Page "Social liberalism" Paragraph 11

In the 1870s and the 1880s, the American economists Richard Ely, John Bates Clark, and Henry Carter Adams — influenced both by socialism and the Evangelical Protestant movement — castigated the conditions caused by industrial factories and expressed sympathy towards labor unions.

None, however, developed a systematic political philosophy, and they later abandoned their flirtations with socialist thinking.

In 1883, Lester Frank Ward published the two-volume Dynamic Sociology and formalized the basic tenets of social liberalism while at the same time attacking the laissez-faire policies advocated by Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner.

The historian Henry Steele Commager ranked Ward alongside William James, John Dewey, and Oliver Wendell Holmes and called him the father of the modern welfare state.

Writing from 1884 until the 1930s, John Dewey — an educator influenced by Hobhouse, Green, and Ward — advocated socialist methods to achieve liberal goals.

Some social liberal ideas were later incorporated into the New Deal, which developed as a response to the Great Depression.