Rise Collectivism Vol 1

W.H. Greenleaf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135033613
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Published in 2003, Rise Collectivism Vol 1 is a valuable contribution to the field of Political History.

Part One
Theme and Context

To what tune danceth this Immense?

Semi-Chorus in T. HARDY, The Dynasts, 1904-8; repr. 1965, p. 524

1
The Character of Modern British Politics

I' th' commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things; ....

The Tempest, II.i. 143—4

The Study of British Politics

'Nothing here but trees and grass', thinks the traveller, and marches on. 'Look,' says the woodsman, 'there is a tiger in that grass.'

R. G. COLLINGWOOD, An Autobiography, 1939, p. 100

WHEN Phineas Finn wrote home to say he had been invited to stand for Parliament he justified his acceptance of the nomination by confessing, "'I own that I am fond of politics, and have taken great delight in their study"'.'"Stupid young fool!" his father said to himself as he read this'.¹ Quite so: for concern is inevitably and properly aroused at so curious an interest and eccentric an ambition not least because the motives for such intimate political engagement are rarely happily considered or appropriate. Nevertheless the value and attractions of the study itself (however ill-conceived the precise grounds or occasions involved) have by now been deemed sufficiently strong for the subject to be introduced in one form or another in most if not all of our universities. And for obvious reasons consideration of British affairs in particular has bulked large in these academic pursuits. There have become established, too, specific ways of examining these matters, various categories of approach that between them comprise the possibilities currently explored by university departments when their attention is directed to the domestic political scene; and this in addition to the usual array of comment and review of different sorts and levels by politicians themselves, journalists, and other professional publicists.

First, there is what might reasonably be called the traditional manner, the conventional and most long-established kind of inquiry into the British Constitution. It takes three forms which, though they may in practice be interwoven, are notionally distinct. One consists in studies of constitutional law. Here there is naturally a substantial though never exclusive emphasis on the framework of convention, statute, and case-law relating to our political institutions and practices. And certain aspects of our concerns that may otherwise receive scant attention (such as military or electoral law, Parliamentary privilege, public liability, administrative justice, the Privy Council, and the courts) are in this legal context usually given treatment in some depth. The manner of discussion, which may be highly technical, is easily familiar to readers of such well-established authorities as Keir and Lawson or Wade and Phillips, recent studies of the same kind such as that of Professor de Smith, and, as well, specialized works like Rogers on elections or Edwards on the law officers of the Crown. The second traditional style is that of constitutional history, a discipline concerned, of course, to examine the past and development of our public offices either as a whole or in respect of some specific topic relating to a given period, issue, department, or procedure; nor are the individual persons neglected who have played some significant role. A good many of the earlier accounts of our politics took this form though the emphasis or interest could vary notably as the contrast between, say, the work of Hallam and Maitland makes quite clear. Very often there is a close and natural connexion with the history of the law as in Sir William Holdsworth's great and masterly volumes.

However, these two kinds of study of our constitution are usually stronger in other departments of universities than those which deal explicitly with politics. There the remaining traditional fashion flourishes, constituting, I fancy, the greater part of the output of academic students of British political affairs. It is institutional rather than legal or historical in nature and, though it may contain perhaps quite substantial elements of these other sorts, it need not do so. It involves a notable concentration on official structure and procedure and offers a more or less detailed examination of the formal machinery of government and the way it works. Of course, there are, again, varieties of emphasis and nuance and even of omission — some recent general textbooks curiously fail to consider such matters as local authorities or the nationalized industries which are hardly insignificant channels of public power. But, within this general mode, descriptions are invariably provided of government departments and their operation, the functioning of parties, the role and procedure of Parliament, how Cabinet business is arranged, and so on; or a chosen aspect of the system may be looked at closely to examine, say, the conduct of a single election, the passage of a particular piece of legislation, the organization of some office or agency, or the origin and implementation of a given act of policy. All such accounts draw on a range of sources from newspapers and government reports to biographies and histories of one kind or another; and though participants may be interviewed where this is possible, it is still rather unusual for archival material to be tapped especially in the broader surveys, partly I imagine because these primary data may be inaccessible in respect of more recent times. Obviously there is a wide spectrum of work of this type in which the institutional concern shades into the contemporary interest. There is often, indeed, a high premium placed on current relevance and tendency, and consequently the expression of critical opinion, even partisan bias, is not always avoided. It is, in truth, easy to see how an academically inappropriate tendentiousness can creep into this sort of commentaries: that statute is against the national interest and ought not to have become law but another implemented in its stead; this institution is inefficient or this procedure is unfair and should be reformed; such and such a policy or influence is ideologically suspect and should be withdrawn or contained. The temptation is obvious, and I must quickly repeat what I said in the Preface that in respect of the present essay I would not claim to be completely immune to the lure though I have tried to resist it. In any event, this entire genre is manifestly well-established and it has changed relatively little over the years. It is true that of late the range of consideration has extended somewhat to include an increasing amount of material on the social context of political matters and especially on such topics as elections, the process of socialization, the influence of the media, and the activities of pressure groups. Nevertheless, for all the differences of scope and treatment, the similarity is remarkable between an early exemplar such as Sir Sidney Low's The Governance of England (1904) and a modern review like, say, Professor Peter Bromhead's Britain's Developing Constitution (1974) and this despite the lapse of three-quarters of a century. And what follows here certainly and inevitably owes a very great deal to this basic tradition of writing about British politics.

Secondly, there is the sociological view or approach, in some ways a latter-day development or, rather, rediscovery. It naturally tends to concentrate on matters that especially suit its emphasis either to examine particular segments of the general political scene (the role of special interests, the formation of opinions and values, the class background of elites, the social basis of party affiliation, themes such as participation and communication, and so forth) or to focus attention on particular localities for intensive study (Glossop or Banbury, for instance). The purely Marxist literature apart, however, and with the possible exception of a winsome yet ultimately forlorn attempt by Professor Richard Rose, I think there is no general account of British politics premeditated on this sort of basis. Nor is the deficiency surprising because the reach of this style of analysis, though immensely powerful within its range, is limited in scope. It can list what schools ministers and their advisers went to and the like and draw conclusions, though necessarily of a limited kind, from such evidence; but it cannot really help us all the way or all that much when we want to know, say, the whys and wherefores of specific Cabinet decisions or particular institutional arrangements. It can purport to describe precisely, to a couple of decimal points, what percentage of subjectively working-class Conservatives think it is better to be ruled by an old Etonian than by a grammar-school boy (or girl) but it does not tell us a great deal about the political role of the Prime Minister. At its best this approach can be a powerful searchlight; but we often need a flare. And even where its questions are politically relevant or significant the information necessary to deal with them may be unavailable and in any case open to a wide variety of interpretation.

A fortiori this kind of narrowness or irrelevance is also the case with the fashionable worship of naturalistic gods: the pursuit of laws, taxonomies, causal or functional relationships, the use of aggregate analysis, regression coefficients, systemic models, and all that. On the whole these exercises are very long on technique and very short on concrete political content. What they reveal to us of scientific significance I am unable to say and really rather indifferent, though I suspect the work is merely imitative: no real scientists ever seem to be interested in it. But the failure so far to add much to our detailed understanding of British politics — the field with which we are here concerned — is pretty clear and results from the procedures employed being inappropriate to that grasp of practical, moral, and historical confusion which is a crucial feature of political life. The point made so forcibly by Keynes about 'pseudo-mathematical methods' in economics is most apt. Too much of what results, he suggested, is mere concoction, as imprecise as the initial assumptions it rests on; and the great danger involved is that it allows 'the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols'. In respect of this scholar's fairyland, I incline myself to the opinion of Mr Ramboat in H. G. Wells's Tono-Bungay: 'There's a lot of this Science about nowadays, . . . but I sometimes wonder a bit what good it is'. Equally, books and papers fashioned in this style, 'following along the path of solemn unintelligibility', will no doubt continue to pour out for some while yet until the fad fades away.²

Of course, the work comprised by these different kinds of endeavour (always with the exception of the last) constitutes an impressive and invaluable foundation for the study of British politics. One could only hope to advance by building on it. Yet improvement is required for, despite its extent and amount, the general corpus of inquiry may none the less leave a certain sense of narrowness or incompletion that needs to be supplied. Three deficiencies in particular seem manifest. First, there is almost always a neglect of the ideological dimension of our political life, of the doctrines and ideas that constitute in fact so crucial an aspect of this experience. It was indeed an utter disgrace that for so long there was not simply no good account but no recent account at all of modern British political thought. There have, of course, been studies of particular doctrines, especially Socialism, or of particular writers. And an attempt at a complete survey was made in 1925 by an American graduate student Lewis Rockow in his Contemporary Political Thought in England; but until just the other day this had no successor and naturally in some respects began after a while to show its age. There is now Dr Rodney Barker's admirable conspectus which covers the whole ground most swiftly and expertly.³ But it is significant that it stands out and stands alone. Then, secondly, there is often no attempt to relate foreign and imperial affairs to the conduct of domestic politics and the development of institutions and ideas. It is true that these exotic matters may receive specialized attention of a most extensive and detailed kind from students of international affairs whether these be historians or political scientists. But the latter tend often to take a vulgarly naturalistic view of their professional preoccupations; and neither is necessarily concerned to integrate the external to the home dimension of our political tradition. Then, thirdly, the study of British ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES
• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
• GENERAL PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Part One Theme and Context
• Part Two The Great Change
• CODA
• INDEX