A01=Jonathan Parry
Author_Jonathan Parry
Category=JBCC9
Category=JPF
Category=JPL
Category=NH
Catholic Question
civil liberties
Constitutional reform
devolution
electoral reform
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
free trade
human rights
John Maynard Keynes
laissez-faire
Lloyd George
Nonconformism
representative government
the franchise
The Liberal Party
The Reform Acts
William Gladstone
Product details
- ISBN 9781788218054
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 03 Apr 2025
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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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 conducting 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.
Jonathan Parry is Professor Emeritus of Modern British History at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of Pembroke College. He has published three books and many articles on British Liberalism in the nineteenth century, as well as a number of essays about Benjamin Disraeli.
