Three Histories of Liberalism: Hobhouse, Berlin, and Rawls: A study of liberalism, the liberal tradition, and their historical development

Liberalism has a history. Not only does it have a history, it has a history of that history being rewritten, reshaped, and recounted. The thesis explores this ‘second-order’ history—the history of the history of liberalism, for want of a better phrase—and examines some of the different ways in which liberalism has been understood as a tradition and as an historical phenomenon. More precisely, the thesis is an examination of three histories of liberalism; liberalism according to L. T. Hobhouse, Isaiah Berlin, and John Rawls respectively. All three figures made their defences of liberalism at particular moments and in the face of particular crises during the long twentieth century. All three of those defences were predicated upon different conceptions of liberalism as a historical phenomenon and a living tradition, which attempted to either reconcile or accommodate the inherent conceptual tensions and divided lineages within liberalism, and distinguish it from its ideological rivals. These different conceptions of the liberal tradition were also, I argue, forms of 'practical' pasts where the past was framed in relation to the present and one context was written over from another. By examining these 'practical' pasts in their own contexts and alongside one another, we can see the changes in the meaning of liberalism as a historical phenomenon and the emergence of the stories that have come to seem essential to liberalism's self-image as the modern tradition par excellence. This development of the liberal tradition, I argue, has been essential to ways in which liberalism was understood in the twentieth century, and by examining the former, we can better grasp the latter and the multiplicity of meanings that have at different times been attributed to it.