The Ideas That Shaped Post-War Britain. Anthony Seldon

got underway,

      … in June 1978 and in Paris, where a spate of articles and even books marked the tenth anniversary of the demonstrations, student uprisings, strikes and other public actions in which large masses of citizens in Western Europe, North and South America, and Japan had participated in 1968. Many commentators noted how remote this phenomenon seemed already. Indeed, the change in mood that has taken place within so short a span of time is remarkable. An important ingredient of the ‘spirit of 1968’ was a sudden and overwhelming concern with public issues – of war and peace, of greater equality, of participating in decision-making. This concern arose after a long period of individual economic improvement and apparent full dedication thereto on the part of large masses of people in all of the countries where these ‘puzzling’ outbreaks occurred. While poorly understood at the time they took place, those outbreaks are today classed as abnormal and quixotic episodes; in the course of the seventies, people returned to worry primarily about their private interests, the more so as the easy forward movement that had marked the earlier period gave place almost everywhere to uncertainty and crisis. Thus, the change from the fifties to the sixties and then to the seventies and other such alternations in earlier periods raises the question whether our societies are in some way predisposed toward oscillations between periods of intense preoccupation with public issues and almost total concentration on individual improvement and private welfare goals.

      I am still rather satisfied with the way I laid out my topic in this paragraph, but upon re-reading it I immediately realised that I could never have written it in London (or Sheffield). The reason is simple: the ‘1968 Revolution’ never took place in this country. With the exception of some minor commotions at the London School of Economics and a few anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, mostly by American students (such as Bill Clinton) at Oxford and Cambridge, the British student scene remained quiescent and there was no outbreak of any ‘sudden and overwhelming concern with public issues’.

      I am sure that this particular instance of British ‘exceptionalism’ has been closely studied by social scientists here. We know today that the 1968 uprisings were far less unitary than they appeared at the time and had very different specific motivations in different countries. In the United States, for example, the opposition to the Vietnam War was of course a crucial factor, whereas in Germany the students’ protests were directed in part against their parents and the newly perceived responsibility of that older generation for bringing to power and supporting the Nazi regime. Nevertheless, in the background of the 1968 protests there was still a common experience: the end of the war had brought the most sustained experience on historical record of vigorous economic growth and, in particular, of the ‘rise in mass consumption’, so much celebrated by Walt Rostow in the fifties. This rise took place primarily in the area of durable consumer goods – automobiles, televisions, refrigerators, washing machines, and so on. In my book I argued that these famous durables have a hidden drawback: in contrast to what I called ‘truly non-durables’ (things such as food and fuel that actually disappear in the process of being consumed), durables are particularly good at generating waves of consumer disappointment. This view provided me with a rather novel interpretation of the events of 1968: the durables bonanza of the post-war period had exacted a delayed retribution.

      Can this theory – or conjecture – be invoked to account for the ‘failure’ of the English students to participate in the 1968 uprisings? No doubt the growth of the English economy, while passable in the first two post-war decades, was not nearly as vigorous and sustained as in the rest of the Western world, particularly on the Continent. Could it be then that the comparatively modest expansion in the availability of durables during that period kept consumer disappointment within bounds and therefore made English society less receptive to the viruses that attacked other societies in the late sixties?

      This application of my conjecture about consumer disappointment strikes me as a bit mechanical, but it does lead to a deeper question. I wonder whether British society is simply equipped with some special cultural resistance against the passion for ever more and new consumer goods that so grips other societies. Observers from the United States and the Continent have often criticised Britain or poured ridicule on it for this very reason, for its clinging, not just to traditional ways and customs, but even to traditional and ‘old-fashioned’ product designs, from taxis to plumbing fixtures! In Shifting Involvements, I pointed out at some length how Adam Smith celebrated ‘opulence’ and the Wealth of Nations, on the one hand, and denounced, on the other, in this very book and elsewhere, a whole range of consumer goods as frivolous and contemptible ‘trinkets and baubles’. It looks as though this strange ambivalence is or has become a characteristic mood of the nation as a whole. In some unconscious wisdom, Britain may have acquired a resistance against the onrush of innovation, born perhaps from the hunch that various types of disappointment invariably accompany novelty.

      So much for the portion of my book where I attempt to account for the movement of citizens from the pursuit of their private happiness to a sudden and intensive concern for the public interest. Let me now look at the opposite movement, the withdrawal from public affairs back to concentration on the private life and its activities. Once again, I am struck by the fact that, in this country, that movement, if it exists at all, takes a rather different shape from the one I had outlined in my book.

      When I turned to the movement from the public to the private domain, one of my basic texts was Benjamin Constant’s famous and luminous speech of 1820: ‘De la liberté des Anciens comparée à celle des Modernes’ (On the Liberty of the Ancients as Compared to that of the Moderns). Here Constant criticised Rousseau (and implicitly the French Revolution) for conceiving liberty and democracy in line with the Athenian model which was premised on the citizens’ full dedication to, and participation in, public affairs. Nowadays, Constant asserted, things are very different:

      every individual is occupied by his speculations, his enterprises, and the pleasures he obtains or hopes for, so that he wishes to be distracted from these matters only for short periods and as infrequently as possible. (Cited in Shifting Involvements, p. 98.)

      For Constant, the basic problem of securing liberty and democracy under modern conditions lies in the tension between the desire to participate in public affairs and the pull of other affairs (or rather affaires – when used in French without a qualifying adjective, this term stands simply for economic interests and business operations). Constant, a perceptive observer of the contemporary French scene, saw this tension as a fact of life in post-Napoleonic France, and extrapolated this observation to ‘modern society’ in general. But perhaps France was actually an exception at the time: its traditional upper class, the nobility, had been decimated as a result of the Revolution, and the new ruling groups, being drawn largely from the bourgeoisie and non-aristocratic circles, may indeed have experienced the tension described by Constant. His strictures against the ‘Athenian’ model may apply much less to other contemporary European societies whose traditional ruling groups had not suffered any substantial depletion and displacement.

      In Britain, in particular, the continuity in power of the ruling gentry was not only a fact while that country passed through its Revolution (I mean the Industrial one), but to assure this continuity was sensed by the gentry as both a right and even more as a civic duty. I am thus curious to raise the question: did any substantial voices come forward in England during the first half of the nineteenth century, to argue, like Constant did in France, that upper-class people were routinely torn between their private, commercial and money-making pursuits and their dedication to public affairs? From what little I know I doubt that this was the case. In his English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980, the American historian Martin Wiener describes at great length the predominance of ‘gentry values’ throughout the Victorian age (and beyond). The supreme value traditionally attached by the gentry to public service is impressively described by Trollope in 1864 in Can You Forgive Her?, the first of his Palliser novels. At the opening of a chapter he introduces Plantagenet Palliser to the reader with unusual solemnity and generality:

      Mr Palliser was one of those politicians in possessing whom England has perhaps more reason to be proud than of any other of her resources, and who, as a body, give to her that exquisite combination of conservatism and progress which is her present