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Welfarism, Socialism and Religion: on T. H. Green and Others

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Mark Bevir
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Extract

Scholars often link the emergence of welfarism and socialism to a loss of religious faith. Yet an examination of the beliefs of secularists who had lost their faith suggests that the loss of faith did not result in an emotional need that social reformism sometimes met. Nonetheless, an examination of welfarists and ethical socialists such as T. H. Green suggests that there was an intellectual or rational link between faith and social reformism. Here many Victorians and Edwardians responded to the dilemmas then besetting faith by adopting immanentist theologies, and this immanentism often sustained a moral idealism that inspired various social reformers.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , Fall 1993 , pp. 639 - 662
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1993

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References

1. In what follows, I will use the terms welfarism and socialism to refer principally to certain moral doctrines rather than those policies and institutions that we now regard as characteristic of welfare and socialist states.

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50. Ibid., sec. 273 (p. 295).

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59. Trevor, , Tracts, Tract 2: From Ethics to Religion, p. 21Google Scholar; Gore, C., The Sermon on the Mount: A Practical Exposition (London: J. Murray, 1896), p. 19.Google Scholar

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61. See, for instance, Morrow, J., “Liberalism and British Idealist Political Philosophy,” History of Political Thought 5 (1984): 91–108.Google Scholar Certainly we should be cautious about proclaiming a total break between the two. This, however, is because ideologies do not possess an essentialist core, but rather have numerous strands many of which usually will persist through a time of great change.

62. For a recent statement of the importance of idealism, as opposed to Idealism, for welfarism see Harris, J., “Political Thought and the Welfare State 1870–1940: An Intellectual Framework for British Social Policy,” Past and Present 135 (1992): 116–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

63. On changing attitudes to the object of social policy see Harris, J., Unemployment and Politics 1886–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972).Google Scholar

64. On the importance of the evolutionary motif in welfarist thinking see M., Freeden, The New Liberalism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978).Google Scholar The undoubted significance of evolutionism, however, should not obscure the place of Idealism: Hobhouse, for instance, owed a debt to Idealism at the same time as he adopted evolutionism: see Collini, S., Liberalism and Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).Google Scholar The fact is that both evolutionism and Idealism could accommodate the immanentist and moral doctrines that we have identified, so the two often went together in the thinking of both new liberals and ethical socialists: see, in particular, Ritchie, David, “Darwin and Hegel,” Darwin and Hegel with Other Philosophical Studies (London: Sonnenschein, 1893), pp. 38–76.Google Scholar