Abstract
Historians who have written about Edwardian politics have spent much time examining the state of Liberalism and of the Liberal Party in the hope of finding here some clue that will explain the misfortunes which befell that party during the First World War and the 1920s. Thus, the friction at constituency level between Liberals and the newly founded Labour Party has been seen as a harbinger of later events, when the Liberals found themselves reduced to irrelevance in a society more demonstrably polarised along class lines. Other historians, less concerned with the Liberal Party as an election-fighting organisation, have analysed Liberalism (in this sense, usually ‘liberalism’) as an ideology or a set of assumptions about how political life should be conducted, and an interesting debate has developed about whether or not it was ‘in crisis’ in the pre-war period. This emphasis in historical writing is entirely understandable, but it has somewhat obscured the self-evident fact that the Conservatives faced much greater difficulties in those years. Indeed, it would be easy to give an account of Edwardian politics in which the emphasis fell on ‘the crisis of Conservatism’ and on the parlous state of the Conservative Party on the eve of the War.
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Bibliographical Notes
Little has been written about the Radical Right as such, apart from the stimulating essay by J. R.Jones, ‘England’, in H. Rogger and E. Webber (eds), The European Right — A Historical Profile (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Cal., 1965). But there has recently been a reissue of Efficiency and Empire by Arnold White, a prominent protagonist of Radical Right views, with an introductory essay byG. R. Searle (Brighton, 1973). We still await a full-dress biography of Leopold Maxse and a modern assessment of the diehard movement; but the Belloc-Chesterton circle has been described in R. Speaight’s Hilaire Belloc (1957) and in M. Ward’s Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1944). It is also well worth going back to source and reading H. Belloc and C. Chesterton’s The Party System (1910). The muck-raking activities of this group and of other more typical members of the Radical Right make an appearance in F. Donaldson’s The Marconi Scandal (1962), which provides an admirably clear and enjoyable analysis of the scandal itself but fails to place the subject in a sufficiently wide context.
Historians have taken greater interest in the related topics of social imperialism and national efficiency. B. Semmel’s important study Imperialism and Social Reform (i960) is still essential reading; see too G. R. Searle’s The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study in British Politics and Political Thought, 1899–1914 (Oxford, 1971) and R. J. Scally’s The Origins of the Lloyd George Coalition: The Politics of Social Imperialism, 1900–1918 (Princeton, NJ, 1975), though Scally’s book is marred by factual errors and by a lack of proportion. There is much valuable discussion of these issues, and also of Opposition politics generally, in two biographical studies by A. M. Gollin, The Observer and J. L. Garvin, 1908–1914 (Oxford, 1960) and Proconsul in Politics: A Study of Lord Milner in Opposition and in Power (1964).
Edwardian patriotism, militarism and xenophobia in their many manifestations have recently aroused much historical interest. The following articles and monographs are all worth consulting: S. Hynes, ‘The Decline and Fall of Tory England’, ch. 2 of his The Edwardian Turn of Mind (Princeton, NJ, 1968); A. Summers, ‘Militarism in Britan Before the Great War’, in HWJ; 11 (1976); J. O. Springhall, γouth, Empire and Society (1977); and B. Gainer, The Alien Invasion: The Origins of the Aliens Act of 1905 (1972). C. Holmes’s Anti-Semitism in Britain, 1876–1939 is due to be published later in the year, as is a study of anti-semitism in Britain by Gisella Lebzelter.
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© 1979 Walter L. Arnstein, Suzann Buckley, Peter Cain, Dennis Dean, T. R. Gourvish, Colin Nicolson, Alan O’Day, G. R. Searle
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Searle, G.R. (1979). Critics of Edwardian Society: The Case of the Radical Right. In: O’Day, A. (eds) The Edwardian Age: Conflict and Stability 1900–1914. Problems in Focus Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15854-6_5
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