The Idiots guide to: Welfare Liberalism

During the late 19th Century, Local Authorities found that by building hospitals, schools and Libraries, they could make significant improvements particularly to the lives of the poor. Liberal Politicians such as Gladstone and Joseph Chamberlain provided leadership at central and local level, for instance Chamberlain as mayor of Birmingham radically transformed housing and public buildings as well as using the proceeds of gas and water sales to invest back in the city facilities e.g. municipal socialism. Also Surveys in the late 19th century by Rowntree and Booth suggested that many people were in abstract poverty and simply didn’t have sufficient means to help themselves if they wanted to. As a result some liberals were looking for state intervention, the most prominent, Thomas Hill Green who was a professor of Philosophy at Oxford. Green developed what he called a more positive concept of freedom, the Classical liberals regarded freedom as a more negative thing, for instance the absence of the interference of the state or someone taking your property away or being locked up in Jail, Green however believed there was more to this, freedom is not merely about being left along but is the positive ability of doing something e.g. if a child is born into poverty without access to good health or education e.t.c, he cannot be truly free, because his freedom will be constrained by his lack of social opportunity. Green also argued that we are not truly free if we don’t have a sense of caring or obligation because like Rousseau he believed that we would be enslaved in our own personal pursuit of interest. Leonard Hobhouse 1864-1929 could be described as being at the socialist end of the New Liberal movement. Hobhouse argued that the poor and low paid workers had no control over the operation of capitalism, therefore not free but subject to economic forces beyond their control, it was up to the state to free these forces by ensuring a decent standard of living and the right to work. These can be described as social rights rather than economic and political rights.
One of the most renowned liberal thinkers was JA Hobson. Hobson had a more positive interpretation of the role of the state. Hobson in his famous book on imperialism argued that capitalism suffered from the periodic problem of “overproduction,” whereby consumption within society had been satisfied and therefore producers had to look for oversees markets which was often made by building up an empire and conquest. This would lead to periodic crisis within capitalism due to a lack of demand leading to unemployment and social distress. Hobson argued that the state could intervene to stimulate demand during trade depressions by boosting the buying power of the working classes by providing jobs and basic skills and rights to housing and education. The role of the state was to provide economic stability which makes everyone free through a lack of a boom and bust economy but also a freedom away from conflicts.