Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-Century Political Thought and Practice

First published in 1990, Victorian Liberalism brings together leading political theorists and historians in order to examine the interplay of theory and ideology in nineteenth-century liberal thought and practice. Drawing on a wide range of source material, the authors examine liberal thinkers and politicians from Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill to William Gladstone and Joseph Chamberlain. Connections are drawn throughout between the different languages which made-up liberal discourse and the relations between these vocabularies and the political movements and changing social reality they sought to explain. The result is a stimulating volume that breaks new ground in the study of political history and the history of political thought.