After having been employed as a solicitor in The Hague until 1881, Cort van der Linden was a teacher of economics at the universities of Groningen and Amsterdam and began to reunite Liberals with a program of social reform. Key planks of his platform included workmen's compensation and educational and public-health reforms, enacted under the Liberal ministry of 1897–1901, in which he served as minister of justice. He became a member of the state council in 1902. In 1913, when the Liberals proved unable to form a government, Cort van der Linden assembled a distinguished extraparliamentary administration and became prime minister.

Cort van der Linden gained passage in 1914 of an unemployment-insurance program and began implementing a policy of neutrality and economic austerity to deal with wartime conditions. His ministry sponsored revisions of the constitution in 1917, by which universal male suffrage and proportional representation were granted by the religious parties in exchange for enactment of equal state aid to public and denominational schools. After the Calvinist-Roman Catholic victory in the 1918 elections, Cort van der Linden resigned and was again appointed to the state council.