Some incredibly useful reading for this week and one of the great non-fiction books ever written, completely readable and packed wall to wall with sarcasm and snark amid the erudition. The Strange Death of Liberal England - about the collective nervous breakdown England experienced directly before WWI that in many senses may have led to it. When HH Asquith came to power in 1908, it was widely assumed that all the liberal reforms which were long delayed could finally be passed that right a ship that had gone off-course generations before. But the world had moved on, it was too late, and therefore Britain was so divided that all the various factions of the country could no longer speak to each other in the same language and assumed everyone who disagreed was evil, and the concerns of the new era were entirely different and of a magnitude that dwarfed the world in which these reforms of a generation ago could have made a difference. The two English political parties were literally split right down the middle in the composition of their votes, and even if a reckoning with British imperialism was still a generation away, the realization was particularly dawning on England for the first time that Irish lives matter. What became clear in this period was that the traditional liberal notions of the 19th century weren't enough for the contemporary world, and if liberalism was to survive, it needed to take a number of radical notions onboard. But England was not ready to come to terms with its contradictions or the magnitude of its sins, sins that the liberalism of the time could only minimize and not truly end in a period when British conservatism and authoritarianism made the sins of a magnitude too great for mere reform and repentance to accommodate, and therefore the explosive collapse of the old order was a foregone conclusion.
Obviously, this has no relation to contemporary life.
Incidentally, HH Asquith is Helena Bonham Carter's great-grandfather.
https://archive.org/details/strangedeathofli00dang
No comments:
Post a Comment