Hobson’s mature welfare economics was less a product of Oxford liberalism than of a radical tradition going back to Paine. However, Hobson also strove to express that radicalism in qualitative terms, and here was more strongly influenced by the illiberal Ruskin, whose inspiration was pre-capitalist, than by liberal predecessors. By 1900, Ruskin was frequently interpreted in a socialist manner: the task Hobson set himself was to show that Ruskin’s insights were compatible with his version of New Liberalism. The outcome, with its stress on quality rather than quantity, was distinctly different from the liberal orthodoxy that established itself in his lifetime.

How can the political meaning of the family and its relationship with the state be redefined in the liberal era? This chapter explores three answers that rearticulate the standing of the family within the liberal commonweal and redraw the balance between family and state. The responses differ in their narration of the interest that the liberal state has in the institution of the family, depicting the latter as an agency of the state, an organ of the state, or an apolitical space that marks the state’s limits and dependence on prepolitical conditions. The three approaches are presented as concurrent trends representing discrepant versions of liberalism as a political theory.