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of the American republic. The view of the state articulated
by Hamilton, Clay, and Webster had triumphed
completely, and although there was a considerable
“rollback” of government power in the aftermath of the
war, a whole range of precedents had been set, including
the rudiments of the welfare state in the form of
Civil War pensions. The common thread uniting all of
those defeats for liberty—in Germany, Britain, and the
United States—was nationalism, the idea of a sovereign,
national state acting to achieve a collective national
purpose or destiny.
The last third of the 19th century saw the decline of
classical liberalism as both a body of ideas and a political
movement. The period, described variously as the
Gilded Age or La Belle Epoque, appears in retrospect
as a kind of Indian summer of liberal civilization. In
reality, the foundations of that civilization were being
steadily eroded. Many states saw a movement in policy
away from liberal prescriptions that had been
instituted earlier—a crucial event in Britain was the
first Gladstone government’s creation of compulsory
state education in the Education Act of 1870. By the
1870s, the growth of interventionist legislation had
become marked enough for Herbert Spencer to mount
a vigorous attack in The Man versus the State, declaring
that “those now passing as liberals are tories of a
new type” and forecasting “the coming slavery.” After
1870, liberal arguments lost much of their radical content
and cutting edge and became increasingly defensive
and conservative. Liberal ideas no longer set the
agenda. One aspect of this development was an evergrowing
focus on economic matters and arguments at
the expense of other areas of debate. Another was a
dramatic change in the content of culture. Most early
and mid-19th-century artists, composers, and writers
had been sympathetic to classical liberalism, and
these views were reflected in their work. Verdi,
Stendahl, Hugo, Trollope, Beethoven, Brahms, and
Manzoni were all ardent liberals. The major artistic
figures of the later part of the century, including Zola,
Ibsen, and Wagner, were almost without exception
hostile to liberalism and bourgeois civilization.
One aspect of the decline of classical liberalism as a
doctrine was a change in the content and form of much
of what passed as liberal argument. In every country,
liberalism bifurcated into two distinct but related discourses,
described variously as moderate/radical as in
Italy and Scandinavia or classical/new as in England
and North America. The 1890s saw the rise of new liberalism
in Britain and progressivism in the United
States. In Germany, the new variant of liberalism, articulated
by authors such as Friedrich Naumann, almost
completely replaced the older form put forward by
Eugen Richter and Ludwig Bamberger. New liberalism
was a collectivist variant of liberalism that retained the
commitment to freedom as the highest political good,
but redefined the term as positive liberty or capacity,
rather than negative liberty, which referred only to the
absence of coercion. New liberalism gave a much
larger role to the state in both economic and social matters
and defined social development not in terms of
increasing freedom, but as growing sociability and collective
cooperation. This change did not go unchallenged.
The 1880s and 1890s saw a vigorous debate in
all countries, but particularly in Britain and the United
States, between self-styled individualists and collectivists.
In Britain, the case for limited government was
put by organizations such as the Liberty and Property
Defense League and the Personal Rights Association,
ably supported by the older generation of feminists
such as Helen Blackburn, Jessie Boucherett, and
Josephine Butler. In the United States, a major individualist
liberal was William Graham Sumner, a severe
critic of the move to imperialism after 1896 in essays
such as “The Conquest of the United States by Spain.”
The debate is best understood as centering on the meaning
of key terms such as liberty and progress. The shift
in the meaning of these ideas was described in 1900 by
E. L. Godkin in The Nation:
In the politics of the world, Liberalism is a declining,
almost defunct force. The condition of the Liberal
party in England is indeed parlous. There is actually
talk of organizing a Liberal-Imperialist party; a combination
of repugnant tendencies and theories as
impossible as that of fire and water. On the other
hand there is a faction of so-called Liberals who so
little understand their tradition as to make common
cause with the Socialists. Only a remnant, old men
for the most part, still uphold the Liberal doctrine,
and when they are gone it will have no champions.
The outcome of this debate was a decisive victory
for the collectivists. In the United States, the turning
point was probably the depression that followed
Grover Cleveland’s second victory in 1892. It led to
the crushing defeat in 1894 of the Democrats, at that
time the party of free trade, limited government, and
laissez-faire, and the start of a prolonged period of
Republican domination of Congress. One feature of