Liberalism

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LIBERALISM

emancipatory liberalism
liberalism in power
liberalism challenged and surpassed
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For a good many reasons the nineteenth century may be considered the century of liberalism par excellence. Indeed the Europeans of the time took it for granted that theirs was a liberal era. The term itself and several other relatives of "liberty" ("liberal," "liberals," "liberalism," or the Italian "liberismo," referring to an economic rather than a political liberalism) all date from the nineteenth century. Consequently, and even though liberalism can claim no founding programmatic statement or text, the word has come to connote almost all the great political and social changes brought by "modernity."

Four broad spheres may be identified that together make it possible to arrive at an overall picture of nineteenth-century European liberalism. One such sphere in which liberal ideas were able to develop was the judicial one, embracing the entirety of reforms and advances of a legal kind founded on guarantees made to the individual and including the right to defend oneself in court, the right to the presumption of innocence, the right to a trial by jury—in short, the right to justice, whether individual or collective (especially with respect to religious minorities). The issue here is less the "rights of man," in the sense of the French Declaration of 1789, than a set of rights, won incrementally and concretely within the judicial realm, which together solidified the rule of law (called l'état de droit by the French and Rechtstaat in German-speaking countries). This process was under way before 1789 and it continued long thereafter (as witness the belated abolition of serfdom in Russia in 1860).

A second front of advancing liberalism was that of the economic, commercial, and industrial freedoms wrested from the old economic order based on partial control of the economy by the state (mercantilism), on various kinds of corporations and monopolies, and on the last vestiges of the feudal yoke. The notion that anything that helps free up commerce and industry must be good for the individual and for society at large gained currency as early as the second half of the eighteenth century. The idea of free trade nourished the prospect of prosperity and social harmony not just within each country but also in the relations between states: commerce was supposed not merely to offer individuals the greatest possible number of opportunities, not only to reward talent and merit but also to bring peoples closer together through exchange and reciprocal enrichment.

Advances in the realms of thought and science constitute a third sphere of liberal growth. Here the notion of freedom implied the setting of great store by discussion; the spread of "enlightenment" and the creation of a "public sphere" where not only every new idea but also every new political reform, indeed every "public" innovation, could be subjected to the test of debate and argument in a multitude of circles, academies, salons, clubs, and newspapers or journals.

The fourth dimension of the spread of liberalism in Europe concerns the most decisive but also the most delicate aspect of the matter, namely the organization and the very nature of political power: free and open discussion, public control over the actions of the executive authorities, the holding of government responsible for any errors it might commit—all were cardinal for liberalism, or more precisely for liberal constitutionalism.

Separately or together, these four aspects of the rise of liberalism were responsible for an almost infinite variety of policies and moments that could be described to a greater or lesser degree as "liberal." In some cases legal and civil liberties were granted without any true loosening of the grip of an authoritarian political order (as for example in the case of the Stein, Hardenberg, and Humboldt reforms in Prussia between 1807 and 1815). Sometimes, by contrast, economic liberalism was introduced to boost national power, especially in the military sector, without any concomitant political liberalism—without instituting such public freedoms as the right of assembly, the freedom of the press and of publication, and the right of association, or such constitutional liberties as a parliamentary system and broader suffrage.

Had it ever achieved its full expression, therefore, nineteenth-century European liberalism would have meant the fusion of all four spheres into an indivisible whole. To define a political order, the doctrine of a party, or the ideas of an individual as liberal in the fullest sense would then imply the reality or premise of an established state having adopted economic liberalism (a free market, or what the Italians call liberismo, implying minimal state intervention) while at the same time embracing complete freedom of the public realm and genuinely liberal state institutions (executive and legislative bodies in competition based on open debate and the principle of governmental accountability). The chances of all four strands of liberalism coming together in this way, however, were close to nil. To confront such an ideal model with the various realities of European history is to understand why liberalism was never consistently defined across the Continent. The best that may be hoped for by way of definition of nineteenth-century liberalism is a sort of scale of historical situations, ranging, say, from nearly perfect examples (Great Britain in the 1850–1890 period and a number of smaller European states such as Belgium or the Netherlands) to cases of weak and minority liberalism (Otto von Bismarck's [1815–1898] Germany, Austria-Hungary after 1867, or—and especially—tsarist Russia), with France, Italy, or Spain occupying intermediate positions as examples of an unfinished or partial liberalism.

To these fundamental obstacles in the path of a clear definition of European liberalism must be added difficulties of the linguistic, ideological, and cultural kinds. In Europe the nineteenth century was the age of rising nationalism, and the use of the terms liberal and liberalism, like the adoption by one state or another of a model considered liberal, were widely infected by national rivalries. As identified with the ideas thrown up by the French Revolution, "liberal" notions were violently denounced in the 1820–1850 period by monarchist states attached to the old European order, even though such states (including Prussia, Austria, several small German states, and Piedmont) had already undertaken civil, judicial, and administrative reforms consistent with the ideal of the rule of law. As attributed, by contrast, to France's great rival England, "liberalism" was the butt of a multitude of criticisms and caricatures from Jacobins, democrats, and republicans; from this perspective, French Republicanism, even as embodied in the Third Republic after 1875, was seen as an advance beyond liberalism, which was too "English" and too aristocratic. Lastly, in a general way, and especially in the second half of the century, liberalism came in many countries to be viewed simply as an import either from the Anglo-Saxon world or (as by Russian pan-Slavism) from the Western one; the rejection of liberalism, or the claim that liberalism had been transcended and its supposed shortcomings obviated, thus became a badge of patriotic and nationalist correctness (as in the Germany of William II).

emancipatory liberalism

The features of the liberal movement that developed in the wake of the French Revolution of 1789 had little in common with the present-day conception of liberalism. The "liberalism" of that time was inseparable from violent, revolutionary events set in motion by the people, and the power of liberal ideas from the advent of the Revolution onward was grounded in their rejection of an ancien régime all the more intolerable because it was in decline (see Alexis de Tocqueville's The Old Régime and the French Revolution, first published in 1856). In every part of Europe where the reverberations of the Revolution were felt, whether directly (thanks to invasion and occupation by the French) or indirectly, the idea of liberty had as its first implication freedom from the old order. This emancipation had legal aspects (equality before the law; one justice for all; the same rights for every individual, irrespective of birth); social and economic aspects (suppression of guilds, right of free enterprise, abolition of church tithes); intellectual aspects (freedom of the press, growth of philosophical societies); and, of course, political aspects proper (the establishment of elected representative bodies capable of participating in or even seizing state decision-making powers).

Linked as they were to the French Revolution, these "liberal" ideas suffered the backlash of disillusion that the Revolution precipitated. For the Revolution did not long remain the general "idea" celebrated by European philosophy in general and by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) in particular; as a historical reality, after all, it meant the Terror, civil war, religious persecution, anarchy, corruption—and ultimately dictatorship, in the shape of Napoleon I (1769–1821). It is here, in fact, that the real roots of liberalism are to be found: in the need to draw up a critical balance-sheet of modern liberal ideas, ideas that did not originate in some miraculously rational doctrine applied by an enlightened government, nor in the heads of philosophers gathered together, but which were forged in the great maelstrom of a people's revolution. European liberalism, at least on the Continent (for Great Britain was an exception in this regard), drew strength from its own contradictions, from the gulf between its philosophical agenda and the runaway course of its historical embodiment.

All the basic questions concerning European liberalism were raised during the years 1800–1820, either in the form of intellectual review (Edmund Burke [1729–1797] in Great Britain, beginning in 1790; Benjamin Constant de Rebecque [1767–1830], Germaine de Staël [1766–1817], and François Guizot [1787–1874] in France between 1790 and 1820); or else in the more concrete and pressing form of the set of dilemmas confronting the political and social elites: Should political freedoms (of assembly, the press, association, elections) be instituted at the risk of inviting excesses and anarchy among the people? Should the political responsibility of the government with respect to parliament be instated at the risk of weakening the central power of the state (so necessary in case of civil or foreign war)? Should completely free trade and exchange be allowed at the risk of creating a social void, of atomizing society by abolishing mediating bodies and spontaneous associations? Should a representative system be confined to elites alone or should the perils of universal suffrage be confronted? Seen in this light, the liberalism of the first half of the nineteenth century, as expressed by Guizot, for example, or by his Dutch counterpart Johan Rudolf Thorbecke (1798–1872), was an anxious and at times pessimistic one. It vacillated between an overarching optimism, envisioning the historical advent of liberty and reason thanks to representative government and the rise of a universal middle class, and a pessimism based on real fears (of people's uprisings, the Jacobin Terror, the specter of the guillotine, the manifest instability of post-1789 political regimes, and the extension of suffrage).

From this critical relationship to the French Revolution arose the two great contrasting traditions of European liberalism: on the one hand, a left-wing liberalism that did not confine itself to promoting the tenets of liberal philosophy but considered the people to be a historical agent, actively sought to extend the involvement of individuals in the machinery of the state, and deemed it legitimate to resort to revolution; on the other hand, a conservative liberalism, concerned with the civil and social order, which strove to protect the individual from the power of the state, feared anarchy and the people and urged reform while rejecting revolution and democracy. As early as the Restoration period in France (1814–1830), both tendencies nevertheless appeared under the banner of the liberal "party" in common opposition to reactionary monarchism. They were likewise present in Spain, where the term liberal was first used in connection with the regime voted in by the Cadiz Cortes (assembly) in 1812; during the three-year liberal interlude of 1820–1823, liberals were subdivided into moderados (moderates) and exaltados (ultraradicals). In Great Britain too the liberal universe tended to swing from moderation and the aristocratic tradition (the Whig party) to radical and democratic demands (followers of James Mill [1773–1836]). In Italy, the Risorgimento, a movement whose goal was the reunification of the nation as a free country, was split between advocates of a liberal state under whose sway reforms would be implemented from above (Count Cavour [Camillo Benso, 1810–1861] in Piedmont) and proponents of a more democratic liberalism (such as Giuseppe Mazzini [1805–1872]). In all European countries the liberal tendency initiated at the beginning of the century thus followed a narrow course between two possible "deviations," rather like a bowling ball ever in danger of veering to left or right off its lane. Liberals who tended to resist even cautious reforms out of fear of universal suffrage, of violent revolution, or of the poorer classes in general, tended to defect to conservatism; those ready to pursue democracy, voting rights, or the will of the people come what may, tended to quit the liberal realm and enlist with democrats, radicals, or republicans.

Almost everywhere, this basic split in liberalism was correlated with two distinct views of the role of religion in modern society. Thus radicals or exaltados espoused anticlericalism, whereas moderados, Whigs, or conservative liberals felt that strong religious institutions buttressed the social order. In predominantly Catholic countries this dividing line left but a very narrow space for liberal Catholicism. And the further liberal and modern ideas evolved toward democracy, lay institutions, and secularism, the further religious practice declined and the more sharply contradictory Catholics who had endorsed the liberal program of 1820–1830 felt their own positions to have become: they felt that they had played the sorcerer's apprentice.

Liberalism was precipitated and carried forward by the French Revolution, but for that very reason it was assailed by the Revolution's backwash. In the Europe of the Holy Alliance that emerged from the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), the liberal tendency was reduced to the role of a minority opposition, at least for the time being. It was not long, however, before trends in the development of ideas, of the arts and of culture, gave liberal ideas a new lease on life. The about-face of Romanticism, a movement which began by opposing eighteenth-century rationalism but ended up exalting the freedom of the artist from the dictates of academicism, is a very typical instance. Although the expression of liberal ideas in the properly political sense was seriously hindered by authoritarian restrictions, the liberal sensibility, at least, continued to develop through music, opera, theater, poetry, literature, and the genre historique. This example of "the cunning of history" did more, perhaps, for the dissemination of liberal ideas than formal political organizations of liberals in legal and parliamentary opposition. The revolution of July 1830 in France, which opened the way to a liberal monarchy personified by Louis-Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877) and Guizot, was also a revolt of Romantic youth.

But the chief ally of the liberal idea in the Europe of 1820–1840 was unquestionably the idea of the nation. This might seem paradoxical in view of the fact that this idea would later be assimilated to that of nationalism, and hence to a rejection of liberal values. In the context of the early nineteenth century, however, the primary connotation of the idea of the nation was that of an emancipation. The point was liberation: either liberation from foreign occupation—be it that of the future Belgium from the Netherlands; that of Poland, largely occupied by Russia; that of Ireland from the English; or that of Greece and other Balkan countries from the Ottoman Turks—or liberation from the division of a nation into several states, an arrangement perceived as an anachronistic legacy of the past, as in the case of Germany or even in that of the Swiss confederation. Italy belonged to both categories, being partly occupied and partly shackled by divisions (between Italian states) inherited from the past. In much of continental Europe—indeed in by far the greater portion of it, considering the ease with which national demands proliferated as freedom movements spread—the cause of national freedom was thus a formidable crucible of liberal ideas.

During this first phase of the nineteenth century, for example in the philhellenist movement of the 1820s, the freedom of one European nation was felt to concern all other Europeans in accordance with an optimistic and reconciliatory outlook sustained by the liberal movement's Romantic generation. The liberals of each country should struggle for their own national freedom, but, once it was won, they should come to the aid of the liberals and patriots of other, still oppressed countries. As for the military interventions of conservative monarchies seeking to repress movements of national emancipation (such as the invasions of Spain and of Italian states during the 1820s, or the quelling of liberal-national movements in 1848, notably in Italy and Hungary), they merely reinforced the intensity of the ideas, passions, and myths of Romantic liberalism. A liberal "public opinion" came into being for the first time. Liberal tendencies in each country won many more recruits by playing on national-patriotic themes than they could ever have garnered by evoking the liberal program in its "pure" form (consider the liberal patriots in Spain, Italy, and Germany).

Even after 1850 and the first disillusions with movements of national unification, the idea of a right to freedom for every European people or nation continued to be a central plank of liberal party platforms. Right up until 1914, in fact, a not insignificant portion of Europe, from Ireland to the Balkans, and including the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, known as a "prison of peoples," continued to foster the alliance between liberalism and the idea of the nation (in Norway, the liberal-national party Venstre led the country into independence in 1905; the Greece of Eleuthérios Venizelos [1864–1936] and the Irish Home Rule struggle likewise come to mind here).

liberalism in power

Borne along by the whirlwind of revolutionary, emancipatory, and national ideas; by most literary and artistic trends; and by the gradual embrace by European states themselves of modern conceptions of law, the liberal movement in the first half of the nineteenth century tended to find itself fighting for social demands and against established power (authoritarian monarchies or representative systems with oligarchic tendencies where the vote was confined to the propertied classes). Liberalism derived a powerful dynamism from this oppositional role. The midpoint of the century saw the start of a new stage, that of "liberalism in power." Its divisions notwithstanding, the liberal movement became almost everywhere the chief government party or the chief political force capable of affecting the decisions of governments and states.

The best example of liberalism triumphant was Great Britain. There are five reasons for saying so. First of all, British liberalism benefited from the continuity between already ancient traditions of civil liberties (habeas corpus) and of local and parliamentary aristocratic rights and such modern achievements as the emancipation of Catholics and Jews, the establishment of free trade, freedom of thought, and the extension of the franchise in 1832. It was thus not necessary for British liberalism to negotiate a revolutionary crisis opening a chasm between tradition and modernity, ancien régime and revolution, the elites and the people, and liberal ideas and progress toward democracy. The passage of the Reform Bill of 1832 showed that the parliamentary regime was capable of reforming itself and getting into step with the march of history. The second reason for British liberalism's success was that, although confronted until the outbreak of World War I by the continued social and political power of the aristocracy and the "establishment," it was able to incorporate many radical and even populist themes (in the arguments of William Gladstone [1809–1898] himself, and later in those of David Lloyd George [1863–1945] in his campaign against the House of Lords), and thus glean support from the working classes.

In the third place, the British liberals had already gained access in the eighteenth century to the very heart of political power thanks to the presence in Parliament and in the government of the Whigs, incarnation of the struggle against absolute monarchy. British liberal constitutionalism, based on the weakening of royal prerogatives and the emergence of the cabinet as a governmental structure, became the model for liberals throughout Europe. The fourth reason for liberalism's dominance in Britain, bound up with the patriotic parliamentary constitutionalism that reached its zenith in the middle of Queen Victoria's reign (1837–1901), is that Great Britain was also the cradle of the most thoroughgoing expression of liberal political philosophy. In John Stuart Mill's (1806–1873) account (1859), liberty was at once a condition of individual accomplishment and the only possible guarantor of an independent society that could run itself (mutual aid, charity, philanthropical associations) and thus limit the reach of state power. Although it is arguable that liberal philosophy concerned only the elite, liberalism in the broad sense certainly became the core of British national identity—and that is the fifth reason for its ascendancy. Victorious liberalism in the British mold, as the final argument of British military, maritime, commercial, and industrial power—linked to the adoption of free trade (1846–1848), to the notion of an increase in wealth and an improvement in life within the reach of all (as embodied by the campaigns of Richard Cobden [1804–1865] and the Anti–Corn Law League, created in 1839), and to the prospect of stable and pacific relations between states, in the period framed by the administrations of its two great prime ministers, Robert Peel (1788–1850) and William Gladstone (1809–1898), among others—represented the true high-water mark of the entire European liberal movement.

This "moment" of governmental liberalism may certainly be discerned in other European countries, as for example in Piedmont under Cavour or Hungary under Ferenc Deák (1803–1876), but such instances are invariably less stable and less "pure" than the British one. The case of France, where the memory of the Revolution of 1789 remained present in everyone's mind, and where the experience of political revolution was in fact relived several times (in 1830, 1848, and 1870–1871), is certainly the most complicated. That liberal ideas were in power in France cannot be disputed: one need only consider the nature of the country's political institutions (French parliamentarianism was in every way comparable to British) or the establishment of public freedoms at the end of the Second Empire and under the Third Republic. There were nevertheless three impediments to the advent of a true liberal era in France. In the first place, the powerful central role of an administrative state inherited from the ancien régime, and from Napoleon, continued to block the complete application of civil, judicial, and political liberalism: important factors here were the existence of an administrative justice separate from the general judicial system, a number of restrictions upon public freedoms, and state controls affecting civil servants and judges. Secondly, French liberalism, now identified with the limited electoral system of the July Monarchy (1830–1848), was criticized and overtaken by a more radical conception of democracy stemming from the Revolutionary tradition (Jacobinism and the ideal of direct democracy).

Although a few republicans in the 1860s, at the beginning of the Third Republic, continued to describe themselves as liberals (Jules Ferry [1832–1893] being a case in point), the word underwent a distinct change in sense and usage in the last decades of the century, as republican, democratic, and radical ideas continued to evolve. By the beginning of the twentieth century it was being used only by those Catholics (Popular Liberal Action party) opposed to the secularizing reform efforts of left-republican governments. The third obstacle confronting French liberals was the fact that they were the first in Europe to contend with mass electoral politics, universal male suffrage having been instituted in 1848. In this connection, French liberalism simply did not have the mobilizing appeal of radicalism, socialism, or even nationalist and chauvinist forms of conservatism. This was amply demonstrated by legislative election results up until 1914. The fact was that French liberals were often distinguished individuals hailing from the professional class and having no connection with movements, trade unions, or other organizations rooted in civil society. They were therefore condemned to remain in the minority, even if their ideas influenced all their adversaries (the republicans eventually became fierce defenders of parliamentarianism—and this even in its bicameral version, a characteristic liberal cause).

As for German liberals, they did achieve political power, first in Prussia and in a number of small states (notably Baden) and later in the context of a unified Reich, but this success entailed a basic change in liberalism itself, a shift that was evident in varying degrees throughout Europe and especially in newly unified nation-states.

Until the failure of the 1848 revolution and of the Parliament of Frankfurt (1848–1849), the program of the German liberals called for German unity to be attained by liberal means. They banked on the support of an educated middle class and the leadership of liberal governments in each of the German states (such as that of Heinrich von Gagern [1799–1880] in Hesse; Gagern also presided between December 1848 and May 1849 over the government formed by the Parliament of Frankfurt). Economic exchange (Zollverein) was also expected by the liberals to play a unifying role, along with the extension of public rights, a free press, and peaceful political relations among the states. After the shattering successes of Bismarck's authoritarian policies, however, and the imposition of unity on the Germans from above (1871), the liberals were obliged to define themselves not only in terms of their own philosophy but also by reference to the national prestige of Bismarck and the new Reich. Their subsequent electoral gains and their place in parliament and government could not be attributed solely to the virtues of the liberal program, for they had effectively subordinated themselves to other political tendencies and in so doing firmly tied the liberalism to the idea of the nation. The upshot was twofold: in the first place, the liberals split into opposing camps, with Rudolf von Bennigsen's (1824–1902) Nationalliberale Partei, founded in 1879, on one side and Eugene Richter's (1838–1906) left progressives on the other; secondly, the conquest of supreme power became impossible for them inasmuch as the chancellor, Bismarck, was not answerable to the Reichstag. This shift in Germany between 1861 and 1890 had profound and long-lasting consequences for European liberalism as a whole and most particularly for countries such as Italy.

In the wake of the French Revolution of 1789 liberalism could reasonably identify itself with the movement of history itself; it seemed to be the incarnation of the modern idea of progress. Later, even its reverses and failures, including the return of conservative monarchies after 1814–1815, could be looked upon merely as temporary obstacles or delays in the ineluctable advent of a liberal regime and society. In Bismarck, however, the liberals were faced by an opponent who had won where they had lost. The German liberals of 1848 showed up the weakness and limitations of their movement, its inability to endow the Germans with a unified state, to make war on Austria and France, to create a strong and effective government. The final irony was that the very enemies thought to have been condemned by the movement of history—conservatives, sometime reactionaries, monarchists of the ancien régime—had retrieved a prestige and popularity among the people (Bismarck first, then William II [r. 1888–1918]) that no one could ever have imagined before 1848. In striking contrast, the liberals themselves, whether "national" or "progressive," proved incapable of expanding beyond the middle classes, the liberal professions, and the intellectual elite. Thereafter it was easy for their opponents to denounce them for defending the status quo and private property and standing for class privilege (or, in Italy, for favoring the North over the South).

liberalism challenged and surpassed

Between about 1890 and 1914 liberalism in Europe had to deal with the surging power of the masses and the problems of freedom in an industrial society. This watershed period was marked by the generalization of political suffrage; the achievement of literacy by the greater portion of the population; a dramatic expansion of the popular press and of all kinds of publishing; and the emergence of large organizations—patriotic associations or leagues, trade unions, and political parties. During the period from 1860 to 1880, all the main European political traditions, namely liberalism, democratic radicalism, socialism, and nationalism, were essentially at parity with respect to the coming struggle for mass support.

By 1914 the state of play as it would have appeared to contemporaries was extremely unfavorable to liberals and liberalism. How is such a failure to be explained?

A first consideration is that liberalism found it very hard to adapt to the new world of highly organized and disciplined political parties. At bottom, liberalism was the product of the highly restricted ("censitary") representative systems of the early nineteenth century and of circumscribed groups of intellectuals (aristocratic salons and clubs, learned societies, newspaper editorial committees, Masonic lodges in some countries, and so on). Almost everywhere in Europe, therefore, liberals were defined by their fealty to the principle of open debate and to the interplay of freely formed and expressed opinions. Factionalism and its attendant divisions alarmed them not at all.

Neither the Whigs in Great Britain, nor the liberals of the July Monarchy in France, nor their counterparts in Spain or Italy were ever unified, and they never defended political unity as needful to a "party." All these assumptions and habits became a liability with the advent of the mass era. Vis-à-vis a newly vast electorate whose opinions were formed by the great popular newspapers and by national political campaigns, liberals frequently fell prey to their own divisions and to their inability to frame a simple or indeed "demagogic" program, to adopt a single slogan (or "cry" in the traditional English sense), or to produce a leader acceptable to all their number. In parliament they were confronted by groups unified by a coherent ideology—sometimes by radical democrats but more often by agrarian parties, Catholics, nationalists, or socialists. In this context they were often ill served by their affection for open debate and free balloting. Even where liberals succeeded in forming governments, as in Great Britain with Gladstone or Herbert Asquith (1852–1928), they were continually undermined by personal and factional rivalries. As the situation grew more perilous in Europe, as an accelerating arms race and mounting nationalist propaganda raised the specter of war, conservatives, often recycled as modern-day nationalists, had no trouble tarring liberals and parliamentary liberalism with the brush of weak government. There were even those among the liberals who "betrayed" their cause by endorsing the view that public order trumped individual liberties or that a strong executive took precedence over legislative government (as for instance in the Italy of Francesco Crispi [1819–1901]).

Some liberal parties, certainly, were organized and structured. In Great Britain, through the efforts of Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914), who took the local model of Birmingham as his starting-point, and under the leadership of Gladstone, the Liberal Party assumed the profile of a modern political party. It drew a response from the masses (including the working class), imposed a relatively effective discipline on its members in Parliament, led coherent political campaigns at the national level, and so constructed a genuine identity for itself. Yet two facts militate against the claim that liberal "parties" enjoyed great success. In the first place, save in Great Britain and a few northern countries, partisan liberal organizations throughout Europe must be said to have failed. This is true of Italy, and most of all of France, where the liberals achieved neither parliamentary discipline nor any kind of national electoral organization (the radical-socialists, who dominated French political life in the 1900s, not being purely liberal in character).

Second, and this even in Great Britain, the philosophical tenets of liberalism continued to undermine the reality, stability, and durability of the party form. Gladstone's Liberal Party very soon suffered the secession of the Unionists (1886) over the issues of Irish Home Rule and imperialism. And even though the party continued to dominate the political scene during the Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1836–1908) and Asquith governments (1906–1914), and on through the war years, with David Lloyd George (1863–1945) and Winston Churchill (1871–1947) in the leadership, it is doubtful that the Liberals were a homogeneous and philosophically consistent grouping: internal debate raged on imperialism, on state intervention in the economy, and on the redistribution of wealth by fiscal means—all issues that put Whigs, moderate liberals, partisans of the New Liberalism, and radicals at odds with one other.

A major reason, too, for European liberalism's failure on the eve of World War I was competition from socialism, and more generally from all the new social ideas of the time (not just the Marxist or collectivist ones). Political liberalism was in a weak position relative to the model of the modern political party, but social liberalism—meaning the social ideas of classic liberalism—also came under fire, and was indeed ultimately overtaken. The liberal view of socioeconomic issues was based on the importance of individual merit, the achievement of personal success, free enterprise and commerce, and a minimal role for the state; these ideas had long dominated European thinking. It is arguable, indeed, that so long as socioeconomic features of the ancien régime persisted (such as constraints on business, the power of the landowning nobility, of corporations and guilds, or of the established church), then the ideas of the so-called Manchester liberals retained a good deal of their progressive character, that they were still revolutionary as applied to the most economically backward parts of the Continent, where agrarian reform was still unheard of and property ownership highly restricted. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, these liberal economic and social conceptions no longer tallied with majority opinion. In the mid-1870s the European economy had entered its first great cycle of depression in the modern sense. The liberal myth of a market economy founded on never-ending progress and the enrichment of all lost credibility. Most European countries aside from Britain adopted protectionist measures and turned their backs on the free-trade ideal, hitherto considered the guarantee of rapprochement and interdependence between states. By the century's end, the economy began to be perceived within European opinion as a new kind of war of conquest, of merciless competition (including the practice of dumping). This was yet another blow to the sanguine visions of economic liberalism of the Manchester variety.

Around 1900, even though Marx's bleak predictions concerning the pauperization of the working class and the total collapse of capitalism had not come to pass, the promise of generalized prosperity held out by liberalism had proved scarcely less illusory. Poverty and the extremely slow development of a middle class in the agricultural regions of southern Europe, including most of Spain and Portugal, the south of Italy, and the Balkans, were inhospitable conditions for the implantation of liberal ideas, especially in view of spreading socialist and even anarchist ideas and (as in Scandinavia) the success of agrarian-defense parties. Meanwhile, in urbanized and industrialized areas of Europe, the liberal vision of a society founded on individual merit and the disappearance of social class was given the lie by low social mobility, by the persistence of class and status differences, and by abiding feelings of fear and insecurity centered on industrial accidents, temporary or chronic unemployment, and illness. True, a new generation of liberals, spearheaded by Giovanni Giolitti (1842–1928) in Italy and by Lloyd George in Britain (with his "people's budget" of 1909 based on progressive taxation), introduced real social reforms in the 1900s (the eight-hour day in Italy in 1908; the British National Insurance Act in 1911) that laid the groundwork for the welfare states of the future. But even these measures inevitably appeared timid and incomplete, not to say hypocritical, when compared with the social solutions, pledges, and utopias outlined in the programs of the radical-democratic, social-democratic, and socialist parties.

As World War I approached, the liberals' economic and social agenda spoke only tangentially to the broad masses; only the middle and professional classes were drawn to it. The movement appeared distinctly weaker than its immediate rivals. In sharp contrast to democratic and radical parties, liberals were often reticent and suspicious with regard to universal suffrage and the political participation of the masses; they seemed pusillanimous, as compared with conservatives and nationalists, when it came to the defense of national unity and public order; and the appeal of their promises on the social front was easily surpassed by that of the socialists.

Perhaps the most striking instance of liberal failure in the 1900–1914 period is the case of Russia. During the nineteenth century, Russian liberals anticipated the conjunction of top-down reforms and the institution of liberal political representation from below (by means of the zemstvos, or local government councils, for example). When the moment finally arrived, however, under the pressure of the revolution of 1905 and the convening of a first Duma (elected national assembly), the liberals were very quickly left behind: overtaken on the left by democrats (specifically, by part of the Constitutional Democratic party) and by the various socialist tendencies, they were also challenged on the right by the authoritarian measures taken by the tsar and the conservatives in order to buttress their power. Unable to detach themselves from their nineteenth-century antecedents, the liberals were obliged to make way for the political forces that would stamp the century ahead, namely socialists, nationalists, and partisans of a strong executive arm and an interventionist state.

Up until the outbreak of World War I it was still possible to argue that, even if liberalism had missed the turning-point of political modernity (universal suffrage, organized political parties, trade unions, mass-based leagues, and associations), liberal ideas now helped define regimes and states throughout Europe. Liberals could still console themselves by recalling that their goal had never been to engage in partisan politics but simply to disseminate liberal principles within judicial systems and state administrations, to provide the other parties with constitutional rules capable of regulating their confrontations, and infuse public life with civility and general moderation. But, as some liberals clearly realized immediately, the outbreak of World War I threw liberal principles and ideals dramatically into question. War among European states meant that experimenting with free trade, so far from bringing nations closer together, had set them at each other's throats. War signaled the failure of liberal diplomacy (and the notion of arbitration) vis-à-vis military leaders; likewise the failure of parliaments vis-à-vis executive branches seeking to strengthen their grip on power. By mobilizing the economy under state control, war also showed up the limitations of liberal economics. And with war came types of propaganda, press censorship, restrictions on civil liberties, and methods of treating foreign residents that eroded liberal judicial principles considered beyond challenge in the nineteenth century. Above all, the passions and hatreds unleashed by the war challenged the most important philosophical precept of nineteenth-century liberalism, namely the idea that modern politics should be founded on judgment and reason and partake of the supposed forward march of "civilization."