M. E. Grant Duff, Philosophic Liberalism and the Global Liberal Cause

Abstract

Historians disagree about how best to conceptualize nineteenth-century British Liberalism in relation to its international contexts. This article argues that we can better understand the patterns involved by interrogating individuals who bridged the worlds of partisan politics and elaborated thought. The article centres around Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff (1829–1906), whom it identifies as the Liberal parliamentary party's most ambitious interpreter of global and imperial order in the 1860s and 1870s. It suggests that Grant Duff's highly intellectualized and internationally minded ‘philosophic Liberalism’ was aimed at energizing the fractious Gladstonian coalition, and at helping Liberals see themselves as part of a global progressive tide, running against the false and losing cause of Conservatism. The article contends that Grant Duff's case opens up new questions about how British Liberals situated themselves in relation to counterpart foreign liberalisms, as well as having wider methodological implications for the study of nineteenth-century international thought.