The General Election of 1880 by Trevor Lloyd; The Working Class Tories by E. A. Nordlinger;Social Geography of British Elections 1885-1910 by Henry PellingReview by: Asa BriggsJournal of Social History, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Winter, 1969-1970), pp. 180-183Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3786244 .

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180 180 journal of social history journal of social history

the various groups in the upper class to restore Germany to a position of world power. From the point of view of the interests and ideals of military and business leaders at the time, the mistake was not the alliance itself but permitting the Nazis to break the alliance as soon as this seemed feasible.

Although the thesis of a series of social revolutions, betrayed or supportedS could not be proven, it still makes sense to view Nazi social history as a sequence of upheavals. The four strands of Nazi status ideology and policy the most novel social features, all moved in the direction of a social counterrevolution. The racial and social status claims were to be imposed by violence and the racial enemy was to be exterminated. In contrast, the most radical among the current student protesters seek to abolish all forms of authority and eradicate any kind of status hierarchy. Status politics became counter- revolutionary under the Nazis, while the status politics of the New Left is becoming increasingly revolutionary. A competent history of counterrevolutionary status politics could thus help us to understand the revolutionary status movements of our time.

ARTHUR SCHWEITZER Indiana University

The General Election of 1880. By TREVOR LLOYD (London: Oxford University Press, 1968. 175 pp. $6.65).

The Working Class Tories. By E. A. NORDLINGER (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967. 276 pp. $8.95).

Social Geography of British Elections 1885-1910. By HENRY PELLING (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1967. 455 pp. $14).

Two of these three books are concerned with long-term aspects of British society and political culture. The third deals with one of the great nineteenth-century landmarks Gladstone's victory at the general election of 1880 when "Beaconsfieldism" crumbled "like the vanishing of some vast magnificent castle of Italian romance."

Henry Pelling's volume is indispensible for the serious scholarr if only for its factsS tables and maps. E. A. Nordlinger's is speculative, lively, and provocative and asks many basic questions. Trevor Lloyd's is useful but less original; it sets out most of the main informa- tion about the general election of 1880 and raises most of the critica]

the various groups in the upper class to restore Germany to a position of world power. From the point of view of the interests and ideals of military and business leaders at the time, the mistake was not the alliance itself but permitting the Nazis to break the alliance as soon as this seemed feasible.

Although the thesis of a series of social revolutions, betrayed or supportedS could not be proven, it still makes sense to view Nazi social history as a sequence of upheavals. The four strands of Nazi status ideology and policy the most novel social features, all moved in the direction of a social counterrevolution. The racial and social status claims were to be imposed by violence and the racial enemy was to be exterminated. In contrast, the most radical among the current student protesters seek to abolish all forms of authority and eradicate any kind of status hierarchy. Status politics became counter- revolutionary under the Nazis, while the status politics of the New Left is becoming increasingly revolutionary. A competent history of counterrevolutionary status politics could thus help us to understand the revolutionary status movements of our time.

ARTHUR SCHWEITZER Indiana University

The General Election of 1880. By TREVOR LLOYD (London: Oxford University Press, 1968. 175 pp. $6.65).

The Working Class Tories. By E. A. NORDLINGER (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967. 276 pp. $8.95).

Social Geography of British Elections 1885-1910. By HENRY PELLING (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1967. 455 pp. $14).

Two of these three books are concerned with long-term aspects of British society and political culture. The third deals with one of the great nineteenth-century landmarks Gladstone's victory at the general election of 1880 when "Beaconsfieldism" crumbled "like the vanishing of some vast magnificent castle of Italian romance."

Henry Pelling's volume is indispensible for the serious scholarr if only for its factsS tables and maps. E. A. Nordlinger's is speculative, lively, and provocative and asks many basic questions. Trevor Lloyd's is useful but less original; it sets out most of the main informa- tion about the general election of 1880 and raises most of the critica]

This content downloaded from 185.44.77.82 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 22:18:37 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

BOOK REVIEWS 181

issues, but it involves no new methods and produces no substantial new conclusions.

The Conservative majority on the eve of Gladstone's victory rested on their predominance in England itself. There were Liberal majorities in Scotland and Wales and a Home Rule majority in Ireland. What caused the switch in England in 1880? The Liberals had the more powerful team of speakers, but judging by his comments only a few days before the first results were declared Beaconsfield had no idea of what was to happen to his party. Was the outcome the result of a mass of separate issues and relationships at the constituency level or was it a clear manifestation of a national desire for change ? Lloyd agrees with most historians before him that the key to the election result was Gladstone himself, who by raising moral issues about Britain's role in the world imposed his own pattern on the election. The Conservatives made the mistake of thinking that Beaconsfield's foreign policy was more popular than it was and made little of their own efforts in the field of domestic social policy. For their part, too, the Liberals did not dwell on their future legislative program. What Gladstone did in the greatest period of triumphant platform oratory in British history was to persuade a majority of the electorate in almost all regions of the country that the Liberals stood for great principles and for progress and the Conservatives stood for established interests and traditions. He galvanized enough support from consti- tuency men who mattered to get the voters to the polling booths. Yet the extent of his own victory should not be overrated. The Liberal majority in the total number of votes cast was not spectacular, Gladstone's new government was something of a coalition, and within a few years it was unpopular with a growing section of the population. Solid Conservative areas in 1880 included the Home counties and Northern Ireland, and Conservatives and Liberals were more or less evenly balanced in terms of numbers of seats held in the South and Southwest of England, in the East Midlands and the Marches. Lloyd has a brief but useful chapter in his book on "party organization," but he lays more emphasis on the fervor of Gladstone and of his supporters than on organization itself.

Pelling, dealing with a period which began five years later and ended with the last prewar general election, deliberately says little about changing party organization. He looks at particular election issues, moreover, within a very different context from Lloyd. " Then, as today, large numbers of electors tended to develop a loyalty to

This content downloaded from 185.44.77.82 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 22:18:37 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

182 journal of social history

one or other of the political parties which was of so habitual a character that it was not easily shaken by novel controversies.' He is concerned essentiallyS therefore, with patterns of religlous allegianceS social status, occupations, and local and regional loyalties. Statistical evidence to unfold the ecology of British politics is deficient by European standards, but Pelling makes the very best use of what evidence there is. Following the geographer Fawcett? he divides the country up into regions and examines in relation to each the social composition of the different constituenciesS other factors bearing upon political behavior, such as religion, and the extent of voting swings. Lloyd's evidence about 1880-one more election might qualify some of the detailed judgments Pelling makes about particular regions, but the conclusion is firm- that ';the marked variations between political behaviour in England, Wales and Scotland are paralleled by almost equally marked differences in the various regions of England.;

It would have been interesting if Pelling had had time to embark on a fuller discussion of some of the key questions relating to social class, a changing concept and fact during this long period, which he touches on, all too briefly, in his last chapter. Although he concludes that the working-class voter was evidently subject ;'to more contra- dictory pressures' during this period than the middle-class voter except in the Pennine areas of the country it is not completely clear what the contradictory pressures were. WhatS for example, were the consequences of education? Unskilled workersS he suggests, showed less cohesion on class lines than the C;labour aristocracy?': the point leads directly into a largely unexplored area of speculation. The section on agricultural laborers is tantalizingly brief but extremely interesting. The political pattern of the countryside depended in large measure upon the condition of the farmers and upon their numbers in relation to the numbers of the laborers. i'Where the farmers were large-scale and prosperous and hence likely to he Conservative, they employed the largest proportion of labourers who were, on balance likely to be Liberal.' There was no such ;;law of political compensations5 in the poorer lands where farmers had no reason to feel particularly friendly to their landlords and where they and their laborers might be pulled in the same direction. The whole of this section brings out clearly, if almost too conciselyn the divergence between British rural politics and peasant politics in Europe.

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BOOK REVIEWS BOOK REVIEWS 183 183

Nordlinger's book, backed by contemporary opinion polls, to the extent that 1963 is contemporary, has an interesting section on the reasons why in the past as in the present one-third of England's manual workers voted habitually for the Conservative party, thereby ensuring that in a country, the population of which is two-thirds working-class, the Conservatives not only have survived but so frequently have been in political control. The comparative contempo- rary material here can be found in an article by Dogan in the Revue Franfaise de Sociologie in 1960, and the English material has more recently been reviewed again by McKenzie and Silver. Nordlinger finds the answer in "political culture," the willingness, at times the eagerness, of nonelites to defer to and to put their trust in an elite. He has an interesting study on the styles of leadership, though a fuller study of changing attitudes to "classes" and "masses" in the period covered by Pelling would assist Nordlinger's analysis also. What is missing from the book is an analysis of the contradictory pressures operating on Conservative leaders and followers, while the section on democratic stability in England and democratic instability in France is somewhat dated. Disraeli appears in the index twice, de Gaulle not at all. There is too little about women voters and the changes they may or not have made both to allegiances and to issues, but the book touches intelligently on many long-term questions which few English historians have traditionally bothered to ask, let alone to answer.

ASA BRIGGS University of Sussex

Preussen zwischen Reform und Revolution: Allgemeines Landrecht, Verwaltung und sozEale Bewegung von 1791 bis 1848. BY REINHART KOSELLECK (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1967. 732 pp. DM84).

Reinhart Koselleck may have expected his book to be read in parts rather than as a whole. The arrangement is more topical than chronological, and more like a logical argument than a narrative. Still in the end he achieves a kind of sequence in time as well as in logic. The first section treats the political effects of the Prussian General Code; this is really a study of the pre-March Prussian social constitution, working forward from the social theory embodied in the Code. A second section describesadministrative reform as a kind of substitute constitutionalism. The final and longest section examines

Nordlinger's book, backed by contemporary opinion polls, to the extent that 1963 is contemporary, has an interesting section on the reasons why in the past as in the present one-third of England's manual workers voted habitually for the Conservative party, thereby ensuring that in a country, the population of which is two-thirds working-class, the Conservatives not only have survived but so frequently have been in political control. The comparative contempo- rary material here can be found in an article by Dogan in the Revue Franfaise de Sociologie in 1960, and the English material has more recently been reviewed again by McKenzie and Silver. Nordlinger finds the answer in "political culture," the willingness, at times the eagerness, of nonelites to defer to and to put their trust in an elite. He has an interesting study on the styles of leadership, though a fuller study of changing attitudes to "classes" and "masses" in the period covered by Pelling would assist Nordlinger's analysis also. What is missing from the book is an analysis of the contradictory pressures operating on Conservative leaders and followers, while the section on democratic stability in England and democratic instability in France is somewhat dated. Disraeli appears in the index twice, de Gaulle not at all. There is too little about women voters and the changes they may or not have made both to allegiances and to issues, but the book touches intelligently on many long-term questions which few English historians have traditionally bothered to ask, let alone to answer.

ASA BRIGGS University of Sussex

Preussen zwischen Reform und Revolution: Allgemeines Landrecht, Verwaltung und sozEale Bewegung von 1791 bis 1848. BY REINHART KOSELLECK (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1967. 732 pp. DM84).

Reinhart Koselleck may have expected his book to be read in parts rather than as a whole. The arrangement is more topical than chronological, and more like a logical argument than a narrative. Still in the end he achieves a kind of sequence in time as well as in logic. The first section treats the political effects of the Prussian General Code; this is really a study of the pre-March Prussian social constitution, working forward from the social theory embodied in the Code. A second section describesadministrative reform as a kind of substitute constitutionalism. The final and longest section examines

This content downloaded from 185.44.77.82 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 22:18:37 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions