ABSTRACT
The strengths and the weaknesses of British Hegelianism as a school for life are nowhere better exemplified than in the career of Richard Burdon Haldane. Haldane looked beyond the Empire and the English-speaking world to the establishment of, first, a European Sittlichkeit, and eventually a set of mores which would be the indispensable underpinning of an international legal order. In spite of the suggestion that philosophy was being thrown into a holy crusade against science and irreligion, Haldane was a rationalist and orthodox Hegelian, a philosopher for whom philosophy is its own justification. While many intellectuals were driven by the war’s devastations to despair of liberal democracy, and others of any sort of political action whatsoever, Haldane retained his enthusiasm for both new theories and old values and his willingness to use the coercive powers of the state in defence of liberalism.
