To one who believes in the essential worth of a democratic polity, how much opposition is desirable, and what kinds? What is the best balance between consensus and dissent ? Even among democrats there is not much agreement on the answers to these questions.

It is easy to see why. These questions seem to demand nothing less than a complicated assessment of democracy itself. Or to put the matter more precisely, one can judge the desirability of different patterns of political opposition only by employing a number of different criteria that would be used if one were appraising the extent to which a political system as a whole achieves what are usually considered democratic goals or values.

The religious Orders are, together with the Catholic Church, the oldest political institutions in the West and the only ones to have developed without any break in continuity. St Benedict, the ‘Father of Europe’, founded his first monastery when the Angles, Jutes and Saxons were invading Britain. The Benedictine rule still exacts obedience from thousands today. The Camaldolese and the Vallombrosians existed before the battle of Hastings, the Carthusians date from the same time (1084): both live today by the same rule, according to the same constitutions, clothed in the same habit as their distant predecessors. Exactly one hundred years before Magna Carta, the system of supranational parliamentary assembly was in operation – a system which still governs the monks of citeaux and which, in one form or another, has served as a model for all the religious institutes which have followed.

‘There is cause for grave concern that South Africa has thus far been unable to develop any significant party, aggressively committed to a liberal solution of the racial problems.’ These words, written in 1956, by a distinguished South African historian, imply an important truth about South African politics, namely the extent to which the crucial issues of race relations have become, over five decades, interlocked with disputes between the two white language groups and partly submerged in the process.

These disputes have been ventilated in the context of a parliamentary system which since its inception in 1910 has remained the exclusive preserve of a white minority, determined to resist any challenge by the non-white majority for representation in the process of decision-making.

It is of course a commonplace that the defeat of Russia by Japan in the war of 1904–5 ushered in the revolutionary year of 1905. The role of the frankly revolutionary Russian illegal parties has been frequently studied, but the part played by the various groups of more or less moderate public men who are often loosely designated as ‘liberals’ in preparing the climate of revolution has received less detailed treatment in historical writing. The present article therefore proposes to examine the stages by which these groups moved to a progressively more radical position under the impact of an unpopular and unsuccessful war.