Author Archives: Dictionary of Liberal Thought

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 we continue our trilogy of postings on liberalism – classical, economic and social. Last month it was classical; this month, it’s economic. You can read other previous extracts on LDV here. The entire book is available on Amazon here and can also be bought at the Westminster Bookshop.

Economic Liberalism

In political terms, economic liberals proclaim their belief in individual freedom and free markets; they support a reduction in the role of the …

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 Henry George Foundation; this month Mary Wollstonecraft. The entire book is available on Amazon here and can also be bought at the Westminster Bookshop.

Mary Wollstonecraft 1759–97

An English radical, whose advocacy of equal rights for women and men attracted considerable attention in her lifetime, Wollstonecraft has subsequently acquired a reputation as the pre-eminent feminist polemicist of her age. The range and quality of her literary work helps to explain much of the contemporary interest in her life and thought.

Key ideas

• The ability to reason should be accepted as the foundation of human political community.

• Women and men cannot be distinguished in terms of their inborn capacity to reason.

• Women and men should, therefore, be treated as equals.

• All need to learn how to employ reason in their own and one another’s best interests.

• Equality of educational opportunity is, therefore, an essential requirement for a fair and a decent society.

• Men – as well as women – will be the beneficiaries if women are no longer subjugated and degraded by men.

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 Henry George; this month in follow-up, the Henry George Foundation. The entire book is available on Amazon here and can also be bought at the Westminster Bookshop.

Henry George Foundation

A charity that promotes the theories of Henry George, the Foundation is the principal supporter in the UK of taxes on the value of land (and other natural resources) as a means to promote social justice, alleviate poverty and increase economic efficiency.

Concerned about urban overcrowding and the plight of the poor, in February 1884 the British followers of Henry George (q.v.) established the Scottish Land Restoration League in Glasgow, with 1,800 members. Three months later they captured the London-based Land Reform Union (LRU) and renamed it the English Land Restoration League.

Duncan Brack and Ed Randall, authors of the Dictionary of Liberal Thought, have kindly agreed to let us publish extracts on Lib Dem Voice. Before the summer, Conrad Russell; this month Henry George. The entire book is available on Amazon here and can also be bought at the Westminster Bookshop.

Henry George 1839–97

Nineteenth-century America’s most influential radical theorist, his claim that the God-given land, the source of all wealth, had been unjustly usurped by landlords, and that the situation could be remedied by a tax on the unimproved value of land, inspired a generation of radical and socialist politicians in the English-speaking world and Europe.

Key ideas

• Land is the source of all wealth.

• God gave the land to the people, so its appropriation as private property was theft.
• This can be remedied by taxing away the value of rents paid on land and minerals.
• This ‘single tax’ would eliminate the monopoly power of landowners to exploit wage-earners and allow for the abolition of other taxes.

Biography

Henry George was born in Philadelphia on 2 September 1839, the second of ten children in a devout Episcopalian family. At sixteen, he went to sea and spent ten years drifting from job to job until, with a wife and young family, he settled in San Francisco, where he discovered a talent for journalism and, by 1871, became the editor and co-owner of the San Francisco Daily Evening Post.

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 Institute of Economic Affairs; this month Henry David Thoreau. The entire book is available on Amazon here and can also be bought at the Westminster Bookshop.

Conrad Russell was an academic and Liberal Democrat peer who helped to define and assert the Liberal Democrats’ philosophical and historical roots after the merger of the Liberal Party and SDP.

Key ideas

• Liberalism as a philosophy is primarily concerned with the use and dispersal of power.
• Defence of

…

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, Distributism. The entire book is available on Amazon here and can also be bought at the Westminster Bookshop.

The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) is a UK-based think-tank dedicated to the promotion of economic or classical liberalism. It describes its mission as ‘to improve understanding of the fundamental institutions of a free society by analysing and expounding the role of markets in solving economic and social problems’. The IEA is one of a small number of think-tanks world-wide that can claim to have had a significant impact on public policy, both in terms of contributing to a transformation of the general climate of opinion in the UK and the implementation of specific policies.

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, Henry David Thoreau. The entire book is available on Amazon here and can also be bought at the Westminster Bookshop.

A non-party-political movement that grew up in the 1920s and 1930s, dedicated to small-scale mass ownership of land and property as a bastion against collectivism, big business and big institutions, which its founders believed led inevitably to slavery. Distributism flourished under the early leadership of former Liberals Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton, became associated with radical Catholicism and arts and crafts pioneers like Eric Gill, and disintegrated in the 1940s – but was later influential on key Liberal Party policy-makers in the 1950s and green economics pioneers in the 1970s.

The immediate influences on distributism were the ideas of Hilaire Belloc (q.v.), especially in his book The Servile State (1912), and the prolific journalism of G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936). According to its proponents, it was an economic doctrine, but much of what they wrote was also historical criticism and profoundly spiritual.

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.

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.