I. Introduction: contexts of interpretation

My aim is to revisit Bosanquet's political philosophy, once again. The purpose of the re-examination is to reveal the priority of the ‘social’ over the ‘political’ in Bosanquet's thought by making more prominent what Bosanquet calls ‘all that is “social” ’, namely ‘all that springs from the co-operation and the sympathies of human beings’Footnote ¹. Herein lies Bosanquet's distinctive legacy: he gives pride of place to social cooperation as simultaneously a vehicle for, and constitutive of, his central practical ideal of self-maintaining, self-managing, self-governing individuals. This domain of human connectedness that occupies the space between the ‘political’, state action, and the personal, narrowly conceived individual and gives ‘the profounder meaning of the term “social” goes unrecognized’Footnote ² in the debate between collectivists and individualists. Giving due recognition to the ‘social’ motivates Bosanquet's writings as can be seen from the opening statement in the preface to the first edition of the Philosophical Theory of the State: ‘The present work is an attempt to express what I take to be the fundamental ideas of a true social philosophy’.Footnote ³ While social cooperation is not unique to Bosanquet's thinking, it is central to the Idealist thinking of political life, it receives its clearest treatment and most powerful vindication in Bosanquet's writings. That perhaps it has not received the full recognition it deserves, might have something to do with the ‘spirit of the time’ in the later part of the 19th century and early 20^th century.

I revisit Bosanquet against the backdrop of the scholarly literature which focuses on his relationship with British Idealism as a whole, and especially in light of the issue of state action. Two rival waves of interpreting Bosanquet are discernible in the literature. The old critical wave is bound up with Richter's claim that because of Green's ambiguous position on state action, his followers, like the followers of Hegel, split into ‘right’ (Bosanquet) and ‘left’ (Ritchie).Footnote ⁴ A similar argument is made by Collini who regards Bosanquet and Hobhouse as representing, respectively, the ‘right’ and ‘left’ division within political Idealism.Footnote ⁵ I refer to Richter's and Collini's interpretation as the ‘right-left division claim’. The new revisionist wave, represented by Nicholson and Carter, seeks to restore unity to political Idealism. In particular, denying that the right-left divide introduces fundamental differences into the Idealist camp. Nicholson claims that Idealist unity and continuity on state action is more important and fundamental than differences among Idealists. Indeed, on Nicholson's account, disagreements on state action are ‘tactical disagreements over the practical application of shared principles’.Footnote ⁶ Carter makes Idealist unity on the issue of state action a central piece of his argument. Focusing on the debate over the relationship between circumstances and character, central to the controversy over state action at the time, he contends ‘that there was a definite consensus in the idealists’ approach to questions of character and circumstances.Footnote ⁷ I refer to Nicholson's and Carter's interpretation as the ‘strong unity claim’.

This is my argument: to fully appreciate Bosanquet's political argument (regarding state action), it is necessary to place it in two contexts. One context is the Idealists’ rejection of both laissez-faire individualism and state socialism. I refer to it as the ‘primary context’ because it constitutes a shared Idealist point of view. The second context occupies the normative space between those two discredited poles. I refer to it as ‘derivative context’ since it results from the primary context. I argue that the strong unity claim of the revisionist wave holds to the extent that it is limited to the primary context. It is, however, the derivative context that reveals the relevance of the right-left division claim. At the same time that Bosanquet rejects both laissez-faire individualism and state socialism, he remains, unlike Ritchie and Hobhouse, a reluctant supporter of state action. Specifically, with regard to the issue of poverty that dominated debates on extending state action, Bosanquet upheld ‘a clear, persistent, and restrictive view of state welfare provisions’.Footnote ⁸

What, however, does this claim have to do with the priority of the ‘social’ over the ‘political’, which is my main concern? The answer is twofold. First, pressing the strong unity claim runs the risk of neglecting the important role of social cooperation in Bosanquet's political thinking. Though not a laissez-faire individualist, Bosanquet's stance on state action with regard to the poor unveils a particular kind of individualism which I shall call ‘social individualism’. It is best expressed in Bosanquet's prioritizing of the ‘social cooperative action’ over state action (the ‘political’). Second, the conceptual-normative nexus that Bosanquet forges between individual self-government and social cooperation lies at the heart of his social individualism.

I proceed in four steps. The first and second steps challenge Nicholson's and Carter's strong unity claims, respectively. The third step, ‘individualism in context’, explores Bosanquet's non-laissez-faire individualism in terms of ‘social individualism’. The fourth steps brings out the conceptual-normative link between self-management and self-government and the concepts of reciprocity and interdependence to which participatory cooperative communities give institutional reality. To that end, I place Bosanquet's social individualism in a threefold context: the tradition of civil society, Mary Parker Follett's new pluralism, and J. S. Mill's defence of workers’ cooperatives.

II. The strong unity claim: Nicholson

Nicholson rejects Richter's and Collini's claim that Idealism is politically divided. They claim that Green's ‘idealist followers diverged widely, splitting into a more collectivist and radical ‘left’ and a more individualist and conservative ‘right’, exemplified by Ritchie and Bosanquet respectively’.Footnote ⁹ Nicholson, by contrast, defends ‘An alternative view … [namely] that there are underlying similarities and continuities which count for more than any differences’.Footnote ¹⁰ On Nicholson's account, the ‘similarities and continuities’ are grounded in ‘shared principles’,Footnote ¹¹ ‘the same social ideal’,Footnote ¹² and the ‘same philosophy’.Footnote ¹³ They all ‘were decisive between capitalism and state socialism’.Footnote ¹⁴ Since the ‘shared principles’ were ‘not fully determinate at the level of particular policies’,Footnote ¹⁵ Nicholson claims, differences on particular policies were inevitable. Nicholson's strong unity claim lies, then, with his contention that the differences on particular policies do not count as much as do the ‘similarities and continuities’ because while the latter are at the level of ‘shared principles’, the differences were ‘tactical disagreements over the practical application of shared principles’.Footnote ¹⁶

I argue that disagreements on policies are not merely tactical, but are at the level of principles, though not basic principles. Therefore, rather than accentuating Idealist unity over state action, those differences reveal its limitations. Employing my two-context interpretation to Nicholson's argument, it is clear that the ‘underlying similarities and continuities’ lie with my primary context in which Idealists reject both laissez-faire capitalism and state socialism. To that extent, Nicholson's challenge to Richter's and Collini's argument holds. However, Richter's and Collini's right-left Idealist division is valid in my derivative context, namely the normative space that the rejection of both capitalism and state socialism opens up. For, in that context, the differences among Idealists over specific state action go beyond ‘disagreements over the practical application of shared principles’.Footnote ¹⁷ The differences emerge at the level of principles, albeit mid-level principles which Nicholson's argument does not take account of. To make good my claim, I challenge Nicholson's placing Bosanquet and Hobhouse ‘in the same category’Footnote ¹⁸ with regard to state action.

Nicholson enlists Bosanquet and Hobhouse—which Collini argues illustrate the ‘right’-‘left’ division, respectively, among Green's followers—to support his unity argument. ‘Notwithstanding Hobhouse's later onslaught on Bosanquet for illiberal Hegelianism … it is legitimate to put them in the same category because both work with so many of Green's assumptions’ or with ‘Green's idealist reformulations of the key concepts’.Footnote ¹⁹ More specifically, Nicholson argues thus: ‘Undoubtedly, Hobhouse wanted more state action, especially in the economy, than did Bosanquet. Hobhouse was passionate about what needed to be done: Bosanquet was more cautious about whether legislation and government intervention would do it. Thus they often had different diagnoses of the facts of the situation, and different estimates of the likely outcome of proposed policies (in areas where agreement has still to be reached). Yet these were tactical disagreements over the practical application of shared principles.Footnote ²⁰

I deny neither the relevance of the differences that Nicholson identifies, nor their tactical nature. I do deny, however, that they provide a fully adequate account of the differences between Hobhouse and Bosanquet. A fully adequate account needs also to attend, and importantly, to the differences at the level of principles or ‘key concepts’. At the level of principles, Nicholson's argument misses the role of ‘middle principles’. At the level of ‘key concepts’, different conceptual nexuses account for differences between positive reluctant support for more state action.

Consider Nicholson's own examples of programs supported by Hobhouse, but not by Bosanquet: ‘the introduction of old age pensions, health insurance, and a minimum wage’.Footnote ²¹ The disagreements over these policies are, contrary to Nicholson, not simply a matter of ‘tactical disagreement’ between Hobhouse and Bosanquet ‘over the application of shared principles’. Thus, for example, Hobhouse justifies minimum wage by: ‘the principle that the individual cannot stand alone, but that between him and the State there is a reciprocal obligation. He owes the State the duty of industriously working for himself and his family. … On the other side society owes to him the means of maintaining a civilized standard of life, and this debt is not adequately discharged by leaving him to secure such wages as he can in the higgling of the market’.Footnote ²² Further, Hobhouse also justifies minimum wage by ‘the general principle of economic justice. This principle lays down that every social function must receive the reward that is sufficient to stimulate and maintain it through the life of the individual’.Footnote ²³ Bosanquet, however, regards wages differently: ‘They [and houses] occupy a very interesting middle region between mere hindrances of hindrances and the actual stimulation of mind and will’.Footnote ²⁴ Therefore, ‘as charged with mind and will, these material facts may not be accessible to State compulsion …’Footnote ²⁵ At issue here, as I shall discuss below, is Bosanquet's claim that character (mind and will) has the power to transform material conditions, and, therefore, should be the source of social improvement. The disagreement, then, is much more than tactical and practical.

At issue here is the practical role of ‘principles’. Nicholson's analysis opposes Idealist rejection of absolute principles with their reliance on circumstances and ‘the facts of the situation’.Footnote ²⁶ ‘There is’, holds Nicholson, ‘a tradition in nineteenth-century British political thought of treating social and political issues pragmatically. This approach dismisses natural rights as abstractions and eschews intuitive and a priori moral reasoning in favour of empiricism and inductive method’.Footnote ²⁷ Such stark opposition of absolute, abstract and a priori principles and ‘empiricism and inductive methods’ leads to reliance on ‘different diagnoses of the facts of the situation, and different estimates of the likely outcome of proposed policies (in areas where agreement has still to be reached)’.Footnote ²⁸ Therefore: ‘Specific policy questions could only be dealt with “in the light of a true social ideal and of the best available experience” ’ as well as the different experiences of different thinkers’.Footnote ²⁹

Nicholson's stark distinction, however, is not the only option. An alternative option is offered by Hobson. ‘There are certain middle principles and sober hypotheses which are serviceable half-way houses, built by legitimate generalisation out of past experience, to which it is reasonable to appeal’.Footnote ³⁰ Indeed, Nicholson's own analysis is consistent with the idea of experience-based middle principles. On his account, because (basic) principles are indeterminate at the level of determinate policies, then ‘Specific policy questions could only be dealt with “in the light of a true social ideal and of the best available experience” ’.Footnote ³¹ It is precisely to such experience that Hobson appeals as the source of middle principles.

There is, I believe, an important sense in which Bosanquet, like Hobson, appeals to experience-based middle principles. That appeal is unveiled by the contrast that Bosanquet draws between Sidgwick ‘as a teacher of ethics according to general principles’ and himself. ‘The content of the moral life is derived’, on Bosanquet's account, ‘from relations which constitute and express our individuality. There are general principles in it … but it [the content of the moral life] could not … be deduced from general principles’.Footnote ³² Bosanquet's reference to ‘general principles’ is not inconsistent with my claim. For deduced from the content of moral life, ‘general principles’ are analogous to Hobson's ‘middle principles’ in that they ‘are serviceable half-way houses, built by legitimate generalisation out of past experience, to which it is reasonable to appeal’. An example of such a middle principle is Bosanquet's own ‘principle of respect for the self-maintaining character’.Footnote ³³ It is rooted, as Bosanquet insists, in ‘prolonged and systematic experience in practical efforts to improve the condition of the poor’.Footnote ³⁴

Consider further, and in this context, the concept of self-reliance or individual responsibility. On Nicholson's account, Hobhouse contended that it was unjust to leave people to fend for themselves in the market and earn enough for a civilised life when experience had proved that it was not possible for everyone to do so. The state must step in and “secure conditions upon which its citizens are able to win by their own efforts all that is necessary to a full civic efficiency.” That was not the individual's responsibility (it was beyond his power) but society's. Securing economic rights (a right to work, a right to a living wage) might involve far-reaching economic reconstruction, and socialistic organisation of industry…Footnote ³⁵ ‘Securing economic rights’ is not a program that Bosanquet could subscribe to. Still, Nicholson maintains that since for Hobhouse this is liberal socialism, the ‘underlying similarities and continuities which count for more than any differences’.Footnote ³⁶ In particular, ‘Hobhouse, like Bosanquet and the other idealists, sought to moralise the market, and deployed socialism simply as a principle to guide reform not as a wholesale replacement for capitalism’.Footnote ³⁷ Nicholson is, of course, quite right. Yet, this is to restate the shared rejection of both laissez-faire capitalism and state socialism, or what I call the first context. That double rejection, however, leaves significant normative space for differences and disagreements which are much more than tactical. The right to a living wage, just discussed, is not the only example. The italicized sentence reveals a difference at the level of principles.

Contrary to Bosanquet, Hobhouse draws a distinction between individual and social responsibility (Hobhouse makes a division of labour between individual and social responsibility with direct implications to extending state action. And so does Ritchie.Footnote ³⁸ Bosanquet maintains that where there is ‘the failure … to maintain one's self and one's dependents at the standard prescribed by society. … there is a defect in the citizen character, or at least a grave danger to its integrity’.Footnote ³⁹ This claim is root in, and is justified by, ‘the principle of respect for the self-maintaining character’.Footnote ⁴⁰

III. The strong unity claim: Carter

A particular motivation propels Carter's strong unity claim: ‘I want to tackle head-on the idea that the idealists were fundamentally divided on the issue of state action. If it is true, as Richter and others claim, it brings into doubt the whole question of whether idealism could have created a single tradition or ideology that went on to influence socialist thought. Instead, I will show that the idealists took a very similar approach to the role of the state’.Footnote ⁴¹ Since Bosanquet is viewed by Richter (and Collini, as well as by critics at the time, such as Hobson) as representing the Idealist ‘right’, he is the focus of Carter's strong unity claim.

Carter centers appropriately on the issue of character and circumstances which was central in the late 19^th century debate on social reform and state action. His conclusion is twofold. First, generally, ‘the widespread view of Bosanquet as being an individualist supporter of laissez-faire is misplaced’.Footnote ⁴² Second, and particularly, ‘the criticism of Bosanquet by Ball, Hobson and others—that he only focused on character and not on conditions—is misplaced. Bosanquet could have agreed with Hobson when he said that the true principle of social reform was “a recognition of the interdependence and interaction of individual character and social character as expressed in social environment” ’.Footnote ⁴³ Ultimately, then, Carter concludes ‘that there was a definite consensus in the idealists’ approach to questions of character and circumstances. The state was important in providing conditions to enable individuals to make the best of themselves. …. But the idealists believed that character must be the focus for reform: without it, changes to the social environment would have little impact on the individual’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Herein lies Carter's strong unity claim.

In terms of my two contexts of interpretation, Carter's first conclusion has established Idealist unity in the first context, namely with other Idealists, Bosanquet rejects both wholesale laissez-faire and full collectivism or state socialism. Carter's systematic attention to that issue is a welcome contribution to an adequate understanding of Bosanquet as well as his place in British Idealism. However, I claim that Carter's effort to extend Idealist unity to the second context remains unjustified.

To make good my claim is to challenge Carter's conclusion—‘the criticism of Bosanquet by Ball, Hobson and others—that he only focused on character and not on conditions—is misplaced’.Footnote ⁴⁵ The criticism is misplaced because, as Carter argues, ‘Bosanquet did believe that character was the condition of conditions, but this was not to the exclusion of other factors’.Footnote ⁴⁶ This defence, which relies narrowly on a single source, misses the mark, since circumstances are not ‘other’; they are internal to, and creation of, character. Though Carter does not reach this conclusion, it is clearly implicit in his analysis of which the main point is that ‘material resources … could not be separated from understanding of the growth and workings of the mind’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Therefore, Carter's claim—that ‘Bosanquet thought material resources played a crucial role in individual development’Footnote ⁴⁸—is of little help. For this was not the essential issue for the purpose of social reform.

The essential issue concerned the extent to which social and material circumstances were beyond the control of character (the human self). Or, as a symposium in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society in 1895-1896, in which Bosanquet took part, put it: ‘Are Character and Circumstances Co-Ordinate Factors in Human Life or Is Either Subordinate to the Other’? Bosanquet clearly subordinates circumstances to character, though, given his rejection of antithetical forms of argument, one could not expect him to state it that way. Still, Bosanquet's own route of rejecting the antithesis of character and circumstances yields the same result. For the purpose of determining the method of social reform, at any rate, Bosanquet renders circumstances secondary in importance to the primacy of character, on which they are dependent. Consider the main steps of his answer to the symposium question. Unsurprisingly, he begins by pointing out that the question ‘pre-supposes an antithesis, and raises some such question, as “how far either term of the antithesis can be reduced to the other.” No doubt the antithesis, as assumed, is a product of crude theory or popular “common sense,” ’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The task at hand, therefore, is to lose ‘the simplicity of our initial antithesis’.Footnote ⁵⁰ This Bosanquet achieves by denying that ‘things’ are independent of ‘mind’:

What, then, is the implication of overcoming ‘the simplicity of our initial antithesis’ between mind (self) and circumstances? ‘The self is character, when regarded as an organized whole; it is circumstance when regarded as a congeries of details’.Footnote ⁵³ Depending on the point of view from which one views the self, it is either character or circumstances. But what does this mean? It means that self and circumstances do not, for Bosanquet, relate as ‘an “inner” self, determined by “outer” circumstance’; but rather ‘a higher or larger self—relatively speaking, character—capable of re-acting to an extent which the philosopher under-estimates rather than over-estimates, on the lower or less organized self—relatively speaking, circumstance’.Footnote ⁵⁴ By depriving ‘circumstances’ of their external status, he renders them internal to, and dependent on, character. This explains Bosanquet's rejection of ‘even the simple-seeming distinction of Plato and Aristotle between “external advantages”—the social and material basis of existence including social distinction—and the moral purpose as held by the individual intellect’.Footnote ⁵⁵ The internalization of circumstances into character further makes sense of Bosanquet's claim that Aristotle's view of material goods as sine quibus non gives them in one sense far too independent a position …. Though for life, as a whole, they are sine quisbus non, yet, … they have, by themselves, no power to promote the larger life of character, while it, relatively by itself—i.e., mere existence being secured—has the power to promote them. In other words, though conditions of life, they are not self-subsistent conditions, and they are incorrectly estimated if considered as a sort of foundation on which character can be built up, or as a half-way house on the journey towards it.Footnote ⁵⁶

As the ‘Symposium’ reveals, Bosanquet's prioritization of character over circumstances has deep roots in Bosanquet philosophical Idealism. Particularly important are Bosanquet's Gifford Lectures and especially The Value and Destiny of the Individual which, like the ‘Symposium’, has received too little attention on the issue of character and circumstances. Space prohibits an adequate discussion of Bosanquet's argument. I can only draw attention, first, to Lecture IV ‘The Miracle of the Will’, in which Bosanquet discloses the ‘secret’ of the power of the will, ‘or the power of character, to transfigure and so to conquer circumstance’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Second, the creative power of the will reveals itself in ‘institutions’. Created by the will, social institutions constitute ‘the creative path by which the content of will—the second or spiritual world and nature—comes into finite form…’Footnote ⁵⁸ Third, the omnipotent power of character over circumstances is exposed at its clearest in Bosanquet's discussion of ‘the power of character against the so-called physical impossibility’.Footnote ⁵⁹ He challenges such impossibility: ‘Physical impossibility, to a very great and indefinite extent, is relative. It is relative to the agent's or agents’ strength, motive, ability, and time’.Footnote ⁶⁰

What is, however, the bearing of that argument [the power of character over circumstances] on the issue at hand? It makes good my claim that Carter's strong unity argument should not be pressed beyond the justified conclusion that he was no defender of laissez-faire individualism. Recall Carter's conclusion is ‘that there was a definite consensus in the idealists’ approach to questions of character and circumstances. The state was important in providing conditions to enable individuals to make the best of themselves. …. But the idealists believed that character must be the focus for reform: without it, changes to the social environment would have little impact on the individual’.Footnote ⁶¹ The force of this conclusion lies in its ambiguity about the relationship of character and social reform. That is, it lumps together character-as-end of social reform and character-as-means of social reform. Let me explain.

All ideological strands of social reform shared the idea of character as the focus or goal of social reform.Footnote ⁶² But not all ideological strands share the same means (political program, practical proposals) for achieving that goal. Character was a shared ideal of different and conflicting ideologies or political arguments. To appreciate this point is to draw a distinction the end and the means of social reform. That distinction is pressed home by Rashdall in support of his negative answer to the question ‘Is the Christian necessarily a Socialist?’ He answers: ‘The Socialist and Non-socialist differ as Economists or as Politicians: they need not differ at all as Moralists. They differ as to the means of social salvation: they may be entirely agreed about the end’.Footnote ⁶³

This, then, is the essential point: for Bosanquet, character is both the end and the method of social reform. Not so for Ritchie, Hobson, and Ball. Thus, for example, whereas Bosanquet claims that all social change must begin with change of character, Ritchie stressed that ‘moral and religious influences will only raise a few above the pressure of circumstances, therefore circumstances must be altered … The economic change must come before the moral before we can know certainly what the moral change will be’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Hobson agrees. He agrees with Bosanquet that, normatively, character comes first. Chronologically, however, he claims that change in circumstances must precede change of character.Footnote ⁶⁵ Convergence on the importance of character as the end of social reform does not, then, entail convergence on methods of social reform or political program or public policy.

For Bosanquet, character is both the end and the method of social reform. The end is the self-maintaining, self-managing character. At stake is the appropriate method of restoring self-maintenance in cases of destitution, namely ‘the failure of social self-maintenance; the failure, that is, to maintain one's self and one's dependent at the standard prescribed by society’. The method of restoration rests on ‘the principle of respect for the self-maintaining character’. Bosanquet (and the Majority Report) ‘proceed upon the principle that where there is a failure of social self-maintenance …, there is a defect in the citizen character’, and since such defect ‘raises a problem which is “moral,” in the sense of affecting the whole capacity of self-management’, then the single appropriate method is ‘social therapeutics’. It requires to ‘offer everything—the whole materiel and guidance for life’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Resisting uniformity in favour and requires distinctive attention to specific destitute individuals, social therapeutics calls for trained social workers, not state provisions of welfare.

Nor does Carter's reference to Ritchie's support of state provision of education establish his ‘definite consensus’ argument. For, on Bosanquet's own account, provision of education is different from provision of welfare. The distinctive moral nature of pauperism and destitution ‘separates the treatment required by the destitute or necessitous from anything that can be offered to citizens who are maintaining themselves in a normal course of life’. On the latter, ‘The State imposes … what it holds to be general conditions of good living’.Footnote ⁶⁷

Let me pause to conclude the discussion of Nicholson's and Carter's effort to defend strong Idealist unity. First, Nicholson and Carter have established that Bosanquet shares with other Idealists a via media on state action by rejecting both laissez-faire capitalism and state socialism. To that extent, a clear Idealist unity does exist in my primary context of interpretation. Second, their failure to establish the strong unity claim reveals, however, that Idealist unity in the primary context is consistent with a right-left political division in the derivative context to which the shared rejection of laissez-faire capitalism and state socialism gives space. For, as I have shown, the differences between Bosanquet and Hobhouse go beyond ‘tactical disagreements’. They occur at the level of principles, albeit middle principles, as well as at the level of key concepts. Further, contrary to Carter, there was no ‘definite consensus in the idealists’ approach to questions of character and circumstances. While all agree that character was the end of social reform, Bosanquet alone held that character was also the method of social reform. And yet, the right-left division does not undermine the conceptual-normative contribution and influence of British Idealists in terms of their shared point of view as expressed in the primary context.

Two implications for Bosanquet and Idealism follow from this conclusion. One implication draws attention to Bosanquet's individualism ‘in context’. That is Bosanquet's position on welfare provisions could be properly associated with an individualist stance if his individualism is divorced from laissez-faire and if it is rightly understood as ‘social individualism’ or individuality-based sociability. The other implication is that social individualism unveils direct participatory cooperation as Bosanquet's institutional vehicle of individual self-maintenance and self-government. I turn first to Bosanquet's individualism in context.

IV. Bosanquet's individualism in context

Placed in its proper context of the political argument over social reform and poverty at the time, Bosanquet's ‘clear persistent, and restrictive view of state welfare provisions’Footnote ⁶⁸ reveals a certain affinity with the individualist side of the political argument. I stress ‘individualism in context’. The concept of individualism was as pivotal in British political thought of the 19^th century as was the concept of character. Moreover, ‘individualism’ was not a univocal concept. Bosanquet did not embrace laissez-faire individualism, but this is only one sense of individualism. ‘Individualism’, that is, is not only a contested concept, it is also multidimensional.

What sort of individualism, then, is embraced by Bosanquet? Connecting him with the theory and practice of the Charity Organisation Society, Hobson charges Bosanquet with ‘sheer monadism’ which Hobson equates with ‘the unsupported initiative of the individual will considered as a primum mobile’. He holds that it is inconsistent with Bosanquet ‘eloquent’ promotion ‘of the “general will” and the spiritual solidarity of society’.Footnote ⁶⁹ In response to Hobson's charge Bosanquet insisted ‘My own position is not one which any careful thinker could call Individualist’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Yet, this was just what MacCunn, whose Idealist credentials are unimpeachable, did.

Reviewing Aspects of the Social Problem, he argued that ‘the book is, in a sense, profoundly individualistic’.Footnote ⁷¹ The key is ‘in a sense’. In what sense, then, does MacCunn claim that Bosanquet is ‘profoundly individualistic’? MacCunn is quick to insist that Bosanquet's ‘profound individualism’ is not abstract individualism or social atomism, since Bosanquet's conception of ‘the Reality of the General Will’ clearly refutes ‘the fallacies of abstract individualism’. ‘Yet the substantial fact remains. From first to last in his treatment alike of voluntary and State intervention, in his handling of the family, in his justification of private property, he is fearful of the unwisdom which, working havoc in the name of help, may cut the sinews of individual responsibility’.Footnote ⁷² MacCunn's claim is not without support. ‘There is’, Bosanquet insists, moral evil—the confusion of responsibility between the individual and Society as a whole. “I have paid rates for many years,” a labourer out of work once said to me; “why should I not have my relief simply by asking for it?” The Economic Socialism of out-relief had driven this poor man into Moral Individualism; seeing the fund to which he contributed used to tide over the difficulties of the improvident, he thought that the State intended, in part at least, to take the duty of providence off his shoulders; his will was confused, and his life very probably ruined. No money will make up to a man for a broken mainspring in his social will.Footnote ⁷³ Recall the conceptual-normative difference between Bosanquet and Hobhouse on the relationship between individual and social responsibility. I have referred to it earlier as an example to my claim that the difference between Bosanquet and Hobhouse over the scope of state action went beyond tactical disagreement. It was rooted in disagreement at the conceptual-theoretical level. My concern here is to sort out the specific sense of individualism which is bound up with Bosanquet's restrictive position regarding state aid to the poor.

In the same vein as MacCunn's, Muirhead expressed his concern about what he believed as Bosanquet's overstating the negative aspect of state action as articulated by Green:

In the main text Muirhead states: ‘Green himself was more afraid that too little than too much in the way of constructive interference with existing rights should be attempted by the legislature’.Footnote ⁷⁵

Of particular relevance to clarifying ‘individualism in context’, is the connection that Bosanquet forges between ‘Economic Socialism’ and ‘Moral Individualism’. He contrast that pair with another: the correspondence between ‘Economic Individualism’ and ‘Moral Socialism’.Footnote ⁷⁶ He rejects the former pair in favour of the latter one. He rejects ‘Economic Socialism’ because it employs the compulsion of public power to carry out the moral purpose of society. The result is ‘Moral Individualism’. Since compulsion depends on individuals’ egoistic motives, using their economic needs. Bosanquet associates himself with ‘economic individualism’. He distinguishes it from ‘doctrinaire individualism’ which ‘is the precise counterpart of the Economic Socialist’.Footnote ⁷⁷ The central point of ‘doctrinaire individualism’ is ‘the idea that the public recognition of moral purposes is necessarily fatal to individual moral freedom’.Footnote ⁷⁸ ‘Economic individualism’, by contrast, ‘assumes that the moral purpose has power to take care of itself throughout the general life of society, and only embodies that purpose in acts of the public power when such acts appear definitely necessary on specific grounds for the support of the private moral will’. Bosanquet's rejection of ‘doctrinaire individualism’ is clearly a rejection of laissez-faire individualism as much as his rejection of ‘administrative nihilism’ is. It follows, therefore, that Bosanquet embraces ‘economic individualism’ or ‘undoctrinaire individualism’.

This is not the whole story of Bosanquet's conception of individualism, though. The nexus of ‘economic individualism’ and ‘moral socialism’ is. Acknowledging that the latter ‘is not an accepted expression’,Footnote ⁷⁹ Bosanquet, nevertheless, employs it in order to draw his audience's attention (the Fabian Society) to the flaws of their doctrine of economic socialism. ‘Moral socialism’ is employed by Bosanquet ‘in the sense of actual or theoretical recognition that man's moral being lies in his social being’.Footnote ⁸⁰ ‘Socialism’ refers, then, to sociability. Recall that ‘Economic individualism assumes that the moral purpose has power to take care of itself throughout the general life of society …’Footnote ⁸¹ It follows, therefore, that Bosanquet's conception of individualism is bound up with his conception of sociability.

Telling in this context is a terminological shift that Bosanquet indicates in the second edition of PTS (1909). Contrasting ‘social action’ with ‘the action of the state’, Bosanquet refers to his essay ‘Individual and Social Reform’ (1891). He points out: ‘In the language which I now think more correct, Individual as used in that essay = pure social, and “Social” = social mixed with compulsion’.Footnote ⁸² This terminological shift, including the contrast between ‘social action’ and ‘state action’, suggests that, rightly understood, Bosanquet's ‘undoctrinaire individualism’ is ‘social individualism’ or individuality-based sociability.

V. Individual self-government and participatory social cooperation

Social individualism or individuality-based sociability occupies the sphere of social connectedness that, on Bosanquet's account, escapes both individualist and collectivist accounts of social relations. Referring to both the individualist and collectivist side of the political argument over state action, Bosanquet rejects both. The error lies, on both sides, in an insufficient appreciation of what is involved in man's social being. Between visible activities backed by the force of the State, and the narrowest self-assertion, equally visible, of the separate, or would-be separate, human person, the whole social development—the development, that is, of man's universal nature, of which these are merely extreme limiting cases—fails to obtain due recognition.Footnote ⁸³

To give ‘due recognition’ to ‘all that is “social”—all that springs from the co-operation and the sympathies of human beings’Footnote ⁸⁴—is Bosanquet's goal. An important terminological clarification serves that goal, as I have shown above. Essentially, Bosanquet draws a clear distinction between ‘true social activity’Footnote ⁸⁵ or ‘social action’ and ‘action of the state’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Its purpose is to help justify the normative priority of the former over the latter. This is because ‘the content of legislation and administration’ is ‘almost entirely supplies’ by ‘forms of social action’ which are ‘independent it is “truly social activity”, independent of the public power’. ‘Truly social’ activities constitutes ‘the laboratory of social invention’, ‘the inventive, experimental, creative element.’ ‘The work of the State is de facto for the most part “endorsement” or “taking over”—setting its imprimatur, the seal of its force’Footnote ⁸⁷ on such activities.

The priority of the ‘social action’ over the ‘action of the state’ is more significant still. It presupposes the entire social fabric of intermediatory groups, the social institutions and practices which function as a rich repertoire of shared values, collective achievements. Bosanquet's debt to Hegel shines through: the social fabric plays an essential role in both expressing and enabling human development.Footnote ⁸⁸ At the same time that its complex institutions function as ‘nurseries of citizenship’,Footnote ⁸⁹ they also provide venues for exercising democratic self-government. At the same time that intermediatory associations constrain human selfishness, they constitute a condition for the meaningful development and exercise of individuality. The constitutive role of the complexity of social institutions is rooted in the metaphysics of identity-in-difference and its most distinctive expression is in cooperative activity in participatory communities.

It is the participatory social cooperation-cum-individual self-government nexus that is my focus here. In part, my aim is to lend further support to the pluralist interpretation of Bosanquet's state which I view in terms of a cooperative community of cooperative communities.Footnote ⁹⁰ In particular, however, my aim is to highlight the constitutive role of cooperative participatory communities in giving institutional effect to a central practical ideal of his social philosophy, the ideal of individual self-maintenance or self-management or self-government. The conceptual-normative connection that Bosanquet fashions between the two lies, I believe, at the heart of his social philosophy. Too often the significance of that connection is lost between, on the one hand, the attempts to rescue Bosanquet's idea of self-government from its problematic association with Rousseauesque ideas of real and general will and, on the other hand, the association of the idea of self-maintenance with the more vulgar forms of self-reliance which Bosanquet's affiliation with the Charity Organisation Society has provoked. The nexus between direct cooperative institutions and individual self-government and self-maintenance escape the grip of both. Divorced from both Rousseauesque troubles and the alleged narrow individualism of the CPS therapeutics, the ‘practical and practicable’ ideal of cooperation-based individual self-government can receive its due recognition. To that end, it is helpful to place cooperative participatory communities in three relevant contexts: the tradition of civil society, Mary Parker Follett's The New State (and other pluralist arguments), and J. S. Mill's defence of workers’ cooperatives.

Bosanquet's emphasis on the social fabric of intermediatory institutions and groups places him, with Burke, Hegel, Tocqueville and neo-Tocquevillian such as Putnam, in the tradition of civil society. Indeed, like Putnam, Bosanquet does not identify civil society exclusively with the voluntary sector of society. He includes also the institutions of the family and neighborhoods. The essential point is that the benefits of social cooperation could not be gotten without active participation and direct forms of interaction. Putnam holds that such forms of social connectedness produce social capital: ‘ “social capital” refers to features of social organization, such as networks, norms, and trust, that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit’.Footnote ⁹¹ Though Bosanquet does not employ the language of social capital (much as Burke, Hegel, and Tocqueville did not), the special importance he gives to participatory cooperation reveals the same sort of mutual benefits.

In particular, with Bosanquet, Putnam stresses the importance to healthy local communities of active community associations. For example, discussing the erosion of social capital in inner-city communities in the U.S., Putnam laments that ‘The settlement houses that nurtured sewing clubs and civic activism a century ago, embodying community as much as charity, are now mostly derelict’.Footnote ⁹² Originating in Britain, settlement houses later migrated to the U.S. Bosanquet was both active in various settlement houses as well as defending their positive role as participatory communities in enabling the poor to draw out their intellectual and moral capacities, to develop habits of self-discipline, foresight, and personal responsibility, as well as a sense of self-respect. In a similar vein, Bosanquet called for local activism to secure ‘equality in education’: ‘You can secure this by taking in hand the management of the popular schools, and you cannot secure it in any other way’. Therefore, he claims,

Another example concerns ‘the work of Chalmers in his Glasgow parish’ of which, Bosanquet holds, the ‘central principle was in essence that of democracy’, namely the ‘sufficiency of the people’.Footnote ⁹⁴

Drawing on actual examples of communal participation in managing local affairs, Bosanquet puts forward ‘a practical and practicable ideal’ of a society organized in convenient districts, in which men and women, pursuing their different callings, will live together with care for one another, and with in all essentials the same education, the same enjoyments, the same capacities. These men and women will work together in councils and on committees; and while fearlessly employing stringent legal powers in the public interest, yet will be aware, by sympathy and experience, of the extreme flexibility and complication of modern life, which responds so unexpectedly to the most simple interference; they will have a pride in their schools and their libraries, in their streets and their dwellings, in their workshops and their warehouses.Footnote ⁹⁵

Bosanquet's ‘practical and practicable ideal’ of society is not unsimilar to Follett's idea of a pluralistic state which she develops in The New State. Group Organization the Solution of Popular Government (1918). In her conclusion of the essential points of pluralism, Follett gives pride of place to neighborhoods: ‘Neighbourhood education and neighbourhood organisation is … the pressing problem of 1918. All those who are looking towards a real democracy, not the pretence of one which we have now, feel that the most imminent of our needs is the awakening and invigorating, the educating and organising of the local unit’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Indeed, as Bosanquet suggests: ‘It is possible that The New State may owe a little, in its treatment of the Neighbourhood group, to the last chapter of the present work’.Footnote ⁹⁷ At the same time, Bosanquet acknowledges ‘the debt I owe to its [The New State] author’.Footnote ⁹⁸ More substantively, Bosanquet holds that Follett's view of sovereignty ‘vindicates for our doctrine the right to hold itself continuous with them’ [her views on pluralism which she articulates in her book].Footnote ⁹⁹

That continuity with Follett's pluralistic state and his own conception of the state highlights the pluralist nature of Bosanquet's own conception of the state understood as ‘a society organized in convenient districts’. Three features of Bosanquet's pluralism merit attention. First, the pluralism of social groups is not without unity both at the level of the group and of the multiplicity of groups. Thus, ‘the true social group … is always an affair of the integration of differences’,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ not a herd or crowd. Nor is the multiplicity of groups a mere aggregate. They are integrated by ‘the unifying state’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Unifying is the achievement of sovereignty. This is the second point. Far from the Austinian legal conception of force, sovereignty, Bosanquet insists, resides not in any determinate person/s ‘but only in the working of the system of institutions as a whole’.Footnote ¹⁰² That is, sovereignty is an actual growth, created by the process that creates the general will. The significance of this claim is that, with Follett, Bosanquet insists that self-government (‘the sufficiency of the people’) cannot be given. It can only be acquired by learning to exercise it in a participatory community such as neighborhood because it constitutes a ‘sphere of direct relations’:Footnote ¹⁰³ ‘You have to take part in decisions and feel the results of what you do. In this way you learn what you can learn in no other way …’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Hence, Bosanquet's emphasis on local self-government.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The third point about Follett's pluralism, that sheds light on Bosanquet's own, concerns Follett's new individualism: ‘We shall need a new individualism, vitalised through the groups. The member of a state will not be the unit of a crowd whether of persons or of groups, but the full individual, the many-sided activity, revealed and realised in the system of groups’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Notwithstanding Bosanquet's criticism of J. S. Mill for embracing individualism, clear continuity between them is noticeable on workers’ cooperatives and the priority of the ‘social’ over the ‘political’. It might be seen as a convergence of normative results derived from different premises. There is, however, a sense in which the normative convergence is rooted in similar, though not identical, conceptions of the self. The similarity lies with the stress on an independent, self-governing, self-developing, and energetic character or self. This conception of self justifies for both a preference for social action—embracing ‘varied experiments, and endless diversity of experience’Footnote ¹⁰⁷—over the uniformity of governmental action. Further, both hold that in order to effect the realization of the self-governing, self-developing individual, participatory institutions are essential. At the same time that such institutions are ‘nurseries of citizenship’ (Bosanquet), providing ‘the peculiar training of a citizen’,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ they also provide personal benefit by drawing out, what Mill calls, the intellectual, moral, and practical capacities. In a sense, the same capacities which are essential for exercising citizenship are also beneficial for personal development. Both Bosanquet and Mill converge on the most essential participatory institutions, such as ‘free and popular local and municipal institutions … the conduct of industrial and philanthropic enterprises by voluntary associations’,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ and trade unions. I wish to highlight their support of cooperatives.

Except for neighborhoods, worker cooperatives loom large and consistently in Bosanquet's social thought. ‘The only thing that I dread in the system known as Socialism is the cutting off individual initiative outside certain duties specified by rule … . On the other hand, of practical Socialism, i.e., of the workman's ownership of the means of production, we cannot have too much’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Not only do workers’ cooperatives afford plenty of opportunity for exercising individual initiative, more fundamentally, cooperatives are the vehicle of individual self-maintenance and self-management. Indeed, Bosanquet cites ‘the Co-operative movement in Great Britain’ from ‘the Rochdale Pioneers onwards’Footnote ¹¹¹ as an example of the power of self-organised groups to transform circumstances.

Like Mill, Bosanquet appeals to Leclaire's establishment of workers’ cooperatives in order to draw out the benefits of mutuality. Cooperation teaches workers that their own well-being is dependent on, and reciprocal with, the well-being of fellow workers, and habituate them to the fact of their mutual dependence. For a cooperative is a participatory community ‘in which the welfare of all depends on the heartiness and on the wisdom with which every man works for the common purpose, that is to say, does his duty’.Footnote ¹¹² The experience of mutual dependence, in turn, provides ethical training. The lack of drunkenness among the workers is singled out for praise by Bosanquet.Footnote ¹¹³ More generally, as Mill points out, the conduct of the workers improves not only at work but also away from it, ‘showing increased respect both for others and for themselves’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Moreover, since workers are integrated into the political aspect of the cooperative, they learn democracy by participating in its governing institutions. In a nutshell, participatory cooperation lays ‘the foundation of the good, self-supporting, well-arranged life’,Footnote ¹¹⁵ thereby it is able ‘to meet the powers and needs of human character’.Footnote ¹¹⁶

‘The present work is an attempt to express what I take to be the fundamental ideas of a true social philosophy’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ So says Bosanquet in the opening statement of his preface to the first edition of The Philosophical Theory of the State (1899). Accordingly, he seeks to give due recognition to ‘all that is “social” ’, namely ‘all that springs from the co-operation and the sympathies of human beings’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ I sought, in this essay, to unveil, and give prominence to, the ‘practical and practicable’ ideal that lies at the heart of Bosanquet's ‘true social philosophy’: the dynamics of social cooperation-based individual self-government.