‘Dissolving the colour line: L. T. Hobhouse on race and liberal empire’, European Journal of Political Theory (May 2022)

Abstract: L. T. Hobhouse (1864–1929) is most familiar today as a leading theorist of British new liberalism. This article recovers and examines his overlooked commentary on the concept and rhetoric of race, which constituted part of his better-known project of advancing an authoritative account of liberal doctrine. His writings during and after the South African War, I argue, represent a prominent effort to cast liberalism as compatible with both imperial rule and what he called ‘the idea of racial equality’. A properly liberal empire, he asserted, would dissolve the colour line. This article traces the arguments Hobhouse advanced to make this claim, and explores his motivations for doing so. I contend that Hobhouse drew on the idiom of race as a form of exclusionary rhetoric, to delegitimise rival accounts of liberal empire and to cast his own as properly cosmopolitan. This recovery, I suggest, offers payoffs for our understanding of both Hobhouse’s political thought and, more broadly, the uses of ‘race’ in twentieth-century liberalism.

Read the full article here (open access) or download a PDF copy.

This article won EJPT’s article of the year for 2024, the Carlo Argenton prize, for its ‘subtle and sophisticated analysis of the role of race in Hobhouse’s account of liberal empire, revealing how Hobhouse thought that liberalism could be rendered compatible with both imperial rule and racial equality. The prize was judged by a selection of the journal’s Associate Editors, who were especially impressed by the article’s meticulous historical research and its success in speaking to wider theoretical debates about race, hierarchy, and liberalism. The prize is dedicated to the memory of Carlo Argenton and is generously funded by his family.’ See the full announcement here.

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