As a liberal, I'm inherently suspicious both of the claimed necessity of a thick shared political heritage for lasting states, and of the value of one, because thick shared political heritages have to be imposed on people who don't quite see things that way, usually coercively imposed, which is hardly a tactic with a unchequered record on the peace, love, milk and honey provision stakes, an obvious way of excluding some from full citizenship, and a violation of people's freedom of conscience. So any wailing for the heady days on nuns on tricycles coming over the crest of the Watford bypass, struggling through the tangle of undergrowth with their machetes towards the Holy Grail of the wife-beater next door, or whatever tendentious but pleasant-sounding claptrap that earnest reactionaries come up with next to cover up the fact that they're actually reactionary and tendentious, doesn't go down well with me.
The other thing is, whenever they actually get pressed on what they want done to inculcate this thick shared political heritage, in Britain at least, it ends up being boringly liberal anyway, exactly the sort of thing that there's no need for a thick shared political heritage to sustain: respect for the rule of law is hardly a particularly distinctive British value, as it is essential for any democracy anywhere. I think there are two reasons for this: one is that the British are actually pretty liberal, and the other is that they know that anything thicker, more demanding, more particularistic, would be unacceptable, at least in part because the British are pretty liberal. I think I disagree, for example, with Blimpish, when, as an afterthought in a piece on George Monbiot, he claim that the British working class is predominantly conservative or reactionary, which is perhaps hardly surprising. It certainly is in ways: the trade union movement is, I understand, incredibly patriarchal, for example. However, there is a fine tradition of British working class protest against authority which stretches back at least as far as Wat Tyler, encompasses the Levellers and various other quasi-Millenarian radical Protestants, the Jacobins, like Tom Paine, around the end of the eighteenth century and the beginnings of the nineteenth, the Chartists and the early Trades Unionists. All of these movements were essentially liberal, featuring strongly a distrust of authority and the demand to not be interfered with, which to my mind speaks of a powerful current of suspicion towards claims that someone else should be able to force an identity on you as a condition of remaining a full-fledged citizen. Perhaps the reason we haven't been subjected to such impositions so far is precisely because the best things to force on anyone tell us that there is nothing to be forced.
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"All of these movements were essentially liberal": really? Prove it. My base case assumption is that most "revolts" are about who will exercise authority, not about the limits to be put on authority. I think the facts of history point my way.
Well, I don't know very much about Watt Tyler, but I'd say that advocating the view that private property was often an usurpation of the rights of those who had none or less, as the Levellers did, was hardly conservative, especially when it formed much of the foundation of the thought of Locke, surely an undeniably liberal thinker. Equally, calling up the opponent of Burke as an example of conservatism seems to be stretching the boundaries of the concept somewhat, while the demands of the Chartists, bar the restriction of suffrage to men, would fit nicely into any radical democrat's programme now. All of these examples have, at their heart, the conviction that it is unjust for the few to dictate the rules of the game to the many because no-one should be another's tool, because people should be free to direct their own lives. If not necessarily liberal, that is at least quasi- or proto-liberal. As for the 'political conflicts are about who gets authority, not what its limits are', to fail to see that who gets authority automatically puts limits on it is perhaps a rather simple mistake to make.
Almost goes without saying I disagree, Robert, but...
First, I'm with Dearieme in questioning the liberal provenance of some of those groups, at least as we think of liberalism today. Many were deeply religious folk, which sits oddly with modern liberalism. The Levellers, for example, might've wanted a secular republic - but to my knowledge, most were fairly hardcore non-conformist protestants.
Second, I'd question the working class characterisation of some of those groups. I don't think John Lilburne was exactly one of the huddled masses, even if not high society. Likewise, I believe the Chartists had significant middle class leadership. That's not to say that they weren't able to recruit well from the working class; although in neither case would they come to dominate working class opinion, as movements elsewhere did.
Third, there's a difference between universalist liberalism and the positions of many of these movements. Trade unionists were, from the start, typically very patriotic people. They might have been committed to a radical democracy, but it's doubtful that they would see their national political loyalty as an administrative question.
So... I'd guess my big problem with your point is that it misses some of the foundations of working class culture, especially in more recent centuries, which were often-unspoken patriotism, and sometimes puritanical religious fervour.
It's also that I think your point is very different to mine - I think the working classes are small-'c' conservative; that they are unideological. I don't think they can easily be subscribed, and their patriotism was strongest when they were left primarily to their own affairs. But I think, as a matter of comparative history, the British (English?) working class is not easily moved by political radicalism. We prefer our whinges, whines, tea breaks, and class chips-on-the-shoulder.
P.S. - personally, I'm a happy and 'out' reactionary; I'm sure Dearieme would say the same.
Blimpish,
I’m not sure the original point was that the British – which I agree may be operating as a synonym of English here – is small-c conservative: riots in which prominent Catholics were dragged from their houses and murdered is hardly small-c conservatism. Anyway, that’s not the substantial point of disagreement, I think. The substantial point of disagreement is the degree to which the British – or English – working-class is conservative in any sense. I have not been claiming that there is no sense in which they are conservative: I mentioned the patriarchialism of the trade union movement.
What I am claiming is that there is a long-standing tradition of quasi-, proto-, or even out-and-out liberal political movements amongst the British working-class, and that this is good evidence that there is at least a significant strand of liberal sentiment in British national identity, whatever that is anyway. In particular, there is an unwillingness to accept the frankly fraudulent claims to exclusive authority of, variously, aristocrats, merchants and the bourgeoisie, allied to demands for freedom from oppressive laws and material scarcity. I think that that kind of set of sentiments can be perfectly adequately described as liberal: even if that is a push for you, its unwillingness to defer to establish authorities could hardly be described as conservative.
Neither pointing out the patriotism, nor the religious affiliation, of some of these political movements, does any significant harm to this claim, because neither am I claiming an exclusively liberal patronage, nor do the patriotism or religious affiliation of these groups compromise the kinds of liberal beliefs I am pointing to. Neither the patriotism nor the religious affiliation compromise those liberal beliefs because, in both cases, as long as one is prepared to accept difference, to tolerate, there is no conflict between patriotism or religious affiliation and liberalism as a general political creed. Even if one is not prepared to accept difference, and consequently one is not a full-blown Rawlsian or Millian liberal, this does not destroy the essentially liberal character of some of one’s beliefs: were someone to believe that there were fundamental and ineradicable moral, intellectual, physical and biological differences between races, this belief would still be racist whether or not that person also believed that all races should be treated equally in some non-vacuous respect. Indeed, one could be, politically, a liberal, and hold this belief: particularist ethical beliefs do not threaten political liberalism unless they too become political.
On the actual working class nature of the political movements pointed to, I admit to being on more shaky ground here. The Chartists were a genuine mass political movement – to get a petition signed by more than one million people out of a population of not much more than ten million (not including the Irish) is fairly impressive – with substantial working-class membership, but my knowledge of the debates over the character of their leadership is small. It is worth remembering that they denounced the Anti-Corn Law League, a definitely middle-class organisation, as insufficiently interested in the rights of the working-class, which seems unlikely from a middle-class-dominated group. I understand that some NCOs, who may well have been working-class – if that designation is remotely useful in the mid-seventeenth century – spoke at the Putney debates, but other than that, I know next to nothing about the membership of the Levellers. As for the trade-unionists, I think it’s worth bearing in mind that constituency with strong union presences, in the absence of the Irish – doubly hated as both scabs and bog-trotting papists – voted more or less uniformly for the Liberal party in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Admittedly, unionised men were labour’s aristocracy, but it’s not totally implausible to think that their political leanings were at least partially shared throughout the working-class.
In short, predictably, I disagree: I don’t think the points you raise against my claim tell against it, and I think you’re probably wrong about some of the facts. Still, it’s been thought-provoking. Thank you.
Robert:
I wouldn't disagree with the notion that there is a liberal strand in British identity; only that it is just that, a strand, and not all-encompassing. (The US is a much more interesting case, because it formally is a liberal society. But, constitutionally let alone historically, Britain cannot be simply described as liberal.)
Re the working classes - following that general point about the liberal strand of 'Britishness' (what an unseemly topic of conversation that is), I'd say the same is reflected in working class political movements at some times. But I think the anti-authority tendency that you point to is more about a prideful wish for autonomy among the working classes than any widespread subscription to a liberal programme.
One element in this is that the defiance of authority was rarely, for most of the working classes, a wish to overthrow the general hierarchy of English society. This is what I was probably skirting in pointing to the strong tendencies to patriotism and Christianity; that working class claims were typically quite narrow. Their defiance of claims to rule of (say) the aristocracy, were not against (at the time that it counted) the notion of aristocracy so much as the sphere of aristocratic rule: hence, they wanted class autonomy, but not - at least until the true arrival of Labour, which had very strong middle class leadership - to challenge for the rule of the commanding heights, etc.
Two other, mainly peripheral, points:
1. The Gordon Riots were, yes, a big-C conservative moment. But just as the working classes would flirt with liberalism, so they would with reaction.
2. Not an area of great knowledge for me, so you're probably right, but I thought that into the 1890s, the trade unions and the Tories were quite friendly, because the Liberals were the party of the bourgeois, manufacturers and laissez-faire. Tory Democracy, etc. After all, the legal regime put in before Taff Vale (1901?) were Disraeli's work; and it was the Tories who were often more willing to legislate for factory regulation, public health, etc.
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