Training minds for the war of ideas
Ashridge College, the Conservative Party and the cultural politics of Britain, 1929–54
Publication | Table des matières | Critiques
Résumé
This book examines attempts by the Conservative party in the interwar years to capture the ‘brains’ of the new electorate and create a counter-culture to what they saw as the intellectual hegemony of the Left.
It tells the fascinating story of the Bonar Law Memorial College, Ashridge, founded in 1929 as a ‘College of citizenship’ to provide political education through both teaching and publications. The College aimed at creating ‘Conservative Fabians’ who were to publish and disseminate Conservative literature, which meant not only explicitly political works but literary, historical and cultural work that carried implicit Conservative messages.
This book modifies our understanding of the history of the Conservative party and popular Conservatism, but also more generally of the history of intellectual debate in Britain. It sheds new light on the history of the ‘middlebrow’ and how that category became a weapon for the Conservatives.
Winner of the 2016 PSA Group Prize for the best publication on conservatism.
Table des matières
Introduction
1. The Conservatives’ great fear
2. Founding the Bonar Law Memorial College at Ashridge
3. The Conservative party and the middle classes
4. Ashridge and the student community
5. Redefining the principles of conservatism
6. The Tory interpretation of History
7. Educating for citizenship
8. Fighting the ‘battle of the brows’
9. Rural Elegies
10. Ashridge and the media
11. Ashridge after the war: the Baldwinians versus the Churchillians
Conclusion
Index
Critiques
- Winner of the 2016 PSA Group Prize for the best publication on conservatism.
- ‘Dr Berthezène bids fair to join that distinguished band of French historians, from Taine and Tocqueville through to Boutmy and Halévy, who for nearly two centuries have taught British readers and citizens many facts and insights about ourselves that we do not learn from our native commentators.’
- Jose Harris, The English Historical Review, Volume 132, Issue 556, 1 June 2017, pages 752–755
- ‘Berthezene’s ground-breaking scholarship valuably manages to open up various new avenues for exploring the intellectual history of the Conservative Party.’
David Thackeray, University of Exeter, Twentieth Century British History, Vol 27, No. 1, 2016, pp. 144-169
Lire l’intégralité de la recension de David Thackeray inTwentieth Century British History, Volume 27, Issue 1, March 2016, Pages 144–145. - “This important volume from an authoritative international team of authors sheds significant new light on the comparative development of post-war Conservatism in the western world.”
– Stuart Ball, Professor Emeritus, University of Leicester, UK - “The rich essays collected in this illuminating volume show that the rise of right-wing politics in the United Kingdom, the United States, and France since the 1970s was a remarkably transnational phenomenon. As they attacked social democracy and cultural pluralism, right-wing movements borrowed ideas, visions, vocabularies, and tactics from each other, adapting them to their own national idioms and using advances in one country to win advances elsewhere. Anyone interested in confronting the problems that have proliferated in the wake the right’s reconfiguration of politics – surging inequality, belligerent ethno-nationalism, worker disempowerment and insecurity, and lost faith in the capacity for democratic self-government – has much to learn about the origins of these problems from this important book.”
– Joseph A. McCartin, Georgetown University, USA, author of Collision Course