This article was written by Simon Banks, Waltham Forest councillor for 12 years with five as group leader, chair of Lib Dem East of England Region’s Development Committee, and SLF Council Member.
This review forms part of Simon's "Books with Banks" series
Jonathan Parry, an historian with a strong British Liberal background, has written “Liberalism” within a series of “short histories”. His book has been widely welcomed within the Liberal community, mainly for being accessibly written, brief and not overloaded with theory. Perhaps it appeals particularly to those uneasy with theory or ideals. The book is certainly an excellent introduction to the history of British Liberalism (nothing is said about Liberalism anywhere else) for people knowing relatively little about this history and there will be bits that enlighten those with plenty of knowledge, especially as his account goes right up to the situation following the election of 2024. The first events he mentions are in 1688 and he says little about events before 1830, so this work has in common with Helena Rosenblatt’s that it makes no attempt to investigate groups and ideas that fed into what was later called Liberalism.
I would dissent very little from his judgement on developments from the 1940s on. I have some disagreement with other elements.
Focus on Leadership and Definition of Liberalism
He concentrates purely on the actions of a few leaders – so Victorian Liberalism is represented by some ten or twelve individuals over seventy years and the period between the wars by five people. If the aim is to characterise Liberalism, he should have looked at the rank and file, for a leader may have ideas notably different from most of his activists, as was all too evident when Nick Clegg led the party in coalition. The work of Professor Eugenio Biagini precisely explores the views and actions of the active rank and file in the second half of the 19th century, but Biagini is not even cited by Parry as a source.
His characterisation of Liberalism – Liberalism in action, as one might say – is that it’s about assaulting concentrations of power. That fits a great deal of Liberal thought and behaviour much better than some academic theories. He adds that this is assaulting concentrations of power to save capitalism, an interpretation of motives that seems dubious and lacking in evidence - but also observes that Liberalism, thus interpreted, naturally leads to decentralisation and “localism”, which is helpful. There is no doubt that many Liberal “great causes” were indeed assaults on accumulated power and it fits my own argument that after the collapse of the classical world (roughly equating to the furthest boundaries of the Roman empire), something like Liberalism emerges from the 16th century in reaction to new-style, godlike, non-feudal monarchy. But a thoughtful Liberal, assaulting power, may possibly ask herself why she is doing this and not answer “because capitalism needs saving”. Moreover, imagine a society in which concentrations of power have been abolished, but individuals compete without compassion, co-operation or an eye to the environment or the distant future. It’s possible: the tendency of such a society to develop new concentrations of wealth and power could be checked by mechanisms which broke them up. But would it be a Liberal society and would Liberals now have nothing to campaign for?
Theory, Interpretation and Historical Judgement
The case of Lloyd George is educative. Jonathan Parry refers to a claim that he wasn’t really a Liberal because he had little commitment to civil liberties. He ripostes that if Liberalism is defined not by civil liberties, but by an assault on concentrations of power, then Lloyd George qualified. Well, most Liberals would expect a Liberal to be committed to civil liberties AND to assaulting concentrations of power and to assaulting poverty and to free co-operation. Someone who doesn’t fit well under one heading may fit under others. That may well be logically inconsistent, but then, people are. Not everyone will tick all the boxes.
Jonathan Parry has been rightly praised for getting away from academic theories on Liberalism, which are often cooked up in academia for consumption by students and credulous others and promoted with little attempt to test against outside reality. But his own approach is particularist to the point of nullifying theory. JS Mill or TH Green were not producing theories of long-term and wide-reaching relevance: they were coming up with ideas to justify a response to a particular local problem. This is like treating the theory of gravity as applying only to apples and denying its relevance to flight, ballistics or astronomy. If a theory is anything, it must have wide-reaching significance and be usefully applied to some situations of which the theorist knew nothing.
Similarly, his interpretation of the policies and actions of Gladstone (in particular, but not only him) run something like this: “In order to preserve the existing social order and win votes, what changes to existing laws and institutions are necessary?” That Gladstone was no revolutionary (in a UK context) is certainly true, but Parry seems to eliminate the possibility that he had a hunger for justice (too general and idealistic). As a corrective to theoretical or idealistic interpretations, this is healthy, but the wide readership Parry aims for may simply take his interpretation as the whole truth, always dangerous with a historian.