Progressive thought in Britain in the four decades preceding the First World War exhibited an extraordinary eclecticism. This is not to say merely that many different views were current which could be classified under the umbrella term ‘progressive’; in any democratic society such a statement is a truism. Rather, it is to say that there existed a ‘Progressive Movement’, which to its participants was a vital reality, and within which many different political and philosophical opinions were freely held and discussed. This discussion was not simply a contest of rival orthodoxies. Indeed, orthodoxies – in the sense of monolithic systems of anthropological, philosophical, social, and political belief requiring the adherent's unqualified acceptance – are difficult to detect in the progressive milieu of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It is not merely that Fabians, New Liberals, and others co-operated within the Progressive Movement, but that within each of these groups there existed Idealists and Positivists, ideas derived from thinkers as diverse as Mill and Marx, a baffling range of socialisms and non-socialisms, and an array of ‘individualisms’ and ‘collectivisms’ so complex as to call into question the very usefulness of these terms themselves.

The terms are nevertheless deeply entrenched in academic discussion of the period.