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Welfarism, Socialism and Religion: on T. H. Green and Others

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Extract

Scholars often link the emergence of welfarism and socialism to a loss of religious faith. Yet an examination of the beliefs of secularists who had lost their faith suggests that the loss of faith did not result in an emotional need that social reformism sometimes met. Nonetheless, an examination of welfarists and ethical socialists such as T. H. Green suggests that there was an intellectual or rational link between faith and social reformism. Here many Victorians and Edwardians responded to the dilemmas then besetting faith by adopting immanentist theologies, and this immanentism often sustained a moral idealism that inspired various social reformers.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1993

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References

1. In what follows, I will use the terms welfarism and socialism to refer principally to certain moral doctrines rather than those policies and institutions that we now regard as characteristic of welfare and socialist states.

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61. See, for instance, Morrow, J., “Liberalism and British Idealist Political Philosophy,” History of Political Thought 5 (1984): 91108.Google Scholar Certainly we should be cautious about proclaiming a total break between the two. This, however, is because ideologies do not possess an essentialist core, but rather have numerous strands many of which usually will persist through a time of great change.

62. For a recent statement of the importance of idealism, as opposed to Idealism, for welfarism see Harris, J., “Political Thought and the Welfare State 1870–1940: An Intellectual Framework for British Social Policy,” Past and Present 135 (1992): 116–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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