Critics of Edwardian Society: The Case of the Radical Right

Abstract

Historians who have written about Edwardian politics have spent much time examining the state of Liberalism and of the Liberal Party in the hope of finding here some clue that will explain the misfortunes which befell that party during the First World War and the 1920s. Thus, the friction at constituency level between Liberals and the newly founded Labour Party has been seen as a harbinger of later events, when the Liberals found themselves reduced to irrelevance in a society more demonstrably polarised along class lines. Other historians, less concerned with the Liberal Party as an election-fighting organisation, have analysed Liberalism (in this sense, usually ‘liberalism’) as an ideology or a set of assumptions about how political life should be conducted, and an interesting debate has developed about whether or not it was ‘in crisis’ in the pre-war period. This emphasis in historical writing is entirely understandable, but it has somewhat obscured the self-evident fact that the Conservatives faced much greater difficulties in those years. Indeed, it would be easy to give an account of Edwardian politics in which the emphasis fell on ‘the crisis of Conservatism’ and on the parlous state of the Conservative Party on the eve of the War.