Book abstracts

4. Bramston, Robert Menzies (28 January 2024)

by kurto

Australia’s longest-serving prime minister mastered the mechanics of politics such that he reached an artfulness and unparalleled command. Major accomplishments include the establishment of the Liberal Party, sustained prosperity and the demise of sectarianism, and reorienting Australia toward the Pacific region; while he stumbled on the Suez Canal and Vietnam and stayed too long in office, losing touch with his cabinet and eventually voters. Like de Gaulle, he should have left sooner, in 1963. His distinctive crafted entailed deep understanding of government institutions (e.g., the Westminster system and the common law), policy guided by conviction (e.g., the goodness of family, home, and community), party management and alliance with the Country Party, astute retail politics aimed at winning respect (not popularity), and persuasion by logic, reason, emotion.

Menzies, becoming at 25 a nationally regarded lawyer through defeating HV Evatt in the Engineers case, which applied federal law to state jurisdictions, turned to politics to erase family dishonor stemming from his not enlisting for World War I service. Flashing to Attorney General and then PM, he supported appeasement (as Curtin favored conciliating Japan) but snapped to Britain’s defense. He visited London four times in three years before losing control of the United Australia Party, giving rise to reputation for British obsequiousness: The

    Sydney Morning Herald

editorialized his brilliance tarnished by lack of public understanding. (Bramston dismisses David Day’s claim he wished to replace Churchill.)

Menzies learned from his first-term mistakes and modified his public persona. He opposed Labor selectively and did not insist on undoing Curtin and Chifley’s great innovations – though he profitably contested nationalizing banking – believing it a mistake to contest settled issues, and that a PM first gained stature in parliament before winning voters. Over 1942-44, he gave weekly radio broadcasts touting the virtue of liberalism and famously the ‘forgotten people’, foreshadowing Reagan’s General Electric touring. Having established the Liberal Party by painstaking campaign and then formal convention, he resigned as party leader in 1947 to invite rivals: by 1949 he was a credible alternate to the wartime’s statist socialism. As PM, he left ministers to run their portfolios, provided they were masters of their briefs, seeing himself as primes inter pares, albeit with a naturally commanding presence. LP’s statism governed by budget policy and managing credit rather than bureaucracy. Menzies continued Calwell’s postwar immigration program (which he thought the unions wouldn’t have accepted if originating on the right). Abroad, despite deep sympathies with Britain he pursued Australia’s national interests by building closer ties with the US. He knew virtually all the West’s key players; Nixon regarded him highly. Menzies’ political philosophy was interpreted differently by Fraser, Howard, Abbott, and others (p. 115).

See also Robert Menzies,

    Afternoon Light

3. Davie, Anglo-Australian Attitudes (17 January 2024)

by kurto

Explores the Anglo-Australian relationship through stylishly recounted stories of upper-end society, culture, and sport (i.e., cricket): Australia’s ties have been fraying and the country must inevitably become a republic. Davie correctly assumes that connections which are not husbanded must decay; wrongly presumes Aboriginal problems means British and Irish heritage must also be; and nowhere considers that the Westminster tradition has been helpful to an effective political system. Less systematic assessment than a series of essays, Davie looks to have been deflated by 1999’s ‘no’ vote: ‘spiritual independence cannot be rushed’.

Menzies and cabinet had been surprised to discover Australia’s politics did not map to Britain’s. The key cultural break of the 20th century was Curtin’s refusing to deploy troops to Burma, prompting Aussie recognition that self-defense should trump imperial concerns. However, Britain’s 1941 decision to prioritize Europe was no betrayal, as in David Day’s telling. Australia and Britain hardly collaborated in postwar immigration: the UK resisted sending skilled people; the Aussie unions didn’t want those trained outside the British system; the ‘whingeing Pom’ had committed only £10 to emigrate and so took things for granted. The 1930’s self-deception (i.e., appeasement) did not persist in the 1960s, when the political class took the measure of Britain’s turn to the EEC and its Commonwealth Immigration Act – no more favored treatment for the dominions – and in turn opened toward Asia. 1964-70 was the most difficult period since the early colonial era, but the author confuses the correlated rise of the Tigers and China with causing England’s turn to Europe.

Manning Clark thought Australia was a geographic terms and self-contained historical topic. Stuart McIntyre and Davie see parallels to Australia in Canada and New Zealand, notwithstanding differing attitudes toward republican status. British educators and artists in exile are portrayed as exercising outsized influence on elite Aussie culture. In cricket, following a nuanced study of 1937’s bodyline tour, Aussie pragmatism ‘routs’ English romanticism. Less encompassing than Pringle, he dedicates an entire chapter to Windsor gossip and another to the editorial echelon of the chattering class.

‘When an Aussie enters a British room, you can hear the chains clanking’.

22. Mansfield, Statesmanship and Party Government (7 November)

by kurto

The philosophic import of political parties was established in 18th-century England, when Burke’s realism bested Bolingbroke’s ‘patriotism’, downgrading statesmanship to a conservative prudence.
In the classic era, philosophers solved the fundamental problem of rich versus poor by mixed government, not party government. The Glorious Revolution settled the contemporary problems of religion and divine right by reconciling warring elements of the ruling class, vindicating not Shaftesbury’s raison d’etre but something between Macaulay’s Whiggism (as represented by William of Orange) and Trevelyan’s prudence (seen in the trimmer Halifax). Burke’s

    Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents

then gave the first justification for party as the best use of talents, harnessing statesmanship to honest conduct by compromising the individual’s discretion and requiring the party’s action to be both defensible and practical. As against Bolingbroke’s disinterested statesmanship, which reached its apex in the 1760s, he sought to remedy the possibility of tyranny: he didn’t actually believe George’s court to be a cabal, but needed to illustrate the defect for which party is the remedy.
Bolingbroke saw James I’s divine right as formerly preempting the country party’s split into Tories and Whigs. Men can know the works of God but not his nature; they can reason a posteriori as to God’s will, but not a priori; they can have knowledge of knowledge which they can’t fully possess. Nature is beneficent because it’s intelligible; but its essence is not understandable, so there must be a God who means well. Bolingbroke straddled ancient and medieval thinkers who supposed beneficence, and modern ones who saw a hostile nature to be conquered. Natural law is obvious in God’s work because men appreciate the benefits of society irrespective of without its contrasts with the state of nature. Averring man’s natural sociability marked his great break with Hobbes and Locke. Hobbes is to Bolingbroke in religion as Bolingbroke to Burke in party: Hobbes had not foreseen the resolution of religious conflict, but Bolingbroke, seeing religion had been solved, thought parties were consequently superfluous. He presumed a society based on truth (i.e., first principles) which expresses intolerance of not truth, and results in lack of partisanship. But politics are not (cannot) be nonpartisan, and parties can be helpful. Bolingbroke saw that parties are groups associated for purposes which are not those of the entire community, and become factions when personal or private interests predominate communal good; whereas Burke followed Plato and Aristotle in praising prejudice (‘noble truth’). Commerce is the foremost example of nonpartisan association; government is nonpartisan when its ends are not happiness but the means of happiness. For example, military policy might serve commerce.
The king and a court of the most able patriots were to be the most virtuous; corruption was the risk. The patriot king required not aristocrats but men of ability, resistance to corruption, the preferment of peace over military glory, and the fostering of commerce. Such a program reduces reliance on statesmanship-cum-virtue: it is the ambition of party beyond tyranny. Bolingbroke and Jefferson firstly sought to replace absolutist / aristocratic statesmanship with party; Burke sought for multiple parties, thinking a group of super-able men of ability, supernaturally virtuous – however unlikely – conferred undue advantage.
Burke thought parties possible in Britain because the great parties of religious conflict and divine right were bygone; only the quotidien remained. Open, established opposition was not a requisite for party government but instead evidence of attenuated great parties, that politics no longer culminated in civil war. (In founding political parties in America, Jefferson capitalized on the success of republican principles, yielding productive, legitimate partisanship.) Yet simultaneously he opposed fomenting general discontent with present good (e.g., pamphlets criticising the constitution) while suggestively promising improvement that might in fact fail. This was nearly Aristotle’s opposition to innovation: since virtue is a product of habitation and innovation disrupts habit, innovation disrupts virtue, even if the outcome is otherwise good.
Burke understood the constitution after 1688 to be mature, no longer needing improvement, and the monarch now being head of state but sharing leadership of government. The king, whose powers rested more on the normative than the statutory, retained the discretion necessarily vested in the executive, provided these were prudentially used – Aristotle’s phronesis. The ‘political school’ (i.e., Bolingbroke’s supporters) were implicitly required to support the king’s ministers because they were appointed by these rulers, whereas Burke saw the Commons as a check on the monarch and his ministers, and so the chief worry was abuse of prerogative. All uncontrolled power will inevitably be abused. Burke’s theory of popular government straddles Bolingbroke, American federalism (the Federalist saw legislators as subject to the Constitution, and so Congress), and modern British constitutionalism as described by Bagehot (responsible to the people).
Burke thought prescription embodies heritage (or tradition), and ‘establishments’ are the artefacts of heritage. Then, British government was to be ruled by gentlemen who defended the establishments and their prejudice: ‘Party is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed. For my part, I find it impossible to conceive that anyone believes in his own politics, or thinks them to be of any weight, who refuses to adopt the means of having them reduced into practice. It is the business of the speculative philosopher to mark the proper ends of government. It is the business of the politician, who is the philosopher in action, to find out proper means towards those ends, and to employ them with effect. Therefore, every honourable connection will avow it as their first purpose to pursue every just method to put the men who hold their opinions into such a condition as may enable them to carry their common plans into execution, with all the power and authority of the State.’
Burke considered that the patriot king increased the likelihood of tyranny, and sought to redefine party in British politics. His Thoughts disguised counterrevolution against Bolingbroke’s party: ‘When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle’. Bad describes those corrupted by executive (monarchical) prerogative. Party for the sake of liberty doesn’t manifest the true practice of politics. The program of a party is in its history, its rationale for past judgment of public measures, not its plans for the future. Deference goes to the party’s self-understanding, rather than the individual executive. The people are not to be included in government, but to be restrained by government, restraints aiming to preserve equal rights in civil society (as opposed to majority rule, which is arbitrary and likely to forget historic rights amid contemporary events). He opposed ‘responsible’ or opposition criticism as bound to flatter the people, and ‘independent’ criticism as lacking ambition to rule. Party did not require far-seeing statesmanship: there is a tension between prudence and consistency. It is a matter of leaders and led, not Aristotle’s rulers and ruled; though the leaders are of the people and mingle, the better to represent (but not to be delegated). The leaders’ property is a result not of public duty, but duty as a consequent of property. Their role is the cause of what they do, not what they do the cause of their role. Honor is the negation of the false pride of one who tends toward tyranny. It facilitates the association of good men, whereas Aristotle tended to isolate them.
Theories of natural law, being accessible to common sense, tend to elide the Aristotelian distinction between moral (or political) virtue and intellectual (or philosophic) virtue. Burke thought the laws we live by should be obvious at least to gentlemen, because there are natural penalties for their failure, and this makes the Aristotelian legislator unnecessary. He opposed viewing politics as a matter of first principles, but instead prioritized began Roma law treatment of prescription (whereby land was effectively titled when longstanding use could be shown). People remain in society to benefit from civilized liberties. The good for Aristotle is the discovery of reason: in politics, it is the product of the legislator. For Burke, civil liberty is based on natural feeling protected by prescriptive right. Prejudice can be effective only if not subject to first principles. His prudence avoids the legislator’s appeal to first principles. (Bolingbroke sided with Plato and Aristotle in that prejudice does admit of first principles.) The 19th century demonstrated economic progress sparked hunger for political innovation at the expense of establishments.
Mansfield suggests Burke was a deist but did not accept Christian revelation, professing its virtue for political benefit. This deity commanded the laws of nature; human nature trumped determinism and established the bases of moral action, of equality before the law. Natural feeling is love of one’s own. Natural law follows Hobbes, is disciplined by honesty, and is not a final, inevitable point as in Aquinas. Consequently when elites forget their obligations they risk not only their own place but the entire social order. Principled behavior in a statesman is not following first principles but defending establishments and prescription. Great men should recognize that honest men of great families (i.e., aristocrats) ordinarily have first call on ruling, because first principles normally fail in politics. It is natural law that is intended to perfect human nature, the standard from which men draw progress.
The conflict between Bolingbroke and Burke is tantamount to rationalism versus empiricism. Rationalism holds liberty (or the basis of natural law) can be discovered in first principles, in freedom from prejudice. It teaches the necessity of seeking security in society, and seeking truth as the path to peace. Empiricism proceeds directly to prejudice and preservation, until the truth can be known; prescriptive right is an inalienable right. Bolingbroke’s patriot party established a new means of statesmanship; Burke instead substituted prudence, or non-principled conservatism, which admits of multiple parties. He did not succeed in substituting prudence for Bolingbroke’s patriotism: he engendered respectable parties but not the party system, for the modern system tolerates fanatics such as Jacobins and Nazis. Nonetheless, modern statesmanship discards the legislator and thus political thought, and accepts popular guidance (as refracted by popular sovereignty). In demoting statesmanship to guarding against theoretical claims which might destroy the establishments, he made party inherently conservative.
Coda: Contemporary political scientists must focus on action and therefore its limits, whereas historians may be tempted by hindsight. Burke, had he known of class and racial parties, would not have advanced party (p. 23).
Machiavelli: ‘To preserve liberty by new laws and new schemes of government, whilst the corruption of a people continues and grows, is absolutely impossible: but to restore and preserve it under old laws, and an old constitution, by reinfusing into the minds of men the spirit of this constitution, is not only possible, but is, in a particular manner, easy to a king’ (p. 73 footnote: Discourses I)

2. Perl, Authority and Freedom (7 January 2024)

by kurto

Art comprises the authority of craftsmanship and the freedom of interpretation, or the reworking of the craft’s tradition. Consequently, art must be subject to its own standards, and ought not subordinate to contemporary sociopolitics. The products of imagination possess an internal logic. The well-made work acknowledges tradition; the artist explores freedom within boundaries. Vocation is sacral: if you’re going to make something, you’d better know how to proceed. Then, truth is expressed in the context of form. Perl thus explains the failure of so-called performance art, which lacks craftsmanship. As the scientist’s work is to be independent, so too the artist’s, Perl writes. But what of ethics? 20th-century art can be characterized by the search for new sources of authority. But modern ‘playfulness’ ought to be more than a bid for attention, and any political opposition which artists engender or encounter tells us nothing of the caliber of their work. Conversely, the distinction between doing and making – roughly, general activity and work within the tradition – allows one to embrace good artists with questionable personal or sociopolitical traits. Perl derives understanding of authority from Hannah Arendt; he might have addressed the contemporary obsession with Foucaldian power. Still, aesthetic theory which restores the distinction between craft and all-embracing politics is welcome.

Isaiah Berlin: ‘Man is a rational being, and to say this is to say that he is able to detect this general pattern and purpose and identify himself with them; his wishes are rational if they aspire such self-identification, and irrational if they oppose it. To be free is to fulfil one’s wishes; one can fulfill one’s wishes only if one knows how to do so effectively, that is, if one understands the nature of the world in which one lives; if this world has a pattern and a purpose, to ignore this central fact is to court disaster. … To be free is to understand the universe. … The well-known Stoic argument that to understand and adapt oneself to nature is the truest freedom, rests on the premise that nature of the cosmos possess a pattern and a purpose; that human beings possess an inner light or reason which is that in them which seeks perfection by integrating itself as completely as possible with this cosmic pattern and purpose (p. 80).

TS Eliot: ‘the existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new’ (p. 108).

18. Roberts, Last King of America (10 September 2022)

by kurto

George III was a custodial not a tyrannical monarch, demonstrating a principled constitutionality and remaining above faction without undermining those in power. Initially unpopular and enduring a series of irresolute or unprepared prime ministers, during the French Revolutionary era he showed himself determined and muchly helpful to Pitt the Younger’s success. The recasting of the British monarchy as constitutional head of state commenced with him, not Victoria.
George’s education was superior to public schooling but reclusive. He learned to value the balanced constitution while developing lifelong hostility to Whig oligopoly. Self-denying for the sake of country, he was the first Hanover to see himself as primarily British. He was kindly and at ease among the populace; many less flattering characteristics aspects of his character are attributable to the salacious Horace Walpole, an entertaining but often misleading diarist.
Just prior to reaching his majority, Parliament entered the Seven Years War having sacked Pitt the Elder, its best strategist, in favor of the corrupt Henry Fox. (George II, though conscious of his rights, did so at the Duke of Cumberland’s urging; he merely agreed with the Old Whigs.) Bute’s tutelage of George was held against his ministry, and the king was at first seen as grasping both by contemporaries and historians, wrongly in Roberts’ view.
At the French war’s denouement, Bute ceded the sugar island Guadeloupe, after having instead considered Canada on grounds that French pressure would have kept the American colonies loyal to Britain. Once safe, economic matters were a pretext for the real issue of self-government. Bute and Blackstone’s Commentaries (1765) fashioned George’s opinion that American claims to self-government had no standing in English law. In addition to the strategic error of tethering the Americans to the Atlantic seaboard (the Proclamation of 1763), this conservative view propelled Britain toward losing the colonies.
George tended to appoint prime ministers and leave them to legislate and execute, notwithstanding the unwonted predominance of the Grenvilles (George and his brother Richard Temple) and the Pitts (the elder being married to Temple’s sister). The Stamp Act was Grenville’s responsibility, and having insisted on dismissing Stuart-Mackenzie as Lord Privy Seal of Scotland, forcing George to break a promise, Grenville alienated George to the family for making him subject to factional interests. Lasting but two months, Grenville was replaced by Rockingham, who had never sat in Commons nor anyone else’s cabinet. Contra Conor Cruise O’Brien, on his return Pitt the Elder (now Lord Chatham) was given more scope than Rockingham, one of several occasions on which Roberts disagrees with the Irish historian. Later the sons of Pitt and Grenville would become PMs, indicating George’s essential forbearance.
In the years following the Stamp Act’s repeal, George contended with keeping Grenville out as PM, Wilkes out of the Commons, Parliamentary review of royal finances and appointments, and France out of the West Indies. Historians who contend George tried to gather power ignore the politicians who wished to avoid responsibility – including Lord North, who had otherwise ended the merry go round. Relatedly, contemporary European governments often resorted to genuine tyranny (e.g., mass arrests, execution of civilians without trial) whereas there had been arrests at all following the Boston Tea Party. George behaved with constitutional propriety during the American unrest, going along with hawkish ministries (admittedly to his liking) rather than driving policy. Of the 28 charges laid against George in the Declaration of Independence, only 2, regarding taxation and parliamentary authority to legislate for the colonists, are logical.
In post facto war gaming, the UK wins the war 45 percent of the time. Even as the war deteriorated, George, stepping back from hopes of an outright win, was determined to hold Canada, Nova Scotia, and Florida. The stakes were more patriotic than economic: circa 1776, imports from the British Windies totaled £4.5 million, versus 1.5 million from India, while the Americans were far below.
1779 marked existential danger for Britain. A French fleet of 63 ships and 30,000 regulars gained control of the English Channel. George showed a decisiveness that North lacked, pressing for attack in the Windies, Gibraltar, and Minorca, recognizing that France and Spain’s joining the war converted the conflict from a domestic question of Parliament’s constitutional rights in the colonies to the UK’s survival as a great power. Colonial possessions had to be defended, even at the risk of the homeland’s invasion, because of the sugar islands’ revenue. However, he was less clear sighted about responsibilities for the American war’s military losses. (NB: ‘Hessians’ werer from several small principalities, representing one-third of the soldiery. Not mercenaries, they were paid by the German states. Though effective they made for poor propaganda, especially during the New Jersey winter of 1777-78.)
Though not ignoring the denouement, Roberts’ current thus turns toward domestic matters. Thinking George a moderate, he is generally unsympathetic to Burke, described as a ‘radical Whig’ (e.g., pp. 417, 445, 486, 490). Pitt on Burke: ‘much to admire, nothing to agree with’ (p. 526). Irish repeal of the Declaratory Act demonstrates Westminster had learned from America, rather panic in the Rockingham administration. Whig attempts to arrogate East India Company patronage to Parliament in 1778 seemed an oligarchical revival to George; parallels to the Whigs’ 1766’s repeal of the Stamp Act make them seem hypocritical.
1784’s dismissal of the Fox-North coalition stemmed from the East India Bill, and was quite constitutional of George. The subsequent election, a hotly contested affair which produced ‘Fox’s martyrs’, indicated that the Whig leader had overplayed his hand regarding East India, the loss of America, and near-republican critique of the monarch. Pitt’s rout result in George’s having a genuine ally for the first time, at time when the king could still have his choice of ministers. Had he died in 1783, he might have been lumped together with his Hanoverian predecessors; but instead he and Pitt saw off the French revolutionaries and Bonaparte. By 1792, Pitt as PM was no longer immediately responsible to the king, but to Parliament; he, Dundas, and Grenville were a united front in dealing with the monarch; Addington extended the trend. Pitt’s success was muchly due to George’s support.
As when recovering from illness, so with the initial period of the Revolutionary wars. Evident homeliness, piety, and commitment to national victory established his bona fides. Whereas during the American revolution George’s principled stance was unhelpful, in the French wars it was invaluable. Ironically, he traveled little, never visiting Scotland, Wales, or Ireland; nor Hanover; nor the American colonies or Windies. Indeed, did he travel north of Worcester or west of Plymouth. He never went to see the newly industrializing Manchester, Birmingham, or Leeds.
In Ireland, George supported toleration of the Catholic Church but not equality, for he was head of the Church of England (and of Ireland), and so was unhappy with the Earl of Fitzwilliam’s concessions. His successor, Earl of Camden, confiscated 50,000 muskets and 70,000 pikes – indicative of 1798. Neoclassical architecture, already underway, reached its apogee during his reign as he frequently paid interest in public projects.
(NB: amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.)
(NB: as an insult, a XXX husband, rather than not remarry, should as condign punishment marry the devil’s daughter. The riposte: the law prohibited marrying one’s deceased wife’s sister – p. 407)

1. Brauer, Education of a Gentleman (4 January 2024)

by kurto

Studies Restoration and Georgian views of upper-class education, finding the debate between advocates of private tutoring and nascent public schooling encapsulated its main goals: individual virtue, public service, scholarly and worldly knowledge, and sociability (good breeding). Of these, virtue was most valued. The Middle Ages had looked to nobles and gentry for military service; in the Renaissance (i.e., the Tudor era), statesmanship came to the fore. Though the Puritans had unsuccessfully attempted to introduce vocational training and the Reformation retreated toward the old tradition of indifference – pedantry was to be feared – upper-class men in the 18th century nonetheless relied on education to buttress their forming the social elite. Patriotic content was expected: history, government, law, political thought running along English lines. Much of the monograph is given to contemporary exposition, notably from Locke and 4th Earl of Chesterfield as well as clergy and schoolmasters. Contemporaries address the nature and extent of English ignorance, comparison with the continent, the value of the grand tour, and so on. Tutors remained most fashionable though the advantage of schools competition with peers was beginning to surface.

2. Jenkins, Churchill (24 Jan 2023)

by kurto

Churchill was the greatest of Britain’s prime ministers, surmounting Gladstone and Lloyd George, despite substantial personal foibles.
More concerned with policy and (often social) legislation, government machinations (especially Parliamentary doings), and society doings and gossip than Roberts, Jenkins more fully portrays why you would dislike the aristocratic thruster. In seeking to show Churchill was out of step, however, he too often falls back on ‘the sense of the house’. He contends, against Roberts and unconvincingly, Churchill was a proto-Europeanist. Often he is more the reproving politician than a historian.
Churchill had the gift of insolence – memorably amusing, performing without fear. His many talents first evident as a junior officer in India, though Jenkins seems unduly critical of the autodidact making up for lost school time.
Upon crossing to the Liberal Party, Churchill was naturally inclined to imperialists Asquith, Grey, and Haldane but personally closer to the Little Englanders. Curiously, he trumpeted his father’s unionism though himself soon to oppose the Curragh mutiny and favor updated Home Rule. He accepted a role junior to Lloyd George, the pair of whom cast aside the Gladstonian tradition of embracing libertarian political issues (and ignoring social matters) in favor of ‘constructive radicalism. ‘[Lloyd George and Churchill] were the two British politicians of genius, using the word in the sense of exceptional and original powers transcending purely rational measurement, in the first half of the twentieth century. As a result they were the two outstanding prime ministers, although in terms of solid (peacetime) achievement Asquith runs at least equal, rather as Peel did with Gladstone and Disraeli in the Victorian age. Churchill was substantially the greater man both because of the wider range outside politics of his interests and accomplishments and because his central achievement in 1940 and 1941 was of a higher order than Lloyd George’s in 117 and 1918, brought off against heavier odds, and still more vital to the future of the world. Furthermore, on issues and people, he had more fixity of purpose and coherence of belief than did Lloyd George: ore principle and less opportunism would be another way of putting it. Yet Lloyd George was undoubtedly strung in a number of significant qualifies than was Churchill, and one, and perhaps the most remarkable of his strengths was the could long exercise and almost effortless authority Churchill.’ (p. 144)
Though in 1911 he had left the Board of Trade, passed through the Home Office, and already spent two months as First Lord of the Admiralty, National Insurance was very much Churchill’s, the details being fully worked out while there. Labour Exchange Boards and enforcement of sweated labor provisions were also to his credit. Unlike most ministers, Churchill drafted his own minutes – and sent them before queries could be lodged.
1919-20 was the least impressive phase of Churchill’s career. He himself considered the Conservative abandonment of unionist Ireland as the most dramatic u-turn in modern history, though it was Lloyd George’s decision and treaty. Churchill and Bonar Law had the least natural rapport of any two major UK politicians to 1950. Baldwin’s failed bid for a protectionist mandate catalyzed Labour’s rise; on Macdonald’s 1924 accession, Churchill had to go back to the Tories as the Liberals were clearly finished.
Churchill was right to return to the gold standard: the establishment’s ‘superior wisdom;’ bested rational argument and instinct. Save that the move turned out poorly!
Marlborough evinces Churchill’s dispute with Macaulay: he won but not without the Victorian’s scoring points. The principal reason Churchill wanted to retain India was economic, as rivals were catching up the UK. Opposing independence is presented in terms of Parliamentary machinations, not political thought: he was on the losing side so he must have been wrong. Too bad – a Labour historian in the 2000s could have taken an honest look at imperialism; no one could now do so.
Churchill’s vindicated wilderness years are qualified in ‘yes but’ chapter 25. Again he falls back on sense-of-the-house explications, without treating Churchill’s stated position. Only war could have brought him back, the author says. His opposition to Soviet communism, commencing in the 1930s and continuing during wartime, is shortchanged. Eden is given credit for wartime diplomatic successes.
The Norway inquest of May 1940 was the most dramatic, far-reaching Parliamentary debate of the 20th century. Almost everyone of note participated. Its rivals are the Don Pacifico affair of 1850, which proved of little consequence; 1831’s first Reform Bill, when the doomed rotten boroughs were named; and 1886’s first Home Rule bill. In this passage, the author’s deep personal experience shines through – elsewhere he is too eager to display his bona fides, as when Atlee received a telegram at Jenkins’ wedding (p. 776) – but the author says there is no doubt Halifax would not take the job, contra Roberts. Churchill was the right man for the nadir of 1940-41 by dint of his courage and self-confidence. His connection with Montgomery reflects both being ‘light casualty’ tacticians; his rapport with Roosevelt was never so deep as often considered. In nearing war’s end, Churchill felt sidelined. (NB: of all the Europeans, Poland least reveres Churchill for acceding to Stalin’s demands for Moscow-based Polish exiles.)
Churchill’s partisanship in opposition bears little relations to an ‘essentially moderate’ term in office over 1951-55. Accepting that Labour legislation was a ‘considerable success’, he played a ‘constructive role’, for the clock could not go back to the 1930s. He missed his chance to bring the UK into Europe because Eden was cool on the matter, Eden acting as a kind of junior PM. Jenkins essentially holds the UK should have abandoned its residual imperial interests to join the Steel and Coal pact. It would have been better had Churchill retired in 1953, that Eden’s didn’t move because of illness and Butler lacked ruthlessness.
For Churchill, duty’s most powerful ally was the desire to be at the center of events. He drew energy from constant change of scene and pattern. He returns again and again to alleged chronic depression, again contra Roberts.
Quotes:
‘Socialism seeks to pull down wealth; Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interests; Liberalism would preserve private interests in the only way in which they can be safely and justly preserved, namely by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference. (P. 132)
‘Oligarchies were seldom destroyed and more frequently committed suicide’ (p. 165)
Clementine: ‘To be great one’s actions must be understood by simple people’ (p. 302)
Jenkins on democratic centralism: ‘All successful political meetings give both audience and the speaker a simultaneous sense of influencing events, with a residue of inspiration but not actually challenging the currents of politics. Whereas constituency militants are ‘almost inevitably a force against sense and statesmanship … The difficulty of sustaining enthusiasm without giving militants excessive power has been one of the perennial problems of democratic government’ (p. 531)

27. Corfield, Georgians (28 December 2023)

by kurto

Is sociocultural history pone to sloppy practice, Whiggish prefiguration, or even ideological capture? Corfield’s Georgians, though hugely learned of the ‘long 18th century’ from Restoration to 1850, suggests all three. The author is evidently fond of the period’s life and detail but seems impelled to judge that slave trading compromised the whole. In conclusion the left-liberal syllabus of 21st-century errors (e.g., climate change, international tax evasion, uncivilized social media, and other sprawling ills) may be traced to the Georgians because 250 years is after all a small span of humanity.

Literacy and numeracy rose, aided by new cultural influences from trade and colonization. First canals then railroads (somewhat out of period) transformed commercial environment. Birmingham, a canal junction, became the first substantial European city not located on a major river. The scientific and industrial revolutions, though they weren’t points in time but transformations, fueled progress.

As Britain urbanized (i.e., as subsistence farming declined), classes blended, and political participation rose. Social violence declined: from 1689 there were no anti-immigrant riots for more than 200 years. As middle-class professions such as law, business, and the like grew, the clerisy lost authority. Household work increasingly became a female preserve. Public schoolboys were often middle class, which category rose to ~ 15% by 1850, from less than 5 in 1700. Titled aristocracy remained stabled at 1-2%, or some 500 families, much less than the estimated 17,000-25,000 noble families prior to the French Revolution.

The extreme of politics was no longer civil war. Of some 5,000 MPs over 1734-1832, more than 50% evidenced commercial or professional interests. A Protestant ethos of public service, neo-republican sense of civic duty, and general national resolve (if not jingoism avant la lettre) fueled respect for government – presumably in lieu of declining class deference – and willingness to pay tax. There was a contest between laissez-faire advocacy (oddly called ‘free trade’) and clamor for professional regulation of medicine and suchlike.

Women were excluded from politics by custom not law; the chancery court was the ‘woman’s friend’. Georgians were newly public of their sexuality (almost predictably leading the book), which trend the Victorians consciously rowed back. By 1850, Methodism had reached 10% of non-conformism, topping the 8% of old-line non-Anglicans. A ‘semisecret’ state grant called regium donum was annually made to Presbyterian, Congregational, and Baptist churches over 1722-1851.

Corliss assiduously identifies harbingers but rarely explores the consequence of abandoned tradition or custom. She contends 2.7 Africans millions reached America, whereas Henry Louis Gates says less than 400,000; both, confusingly, cite Emory University (https://news.emory.edu/features/2019/06/slave-voyages/index.htm). Britain is presented as hegemonic when in fact she contended with continental powers for the whole of the period. Smith is persistently, anachronistically described as a free trader, and Burke in Reflections primarily decries lost social customs (though elsewhere he is treated more considerately, perhaps typical of the left-liberal reluctance to concede him to conservatism). Hill is better: at minimum, history from below leads to simplification and the smuggling in of one’s contemporary prejudice.

1. Roberts, Churchill (12 Jan 2023)

by kurto

Churchill, the first to spot the enormity of Nazism and Communism, was a restless, forward-thinking leader who learned from his mistakes (e.g., Dardanelles, Tonypandy, the gold standard) and triumphed in the end, preserving liberty in the 20th-century west and therefore the world. A fox not a hedgehog, he was a Burkean prejudiced on behalf of England and English-speaking peoples. ‘Man is spirit’, he said on resigning the premiership in 1955, meaning the possibility of success owes to willpower and hard work.
Though possessing a famous name, aristocratic schooling (beloved of the view that men make history) and excellent military training, Churchill felt he hadn’t long to make his mark – ironic given his late success. Also until late, he hadn’t outlived his reputation as a thruster. ‘No boy or girl should every be disheartened by lack of success in their youth, but should diligently and faithfully continue to persevere and make up for lost time.’
As a 20-something junior officer in the Sudan, Churchill confronted extremist sociopolitics. MacDonald, Baldwin, and Chamberlain, appeasers all, never had; nor did they fight in World War I.
Imperialism, a civilizing mission, fit comfortably with reformism. Scandalized by treatment of the defeated Boers and opposing Balfour’s resistance to tariff reform, in the 1900s was he spoiled for a fight with the Tories, and readily crossed to the Liberals. On the 1910 passing of Edward VII, the consensual Tory Democrat in Churchill proposed a coalition government might reform Lords; implement Home Rule; introduce compulsory National Insurance, military service, and land reform.
Proposing in 1912 that the naval budget take a ship-building holiday if the opposition collaborated, Churchill was dismissed by the Germans as a warmonger; if he had died before 1939, his primary legacy would have been modernizing the navy in time for World War I. Obstinacy was a liability during the Dardanelles campaign (but invaluable in World War II). He learned to accede to unanimous military chiefs, and to form them into a coordinated conference subordinate to politicians. He was returned to Lloyd George’s cabinet because of his public voice, that is, his ability to mold and magnify public opinion.
From 1898 to 1939, he made some 1,700 speeches (traveling 80,000+ miles), far more than any other first-rank politician, and was therefore very good at judging an audience. Churchill recounted that he articulated British pride, but rather he inspired it. His wartime speechifying was prefigured in an 19th-century essay entitled the ‘Scaffolding of Rhetoric’: well-chosen words, carefully crafted sentences, accumulated argument, use of analogy, and deployment of extravagance. He often spoke of freedom, drawing on history, Magna Carta and the common law; and not much of Locke, Hume, or Mill. In the Commons, he mastered great flights of oratory with ‘sudden swoops of the intimate and conversational’.
Churchill’s biography of his father was invalid, more a posthumous exercise in justification and self-instruction. Whereas the 1933-38 publication of Marlborough’s biography marked the apex of his political education. As writing history was his professional and a corollary to governing (to making it), he possessed detachment from power which most professionals lack. His political models also included Pitt the younger and DLG, but Clemenceau was most a propos.
By his own sights, returning to the gold standard was his biggest mistake, a lesson in trusting unanimous experts against inner doubts. Other examples include Boer War strategy and World War I convoys. It was the source of his unyielding opposition to appeasement. In the same decade, while Chancellor, he was hostile to the rising United States, and converted to belief in the need for a larger navy.
Antipathy to Indian independence stemmed from his belief in civic mission, without which imperialism was simply dominance. He saw England as responsible for ending suttee, the ostracization of untouchables, and so on. This – not his opposition to appeasement – triggered his years in the wilderness. ‘Every prophet has to come from Civilization, but every prophet has to go into the wilderness. He must have a strong impression of a complex society and all that it has to give, and then must serve periods of isolation and meditation. That is the process by which psychic dynamite is made.’ (p.351). But anti-communism blurred his judgment regarding Italy and Japan.
The Other Club established and maintained personal relations which exceeded partisanship: the UK’s ruling class was united as was no other power, and more than 20 served in wartime government. This the positive side of Foucault’s slippery power.
Contemporaneous accounts of Churchill’s assuming the premiership portray his grasping the prize from a vacillating Halifax – save for his own tellings. Described (on p. 616) as a coup, the entire establishment would have plumped for his more dignified rival. Up through 1942, it tolerated him for lack of a better alternative, and because of his public popularity (which hovered in the high 80s and low 90s to April 1945); it did not accept the losses thereto resulted from is failure to re-arm and appeasement. But, in addition to forecasting the totalitarians’ rise, he correctly predicted the course of the war (forecasting its end in 1944): defeat of Japan would not lead to defeat of Germany, but the converse applied.
The French army’s demoralization was the most dismaying of inherited problems, and his decision not to commit British air force to the French was among the most significant he made. Signing on to the Atlantic charter, especially the anti-imperial article 3, indicated his commitment to good relations with the US and Roosevelt (at least since the 1920s, he had favored Democrats); but his relationship with Marshall was problematic. He left a trail of criticism – later exercised from his memoirs – critical of Overlord (Normandy invasion) because of his previous amphibious failures. (Brooke was similarly critical of Churchill, forgetting the latter had championed buildup campaigns in Africa and Italy). After landing, he was (not consciously) sidelined by Eisenhower, who did not need the help of a politician-cum-2d Marlborough. (NB: the ‘second front’ indicates Soviet propaganda, for the UK was already fighting on 5 (France, Britain’s skies, the Atlantic Ocean, North Africa, and the Mediterranean). (NB: He acted swiftly to protect the Greeks from communist guerillas.)
In fall 1944, he decided against a khaki election that would he have won, but subsequent defeat was a blessing in disguise. India, de-colonization, financial austerity, retreat from the sterling area were not to his forte, as he himself recognized. Opposition allowed him to campaign against Soviet aggression. His later foreign policy objectives were the Commonwealth, the English-speaking peoples, and Europe. But England could not be subordinate to federal Europe (p. 926 – Jenkins et al are wrong on the point.) Roberts describes imperialism as evil rather than mistaken, perhaps the strongest of his not-infrequent condemnations. Simultaneously, having read Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, Churchill began championing ‘property-owning democracy’, a late-life replacement for Tory paternalism (which became a party staple through Thatcher).
Quotes:
‘History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations: but with this shield, however the fate may play, we march always in the ranks of honour. (p. 617)
‘…When nations are strong they are not always just, and when they wish to be just they are often np longer strong.’ (p. 399)
‘Expert knowledge, however indispensable, is no substitute for a generous and comprehending outlook upon the human story, with all its sadness and with all its unquenchable hope’. (p. 893)

25. Frohnen, Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism (17 December 2023)

by kurto

Burke and Tocqueville laid down a set of principles, based on Christian natural law and finding virtue in the husbanding of tradition and community, which together constitute a proper philosophy. Its challenge is finding goodness in an imperfect, materialist society.
In Aristotle, virtue ensures rightness of ends; prudence, or practical wisdom in given circumstances, rightness of means. In Augustine, understanding is the reward of faith. In Aquinas, society’s checking base appetites enables development of virtue. Natural law holds society promotes character: conservatives defend regimes which respect customs as promoting individual virtue. The true conservative mistrusts individual reason, finding in prejudice proofs over time which are applicable to current circumstance, finding in custom God’s purpose as well as the nature of man.
Burke and Tocqueville, whose views are elaborately explicated, could oppose common practice while supporting society as it was, defending that which exists without sacrificing commitment to virtue. Burke’s opposition to the abstract really targeted idealization, which not only omits true qualities but also inserts falsehoods, for not only simplifying human nature but also supposing hoped-for but unreal qualities. Idealization equally undermines existing authority posits false ends, the enforcement of which is tyranny. Government is not the teacher of virtue but its guardian, the keeper of tradition, manners, prejudice.
For Tocqueville, individual character and well-ordered liberty could not be imposed but were habitual; he commenced with the individual himself, one step earlier than Aristotle’s family. Liberty depends on social institutions not political character, for laws are the children of custom, which grow upward from the local. In America, local practice prevailed; in England, the laws were good because they were old. Localism and legalism interceded between the individual and the state. Whereas in France, centralization enervated custom. By doing for citizens what they ought to do for themselves, the state enfeebled its residents. Conversely, public service demonstrates independence – what, when how – from egalitarian diktat. Tocqueville sought to recall French rulers to the pursuit of virtue. Tyranny of the majority restricts worthy contributors to social and political life. Such societies will have little true diversity, few great writers and statesmen. The conservative may consider his own society superior, even if others are virtuous.
The conservative affection for the particularistic, up through the nation-state, is not the same as the republican’s requisite service to the state, for public service can take many forms. But Strauss thought Burke’s identifying tradition with wisdom was conflating the good with the existing. Strauss rejected God in arrangements: natural law and philosophy does not require a deity.
Oakeshott saw man’s ability to act properly outside norms as highly limited. Rules are an abstraction of the essential activity, which resists the cataloging of all possible experience. The less to be discussed, the sounder the social basis. Social achievement is taking next steps consistent with what’s already been done. The search for social perfection results in chaos of conflicting ideas which society can’t survive (i.e., the analogy of Babel). But custom itself is rightful, not the container of higher truth. Oakeshott called a artists and philosophers to promote Platonic lies, unrealistically in Frohnen’s view. He could not reconcile himself to the practical role of religion in rightful conduct. Kristol could not identify a pole other than compromised materialism; Kirk was so concerned with the nature of beliefs that he overlooked the sense of good character.
Best as comparative study, though having raised Strauss’ dispute with Burke, Frohnen ought to have studied the paradox of why the contemporary right looks to both Burke and Strauss.
Burke: ‘Whenever we improve, it is right to leave room for a further improvement. It is right to consider, to look about us, to examine the effect of what we have done. Then we can proceed with confidence, because we can proceed with intelligence. Whereas in hot reformations … the whole is generally so crude, so harsh, so indigested, mixed with so much imprudence and so much injustice, so contrary to the whole course of human nature and human institutions, that the very people who are most eager for it are among the first to grow disgusted at what they have done. Then some part of the abdicated grievance is recalled from its exile in order to become a corrective of the correction. Then the abuse assumes all the credit and popularity of a reform. The very idea of purity and disinterestedness in politics falls into disrepute, and is considered as a vision of hot and inexperienced men; and thus disorders become incurable, not by the virulence of their own quality, but by the unapt and violent natures of the remedies.’ Speech of Economical reform
Tocqueville: ‘… It is not the mechanism of laws that produces great events, gentlemen, but the inner spirit of the government. Keep the laws as they are, if you wish. I think you would be very wrong to do so; but keep then. Keep the men, too, if it gives you any pleasure. I raise no objection so far as I am concerned. But, in God’s name, change the spirit of the government; for, I repeat, that spirit will lead you to the abyss. Recollections of the French Revolution of 1848