Lancashire and the New Liberalism


Book Description

Why was there a Liberal Government in Britain from 1905 until the First World War? And why was the Liberal party replaced by the Labour party so shortly afterwards? These are the kinds of problems which Dr Clarke examines in his study of the Liberal revival in Lancashire. The vote in north-west England was largely responsible for bringing the Liberal Government into power and for maintaining its position, but it also produced almost half the new Labour MP's in 1906. Thus any satisfactory interpretation of electoral history in the early twentieth century must account for what happened in Lancashire. This book calls into question many of the conventional assumptions about British politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.




The New Liberalism


Book Description

This title, first published in 1982, explores the new Liberalism - the great change in Liberalism as an ideology and a political practice that characterised the years before the First World War - and examines the idea that the new Liberals successfully overcame the need they saw in the 1890’s to make Liberalism more socially reformist. This title will be of interest to students of social and political history.




Labour, British radicalism and the First World War


Book Description

This book provides a concise set of thirteen essays looking at various aspects of the British left, movements of protest and the cumulative impact of the First World War. There are three broad areas this work intends to make a contribution to; the first is to help us further understand the role the Labour Party played in the conflict, and its evolving attitudes towards the war; the second strand concerns the notion of work, and particularly women’s work; the third strand deals with the impact of theory and practice of forces located largely outside the United Kingdom. Through these essays this book aims to provide a series of thirteen bite-size analyses of key issues affecting the British left throughout the war, and to further our understanding of it in this critical period of commemoration.




After Chartism


Book Description

Working- and middle-class radical politics in England from the fall of Chartism in 1848 to the 1870s.




Labour's First Century


Book Description

The Labour Party's centenary is an appropriate moment to evaluate its performance across the twentieth century, and to reflect on why a party which has so many achievements to its credit nonetheless spent so much of the period in opposition. Duncan Tanner, Pat Thane and Nick Tiratsoo have assembled a team of acknowledged experts who cover a wide range of key issues, from economic policy to gender. The editors also provide a lucid, accessible introduction. Labour's First Century covers the most important areas of party policy and practice, always placing these in a broader context. Taken together, these essays challenge those who minimize the party's contribution, whilst they also explain why mistakes and weaknesses have occurred. Everyone interested in British political history - whether supporters or opponents of the Labour Party - will need to read Labour's First Century.




French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day


Book Description

There is an enduring assumption that the French have never been and will never be liberal. As with all clichés, this contains a grain of truth, but it also overlooks an important school of thought that has been a constant presence in French intellectual and political culture for nearly three centuries: French political liberalism. In this collaborative volume, a distinguished group of philosophers, political theorists and intellectual historians uncover this unjustly neglected tradition. The chapters examine the nature and distinctiveness of French liberalism, providing a comprehensive treatment of major themes including French liberalism's relationship with republicanism, Protestantism, utilitarianism and the human rights tradition. Individual chapters are devoted to Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Aron, Lefort and Gauchet, as well as to some lesser known, yet important thinkers, including several political economists and French-style 'neoliberals'. French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day is essential reading for all those interested in the history of political thought.




The Liberal Party in Rural England 1885-1910


Book Description

This book explores the relationship between the British Liberal party and the rural working-class voters enfranchised by the Third Reform Act of 1884. In contrast to many works that present urban voters as the primary agents of political change in nineteenth- and twentieth-century England, this study argues that an examination of the dynamics of popular rural politics is essential to a thorough understanding of political developments in the early years of mass enfranchisement. Prior to 1914, capturing a substantial portion of the rural vote was essential to any political party seeking to establish a strong Parliamentary majority; and the Liberal party, coming from a traditionally strong urban base, had to work particularly hard to meet the expectations of the new rural electorate. The book shows that popular political culture in the English countryside was dominated by two important, and sometimes conflicting, traditions: on the one hand, a history of radical social protest, emphasizing attacks on the privileges of landowning elites, and on the other, a widespread concern for the harmony of the local community, coupled with a suspicion of unnecessary divisiveness. The attempt to appeal simultaneously to both of these facets of rural political culture helps to explain not only why the Liberals continued to launch rhetorical attacks on the landed aristocracy and to promote schemes of land reform long after one might have expected them to have switched to a more 'modern' emphasis on class politics, but also why the 'New Liberal' emphasis on the politics of community carried such broad electoral appeal at the beginning of the twentieth century. The book suggests, finally, that in focusing primarily on urban democratization, historians of this period may have exaggerated the role of class allegiances in shaping popular political opinion and underestimated the continuities between 'Old' and 'New' Liberalism.




The Great Liberal Death Wish


Book Description




The Locomotive of War


Book Description

A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year for 2017 'War, comrades,' declared Trotsky, 'is a great locomotive of history.' He was thought to be acknowledging the opportunity the First World War had offered the Bolsheviks to seize power in Russia in 1917. Twentieth-century warfare, based on new technologies and mass armies, certainly saw the locomotive power of war geared up to an unprecedented level. Peter Clarke explores the crucial ways in which war can be seen as a prime mover of history in the twentieth century through the eyes of five major figures. In Britain two wartime prime ministers – first David Lloyd George, later Winston Churchill – found their careers made and unmade by the unprecedented challenges they faced. In the United States, two presidents elected in peacetime – Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt – likewise found that war drastically changed their agenda. And it was through the experience of war that the economic ideas of John Maynard Keynes were shaped and came to exert wide influence. When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, President Wilson famously declared: 'The world must be made safe for democracy.' This liberal prospectus was to be tested in the subsequent peace treaty, one that was to be bitterly remembered by Germans for its 'war guilt clause'. But both in the making of the war and the making of the peace the issue of guilt did not suddenly materialise out of thin air. As Clarke's narrative shows, it was an integral component of the Anglo-American liberal tradition. The Locomotive of War is a forensic and punctilious examination of both the interplay between key figures in the context of the unprecedented all-out wars of 1914–18 and 1939–45 and the broader dynamics of history in this extraordinary period. Deeply revealing and insightful, it is history of the highest calibre.




The Transformation of Urban Liberalism


Book Description

"The Transformation of Urban Liberalism" re-evaluates the dramatic and turbulent political decade following the 'Third Reform Act', and questions whether the Liberal Party's political heartlands - the urban boroughs - really were in decline. In contrast to some recent studies, it does not see electoral reform, the Irish Home Rule crisis and the challenge of socialism as representing a fundamental threat to the integrity of the party. Instead this book illustrates, using parallel case studies, how the party gradually began to transform into a social democratic organisation through a re-evaluation of its role and policy direction. This process was not one directed from the centre - despite the important personalities of Gladstone and Rosebery - but rather one heavily influenced by 'grass roots politics'. Consequently, it suggests that late Victorian politics was more democratic and open than sometimes thought, with leading urban politicians forced to respond to the demands of party activists. Changes in the structure of urban rule produced new policy outcomes and brought new collectivist forms of New Liberalism onto the political agenda. Thus, it is argued that without the political transformations of the decade 1885-1895, the radical liberal governments of the Edwardian era would not have been possible.




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