A Comparative Study Of The New Liberalism And Fabian Socialism In England

This study is based on the author's interest in two most important British welfare ideologies between 1880's and the first world war,that is,the New Liberalism and the Fabian Socialism.These two ideologies were active responses to political,social and moral crises resulted from highly industrialized society,and were the two prominent ideologies in the era of British progressivism.Among all the political ideologies at the end of the nineteenth century,they were most actively involved in the social problems like destitution,unemployment,sickness and education,and were the most important forces in support of British social reforms and the welfare state.There exists an accepted but tentative assertion in English academia since 1970's that British New Liberalism and the Fabian socialism at the turn of the century shared a large number of political concepts,and also had some similarities in reform measures to pressing social problems of the time,so that they were both put under the label of British Left.However,their overlaps and disparities has not been analyzed comprehensively and systematically,and the nature of their consensuses and divergences has also not been understood properly.In the established study of welfare ideologies,both one-dimensional and two-dimensional analyses and comparisons has oversimplified the complexities of ideologies,and therefore has not provided any satisfactory patterns of interpretation.This study devoted to the reexamination of the above-mentioned assertion by means of the functional and morphological approaches to political ideology developed since 1990's.From the functional perspective,the political ideology could be treated as a set of ideas,beliefs,opinions and values that compete over providing and controlling plans for public policy,with the aim of justifying,contesting or changing the social and political arrangements and processes of a political community.From the morphological perspective,political ideologies are complex combinations and clusters of political concepts in sustainable patterns,that is,consist of core,adjacent and peripheral concepts.The wide-ranging structural arrangement of the ideology attributes meanings to a range of mutually defining political concepts,and therefore removes the controversies over their meanings.Drawing on this approach to ideology,this study sees the functions of the New Liberalism and Fabian socialism as providing theoretical basis and practical proposals for the social and political transformation of the UK at the turn of century,that is,the building of the welfare state.In order to define the overlaps and divergences of the New Liberalism and Fabian socialism,it seeks to identify the different places of those political concepts in their respective ideological fields,the diverse combinations and configurations of those concepts,and the different meanings thus generated,through detailed textual analysis of the leading new liberals(L.T.Hobhouse and J.A.Hobson)and Fabian socialists(G.B.Shaw and the Webbs).The author contends that,in the core of the ideological configuration,the new liberalism incorporates the new concepts of community and welfare,and thus partially overlaps with Fabian socialism;in the adjacent field,the two ideologies share the concepts of democracy and state.However,the new liberalism place the free development of individuality in its core,but Fabian socialists often marginalize the concept of individuality;equality is an important adjacent concept of the new liberalism,but at the center of Fabian socialism,and the two identify the different meaning fields of equality through very different adjacent concepts.In the periphery of ideology,both of them support the welfare measures,including the living wage,the old age pensions,the right to work,social insurance and so on;but there are a large amount of disparities about the design of welfare measures between the two,and these disparities are the results of the differences in the core and adjacent areas.Therefore,the two exhibit both overplays and disparities in the core,adjacent the peripheral area.The above assertions have three important implications for the study of political thought and political thinking.Firstly,they revise the refine the past comparative analysis of the new liberalism and Fabian socialism,and therefore this study has improved the academic research in the field.Secondly,this case study presents the merge of liberalism and socialism at the certain historical context,and this implies that relationship between these two great political thought traditions is changing and flexible rather than fixed and rigid.This urges us to think about such a possibility that,although contemporary liberalism and socialism seem to be antagonistic to each other,they could recover their mutual interchange and cooperation in order to reach certain agreement on public policies.Lastly,this case study contributes to the rethinking about the theory of the end of ideology in the mid-twentieth century which wrongly treated the common support for the welfare state as the convergence and even decay of ideologies.This study shows that ideologies could partially merge in core,adjacent and peripheral areas,but this fact does not result that ideologies will become one and even disappear;those ideologies that support similar public policies and agencies always compete over the meaning of political concepts,and the outlook for the future societies.