ABSTRACT
Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill and many New Liberal and other nineteenth-century public philosophers combined political writing with being either members of their parliaments or otherwise engaged in national or, as with T. H. Green, local politics. A. D. Lindsay was one of many twentieth-century British intellectuals who, influenced by New Liberal thought, became a democratic socialist and a member of Britain's Labour Party. He advised the Labour Party on educational policy, and, in 1938, unsuccessfully contested a by-election in Oxford on an anti-Munich, anti-appeasement platform. Ernest Barker's contributions to democratic theory as a public philosophy supplement rather than replicate Lindsay's. For Barker, it is the subordination of governments to their societies that is the great political achievement and hallmark of modern liberal democracies. Democratic rules and principles were moral and universal in that they were applicable to all human beings in similar circumstances, and that their supporting reasons could withstand objections.
