‘Never Reflective, because So Obviously a Fact’: Institutions and National Identity in English Political Thought

Abstract

Following the result of the Scottish Referendum in September 2014, Peter Hennessy thought that the English Question would become the weather-maker in contemporary British politics. It is important, however, to avoid overemphasis on the novelty of this matter. There is a compelling argument to bring current debates about Englishness into fruitful dialogue with historical perspectives because this may yield more nuanced understandings of the relationship between political argument and enduring expressions of Englishness. This article considers first a tradition of institutional thinking and how that thinking helped to define English national self-understanding, what Sir Ernest Barker once described as ‘never reflective, because it is so simply and obviously a fact’. The article explores the erosion of that national self-understanding in recent years through a number of ‘ironies of inversion’, in which the previous virtues of English institutionalism can appear as present vices. These ironies of inversion have become factors of popular political grievance, especially since devolution, and have added to an insistent mood that the English Question must be addressed, even if there is no consensus about how it should be addressed.