Duncan Brack and Ed Randall, authors of the Dictionary of Liberal Thought, have kindly agreed to let us publish extracts on Lib Dem Voice. Last month, the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Limited; this month Henry David Thoreau. The entire book is available on Amazon here and can also be bought at the Westminster Bookshop.

American writer, naturalist and philosopher, best known for Walden, a reflection on simple living amongst nature, and Civil Disobedience, an argument for moral resistance to unjust laws.

Key ideas
• The supremacy of individual conscience over statutory law and social conformity.
• The justification – and obligation – of civil disobedience in response to gross injustice.
• The value of personal development and enriched experience, centred on the pursuit of knowledge of self and nature rather than the accumulation of wealth.
• The importance of untamed nature.

Biography
Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on 12 July 1817; except for brief periods he lived there all his life. He was one of four children born to John Thoreau, a pencil-maker, and Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau, who was active in the Concord Anti-Slavery Society. He attended Harvard College (1833–37), receiving a bachelor’s degree. Afterwards he became a grammar school teacher, worked as a land surveyor and helped run his father’s pencil and graphite factory. All these jobs were secondary to his career as a writer and to his exploration of the woods, fields, lakes and streams of his beloved Concord countryside.

Thoreau never married, living with his family for most of his adult life. He died on 6 May 1862 of tuberculosis aggravated by bronchitis he had developed counting tree rings during a winter storm. Read more »

Duncan Brack and Ed Randall, authors of the Dictionary of Liberal Thought, have kindly agreed to let us publish extracts on Lib Dem Voice. Last month, Community Politics; this month, the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Limited. The entire book is available on Amazon here and can also be bought at the Westminster Bookshop.

Established in 1904 by the Quaker confectionary manufacturer and social reformer Joseph Rowntree, the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust promotes political reform, constitutional change and social justice; it has been by far the largest single donor to the Liberal Party and its successor, the Liberal Democrats.

Joseph Rowntree (1836–1925) was born into the family of a Quaker grocer in York. He built his younger brother Henry’s small cocoa business into a major manufacturer of sweets, chocolate and cocoa, employing nearly 7,000 people by the time of his death. His Quaker faith motivated him to show a genuine concern for his employees and their welfare; Rowntrees was one of the earliest companies to develop a pension scheme, in 1906, and profit-sharing, in 1923. Read more »

Duncan Brack and Ed Randall, authors of the Dictionary of Liberal Thought, have kindly agreed to let us publish extracts on Lib Dem Voice. This month, Community Politics. The entire book is available on Amazon here and can also be bought at the Westminster Bookshop.

Community Politics

Community politics encompasses a restatement of the intellectual basis for liberalism, based on devolving power to communities, and a strategy for winning elections, particularly focusing on local government. It emerged as a concept in the late 1960s, and was officially adopted by the Liberal Party at its 1970 assembly.

The theory of community politics emerged from the intellectual ferment of the Young Liberal movement during the late 1960s. Young Liberal leaders drawn to the Liberal Party by Jo Grimond sought to rethink the intellectual case for liberalism, earning the nickname ‘Red Guards’ because their radicalism conflicted with the more staid orthodoxy of the party leadership. After the Red Guards disintegrated following a series of doctrinal disputes, those members who remained with the Liberal Party set out ‘a restatement of Liberalism in a new synthesis to meet the changed perspectives of a new generation’. Bernard Greaves (1942–), Tony (now Lord) Greaves (1942–), Gordon Lishman (1947–) and Michael Meadowcroft were among its main proponents. Read more »