The Forgotten Menzies: Cultural Puritanism and Australian Social Thought

Abstract

Recent debates on the social thought of Australia's longest‐serving Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, describe his career as a programme either to realise liberalism, conservatism, or liberal conservatism in Australian institutions and national identity. While these analyses have some merit, they fail to capture the historical context of Menzies' age, particularly the kind of Britishness for which he stood, a Britishness compatible with modes of liberalism and conservatism, but far more comprehensive than either of those traditions conceived narrowly as systematic ideologies. We contend that what Menzies was trying to do for much of his career was to reinvigorate what modern historians, and Menzies' contemporary social commentators, identified as a cultural puritan inflexion to British character. Once the nature of this cultural puritanism is understood, Menzies' political ideas, at least up until the Cold War, look less like attempts to promote liberalism or conservatism, and more as a project to reinvigorate a conception of Britishness that many during Menzies' time feared was in mortal danger by the forces of affluence, individualism, and socialism. We focus on his most well‐known speech, “The Forgotten People” (1942), and analyse it in the context of many of his other writings, published and hitherto unpublished.