Both the terms “new liberalism” and “citizenship” have intricate relations to late nineteenth- and twentieth-century politics. The term “new liberalism” is still occasionally confused with the term “neo-liberalism” – the latter is usually taken as a synonym for the liberal new right of the 1980s, which stands in overt opposition to the new liberalism. It is important to bear in mind here that liberalism is a complex and intricate body of thought. It is not a uni-dimensional tradition. Classical liberalism has often been singled out by theorists as the most important dimension; however, this seriously neglects other important and distinctive strands of thought within liberalism, not least the powerful and immensely influential tradition of the “new liberalism.”

“Citizenship” also embodies an ambiguous conceptual legacy. It is a term which has gone in and out of fashion from the nineteenth century to the present. To raise the issue of the concept of citizenship from the late 1960s, even up to the very early 1980s, was seen as either quaint or archaic. However, times have changed and citizenship is once more fully back in vogue. Unlike “citizenship,” however, the term “new liberalism” still has an awkward feel to it in discussions of political theory. Republicanism, classical liberalism and libertarianism, communitarianism, Marxism, feminism, and neo-Aristotelianism flourish in contemporary anglophone political theory, but one hardly ever finds a reference to the new liberalism as a coherent or distinctive view.