The North American High Tory Tradition


Book Description

A significant struggle began in the year 1776 over the fate of a continent, and there are those who believe that this struggle ended in the year 1783, with the ancient ways of the Old World being given over entirely to those of a New. Is it true, however, that the end of what has been called 'The First American Civil' saw the complete victory of the republican way, and the banishment of the older Tory tradition from these shores? The North American High Tory Tradition tells another story, one in which a different vision for life in North America emerges from the cold of the True North where its flame has been kept burning until the present day. George Grant (1918-1988), the most influential High Tory intellectual of the 20th century, warned us in his Lament for a Nation of the collision course which lies ahead for these two different 'North Americas'?---that embodied in the Dominion of the North, and that in the Republic to its South. Is the disappearance of the Tory alternative an inevitable fate to our future as 'North Americans'? In The North American High Tory Tradition Ron Dart shines light upon the classical lineage, deep wisdom and enduring nature of the High Tory tradition as it has been planted and grown in the soil of North America, and in doing so reveals how Canada may serve as a north star to lead North Americans to a different destiny than that planned for them by a certain few in 1776.







Neo-Tories


Book Description

The danger to British democracy in the interwar period came from a different source to that which has thus far been assumed. It came from a network of radical conservatives who challenged the political system and sought to replace it with an authoritarian corporate state. In this book, Bernhard Dietz provides the first systematic analysis of this network and its members, which are called Neo-Tories. With strong links to the European right, yet a minority back home, this group of British conservatives are all the more fascinating today because it is on their ultimate failure that the success of British democracy rested.




The Conservatives - A History


Book Description

The history of the Conservative party has, extraordinarily, rarely been written in a single volume for the general reader. There are academic multi-volume accounts and a multitude of smaller books with limited historical scope. But now, Robin Harris, Margaret Thatcher's speechwriter and party insider, has produced this authoritative but lively history book which tells the whole story and fills a gaping hole in Britain's historiographical record. Taking as his starting point the larger than life personalities of the Conservative Party's leaders and prime ministers since its inception, Robin Harris's book also analyses the interconnected themes and issues which have dominated Conservative politics over the years. The careers of Peel, Disraeli, Salisbury, Baldwin, Chamberlain, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Heath, Thatcher, Major, Hague and Cameron together amount to an alternative history of Britain since the early nineteenth century. This landmark book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in history or politics, or anyone who has ever wondered how Britain came to be the nation it is today.




Tory Democracy


Book Description







Training minds for the war of ideas


Book Description

This book examines attempts by the Conservative party in the interwar years to capture the ‘brains’ of the new electorate and create a counter-culture to what they saw as the intellectual hegemony of the Left. It tells the fascinating story of the Bonar Law Memorial College, Ashridge, founded in 1929 as a ‘College of citizenship’ to provide political education through both teaching and publications. The College aimed at creating ‘Conservative Fabians’ who were to publish and disseminate Conservative literature, which meant not only explicitly political works but literary, historical and cultural work that carried implicit Conservative messages. This book modifies our understanding of the history of the Conservative party and popular Conservatism, but also more generally of the history of intellectual debate in Britain. It sheds new light on the history of the ‘middlebrow’ and how that category became a weapon for the Conservatives.




Dancing with Dogma


Book Description

Gives a left-wing conservative assessment of Thatcherism in action - as ideology, style, monarchy, millenarianism, 19th-century liberalism, a set of moral values, right-wingery, or as a combination of them all - and its effects on the country and on Tory policy during Thatcher's 11-year reign.




Whatever Happened to the Tories


Book Description

Ian Gilmour has been a Conservative MP, editor of Spectator, and is the author of the acclaimed Dancing With Dogma. With this book, he offers a radical and critical history of the Conservative Party since 1945.