Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse was the most sophisticated intellectual exponent of the ‘New Liberalism’ which emerged in Britain in the closing years of the nineteenth century. A determined advocate of political and social reform, who worked for years as a journalist on the progressive liberal press, Hobhouse also had a distinguished academic career, occupying the first professorial chair in sociology to be established at a British university. As a political theorist, Hobhouse is most significant for his attempt to reformulate liberalism to recognize more adequately the claims of community, establish the centrality of basic welfare rights, and legitimate an activist democratic state.
Leonard Hobhouse was born in the Cornish village of St Ive in 1864. The son of Caroline Trelawny and an Anglican clergyman, Reginald Hobhouse, he was brought up in comfortable circumstances. Schooled at Marlborough, he went on to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, earning a first-class degree in Greats in 1887. After graduation, Hobhouse stayed on in Oxford, first as a Prize Fellow at Merton College, and later as a full Fellow of Corpus Christi. By the mid-1890s Hobhouse began to feel cramped by the confines of academia; and, eager to play some more definite part in the crusade for social reform, he abandoned his Oxford career to take up a position with the liberal Manchester Guardian in 1897. He remained with the paper as a full-time leader writer until 1902. Between 1903 and 1905 he worked as Secretary to the anti-protectionist Free Trade Union.
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- Hobhouse: Liberalism and Other Writings , pp. ix - xxviPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994