The principles of New Zealand liberal political thinking in the late nineteenth century

Abstract

This thesis involves an attempt to distill a pattern of political thinking from the parliamentary speeches of various politicians in the late nineteenth century. By the isolating and recognising of such a pattern of political thinking, it attempts to show that the Liberal politics of that era were not the opportunist, pragmatic, and rationalistic phenomena that they have often been said to be. Through the decades of 1870 and 1880 a Liberal ideology was on the rise; an ideology that pivoted upon the idea of the active State, and which, when harnessed to the Liberals’ idolization of small landholders, provided the basic motivation for Liberal political and legislative activity during the 1890s. The principle of an active State, active precisely in pursuit of increasing the possible range of individual action in a society, achieved its most telling focus in the field of the agricultural countryside; in seeking to recreate that rural network of small farmers and villages that they believed to have characterised Elizabethan England, pre-industrial Britain, the Liberals put their theory of the active State to work in the matter of landed property holdings, and promptly raised the anger and mistrust of their opponents who claimed that property, individualism, and self-reliance were all integrally related and ideally sacred from State intervention. The Liberals worshipped the rural small landholder, and disliked the traditional enemies of that figure: large landholders, capitalist middlemen, and city-dwellers. The ideal Liberal society was where an agrarian middle class provided stability and prosperity for a harmonious egalitarian democracy.