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Popular Radicalism and the Socialist Revival in Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Jon Lawrence
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Extract

The twentieth century has not been kind to the “Whig interpretation of history” with its emphasis on the inexorable triumph of reason and progress. Mortally wounded on the battlefields of Flanders, the liberal certainties that underpinned it were finally laid to rest in the shadow of the Holocaust. With the Whig interpretation died the tradition of seeing nineteenth-century politics in terms of the gradual, but uninterrupted, evolution of democratic principles and institutions. In its place emerged a new orthodoxy that stressed the discontinuities of popular politics during the nineteenth century and argued for three distinct phases of political development. The first, a phase of militant, semirevolutionary politics, coincided with the “industrial revolution” and led up to the defeat of Chartism in the late 1840s. This, it was argued, was followed by a period of stabilization during the mid-Victorian decades characterized by relative prosperity and political docility among the working classes. The final phase began with the economic downturn of the late 1870s and was said to have witnessed the reemergence of working-class militancy and socialist politics and to have culminated in the formation of the class-based Labour party.

This three-phase model emerged in embryonic form between the wars in the agitprop histories of Marxist writers such as Theodore Rothstein and T. A. Jackson and in the more influential works of G. D. H. Cole and the Hammonds. At the same time, many of the reductionist assumptions that underpinned it were simultaneously finding favor within Britain's emergent school of economic historians.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , April 1992 , pp. 163 - 186
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1992

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27 Bee-Hive (September 14, 1867) (original emphasis).

28 Reynolds's Newspaper (September 1, 1867). This argument was standard fare for Reynolds's, see November 10, 1867: “class legislation is the curse of the English working classes and the crime of their rulers” or December 15, 1867: “the English working classes have been systematically robbed and starved by act of Parliament.”

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