R.F.A. Hoernlé and Idealist Liberalism in South Africa

Abstract

This paper describes the ‘idealist liberalism’ of R.F.A. Hoernlé (1880–1843), who taught in Britain, the United States, but also at the South African College and at the University of the Witwatersrand. I argue that this liberalism was strongly influenced by the British idealism of Bernard Bosanquet and T.H. Green, but also by key features of Hoernlé’s South African experience. Hoernlé’s idealist liberalism, I maintain, not only offered a response to the challenges of living in a multi-ethnic and multi-racial state such as South Africa in the first half of the 20^th century, but bears on similar challenges found in contemporary liberal democracies.