VI.

Liberalism in Transition

By the middle of the 19th century, liberal thought concerning constitutionalism, wider suffrage, toleration of dissent, absence of arbitrariness, and policies designed to promote happiness had acquired powerful advocates in Britain and other European countries and in the United States. Despite a prevalent tendency to find fault with the United States, European visitors considered that nation an exemplar of liberalism because of its popular culture, emphasis on equality, and wide suffrage.

Nevertheless, liberalism reached a stage of crisis at this time in relation to democracy and economic power that was to be important to its later development. On the one hand, some democrats, such as the French philosopher and author Jean Jacques Rousseau, were not liberals. Rousseau objected to the network of voluntary, private groups that many liberals considered essential to the movement. On the other hand, most early liberals were not democrats. Neither Locke nor Voltaire had believed in universal suffrage, and even most 19th-century liberals feared mass participation in politics, holding that the so-called lower classes were uninterested in the principal values of liberalism—that is, that they were indifferent to freedom and hostile to the expression of diversity in society.

As suffrage steadily widened in the 19th century, with the successive reform acts in Britain in 1832, 1867, 1884, and 1885, many liberals became concerned chiefly with preserving the individual values that they identified with an aristocratic social and political order. Their place as social critics and reformers soon was taken by more radical groups such as the socialists.