Abstract
In1 their book Disraeli: or, The Two Lives,2 Douglas Hurd and Edward Young cite a passage from Ed Miliband’s October 2012 speech to the Labour Party Conference:
You know one hundred and forty years ago … [a]nother Leader of the Opposition gave a speech. It was in the Free Trade Hall that used to stand opposite this building… . His name was Benjamin Disraeli. He was a Tory. But don’t let that put you of, just for a minute. His speech took over three hours to deliver, don’t worry, don’t worry, and he drank two whole bottles of brandy while delivering it. Tat is absolutely true. Now look, I just want to say, I know a speech that long would probably kill you. And the brandy would definitely kill me. But let us remember what Disraeli was celebrated for. It was a vision of Britain. A vision of a Britain where patriotism, loyalty, dedication to the common cause courses through the veins of all and nobody feels left out. It was a vision of Britain coming together to overcome the challenges we faced. Disraeli called it “One Nation.” “One Nation.” We heard the phrase again as the country came together to defeat fascism. And we heard it again as Clement Attlee’s Labour government rebuilt Britain after the war.3
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Notes
Douglas Hurd and Edward Young, Disraeli: or, The Two Lives (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2013), xvii–xviii.
J. P. Parry, “Disraeli and England,” The Historical Journal 43:3 (2000): 699–728.
Coningsby, Book iv, ch. 15. See Michael Flavin, Benjamin Disraeli: The Novel as Political Discourse (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), 74.
Mark Chapman, Doing God: Religion and Public Policy in Brown’s Britain (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2008) and Blair’s Britain: A Christian Critique (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2005).
Cited in Samuel Beer, Modern British Politics (London: Faber, 1965), 271.
The narrative is rehearsed in many places. See, for instance, John Milbank, “The Theological Critique of Philosophy” in John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward (eds.), Radical Orthodoxy (London: Routledge, 1999), 21–37, esp. 23.
Phillip Blond, “Introduction: Theology before Philosophy,” in Phillip Blond (ed.), Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology (London: Routledge, 1998), 1–33, here 3.
John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), esp. 9. I have criticized this theory in my essay, “On Sociological Theology” in Zeitschrift für neuere Teologiegeschichte/Journal for the History of Modern Theology 15:1 (2008), 3–15.
See Jesse Norman, The Big Society (Buckingham: University of Buckingham Press, 2010), esp. ch. 5.
Phillip Blond, Red Tory: How the Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 15.
Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
See Chapman, Blair’s Britain, 22, 60–61. See Geofrey Hawthorn, Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), esp. ch. 6.
See David Nicholls, The Pluralist State (London: Macmillan, second edition, 1994) and “Authority in Church and State: aspects of the thought of J. N. Figgis and his contemporaries” (unpublished Cambridge PhD diss., 1962).
See more generally Marc Stears, Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State: Ideologies of Reform in the United States and Britain, 1909–1926 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Charles H. Kegel, “Lord John Manners and the Young England Movement: Romanticism in Politics,” Political Research Quarterly 14 (1961): 691–697.
See Boyd Hilton, “Disraeli, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit,” in A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles c. 1750–c. 1850, ed. L. Brockliss and D. Eastwood (1997), 48.
Jennifer Conary, “‘Dreaming over an Unattainable End’: Disraeli’s Tancred and the Failure of Reform,” Victorian Literature and Culture 38 (2010): 75–87.
See Ian Boyd, “Chesterton and Distributism,” New Blackfriars 55 (1974), 265–272.
“What’s Wrong with the World” in The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, vol. 4, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 149. On Chesterton’s social criticism, see Adam Schwartz, “Conceiving a Culture of Life in a Century of Bones: G. K. Chesterton and Malcolm Muggeridge as Social Critics” in Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 11 (2008): 50–76.
See Jay Corrin, Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002);
and Nigel Copsey, “A Comparison between the Extreme Right in Contemporary France and Britain” in Contemporary European History 6 (1997): 101–116, esp. 114.
Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State (Edinburgh and London: Foulis, 1912), section III.
Distributism was briefly infuential in Catholic social teaching between the wars. See A. J. Penty, Distributism: A Manifesto (London: The Distributist League, 1937).
Tis concept has been central in Patristic scholarship following the seminal works by Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1939) and Early Christianity and Greek Paideia (London: Oxford University Press, 1961).
Blond, Red Tory, 208. Paul Q. Hirst (ed.), The Pluralist Theory of the State (London: Routledge 1989); Associative Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994); From Statism to Pluralism (London: UCL Press, 1997).
Of the vast literature on multiculturalism, a useful introduction is Tariq Modood, Multiculturalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2007);
see also Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (London: Allen Lane, 2006).
For a critique of the critics of multiculturalism, see Nissa Finney and Ludi Simpson, “Sleepwalking to Segregation?” Challenging the Myths about Race and Immigration (Bristol: Policy Press, 2009).
Anthony Giddens, Over to You, Mr. Brown (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), ch. 7. Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence, 158–165.
On this, see Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
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© 2015 Jeremy Kidwell and Sean Doherty
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Chapman, M. (2015). Red Toryism, Common Good, and One Nation. In: Kidwell, J., Doherty, S. (eds) Theology and Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137536518_5
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