Liberalism—in its many guises—has had a troubled decade in Britain, as elsewhere in the West. While critics on the left have taken aim at neoliberalism as an economic model, the right has wasted no time in accusing a “liberal metropolitan elite” of having waged a war on the culture of the working- and lower-middle classes. In a Britain dominated by the politics of austerity, Jeremy Corbyn, who has straddled those two camps awkwardly, has been both a product of and catalyst for a kind of socialist nostalgia, which has been particularly alluring for many people thinking about the history of the country's welfare state and the National Health Service in particular.

John Cooper's The British Welfare Revolution is one of several recent attempts (I count my own monograph, Bread for All: The Origins of the Welfare State [2017], among these) to question this nostalgia by reexamining the part that liberalism and the Liberal Party played in creating and developing the ideas and structures that the British would eventually call “the welfare state.” The general thrust of Cooper's argument is straightforward and, for historians of the welfare state, familiar: it is that the pre-First World War Liberal governments, brought to power in the landslide general election victory of 1906, were significant innovators who established an administrative framework and set of priorities, focused on the National Insurance schemes (launched in 1911), which set the agenda for Clement Attlee's Labour government almost half a century later.

Cooper develops this argument across 15 chapters, covering reforms, initiatives, and developments in areas from child welfare to pensions, health care, and taxation. The British Welfare Revolution is, however, mainly a book about labor markets in a postindustrial revolution economy. This focus is justified. As Cooper shows, unemployment, underemployment, and economic inactivity brought about by old age had become central problems for liberals and progressives by the early twentieth century. However, the exact nature of the relationship between the labor market and the bigger and even more complex problem of poverty was disputed. One way or another, though, progressives, social reformers, and social scientists saw fixing the labor market as a gateway to tackling a host of other issues, from poor health to what their more conservative opponents called character failings.

Cooper prepares the ground for this discussion with a survey of the final two decades of the nineteenth century, focusing on the creation of what he calls the “counter elite”: a coherent and identifiable group of reformers, with a shared interest in sociological approaches to social problems, who exerted significant influence over (what we would now call) social policy during the early twentieth century. Although he presents this concept as a novel frame of analysis, historians of the period will know the argument well—namely, that the changes pursued by the Liberal governments before the First World War were influenced heavily by individuals who cut their teeth in a new reforming environment that transformed British liberal philosophy. There were various sources for these individuals’ ideas and work, including social science and surveying, the university settlement movement, and the philosophical idealism associated with the Oxford philosopher T. H. Green. A number of the topics covered by Cooper have received much lengthier treatment in other recent works, such as Ann Oakley's Women, Peace and Welfare (2018). Nevertheless, Cooper has performed a welcome service by bringing together a wide range of disparate but related strands, from land reform to agricultural surveys to attitudes towards child labor. In so doing, he has shed light on the contours of a reforming liberal political philosophy that was clearly of great importance in shaping the context in which Liberal politicians acted during the decade before the First World War.

There are areas that I would consider oversights in The British Welfare Revolution. Cooper is keen to play down the importance of things like the cross-party national efficiency movement, which was given a significant boost by the army recruitment crisis during the Boer War. The knock-on effect of doing so is that it shuts off a whole range of subjects, such as eugenics, that were at the very least important features of the intellectual landscape, especially in areas like public health. Indeed, demography—and the specific matter of a declining birth rate—was essential not only to the discussion about eugenics but also a number of economic topics Cooper handles so well otherwise, such as the ageing population. He also reaches specific conclusions—such as those about William Beveridge's work on casual labor as presented in his 1909 Unemployment: A Problem of Industry—that I cannot always agree with. But Cooper's work is forensic and meticulous, making readers think through the foundations of their own views of the subject, even if they are not entirely convinced. Overall, The British Welfare Revolution is a serious book with an important point to make about the genesis of the British welfare state.