Over the past few days, my beach reading has consisted of a 175-page 1976 Harvard undergraduate thesis titled “Old and New Liberalism: The British Liberal Party’s Approach to the Social Problem, 1906-1914.” Scintillating stuff, and I can safely say that I would have lived my life in comparative ignorance if it hadn’t been written by a recent Supreme Court nominee, John G. Roberts.

The fact that President Bush’s supposedly conservative nominee chose to author his undergraduate thesis on a decidedly liberal topic is worth a few hours of August analysis. While left-wing activist groups have been preparing for an ideological Armageddon over any Bush Court nominee, much of Mr. Roberts’s loudest criticism to date has come from right-wingers who deem him insufficiently conservative. His identification with individuals who ran for office under the banner of the L-word would apparently do nothing to alleviate their fears.

But British Liberals at the turn of the last century are a long way from angry Berkeley vegan activists. This was the party of the legendary prime minister William Gladstone, David Lloyd George, and for a time, young Winston Churchill. In discussing Liberal Party values, a young Mr. Roberts paints a picture rich with implications for today’s political landscape. The diverse party appealed to “the serious aristocracy, the High Churchmen, the industrialists, the cheap press and radical agitation, provincial towns, dissent and the working class.” Asking what common ideal inspired such a disparate group, Roberts answers “a love of freedom … Liberals believed in freedom for oppressed groups … free capitalistic enterprise and free trade comprised the Liberal economic doctrine … Liberals generally objected to government interference and unnecessary expenditure.”

At a time when the current American administration loses no opportunity to attach itself to the all-purpose banner word “freedom,” it is worth noting this Britain’s Liberal Party, in this conception, resembled a modern libertarian-leaning conservative administration. But crucially, Roberts questions the ultimate political effectiveness of the party’s initially “negative” laissez-faire policy agenda.

The Liberals were swept to office in a landslide in 1906, over a Conservative administration that had been in office for 17 of the previous 20 years. While assigning blame to boredom with the one-party rule, which had the effect of “exacerbate[ing] the normal swing of the pendulum,” Roberts also criticizes the Tory administration’s narrow re-election in the aftermath of a premature nationalistic celebration over winning the Boer War. Churchill seemed to be channeling the unborn spirit of Howard Dean when he decried the “majority elected under the spell of patriotic emotion … in the stress of an anxious war has been perverted to a crude and paltry purposes of party.” More crucially, the Conservatives subsequently overreached with tariff hikes, which caused Roberts to write that “the Conservatives’ revolutionary fiscal proposals made the Liberals the conservative party.”

But the mixed constituencies of the Labour Party meant that the party was likely to splinter apart after achieving power. Punch magazine called the party’s young marquee stars – Lloyd George and Churchill – “The Young Terrors” for their aggressive approach in tackling social inequities of the time. In the process, they laid the foundations for the modern welfare state, pushing forward old-age pensions, workers’ compensation, school lunches, and other means of reducing the depths of poverty and leveling the playing field. By proposing a series of “people’s budgets,” they helped change the terms of the debate and paid for it all with a series of tax hikes, practically giving birth to a much abused but nonetheless moral line of argument still heard in liberal salons: “What is the cost of old-age pensions compared with human suffering?”

Roberts sees Lloyd George and Churchill as engaged in a struggle to outpace the progress of socialism by transforming liberals into a progressive reform force. As Roberts writes: “the two rejected socialist remedies to the problems they observed, and a desire to pre-empt the socialists, to steal their thunder to liberal reforms.” This centrist strategic logic was explained by Churchill in a famous 1908 speech, in which he said, “Socialism seeks to pull down wealth, Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty.”

Despite giving birth to several political giants and ultimately accepted reforms, the Liberal Party would never again lead the British government. They were squeezed out by the Labour Party on the left and the Conservatives on the right (who Churchill later sheepishly rejoined). Roberts simultaneously criticizes the Liberals for overreaching with a reform agenda that alienated their previously dependable middle class original base and for not having enough of a positive agenda to begin with.

At least in his more youthful days, Roberts appreciated the value of a positive and progressive agenda as a way to update the relevance of aging institutions. An essentially negative political agenda of attempting to stop change did not appear to his young eyes as a wise or sufficient way to sustain an organized political movement. This portrait of the future justice as a young man offers a glimpse into a wry political mind, with an appreciation of the lessons to be learned from the rise and fall of a progressive political party. How this mind will apply such early perspectives to future evolutions of our own republic has yet to be seen, but mainstream conservatives and liberals alike can find surprising common ground and little reason for alarm in this formative vision.