Men versus the State: Herbert Spencer and Late Victorian Individualism.

• Author: Hirsch, Abraham

The author tells us that it had been his intention "to trace the intellectual origins of |the New Right' " but discovered that "although the Individualists were the precursors of the free marketeers of the 1970s and 1980s, they did not provide the inspiration for New Right theorists." This somewhat limits the interest for some readers yet interest enough remains even for those who are not primarily political economists. The volume is mainly concerned with tracing the process through which the radicalism of the mid-Victorian liberals was transformed by the late Victorian Individualists, a group whose leading light was the later Herbert Spencer, into a conservative doctrine.

The author sets the stage in the Introduction by telling us about "the fin de siecle crisis of liberalism caused by a society experiencing profound social, economic, and political dislocation." The problems of the era caused liberals to divide into two groups neither of which were faithful disciples of the old liberal creed. The New Radicals felt that changing conditions made it necessary for the government to play a much greater role than had been allowed by traditional liberal doctrine and to defend this position required a theoretical reorientation. What resulted was a literature with which most of us are familiar. But at the same time, argues the author, while the Individualists continued to champion government non-interference, the defence of Individualism no less required theoretical innovation since it involved transforming "a political theory which had once condemned the injustice of the Victorian social order" into one which could be used "in defence of the very privileges and inequalities it had previously condemned"; this other literature is not well known, according to the author, and he sets out to show in some detail how this transformation was brought about. Taylor uses the positions taken by the classical liberals on various points of doctrine as point of departure and shows how these positions were changed by Individualism, in the process transforming a radical philosophy into a very conservative one.

Some readers might question why a whole volume is needed to show how the radicalism of the earlier liberals became the conservativism of the Individualists. After all, it is well known even by those who are not expert in this field that there was a tension in mid-century liberal doctrine which could be used to support conservative ideology as it could the...