Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
1,682
result(s) for
"British liberalism"
Sort by:
Making Social Democrats
This book, a collection of essays by some of Britain's leading academics, public intellectuals and political practitioners, seeks to engage with the 'big picture' of British social democracy, both historical and contemporary, and point to grounds for greater optimism for its future prospects.
eBook
Making social democrats
Amidst 'Brexit', a divided and out of power Labour Party, and the wider international rise of populism, contemporary British social democracy appears in a state of crisis. This book, a collection of essays by some of Britain's leading academics, public intellectuals and political practitioners, seeks to engage with the 'big picture' of British social democracy, both historical and contemporary, and point to grounds for greater optimism for its future prospects. It does so in honour of the renowned centre-left thinker David Marquand. Drawing on many of the themes which have preoccupied Marquand in his career and his writing, such as social democratic citizenship, values and participation, the volume offers the original perspective that social democracy is as much about cultures and mindsets as it is about economic policy or public institutions.
eBook
Political culture and political economy: interest, ideology and free trade
This article explores the significance of ideas, values and collective representations in shaping political economy by examining the case of free trade in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Its aim is to tie a historical perspective on the importance of political culture to the current methodological debate about political economy in the social sciences. The opening critique of sectoral approaches is used to move the focus from material interests and economistic method to cultural significance and the interpretative framework underlying free trade. Shifting the attention to the knowledge of historical actors themselves reveals the formative role of ideology, historical memory and political language in constructing free trade as a collective good. Free trade was associated with a historical vision of national identity and societal self-development, and a moral ideal of the consumer, rather than with free market capitalism. The discussion concludes with some general thoughts on the importance of giving greater attention to political culture in the study of political economy.
Journal Article
Conclusion
This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the political career of Richard Wainwright and the history of the Liberal Party. The result confirms that British Liberalism had recovered during Wainwright's life from a divided and apparently doomed remnant of an historical phenomenon to a dynamic and significant force in British politics. This chapter also discusses Wainwright's political activity after his retirement in 1987. During this time he maintained a fiery opposition to the then still largely hereditary composition of the Lords and he also invested time in organisations around but not part of the Liberal Democrats, including Charter 88, the Electoral Reform Society, and the Wider Share Ownership Council (WSOC).
Book Chapter
Conclusion: Patterns of Perception
This chapter makes some general remarks on the main themes of the book: the particular forms of British liberalism and its relation to both material systems and perception, and the complicated, nonlinear nature of technological change. It suggests that reductive visual paradigms should be replaced by a multiplicity of overlapping, intersecting, and contrasting perceptual “patterns” that recur throughout the nineteenth century and capture visual experience in all its everyday richness and complexity far better than monolithic abstractions like the panopticon ever could.
Book Chapter
“… the very soul of the world is economic”: the Liberal Aesthetics of Howards End and the Portrayal of Leonard Bast
At a London railway station bookstall in 1903, E. M. Forster purchased a copy of the inaugural issue of Independent Review journal. Upon opening it, he felt that a “new age had begun” (Forster 1934, 116). Summing up the Review’s political perspective, Forster said that “[i]t was not so much a Liberal review as an appeal to Liberalism from the Left to be its better self” (115). This “Liberalism from the Left”, or New Liberalism as it was better known, aimed to be more ethical than its classically Liberal predecessor through the introduction of welfare schemes such as unemployment insurance and better housing for the poor. By analysing the fragments, working notes and manuscripts associated with Howards End (1910) alongside the published version of the novel, my paper aims to reveal how Forster’s affinity towards New Liberalism influenced his portrayal of the lower-middle-class insurance clerk, Leonard Bast, as he drafted his novel. From initially being rendered as a lothario and opportunist, Bast evolved into a lowly office worker, who is sympathetically depicted as a victim of laissez-faire liberal economics and at risk of falling into an abyss of poverty through no fault of his own. This article ultimately reveals that Forster’s delineation of Bast is more compassionate than some critics have argued, but it is a compassion which is obscured by what Forster refers to as his “failure of technique” in the published version of the novel (Wilson 1993, 32).
Journal Article
German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism and the United States, 1776–1945
This book traces the importance of the United States for German colonialism from the late eighteenth century to 1945, focusing on American westward expansion and racial politics. Jens-Uwe Guettel argues that from the late eighteenth century onward, ideas of colonial expansion played a very important role in liberal, enlightened and progressive circles in Germany, which, in turn, looked across the Atlantic to the liberal-democratic United States for inspiration and concrete examples. Yet following a pre-1914 peak of liberal political influence on the administration and governance of Germany's colonies, the expansionist ideas embraced by Germany's far-right after the country's defeat in the First World War had little or no connection with the German Empire's liberal imperialist tradition - for example, Nazi plans for the settlement of conquered Eastern European territories were not directly linked to pre-1914 transatlantic exchanges concerning race and expansionism.
eBook
Behavioural Thatcherism and Nostalgia: tracing the everyday consequences of holding Thatcherite values
With the passing of time and the benefit of hindsight, there is, again, growing interest in Thatcherism—above all in its substantive and enduring legacy. But, to date at least, and largely due to data limitations, little of that work has focussed on tracing the behavioural consequences, at the individual level, of holding Thatcherite values. That oversight we seek both to identify more clearly and begin to address. Deploying new survey data, we use multiple linear regression and structural equation modelling to unpack the relationship between ‘attitudinal’ and ‘behavioural’ Thatcherism. In the process, we reveal the considerably greater behavioural consequences of holding neo-liberal, as distinct from neo-conservative, values whilst identifying the key mediating role played by social, political and economic nostalgia. We find that neo-liberal values are positively associated with behavioural Thatcherism, whilst neo-conservative values are negatively associated with behavioural Thatcherism. In exploring the implications, we also reveal some intriguing interaction effects between economic nostalgia and neo-conservative values in the centre-left vote for Brexit. In the conclusion, we reflect on the implications of these findings for our understanding of the legacy of Thatcherism and, indeed, for Brexit itself.
Journal Article
Neoliberalism and the Politics of Alternatives: Community Forestry in British Columbia and the United States
Calls for community forestry on public forests grew in strength in both British Columbia and the United States during the 1990s, as part of a global movement touting the advantages of community control over centralized state administration of forests. Despite structural similarities, the trajectories of community forestry in the two locations diverged sharply, with community forests rapidly becoming a reality in British Columbia while similar proposals in the United States were blocked. This article explains these divergent trajectories by examining the differences in property relations, state institutions, stakeholder interests, and environmental social-movement strategies that led to nearly opposite outcomes in initially similar situations. It also analyzes community forestry in British Columbia relative to current debates over neoliberalism and alternative economies, arguing that detailed examination of such empirical examples demonstrates the utility of neoliberalism as an analytical concept.
Journal Article