ABSTRACT
THE 'eighties will always be known as a time of rising interest in social reform. For a generation Ruskin and Morris had been exercising a powerful influence on their time. These were both Oxford men, and it was only natural that through them it should have begun to be felt in their old university. One of the present editor's earliest recollections of Oxford was of seeing undergraduates hastening with picks and shovels in hansoms to take part in Ruskin's scheme of road-making at Hinksey in I 874. Through the teaching and example ofT. H. Green and Arnold Toynbee a more practical direction was being given to social effort in the later 'seventies. One who had entered so fully as Bosanquet into that peculiar union of the practical and theoretic represented by these men, and was free to follow his own bent, was not likely to be long content with the "cloistered virtue" of college life. "To find in life new material for philosophy," wrote his wife, "and to take back to life the wider views gained by philosophical insight -this I think may be said to have been his vocation." 1 London
in the 'eighties offered a unique field for its exercise. Here the new interest in social reform had begun to concentrate and organize itself in various societies led by the younger men. Already these were dividing themselves into those which like the Democratic Federation, founded for direct action by Morris and Hyndman in r88o, shortly to be followed by the Fabian Society with its subtler method of "permeation," were pledged to State or municipal Socialism, and those which like the Charity Organisation Society stood for co-operation in the humbler work of detailed action on the character of individual and family life. Both by the ties of family and of friendship1 Bosanquet was drawn to the latter. But there were deeper sources of sympathy with such work. He has himself told us of the impression which the existence in and around his old Northumbrian home of a "real social will," as "the completer fact in which the private will finds form" and as containing the whole secret of "the art of living together," had made upon him.2 This, uniting with what he had learned from Plato, Rousseau, and Hegel of the concrete reality of the General Will, had inspired him with a profound belief that "our growing experience of all social 'classes' proves the essentials of happiness and character to be the same throughout the social whole,"3 and a corresponding distrust of doctrines and methods which seemed to him to dim this "time-honoured belief." "Those," he held, "who cannot be enthusiastic in the study of society as it is, would not be so in the study of a better society if they had it. 'Here or nowhere is your America.' " 4
The danger that such views should be misunderstood and taken by more impatient reformers to be "individualistic" and reactionary is obvious, and Bosanquet did not escape their open hostility on this ground. Perhaps he tended to forget the difference in the problem as it presented itself in a northern village and in the enormously complicated circumstances of modern industrial life,
BernardBosan andfailedsufficientlytorealizethedepthofthewoundinflicted onthelifeoftheworking-classpopulationsbythelaisser-faire doctrineandpracticeoftheprecedinghalf-century.Butithasto berememberedthatthedistinctionbetweenadoctrinaireSocialism andthesocialcontrolthroughlegislationofunsocialprofiteering hadnotyetbecomeclear.Bosanquetwasprepared,ashesaidat thetime,foranyamountofcollectivism.Whatheinsistedonwas thatitshouldbeguidedbysounddoctrineastowhathecalledin thepassagequotedabove"theessentialsofhappinessandcharacter."OnthistherecanbenodoubtwhateverofthequitefundamentaltruthofthedoctrinehehadinheritedfromGreenofthe existenceofatruegeneralwillorsocialconscienceinallclasses ofthecommunity,ontheliberationofwhichfromobstructions, whetherthenaturaloneofignoranceortheartificialoneofindustrialexploitation,allsocialprogressintheenddepends.
