended to meet “the need of a sociology” and to reveal the “shortsightedness” of “biological sociologists.”⁶⁵ Hobhouse's sociological works, in particular Mind in Evolution (1901) and Morals in Evolution (1906), would earn him the professorship of sociology at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1907. As we shall see, their vision of using evolutionary sociology to verify a humanitarian ethics propelled Hobson and Hobhouse to carry out more systematic investigations into Chinese society and ethics.

Hobson's and Hobhouse's sociological views were shaped significantly by evolutionary biology. As biology was the positive science of natural evolution, so sociology, they argued, was that of “human social evolution.”⁶⁶ Following the precedent of biology, the task of sociologists was to synthesize “the narrower results” of biological, psychological, political, and economic studies in order to display the picture of “every size, form, and quality of social grouping, from the organism of the primitive family to that of the most delicately and consciously-adjusted organism of a great modern State.”⁶⁷ A synthesis of empirical data was necessary, most obviously because society was equivalent to an organism, whose “growth involves a correlated series of changes among parts that operate in concert.”⁶⁸ For example, as Hobhouse noted, the evolution of marriage did not “stand alone,” but dovetailed into religious beliefs, social distinctions, and economic conditions, among others.⁶⁹

But there was a subtler reason, which made the synthesizing work even more crucial and relevant to the subject of this article. Hobhouse and Hobson refused to presume that human evolution was “a single continuous process advancing in a constant direction,” a view which Hobhouse dismissed as biased by either “unscientific sociological dogmatism” (referring to Spencer) or subjective speculations which involved some “ingenious form of historical torture” (referring to Green).⁷⁰ They argued that, in tracking the evolution of human civilization as a whole, sociologists had to admit that there were “many possible lines of deviation from the primitive center” and that there were “many paths to civilization.”⁷¹ The trend toward progress did not imply a uniform path of Progress.⁷² To avoid reducing “divergent lines of evolution” to “a simple narrative,” Hobhouse insisted that sociology was a “social morphology” comparable to “the physical morphology of animals and plants.”⁷³ Sociology was, in essence, a comparative study of “the divergence … between the whole trend of Eastern and Western civilization.”⁷⁴

Before we look into Hobhouse's and Hobson's sociological studies of China, however, it is necessary to reiterate the point that they intended to vindicate the presumably still ungrounded Idealist tenets.⁷⁵ Indeed, although the pair forsook speculative reasoning and insisted on a value-neutral method of comparing and classifying, they were unapologetic about using scientific findings to test out the ethical tenets adumbrated by Green. More specifically, the starting point of their sociology was to confirm a quasi-Idealist hypothesis that the human mind, or the “ethical consciousness,” was disposed to harmony. Hobhouse argued that, unlike Green's “eternal consciousness,” this “unity of individual distinct minds” was not “a real agency”; it was the ingrained nature of each human mind that drove people to form a more reciprocal society and, as evolution proceeded, to reach a cosmopolitan “humanitarian ethics.”⁷⁶ Hobson thus noted that as man's

knowledge of that universe is enlarged by science or by ordinary experience, he comes to feel a closer kinship with his non-human as well as his human surroundings. It is that sense of kinship that … [was of] double significance for humanity, first as the co-operative body of human beings, secondly as the corporate part of a system inspired and moulded by some evolving process that may be realized as purpose or even spirit.⁷⁷

Just as tribal loyalties and provincialism had given way to racial and national identities, so the latter would finally succumb to a cosmopolitan brotherhood.⁷⁸ In politics, this meant that nationalism and imperial expansion would be overtaken by internationalism and international government.⁷⁹ In ethics, it anticipated a humanitarian ethics which, Hobhouse contended, “will be guided by the conception of the human race as a whole, bound together by the ties of a common nature, and capable under ascertainable conditions of a future for which all earlier evolution is preparatory.”⁸⁰

The postulation of the growth of humanitarian ethics will help to explain an apparent contradiction in the thought of Hobson and Hobhouse. While they were not cultural relativists and assumed that Europeans were “more civilized” than most non-European peoples, this Eurocentrism was absent from their view of China.⁸¹ The varying perspectives toward China and other Eastern cultures can be illustrated by Hobson's arguments against the civilizing mission of the West respectively in India and China. In the case of India, he spilled little ink on the worth of Indian culture and admitted that British rule had partly civilized India by maintaining law and order, preventing riots and violence.⁸² His rejection of British rule in India originated mainly from the practical difficulty of a foreign government civilizing an alien people: lack of “contact of individual with individual” meant that the civilizing ability of the British Raj was superficial and delusive.⁸³ By contrast, Hobson presented China as a case challenging in principle Europe's claim that her own civilization was “pre-eminent,” “of universal appeal,” and worth “imparting” to the East even by force.⁸⁴ As we shall see, this exceptional regard for Chinese culture derived from the proposition that it was advanced in the teleological, though not unitary, evolution toward a humanitarian ethics.

Confucianism and humanitarian ethics

In Imperialism, Hobson underscored the superior quality of “the Chinese mind” by calling attention to how it paid great respect to “the man of learning and the gardener” as “no Western nation” did. According to Hobson, this cultural judgment was refined and sound, because the two types of people played crucial roles in ethical progress. Assuming that advanced civilizations showed preferences for spiritual ends over materialistic interest, Hobson remarked that China's “genuine reverence” for intellectuals and “the things of mind” “entitle[d] China to rank high among the civilizations of the world.” The nation's inclination to moral and intellectual perfection was demonstrated by “the general prevalence of schools and libraries, the democratization of the machinery of education, [and] the opening of the highest offices of State to a free competition of the people, conducted on an intellectual test.”⁸⁵

Alongside the worship of the intellect, Hobson appreciated the common respectability of peasants in Chinese society. As he understood it, the great esteem for and dedication to labor-intensive farming represented an organic and reciprocal relationship between individuals and society as a whole:

Manual labor is not only a necessary means of livelihood, but a genuinely absorbing personal interest for the entire body of the nation; with simple tools, and scarcely any use of machinery, minute personal skill is applied to agriculture and the manufactures; most workers have some considerable variety of occupation, and see and enjoy the useful results of their toil … this “gardening” life is the most prominent factor in the external civilization of the country.⁸⁶

Arguably, China's agricultural economy epitomized Green's ideal of a society where all its members simultaneously benefited from and contributed to the common good. Seen in this light, the country's backwardness in mechanization and industrialization was actually a strength of its civilization.⁸⁷ It was out of “ignorance,” Hobson observed, that the Europeans described Chinese civilization as “arrested” or “unprogressive.” The common appreciation of the “dignity of labor” in China evinced “a social progress which has won its goal in securing a well-nigh complete adjustment between human life and its stable environment.”⁸⁸

According to Hobson, this harmonic order was also characterized by China's decentralized arrangement of its political and social institutions. Free from a strong government, China's real political nexus was “a huge nest of little free village communes, self-governing, and animated by a genuine spirit of equality.” These village communes were further constituted by groups of families that were alleged to be “the political, economic, and moral unit of society.” In Hobson's eyes, the family system, which spawned town and village groups, sustained an excellent balance between public and private interests that its capitalist counterpart in the West could not attain. He gave two reasons for this. First, as an equilibrium of power was maintained by local families, it was impossible for any individual to monopolize any natural means of production, such as land or water. Under this collective and bottom-up governance, the prevailing form of ownership was that of “small proprietors,” and hereditary customs prevented “accumulation of large properties.”⁸⁹ The omnipresent family system thus served to foil the excessive and demoralizing accrual of capital.

Second, living in such family-dominated communities, individuals were more likely to secure their real freedom. Hobson approvingly quoted A. R. Colquhoun, a British explorer in Asia, who commented that “between the Chinese and the Government is the almost unexampled liberty which the people enjoy, and the infinitesimally small part which Government plays in the scheme of national life.” In addition to this negative freedom from state interference, Hobson hinted that, more importantly, the family system in China helped its members to achieve positive freedom: “the moral authority of the family … not only … presents a substitute for wider politics, but it figures prominently in the education and the religious or ethical system of the people.” As a result, individuals thrived and excelled themselves with a definite purpose to honor their “moral obligations” to their families, and life “seems so little worth living to a man outlawed from family and home.”⁹⁰ This is not to say that Hobson saw Chinese family ethics as equivalent to humanitarian ethics, but he argued that it did work to foster an interdependent relationship between individuals and communities, within which personal freedom was coterminous with collective interest.

By highlighting China's veneration of the mind, and its harmonic and egalitarian order guaranteed by the agricultural economy and family system, Hobson identified China as an advanced civilization, distinct from the “materialistic” civilizations of Europe.⁹¹ Even if China was “in its sleep,” he argued, “its noble and illuminative dreams,” which had cultivated “simple qualities of domestic life and personal conduct” and “a certain real life of the soul,” could still offer inspirations to the West. He thus called for “the free interaction of mind and mind” between Europe and China, not merely in order to rescue China the underdog, but, more significantly, to stimulate “the true process of world-civilization,” which was destined to establish a harmonious and humanitarian way of life that had been partly fulfilled in China.⁹²

Although Hobson's assessment of Chinese society was incisive and consistent with his ethical and sociological thought, it was brief and relied heavily on nonacademic accounts by merchants, explorers, and journalists.⁹³ Moreover, his observation of, and reasoning about, Chinese mentality and customs were seriously flawed, as he did not seek to expand on the guiding ethics of this allegedly advanced society. This is particularly problematic in view of the fact that his sociology gave such a prominent place to the work of mind and ethics. It was his intellectual companion, Hobhouse, who would remedy these shortcomings by adopting the comparative method to examine both Chinese customs and ethics.

After exploring the emergence of higher mental powers in the course of animal evolution in 1901's Mind in Evolution, Hobhouse dedicated himself to studying the progress of ethical consciousness in human history, an effort which resulted in the two-volume Morals in Evolution, published in 1906. This comparative inquiry into ethical evolution across the world took advantage of the fresh findings of archaeology and ethnography, such as the Laws of Hammurabi, discovered in 1901. On China, Hobhouse carefully consulted both the growing body of English translations of Chinese primary sources, such as Chinese classics and criminal law, and analytical works by experts in sinology (among them J. J. M. de Groot and James Legge) and philosophy (among them Pierre Laffitte).

Overall, Hobhouse divided his investigation into two parts: the study of customs and laws (“the rule of action”) and that of religious thought and ethical theories (“the reason given for obeying” the rule of action).⁹⁴ The first volume was organized by chapters on different areas of social life, including forms of social union, law, marriage and women's position, attitudes toward people from other communities, class relations, and poverty and property. By identifying different transformations in customs and relations, he showed the general trend of development in each aspect of society across major civilizations. For example, forms of social union grew from the blood tie to the nation-state, whereas principles for maintaining social order evolved from private vengeance to public justice.

There was therefore no separate assessment of the character of each civilization in the first volume, yet Hobhouse's sporadic remarks on Chinese customs and laws were by and large favorable. On the negative side, he disparaged China's law as imposed by the rulers upon the ruled, rather than democratically “adopted for the common good,” and the position of Chinese women had seemingly deteriorated with time.⁹⁵ He acknowledged, however, that the Chinese pioneered the mitigation of the cruelty of criminal punishment, and that Chinese society was strikingly equal, with an omissible slave class.⁹⁶ Moreover, echoing Hobson, Hobhouse acclaimed China's social and political institutions as the embodiment of “the purest of humanitarian principles.” Mencius’ ethical teachings of “benevolence” were reported to have been translated into “public assistance for the aged and infirm,” taking the form of orphanages and almshouses.⁹⁷ In the field of politics, the “vigorous and sweeping” teaching of benevolence had worked to cultivate a deep empathy with the governed among the governors, and molded a pacifist nation which was apt to “absorb those who have conquered them by peaceful arts.”⁹⁸

Interpretations of this kind implied that ethical norms and theories determined the forms of social customs and institutions. Hence, in the second volume of Morals in Evolution, Hobhouse conducted an intensive study of the development of ethical reasoning, in which a more in-depth (and approving) account of Chinese ethics was given. He outlined the progressive trend of humans’ ethical reasoning, from animism and magic, polytheism, and “spiritual religions,” to “ethical idealism” and “philosophic ethics” respectively in ancient China and Greece, and, finally, modern ethics in Europe. Here we can already detect a breakaway from the Eurocentric narrative of the civilizing process, for Hobhouse allocated spiritual religions, including Christianity, to an early phase of development, whereas Confucianism was deemed an advanced form of ethics.

Hobhouse recognized Christianity, along with Brahmanism, Buddhism, Taoism, and other monotheist religions, as a spiritual religion that grew out of polytheism. According to him, the polytheist ethics of the “early Oriental civilizations,” such as Egypt and Babylon, were characterized by unsystematic moral “platitudes” that did not derive from “a single principle, or at any rate a first cause.”⁹⁹ By contrast, spiritual religions were able to offer coherent guidance on moral conduct by conjuring up “a conception of a spiritual being which is an embodiment of all that man can dream of perfection.”¹⁰⁰

Despite idiosyncratic variances, Hobhouse argued, all spiritual religions spread very similar ethical teachings. They were the “religion[s] of the inner man,” which preached the cultivation of a certain ideal of character, rather than specific forms of conduct, as the purpose of life and the means to salvation.¹⁰¹ More importantly, “theological ethics” generally assumed this ideal of character “negatively as the destruction of selfishness, positively as the exercise of universal love.” As Hobhouse summed it up, in spiritual religions the acclaimed qualities of humankind were “best cultivated apart from ordinary human ties” and formed “the foundation of a monastic brotherhood rather than of a living human society.”¹⁰² Rejecting “group-moralities,” such as loyalty, bravery, pride and honor,

the Buddhist, and still more the Christian, teaching insists on a far more thorough-going self-surrender … Love, universal benevolence, forgiveness, humility, meekness, combined with the extreme of resolute endurance for conscience’ sake—such are the necessary outcome of that emptying of self which Buddhism and Christianity alike demanded. In them the spiritual order formed for itself a new sphere detached from the more elementary morals of the ordinary good citizen.¹⁰³

Consequently, spiritual religions in general, and Christianity in particular, had “no theory of society.” In dealing with social and political issues, nonresistance and passive obedience were the recommended attitudes, while justice and social reform hardly mattered.¹⁰⁴ Hobhouse argued that this revealed the great weakness of Christian religion:

The conception of a brotherhood of love based on the negation of self is demonstrably inadequate to the problem of reorganizing society and intelligently directing human efforts. Even on the personal side it is deficient, for human progress depends on the growth and perfecting of faculty, and therefore requires that provision be made for a self-development which is not selfishness, but builds up a better personality on a basis of self-repression.¹⁰⁵

His quasi-Idealist conviction was telling: the otherworldliness of Christian moral teaching discouraged the mutual growth of self-realization and the common good, a proposition that his sociology aimed to prove as a fact of human progress. He concluded that the inherent pitfall of Christianity was that, “In the pursuit of an ideal which few or none can realize, the element of the divine which lies in our ordinary human nature is overlooked, or rather it is denied.” The concepts of an almighty God and sinful humankind, though giving rise to a lucid ethical theory, came to be a major obstacle to the further progress of mind and society.¹⁰⁶

Confucianism, which took a very different route of moral reasoning, thus represented an epoch-making breakthrough in the course of ethical evolution. Hobhouse drew attention to the fact that, with little reference to transcendental ideas or sanctions, Confucian ethics developed moral doctrines “through reflection upon life and man's place in it, upon human nature and its potentialities, upon human action and its ends.” In doing so, this “ethical idealism,” applauded by Hobhouse as “one of the greatest and most influential doctrines of ethical conduct,” was able to call man “to conform simply because such conduct is best for himself and for humanity,” a form of ethical reasoning that anticipated humanitarian ethics.¹⁰⁷

It is worth noting that this interpretation was a significant departure from British missionaries’ established view of Confucian philosophy. While Hobhouse relied extensively on the translations of Chinese classics by James Legge, a missionary in China who was appointed the first professor of Chinese at Oxford (1876–91), he rejected Legge's Christian-oriented interpretation which branded Confucianism a primitive type of monotheism.¹⁰⁸ Hobhouse's own interpretation was closer to that of the French positivist Pierre Laffitte. This disciple of Comte considered Confucian ethics, with its emphasis on the moral centrality of family, as a harbinger of Comte's vision of a secular “religion of humanity” in the “Positivist Stage” of history.¹⁰⁹ It was the secular elements of Confucianism that impressed Hobhouse. Nevertheless, the Comtist influence on him should not be overstated, for, as we shall see, Hobhouse cold-shouldered the filial elements of Confucius’ teaching, and his appreciation of Confucian ethics was primarily due to the latter's striking affinity to the quasi-Idealist humanitarian ethics.

Hobhouse argued that, in contrast to spiritual religions, Confucian ethics directed people to seek “social salvation.” The main concern was not so much “the greater glory of God” as “the maintenance of human life.”¹¹⁰ “Self-mastery,” in the sense of “preserv[ing] one's mental constitution and nourish[ing] one's nature,” was the sole end of “ethical idealism.” Where, then, did the moral sanction come from? Hobhouse claimed that Chinese sages were shrewd enough to make recourse to “Heaven,” the supreme power, without falling into the abyss of mysticism. As he interpreted it, Mencius suggested that “He who knows his own nature, knows Heaven”; those who carefully reflected on themselves would ascertain Heaven's “appointment” on them.¹¹¹ It may not be surprising that Hobhouse expounded this theory of human nature and obligations in a sympathetic tone, for if we replace “Heaven” with “ethical consciousness,” Mencius’ philosophy reads almost the same as Hobhouse's own theory of humanitarian ethics.

The practice of so-called social salvation was even more indicative of the affinity between Confucianism and humanitarian ethics. To begin with, Hobhouse argued, the Confucian gospel of social salvation presumed that “man … is potentially good, and the germs of goodness in him only need favorable circumstances, teaching, and effort to come to perfection.”¹¹² Like Green, Confucius and Mencius did not believe that human beings were born with sins that were irredeemable without the assistance of divine grace. Hence they promised that, with proper instruction, it was possible for anyone to bring “to the perfection of development the seeds of good implanted in him by nature.” Hobhouse extolled Mencius’ contention that innate “feelings are the foundation of the virtues.” The examples used by the sage to support this thesis—such as “All men have a mind which cannot bear to see the sufferings of others”—were eulogized by Hobhouse as “containing the germs of a scientific theory of moral psychology.”¹¹³ For him, this theory of moral education revealed this insight: “Not the chaining up of human nature, but its full and harmonious development is the object of ethical training.”¹¹⁴ It is not difficult to see this ideal's resemblance to the rejection of original sin and the concept of positive freedom.

In fact, the Confucian version of positive freedom, as Hobhouse understood it, resonated with its New Liberal counterpart in a more crucial way. As Green argued that real freedom could only be attained in pursuit of the common good, so Confucius taught, in Hobhouse's words, that “self-mastery is founded upon nature, and manifests itself in conformity to the rules of social life, in the execution of justice and the practice of benevolence.”¹¹⁵ Here, Hobhouse was drawing attention to two points in Confucius’ proposition. First, virtue was to be found in the common life, and “Human excellence lies in the performance of the social duties.”¹¹⁶ Therefore, the extensive “rules of propriety” were designed to navigate one's everyday life to actualize “the conception of oneself as the servant of mankind, and of social happiness as the supreme end of endeavor for the individual.”¹¹⁷ Hobhouse, quoting Confucius, defined “perfect virtue” as: “when you go abroad to behave to every one as if you were receiving a great guest; to employ the people as if you were assisting at a great sacrifice; not to do to others as you would not wish done to yourself; to have no murmuring against you in the country and none in the family.”¹¹⁸ The reciprocal idea of treating others as we would like them to treat us, or the “golden rule,” brings us to Hobhouse's second point. He considered this “rule of impartiality as between self and others” to be the shared ground of strands of secular ethics originating separately from China and ancient Greece. Confucius was thus accredited as the first theorist of the golden rule that foretold the creation of humanitarian ethics.¹¹⁹

What is more, this theoretical innovation avoided the pitfall of theological ethics, namely overstating benevolence at the expense of justice. Confucius’ emphasis on reciprocity, as Hobhouse understood it, meant that benevolence, “indeed, should be universal, but there must be a rule of justice in applying it. We should forgive injuries, but we should not push that principle to the point of treating the evil and the good alike.”¹²⁰ Thus, while revenge was discouraged, unconditional forgiveness and humility were also set aside by Confucians in favor of the application of justice.¹²¹ With “[u]prightness and benevolence as the two master-words,” Hobhouse argued, the ideal type of Confucianism was “the good citizen, the dutiful son, the kindly neighbour and, in particular, the upright official who would resist to the death the corrupt tyrant.”¹²² Again, it is worth observing that this cooperative, conscientious, and public-spirited character was also what humanitarian ethics was directed at.

Hobhouse's assessment of Confucianism was not without criticisms. He was unsympathetic about Confucius’ insistence on “filial devotion,” and labeled as “simple and somewhat elementary” Confucius’ conjecturing the family as the type and exemplar of the state.¹²³ As Hobhouse noted, Confucian moralists, whose theory gave prominence to family ties, could “hardly be said to have conceived Humanity as has been done in Western thought,” and Confucian moral theory was not as systematic as Greek philosophy, let alone modern European ethical theories.¹²⁴

Hobhouse was nevertheless convinced that Confucian ethics had a special place in the process of moral evolution: Confucian teachings

are truths applicable to all time … they have a sting which we can feel even at the present day, or ought to feel if we do not. The great Chinese classical writers in fact laid the foundation of a distinct ethical and social ideal … appealing to the best of man's nature and calling him to the service of his fellow-men.¹²⁵

The “ethical idealism,” with its confidence in human potential, the prospect of self-mastery, its emphasis on reciprocity and good citizenship, and, above all, its teachings of social salvation, struck a major chord with the theorists of humanitarian ethics. This is the fundamental reason why Hobhouse and Hobson reversed the stereotype and saw hope in Chinese culture—hope for a universal, secular, reciprocal ethics that was verified by the history of an exotic race.

Conclusion

Hobhouse and Hobson were not sinologists, their studies of China were devoid of fieldwork or native informants, and their accounts were understandably overgeneralized.¹²⁶ However, as we have seen, their Sinophilia cannot be dismissed as a perfunctory by-product of their anti-imperialist campaign. Their genuine sympathy for China revealed their primary intellectual concern, namely to use scientific method to endorse a humanitarian ethics which would ensure the well-being of humanity as a whole. This study of the pair's Sinophilia thus reveals the limitation of labeling them either the “New Liberals” or the “imperial sceptics.” Moreover, it shows that, in pursuing an empirically proven shared ethics, Hobson and Hobhouse heralded a pluralist view of evolution: while remaining faithful to a universal humanitarian end to history, they were convinced by evidence that progress could be achieved through multiple routes and that Europeans were not necessarily taking the lead. Their intellectual journey therefore marked a departure from Eurocentrism.

The next question is whether this departure was a whimsy that left no intellectual impact and should not be taken seriously. The answer is a firm negative. True, compared with their contribution to a paradigm shift in social policy and political theory, their evolutionary sociology was futile. As a reviewer of Morals in Evolution observed in 1953, the book “has remained not only without a rival, but even without a successor.”¹²⁷ A significant reason for this was given soon after the publication of the book, by Bertrand Russell, who accused Hobhouse of falling victim to the “naturalistic fallacy.” Despite being impressed by the work's collections of ethical norms, especially the pacifist quotes of Mencius, the analytical philosopher insisted that the “is” could not determine the “ought,” and that the study of “changes of [moral] opinion” was “incapable of giving grounds for any opinion as to what is desirable.”¹²⁸ In other words, there was no objective basis to argue that “the changes constitute a progress,” and ethical resonances between the East and the West did not justify a humanitarian code of ethics that everyone should follow.¹²⁹ Whether Russell did justice to Hobhouse's approach is a philosophical question beyond the scope of the current article. What is certain is that Hobhouse's and Hobson's evolutionary sociology failed to attract followers, and did not result in anything equivalent to Weber's and Durkheim's classics.¹³⁰

Nevertheless, it turns out to be the case that, while Hobhouse and Hobson lost the battle to develop an effective sociological method, they won the war against a complacent, reductionist, and materialist view of human progress. Their warnings of the demoralizing force of imperialism and social Darwinism proved prophetic after 1914. More importantly, their pluralistic understanding of human civilization and their efforts to develop a humanitarian ethics were a foreshowing of the rise of value pluralism and international humanitarianism in the twentieth century—a new episode in the liberal tradition.¹³¹

In the case of China, Hobson's and Hobhouse's positive appraisals anticipated a growing interest in China among British Liberals/progressives during the interwar period. After taking a visiting chair at Peking University (1920–21), Russell published a well-received book, The Problem of China, which would make him among the most renowned Sinophiles in the West.¹³² Alongside him, prominent progressives—notably Lowes Dickinson, Eileen Power, Arnold J. Toynbee, and R. H. Tawney—visited China between 1910 and 1930 and gave favorable interpretations of its civilization.¹³³ If it is difficult to determine the extent to which Hobson's and Hobhouse's works helped British progressives to appreciate the harmonious element of Chinese culture and society, it is fair to say that the pair were prescient in establishing a common ground for Chinese and European culture, especially by identifying Chinese ethics as a precursor to the humanitarianism to which the disenchanted progressives aspired.

This sympathetic vision of China also appealed to Chinese scholars. Though Hobhouse's study of Chinese ethics was not informed by native contacts, it helped to attract the ablest students from China to the LSE. In 1915, his students Y. K. Leong and L. K. Tao published Village and Town Life in China, which is widely considered the first sociological monograph on China.¹³⁴ After returning to China, Tao would eventually become the director of the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica—the national academy of the Republic of China. Another renowned Chinese scholar who studied under Hobhouse was Francis C. M. Wei, a prominent philosopher and educationalist, who wrote his Ph.D. thesis on “The Chinese Moral Tradition and Its Social Values.”¹³⁵ The most celebrated Chinese sociologist in the twentieth century, Hsiao-tung Fei (or Xiaotong Fei), was also a doctoral student at the LSE in the 1930s.¹³⁶ How the leading New Liberals’ insight about sociology and Confucian ethics were elaborated and appropriated by Chinese scholars is a subject requiring independent scrutiny. For the purpose of the current article, however, it is sufficient to state that Hobson's and Hobhouse's journey to discover a humanitarian ethics, from Idealist and positivist philosophy, via evolutionary sociology, to Confucian ethics, was of cosmopolitan importance in modern intellectual history.