radicalism seeks a fundamental change in political structures through a programme of far-reaching but constitutional reform. Its features include some or all of individualism, democracy, minimal government, a market economy, freedom of speech and publication, and opposition to tradition, hereditary privilege, and religious influences.

There was never a single radical party in Britain, though three loose groupings may be identified. The philosophical radicals were the utilitarian followers of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) who formed a small but influential reforming group in the 1830s, including George Grote and Joseph Hume within the Commons, and Edwin Chadwick, Joseph Parkes, and James and John Stuart Mill outside Parliament. Their ideas were publicized through the Westminster Review. Secondly, from the later 1830s, the Manchester School radicals, led by Cobden and Bright, campaigned for free trade and against aristocratic privilege through organizations such as the Anti-Corn Law League. They were supported by nonconformist religious opinion opposed to the established church. Thirdly, outside Parliament, admirers of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1791–2) formed a loose alliance of democratic agitators which gave leadership to the chartist movement (1838–52). These extremists were often in conflict with the other, more middle-class radicals. To a large extent they coalesced in the later 1850s into the radical wing of the Liberal Party under Gladstone's leadership. Notable parliamentary radicals in the 1870s and 1880s were Charles Dilke, Joseph Chamberlain, and Charles Bradlaugh. Radicalism declined as the most advanced school of progressive political opinion with the rise of socialist ideas at the end of the 19th cent.

Edward Royle