The past 20 years have seen a marked revival of interest in the philosophy of the British idealists, the philosophical movement that flourished for 50 years immediately after J. S. Mill's death, and the new liberals (especially L. T. Hobhouse and J. A. Hobson), who came to prominence following World War I. New editions of their canonical texts, major critical studies, and previously unavailable works by Thomas Hill Green, Francis Herbert Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, and Edward Caird have appeared in recent years. David Weinstein has played a significant role in this revival. Hence, it is unsurprising that his new book Utilitarianism and the New Liberalism (hereafter, UNL) is attracting significant interest, with the leading scholarly journal in the field, Collingwood and British Idealism Studies, devoting an entire issue to it.

Weinstein identifies the core claims of new liberalism as follows: Individuals can develop a determinate valuable personality, a sense of the good, and rights only by living within a community that respects them as an end in themselves; power should be exercised over individuals only when doing so serves ends with which they identify their good; and the state should intervene only to enable its individual members to develop their own conceptions of a valuable life. (Precisely how it should intervene depends on practical judgments made in specific circumstances, paying due regard to the imperative to avoid crushing individual character and initiative.)

UNL contributes to the debate over the relationships among new liberalism, British idealism, and utilitarianism, focusing particularly on the relationship between pleasure and self-realization. Chapter 1 (“Introduction”) is devoted primarily to methodological reflections, while Part I (“Consequentialist Perfectionism”) focuses on Green's Kantian consequentialism (Chapter 2), Hobhouse's perfectionism (Chapter 3) and their relationships to “contemporary moral philosophy” (Chapter 4). Part II (“New Utilitarianism”) concerns D. G. Ritchie (Chapter 5) and Hobson (Chapter 6), with Chapter 7 (“Conclusion: Intellectual History and the Idolatry of Conceptual Dichotomies”) returning to methodological concerns.

There is much for philosophers and historians to learn here. Weinstein shows that key differences among Green, Hobhouse, Ritchie, and Hobson, on the one hand, and (particularly Millian) utilitarians, on the other, are overstated in the literature. One of UNL's greatest strengths lies in its comments and criticism of the poor use made of intellectual history by many contemporary philosophers. Weinstein notes, for example, that for many analytic philosophers, “[p]ast philosophic greatness is measured by its relevance to current analytical preoccupations, causing us to ignore too much of the history of political thought as misguided and dreary” (p. 19).He also highlights the associated tendency to struggle toward positions that had already been worked out with far greater sophistication and insight by the philosophers examined in UNL. One of his most effective examples of this tendency is the liberal perfectionism of Joseph Raz and his followers (p. 10 n. 27).

Weinstein is correct to highlight this contemporary parochialism. There is a familiar frustration in reading articles and monographs in the hope that they will deliver on their purported status as “cutting edge,” only to find arguments that are at root poorly worked-out echoes of earlier, more powerful theories. (For example, Ronald Dworkin's “practice view of social integration” harks back to forms of relational organicism found in Hegelianism, British idealism, and new liberalism; and the revival of interest in republican theory has worked over ground covered much more successfully by Green [see Colin Tyler, “Contesting the Common Good: T. H. Green and Contemporary Republicanism,” in Maria Dimova-Cookson and W. J. Mander, eds., T. H. Green: Ethics, Metaphysics and Political Philosophy, 2000].)

Weinstein's lament against the parochialism of analytical philosophy makes it especially important for him to demonstrate historical and conceptual sensitivity in his own analyses. Unfortunately, there is at least one key area where his success is disputable. He distinguishes sharply between “idealism” and “new liberalism.” In the first camp, he places F. H. Bradley, Bosanquet, Henry Jones, and R. G. Collingwood (p. 10 n. 24), and in the latter he places Green, Ritchie, Hobhouse, and Hobson. The respective defining features of Weinstein's categories are obscure, however. His distinction cannot rest on the nature, purposes, and extent of legitimate state action, for example, for although he claims that Bradley and Bosanquet favored limited state action (a claim requiring greater specification), Jones and Collingwood were more interventionist (p. 10 n. 24). It is surprising that Weinstein does not mention what could be seen as an obvious way to conceptualize the two categories (should one wish to do so), by stressing differences at the metaphysical level. One such difference might be the structure of their respective metaphysical theories; a second could be the multifarious relationships posited among metaphysics, social philosophy, political philosophy, and public policy. Alternatively, his categorization might rest on the claim that the relationship of “new liberalism” to utilitarianism was not affected materially by their associated metaphysics. This would explain his failure to discuss metaphysics in any depth. Yet it is an increasingly controversial claim, requiring careful defense, which UNL does not provide.

I suspect that specifying Weinstein's distinction between idealism and new liberalism would expose some schematic difficulties with it. For example, if one looks for a point of “metaphysical” difference, then Green and Ritchie must fall in the idealist camp (as usually they are taken to do, not least by Green and Ritchie themselves!); it also becomes very difficult to defend Weinstein's interpretation of Collingwood as an idealist; and finally, why should one see Bradley's metaphysics as “idealist” unlike the very different metaphysics of the allegedly “new liberal” Green? Partly, Weinstein's problem is that “idealism” has a necessarily metaphysical referent, whereas “new liberalism” has a political one. No unity underlies this difference, problematizing any efforts to make coherent distinctions and meaningful comparisons among its components.

There are other points to dispute: For example, Weinstein understates both Green's profound influence on Ritchie and Hobhouse and the role of nonconscious reasoning in the theories of Green and Ritchie. He also argues (frequently) that his new liberals held that as self-realization brought pleasure, one should seek pleasure in order to realize oneself. He does not explore the fallacy of the affirmed consequent upon which this very weak argument rests, nor does he establish that all of his chosen philosophers actually committed it. For all these criticisms, however, Weinstein's book should be recognized for what it is: an insightful contribution to an important debate by a leading scholar.