POWER AND IDEOLOGY
251
them during his stay in Oxford, then and for years a center of neo–
Hegelianism. Balliol College, the "academy" of the Hegelians-Green,
Bradley, Bosanquet and the rest-was also a nursery of statesmen and
publicists: Curzon, later Viceroy of India; Milner, the great South
African Proconsul and Lloyd George's colleague in the War Cabinet
of 1916-18; Asquith, Liberal Prime Minister from 1908 to 1916;
Edward Grey; and Churchill's friend L. S. Amery. The link between
Hegelian idealism and the imperialist movement was furnished by
Hegel's theory of the State, which is anti-liberal and in essence goes
back to Burke. Its centerpiece is the notion that the institutions of
society are the concrete embodiment of moral values which have a
higher claim upon men's allegiance than the visionary utterances of
the individual conscience. Morality consists in the discharge of man's
duties in the narrow circle
in
which he actually lives-his family, his
locality, his nation-not in running after cosmopolitan chimeras. Since
Hegel had derived this conservative philosophy from Burke, it is hardly
surprising that Hegelianism came to dominate Oxford, or that phi–
losophers like Bosanquet and Bradley became the teachers of states–
men and administrators who then went out to govern an empire. But
to suppose that all these men were Tories is to misunderstand the
situation. The Hegelian philosopher T.
H.
Green was a faithful Liberal
and an advocate of "three acres and a cow" radicalism, the program
adopted by Joseph Chamberlain in 1885 when he was still a Radical
and not yet the prophet of Empire. Bosanquet was another Liberal,
and Arnold Toynbee, Sr., the friend of Milner, was even suspected of
socialism!
Needless to say, Hegelian idealism was too esoteric to serve the
purpose of the new imperialist creed in any but the most exalted circles.
The middle class made do with popularized Darwinian notions and
racial theories which preached the innate superiority of the Anglo–
Saxons. But here again one must be careful: the Darwinians included
Karl Pearson, and Pearson was a socialist who had come to the con–
clusion that Herbert Spencer and the other individualists were
all
wrong. Society was not just an assemblage of individuals; the "survival
of the fittest" was a
collective
affair. A nation was "an organized
whole . . . kept up to a high pitch of external efficiency by contest,
chiefly by way of war with inferior races, and with equal races by the
struggle for trade routes and for the sources of raw material and of
food supply" (Pearson,
National Life,
p. 46). Its problems consequently
had to be viewed in social terms. In order to be organized properly
for the struggle against its neighbors, the nation had to be a "homogen-
