Political History

This book offers a detailed account of the genesis and development of Isaiah Berlin’s political thought, philosophical views, and historical understanding, locating his evolving intellectual interests and political positions in the context of the events and trends of inter-war and post-war intellectual and political life. Special emphasis is placed on the roots of Berlin’s later pluralism in philosophical and cultural debates of the inter-war period, and on his evolving account of liberty. The latter is shown to have been shaped by a response to the liberal confrontation with totalitarianism in the inter-war period and the political and ethical dilemmas of the early Cold War era; and to what Berlin saw as a dangerous embrace of an elitist, technocratic, scientistic, and ‘managerial’ intellectual and political stance by liberals themselves. It is also shown that Berlin’s attitude towards what he called ‘positive liberty’ was from the start more complicated and ambivalent than is often realized. The book reveals the multiplicity of Berlin’s influences and interlocutors, the shifts in his thinking, and the striking consistency of his concerns and commitments. In doing so it sheds new light on Berlin’s thought, and offers a better understanding of his place in the political thought of the twentieth century, and, particularly, his contribution to the emergence of a particular strain of liberal thought.

The Politics of Expertise offers a challenging new interpretation of politics in contemporary Britain, through an examination of non-governmental organisations. Using specific case studies of the homelessness, environment, and international aid and development sectors, it demonstrates how politics and political activism has changed over the last half century. NGOs have contributed enormously to a professionalisation and a privatization of politics, emerging as a new form of expert knowledge and political participation. They have been led by a new breed of non-party politician, working in collaboration and in competition with government. Skilful navigators of the modern technocratic state, they have brought expertise to expertise and, in so doing, have changed the nature of grassroots activism. As affluent citizens have felt marginalised by the increasingly complex nature of many policy solutions, they have made the rational calculation to support NGOs, the professionalism and resources of which make them better able to tackle complex problems. Yet in doing so, support rather than participation becomes the more appropriate way to describe the relationship of the public to NGOs. As voter turnout has declined, membership and trust in NGOs has increased. But NGOs are very different types of organisations from the classic democratic institutions of political parties and the labour movement. They maintain different and varied relationships with the publics they seek to represent. Attracting mass support has provided them with the resources and the legitimacy to speak to power on a bewildering range of issues, yet perhaps the ultimate victors in this new form of politics are the NGOs themselves.

This book is a thematic study of the Conservative Party during one of the most significant and successful periods in its history. The creation of a democratic franchise in 1918 was followed by nearly three decades of Conservative dominance: it was the largest party in the House of Commons and in government for almost 25 years between 1918 and 1945. Stuart Ball begins with an analysis of the foundations of Conservatism: its principles, attitudes and identities. He then examines the nature of the party’s support at general elections by matching voting patterns to the occupational data in the 1931 census. The book then investigates the Conservative Party as a organism, uncovering the composition, roles and relationships of every level from the constituency grass-roots, through the party machine and Parliament, to the Cabinet Ministers and the Party Leaders. The study is based upon a wide range of sources, including the personal papers of 140 leading figures and backbench MPs. This has been combined with the rich resources of the Conservative Party Archive, and more than 200 collections of local constituency association records from all parts of England, Scotland and Wales. The resulting analysis sheds new light on topics which are essential to an understanding of both the Conservative Party and British history in the twentieth century.