Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse (1864–1929) was an English political theorist, sociologist, and activist. In addition to being the leading thinker of new liberalism, he was one of his era’s most engaged public intellectuals and was instrumental in the establishment of sociology as an autonomous academic discipline.

Born on September 8, 1864, in St. Ive, Cornwall, Hobhouse was educated at Marlborough College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Although already engaged in progressive politics, he initially pursued an academic career, becoming a fellow of Corpus in 1894. Shortly after publishing Theory of Knowledge (1896), a realist critique of contemporary British epistemology, Hobhouse left Oxford in 1897 to join the editorial staff of the Manchester Guardian. In this capacity, as well as in his journalistic career after moving to London in 1902, he wrote hundreds of articles urging domestic reform and denouncing imperialism. At the same time, Hobhouse involved himself deeply in the nascent field of sociology. His Mind in Evolution (1901) and Morals in Evolution (1906) proposed an interpretation of evolution notable for its rejection of Spencerian instinctualism in favor of viewing social change as driven by the progressive growth of “general intelligence” coordinating public action. These works led to his appointment in 1907 as professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, the first chair of its kind in the English-speaking world and a post he occupied until his death. As before, Hobhouse split his efforts between academic social theory and public commentary. Having revived his association with the Manchester Guardian, he became director of its company in 1911. His later years were marked by continued contributions to Britain’s progressive journals as well as the completion of his mature sociological system in a series of works collectively entitled The Principles of Sociology (1918–1924).

Liberalism (1911) is considered Hobhouse’s most lasting intellectual achievement, where he argues that classical liberalism’s laissez-faire doctrines rested on a falsely atomistic conception of the individual. To Hobhouse, classical liberals denied the fundamental interrelatedness of human life, resulting in a negative characterization of freedom as the absence of state intervention in the society and economy.

Hobhouse set out to reconcile this individualist foundation with social solidarity, arguing that negative liberty alone could not enable the self-development he saw as “the heart of Liberalism.” Since self-development requires the capacity to pursue a good life, not merely freedom from state intervention, economic redistribution and social welfare necessarily afford all individuals the positive capacity for human flourishing.

As in all of his work, Hobhouse’s attempt to reconcile individuality and solidarity predicates on an organic image of society as a symbiotic whole: the suffering of any particular social segment harms the body politic at large. Against criticisms that this political ontology obviates individuals, Hobhouse took pains to distinguish his organicism from competing holisms and often attacked what he considered the potentially tyrannical political implications of British idealism. These efforts notwithstanding, much subsequent discussion of Hobhouse’s social theory concerns whether his own organicism ultimately collapses into an anti-individual collectivism.

Hobhouse died on August 21, 1929, leaving a body of work prefiguring many later developments in social theory. His focus on the social nature of freedom foreshadowed both perfectionist liberalism and communitarianism, and his contributions as a public intellectual to the foundations of the welfare state were unparalleled. Despite his important role in the founding of academic sociology, however, his voluminous output in this field has fallen from favor due to its strongly teleological assumptions, and thus remains of interest primarily to historians of the discipline.

Bibliography:

Collini, Stefan. Liberalism and Sociology: L.T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England, 1880–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Freeden, Michael. The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
Hobhouse, L.T. Democracy and Reaction. London:T. Fisher Unwin, 1904.
Development and Purpose: An Essay in the Philosophy of Evolution. Rev. ed., 1927. London: MacMillan, 1913.
The Elements of Social Justice. London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1922. Reprint, London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1993.
“Liberalism.” In L.T. Hobhouse, Liberalism and Other Writings. Edited by James Meadowcroft. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
The Metaphysical Theory of the State: A Critique. London: MacMillan, 1918. Reprint, London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1993.
Mind in Evolution. London: MacMillan, 1901.
Morals in Evolution: A Study in Comparative Ethics. Vols. 1 and 2. London: Chapman and Hall, 1906.
The Rational Good: A Study in the Logic of Practice. London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1921.
Social Development: Its Nature and Conditions. New York: Henry Holt, 1924. Reprint, London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1993.
Hobson, J. A., and Morris Ginsberg. L.T. Hobhouse: His Life and Work. London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1931. Reprint, London: Routledge/ Thoemmes, 1993.
Simhony, Avital, and D.Weinstein, eds. The New Liberalism: Reconciling Liberty and Community. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

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