Ideational evolution: an introduction

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At certain moments in history, the ideological changes in a single individual can change the course of history. This blog notes the results of research on a few key examples of those remarkable transitions, specifically the transitions in the thought lives of Woodrow Wilson, William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli. 

In April of 1908, Woodrow Wilson suddenly and inexplicably stopped speaking out against the regulation of business and started preaching for it. “No one now advocates the old laisser faire (sic),” he announced, though until that day he had advocated for just that, “or questions the necessity for a firm and comprehensive regulation of business operations in the interest of fair dealing and of a responsible exercise of power.” It was biographer Henry Bragdon who first documented this moment. The transition has been denied by other biographers who claim either that Wilson was always a progressive (Pestritto) or that he was always a conservative (Diamond, Thorsen). But the transformation was dramatic and sudden, as Bragdon tracks it, and leaves behind a mystery: why did he change his mind? How did it affect the course of history?


It is entertaining to argue that another such dramatic moment occurred for Wilson’s early political hero, William Ewart Gladstone. Gladstone, who would eventually become prime minister of the United Kingdom four times for the Liberal Party, famously began his career on the other side, as a Tory. He joined the Liberals in 1859, just a few months after he returned from a quixotic assignment as the Lord High Commissioner Extraordinary to the British colonies in the Ionian Islands in what is now Greece, a mission that made him look foolish to colleagues and appears to have been engineered by his arch-rival Benjamin Disraeli and Disraeli’s best friend, Edward Bulwer-Lytton. A case can be made that without the trip to the Ionian island of Corfu Gladstone would never have agreed to join a government under the leadership of Liberals. Corfu fascinated Gladstone, a sometime Homeric scholar, because it was once the land where Homer’s Odysseus told his tall tales of battling a Cyclops and a witch, sea monsters and giants to an audience of Phaecians. Did this dalliance into his side interests accelerate Gladstone’s shift from right to left? And what impact did that shift have on history?


Disraeli, meanwhile, had an ideological transition in the opposite direction. “Disraeli, as everyone knows,” writes seminal Disraeli biographer Robert Blake in a 1998 essay, “began his many unsuccessful efforts to storm his way into Parliament as a Radical.” This ostensibly put him on the left side of the political spectrum. At a time when the word “democracy” was a dirty word on both the left and right of British politics, Disraeli wrote an essay stating, “We must either revert to the aristocratic principle, or we must advance to the democratic. … I for one believe it is utterly impossible to revert to the aristocratic principle … I feel it absolutely necessary to advance to the new or democratic principle.” Historians argue he was not really talking about what we think of today as democracy, but he was clearly taking a stance for some policy to the left of the kind of aristocratic stance for which he would become known. What made Disraeli shift from “independent Radical” to sometime ultra-Tory? What did it have to do with his own side interests, as a prolific writer of fiction? How much of his old point of view on democracy did he bring with him? And what impact did his transformation have on history?


Each of these figures were pivotal in the evolution of our concepts of liberal and conservative. Wilson has been described by both right and left historians as a consequential president whose style of governance stood at the beginning of what we think of as modern liberalism. Gladstone has been described as the key defining personage for the liberalism of his time, and stood for what Wilson stood for before Wilson changed. Disraeli defined conservatism for a generation and has been held up (rightly or wrongly) as the founder of “one nation conservatism,” which still is cited by some conservatives as their operational philosophy today. 


In this blog I’m going to explore those pivotal moments and the meaning of liberalism and conservatism. I’ll also review books and other media that are relevant directly or indirectly. I’ll explore something all three of these figures had in common: they all wrote either fiction or criticism of fiction, an exceedingly rare thing in the world of statesmen. 

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