This is a book whose title does not adequately convey its content. On the one hand, it is admirably broad in its scope relating issues in the philosophy of mind, psychology, sociology and of evolutionary biology to politics and ideology. On the other, the anticipation of relating the new liberalism in England (nothing is said of Scotland and Wales) to European liberalism is not fulfilled. Instead, the crisis of European consciousness relates to quite different considerations. The period between 1870 and 1930, it is claimed, saw an unprecedented questioning of the cohesion between reason and enlightenment, especially in three fields of knowledge that provide the focus for Margins of Disorder, social psychology, biology, and classical studies. The revolt against the enlightenment was manifest in the proliferation of fields of knowledge developing their own vocabularies and procedural rules, rendering them incommensurable with one another. Encyclopedic reason was undermined by self-interrogation and increasing specialization. In social studies, for example, there were doubts about the existence, or alternatively the apprehension, of a universal set of standards for social good. Max Weber saw rationality as relational and historical, and Emile Durkheim, Gaetano Mosca, and Vilfredo Pareto formulated issue-specific terminologies allowing systems of social behavior to be analyzed without reference to their truth values or moral functions. Such arguments, Gal Gerson contends, justified the exercise of power by elites for its own sake (p. 17).

There are three deficiencies of significance in this work. First, once again an opportunity has been missed to view the new liberalism as part of a much wider liberal phenomenon. Guido de Ruggiero, whose name is mentioned, but whose ideas are not discussed, had his History of European Liberalism translated into English in 1927 by R. G. Collingwood. Collingwood, himself a disciple of de Ruggiero, was an exponent of the liberal theory of the state that renounced the error of imposing a blueprint upon the individual for which he or she was not inwardly prepared, and promoted the idea that the state is the organ through which a people expresses whatever political acumen it may possess, reproduce, and foster within itself. De Ruggiero's magisterial sweep across Europe acknowledges the importance of L. T. Hobhouse, the most important of new liberal thinkers in England, and applauds his emphasis upon free scope for personal development, not in the name of equal rights before the law but of equality of opportunity, which linked him to the French democrats. European liberalism in general, and not just in England, effected a synthesis between revolutionary socialism and laissez-faire economics in the form of social liberalism. Hobhouse himself recognized that ideas of social progress transcend borders. The liberal revival, he said, “was not confined to Great Britain…. [T]he deeper movements of social opinion can no longer be isolated” (Leonard Hobhouse, Democracy and Reaction, ed P. F. Clarke, 1972, p. 253).

Second, the author overstates the distance between the philosophical idealists and the new liberals, and in this I fear that he has been somewhat seduced by Hobhouse's and J.A. Hobson's own mischaracterizations in largely taking Bernard Bosanquet to represent the School. Bosanquet was far from typical of the idealists, and even his fellow idealists accused him of being too obtuse for his own good. Take, for example, one substantive issue. T. H. Huxley differentiated himself from Darwin in arguing that the evolutionary, or cosmic, process of nature red in tooth and claw was a different process from the evolution of ethics. Gerson points out that the new liberals rejected this bifurcation of the evolutionary process: “Morality and nature were mutually continuous” (p. 101). Here as in many other respects on substantive issues, the idealists and the new liberals were at one. Andrew Seth Pringle Pattison puts forward a persuasive case for the continuity of nature and spirit, arguing that the former can only be made intelligible in terms of the latter (see Man's Place in the Cosmos, 1897). On other occasions, Gerson is simply wrong in what he attributes to idealism. He asserts, quite erroneously, that “for the British idealists, human nature was constant and universal” (p. 147).

Third, although the author acknowledges that he largely ignores the international theory of the new liberalism, he gives no reason for doing so (p. 5). The period covered encompasses what Eric Hobsbawm calls the Age of Imperialism: the Boer War, the Russian Revolution and the crisis of capitalism, the rise of German militarism and the First World War, the rise and fall of liberal internationalism, the creation of the League of Nations, and much more. These were the substantive international political matters that the new liberalism addressed in great detail. Hobhouse and Hobson were wrong in suggesting that the British followers of Hegel acknowledged no obligations outside of the state. Idealists differed in the extent to which they acknowledged the actual achievement of a wider international community, but nevertheless thought it desirable and possible. The issue in question was how international society could be extended. The starting point had to be actual moral communities out of which broader principles of humanity arise. This is what Hobson suggests (Imperialism, 1902, p. 11) and also Hobhouse when he says: “All virtues are like charity in one respect—they begin at home” (Leonard Hobhouse, “The Foreign Policy of Collectivism,” Economic Review, 9 [1899]: 212). On the issue of imperialism, for example, despite the vehement denunciation of social liberalism, it has gone little noticed that Hobhouse and Hobson agreed with many of the British idealists that there is a right kind of imperialism, one which is not exploitative, but which prepares countries for self-government.

Despite the deficiencies highlighted, the book is distinctive in its focus and does much to set the new liberals in a wider intellectual context than is usual. In seeing the new liberalism as largely a reaction against antienlightenment sentiment on the continent, steering a path between Fabianism and British idealism, Gerson gives much food for thought.