Published in 1911 and coinciding with the welfare reforms put in place by the British Liberal Party (1906-1914), this work enunciates the predominant political morality at the time.

The liberalism, or libertarianism as we now call it, of John Stuart Mill had been predicated on a theory of man as competent to handle his own affairs. Hobhouse and modern liberals reject that concept, as rightly noted by Robert Paul Wolff (The Poverty of Liberalism), Gerald F Gaus (The Modern Liberal Theory of Man), and by Amy Gutmann (Liberal Equality). Man is not competent; in areas where he is competent, he may be granted freedom, but those places are few and far between. Man is, Hobhouse claims, not much different from a child. The government is the loving parent.

Economically, Hobhouse adopts parts of Marxism, while rejecting others. Instead of claiming that employers are exploiting the workers, he claims that employers and workers are pocketing wages that rightly belong to society. To paraphrase the argument into modern terms, did Bill Gates and the workers of Microsoft alone invent the OS they sell? No. The OS they sell and and make billions off rests upon decades of collective knowledge by hundreds or even thousands of other individuals. Bill Gates is entitled to some earnings; the workers are entitled to some; and society is due the part that came from collective contributions.

It is neither liberalism nor socialism, Hobhouse claims, but "liberal socialism."

L. T. Hobhouse's Liberalism, of 1911 was a pretty good restatement of Classical Liberalism at the beginning of the 20th century.

Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse (8 September 1864–21 June 1929) was a British liberal political theorist and sociologist, who has been considered one of the leading and earliest proponents of social liberalism. His works, culminating in his famous book Liberalism (1911), occupy a seminal position within the canon of New Liberalism. He worked both as an academic and a journalist, and played a key role in the establishment of sociology as an academic discipline; in 1907 he shared, with Edward Westermarck, the distinction of being the first professor of sociology to be appointed in the United Kingdom, at the University of London. He was also the founder and first editor of The Sociological Review.