ABSTRACT
The nineteenth century is the epoch of liberal triumph; from Waterloo until the outbreak of the Great War no other doctrine spoke with the same authority or exercised the same widespread influence. For the greater part of the nineteenth century, and over the greater part of Western Europe, government presented itself to the owning classes as nothing so much as the defensive rampart by which their privileges were protected from invasion by the poor. The essential attack on the liberal idea in the nineteenth century was that of socialism. The socialists rejected the liberal idea because they saw in it simply one more particular of history seeking to masquerade as a universal. Nothing shows more clearly the buoyant attitude of the post-Ricardian economics that there was, in fact, no practicable alternative to its postulates than the complete ignoration of socialism by its votaries until the last third of the nineteenth century.
