Liberalism

A short history of liberalism since the 1820s, one rooted in practical politics rather than abstract theorising. Liberalism is shown to be best understood as a political tradition that has been profoundly shaped by Britain’s unique and evolving political culture and by political realities.

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Jonathan Parry presents a history of Liberalism that is organized around themes in British Liberal politics since the early nineteenth century. In the first half of the book, he shows how the Liberal Party shaped national politics between 1830 and 1914 by organizing a series of campaigns against what it saw as over-dominant interest groups in British and Irish political, economic and religious life. Some of these campaigns succeeded, some failed, but they gave the party a strong identity as a political movement hostile to concentrations of power. The last two chapters chart its response to its political marginalization by Labour and Conservatives since the 1920s. They show how Liberals have continued to organize against over-centralized institutional power. They have defended civil liberties, urged devolution, criticized the rigidity of the electoral system, and attacked exaggerations of Britain’s capacity to act independently in the world. British Liberalism’s focus has never been the defence of laissez-faire economic principles, as many claim; it has always been political.