This book continues the work of many historians in recuperating the lost world of fin de siècle British New Liberalism. This project began in the 1960s with Bernard Porter's Critics of Empire, and the New Liberal seam has been continued to be mined ever since with well-researched and illuminating monographs produced notably by Peter Clarke, Michael Freeden, Martin Wiener, and Stefan Collini in the 1970s, and John Allett, Freeden (again), and Peter Weiler in the 1980s. Production trickled to the odd article or edited collection of essays in the 1990s. Just when there seemed to be little more to be said on the subject, Gal Gerson has managed to discover and illuminate some of New Liberalism's forgotten corners and add yet another chapter to the New Liberal “story.” In part the stimulus stems from the rise of postmodern and poststructuralist sensibilities that have turned the academic tide away from political economy, functionalism, and totalizing methodologies and toward language, culture, psychology, and the “local.” This “turn” was initiated by Nietzschean and Heideggerian-influenced French philosophers who saw standing behind the innocent, theoretical totality the totalitarian monster, the subconscious “will to power” of the radical intellect. Gerson detects echoes of a similar turn—at least intellectual—at the end of the nineteenth century and asks the question: how did New Liberals, “progressive” champions of the Enlightenment, respond to, first, the developing “new knowledge” that suggested that human beings for all sorts of reasons were not as rational or educable as had previously been assumed, and second, to the argument that particular knowledges could not be synthesized into a neat (progressive) pattern? Again it seemed as if the “Continentals” were putting a spanner into the “rational” works, with Tarde's and Le Bon's researches into crowd psychology, Mendel's work on genetics, Bergson's vitalism, Durkheim's sociology, and Freud's psychoanalysis. Thus, two of Gerson's themes consist of the New Liberal treatment of “mind and society” (crowd psychology) and “nature” (genetics and creative evolution). Predictably, J. A. Hobson, L. T. Hobhouse, and Graham Wallas all assume center stage in these areas. Nevertheless, given the author's overall approach, the discussion of these much-discussed thinkers is an interesting one to New Liberal scholars.

Yet the lesser known New Liberals or those only loosely connected with the New Liberal project are also analyzed by Gerson in the area where the “post-al” sensibility is less, namely, in the examination of (especially Greek) Antiquity. Thus, Cecil Delisle Burns, John Mackinnon Robertson, W. Robertson Smith, Gilbert Murray, and Jane Harrison get a look in, as does William Clarke, who played such an important role in the development of New Liberalism. Indeed, this third theme of the book will perhaps be less familiar to students of British New Liberalism and is a fascinating account of how these thinkers attempted to keep the forces of reason going in the light of the new studies of ancient Greek ritual that seemed to undermine the commonly held view of ancient Greeks as rational and humane.

What Gerson brings out most clearly is the common New Liberal strategy in dealing with these “irrational” threats at the “chaotic margin” in “times” that seemed “out of joint,” to use Derrida-speak. These seeming threats could be either an expression of, or harnessed by, reason, because they were creative in progressive terms and could therefore be subsumed within a larger, evolving, forward-moving, yet heterogeneous, whole. Or they could be the product of the press and manipulative politicians and therefore dismissed. Broadly speaking what Gerson shows is that even radical alterity, when examined through the New Liberal lenses, becomes far less radical and more familiar and comforting, because in some way or other the “rational” needed the “irrational.”

This is a well-written, well-researched, and thoughtful work, and if there are criticisms to be made they probably reflect my own predilections and interests. Thus, Gerson draws our attention to parallels between the New Liberals and contemporary thinkers such as Ronald Dworkin as well as communitarian liberalism. Perhaps a more significant parallel would be with synthetic endeavors of Jürgen Habermas. In addition, perhaps more have been said about why the New Liberals had the intellectual “containment” strategy in the first place, and where it came from. On the latter question one suspects that Hegel, whatever the New Liberal, anti-idealist protestations, cast a long shadow from which they had not fully emerged. On the former, perhaps political issues were uppermost, with the ideological exhaustion of the “old” liberalism at the turn of the century, the demoralization of the Liberal Party, and the need to create a new “progressive” center. Further, while Gerson offers some sound criticisms of these New Liberals, especially how they did not adequately cope with radical difference, these could have been made more strongly. The New Liberal subsuming tendentiousness on this matter arose not merely from the Hegelian-inspired attempt to make the “real” appear “rational,” but also from the nature of this “modern” progressivism. It felt compelled to incorporate the “new,” which in this case included knowledge and political positions that were viscerally hostile to an internationalist and socially reforming liberalism. Poststructuralist perspectives could also have been utilized further to expose the statist position of the New Liberals, shared by the Fabians, which extolled the virtues of social engineering by the state “expert” (e.g., Hobson's eugenics). Indeed, a basic Marxist consideration needs recognition. The state, however democratic, within a capitalist society has great difficulty in being impartial and reflects the needs, wishes, and interests of a democratic majority. This then points back to the structural issues that New Liberals addressed (which is not the focus of this book) and raises the question, suggested most strenuously by C. B. Macpherson, of whether their values, however updated, can be realized in a capitalist society. All these considerations do not necessarily support the case for a New Liberal-postructuralist-Marxist standoff, but perhaps for a further, transcending aufhebung that fully explores the strengths and weaknesses of these positions, all in the cause of human freedom.