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The fate of Herbert Spencer's opus over the past century has been a curious one. He has been wheeled out as a modern evolutionist, a laissez-faire liberal, an individualist, a [...]

D.P. Chattopadhyaya. Sociology, Ideology and Utopia: Socio-Political Philosophy of East and West. Leiden: Brill, 1997. viii + 236 pp. $89.50. THE STUDY OF IDEOLOGY, as is well-known, is beset with [...]

by Graham Neville (Oxford: Clarendon P., 1998; pp. 360. 57.50 £) In its development of an ethos of state responsibility towards citizens' well being, the new liberalism was, by and [...]

Bertrand Russell has long been forgotten as a social theorist, and Philip Ironside's The Social and Political Thought of Bertrand Russell. The Development of an Aristocratic Liberalism (Cambridge: U.P., 1995; [...]

Thirty years ago, Ernest Barker was considered to be a major interpreter of the history of political thought. To this day, his commentaries on Plato, Aristotle and Burke are judicious [...]

Mark Francis and John Morrow, in A History of English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London: Duckworth, 1994; pp. 336. £40), have written a timely and innovative book that [...]

For some time now historical scholarship has shown the individualist, destructively competitive version of social Darwinism to have co-existed along-side a co-operative variety, conferring intellectual validation on the emergence of [...]

The major strength of Michael Newman's study, Harold Laski. A Political Biography (London: Macmillan, 1993; pp. xvi + 438. £45), lies in its sensitivity towards the complex, evolutionary and tentative [...]

With the growing political and economic integration of Western Europe, the sparseness of comparative historical studies has become more striking. Stefan-Georg Schnorr's Liberalismus zwischen 19, und 20. Jahrhundert. Reformulierung liberaler [...]

The English Historical Review is the enemy's organ -- the organ of 'scientific' history', wrote G. M. Trevelyan, as quoted in Victor Feske, From Belloc to Churchill. Private Scholars, Public [...]

Edward Carpenter represents a peculiar strand of British socialism: romantic, idealistic, highly personal, relatively apolitical or, at least, impractical. His views were almost as far removed from the state socialism [...]