Leonard Hobhouse

[7]: ix–x  Taking a break from academia between 1897 and 1907, Hobhouse worked as a journalist (including a stint with the Manchester Guardian) and as the secretary of a trade union.

Governmental co-operation with trade unions could therefore be justified as helping to counter the structural disadvantage of employees in terms of power.

His work also presents a positive vision of liberalism in which the purpose of liberty is to enable individuals to develop, not solely that freedom is good in itself.

While rejecting the practical doctrines of classical liberalism like laissez-faire, Hobhouse praised the work of earlier classical liberals like Richard Cobden in dismantling an archaic order of society and older forms of coercion.

Hobhouse held out hope that Liberals and what would now be called the social democrat tendency in the nascent Labour Party could form a grand progressive coalition.

[6] He was an internationalist and disliked the pursuit of British national interests as practised by the governments of the day.

During the war, Hobhouse criticised the British Idealists such as Bernard Bosanquet in his book The Metaphysical Theory of the State (1918) for being Hegelians and therefore Germanizers.