Dangersfield Thesis

George Dangerfield’s thesis challenged the then current theory that the Liberal Party was alive and well until the First World War imposed intolerable strains upon it. His view was that not only the Liberal Party but the very idea of Liberalism itself was cracking under the strain of internal crises even before 1914. Historians have argued about the validity of the 'Dangerfield thesis' and the consensus now is that he overstated his case and that both the Liberal Party and the internal cohesion of the nation were in better shape than he allows for by the time war intervened in 1914. But however much one might differ from his interpretation, there is no denying the force of his prose. Dangerfield writes about how the long Liberal epoch of England

Behind them stood the House of Lords. The Liberal contradiction then was that, where they form a large enough body to be the governing power, the middle class--much as they may wish to be, for psychological reasons--can never be progressive, because progress must come at the expense of the society the dominate. In effect their progressivism is directed against themselves and, while a unique confluence of events and factors may from time to time make it possible to ignore, that contradiction can never be fully reconciled. Mr. Dangerfield captures the problem nicely in his description of David Lloyd George: "[H]e represented--or seemed to represent--all those dangerous and possibly subversive opinions which Liberalism, in its grave game of progress, was forced to tolerate." A political party which is the governing institution in a society yet which has to tolerate subversion is obviously unstable at its very

This elegiac chapter is reminiscent of George Orwell's great novel, Coming Up for Air, wherein the putatively Socialist author looks back on the lost England of his youth with obvious regret for its passing. So does Mr. Dangerfield conclude his book, after describing Brooke's death in WWI, with the following plaintive lines:

[W]ith his death one sees the extinction of Liberal England. Standing beside his moonlit grave, one looks back. All the violence of the pre-war world has vanished, and in its place there glow, year into backward year, the diminishing vistas of that other England, the England where the Grantchester church clock stood at ten to three, where there was Beauty and Certainty and Quiet, and where nothing was real. Today we know it for what it was; but there are moments, very human moments, when we could almost find it in our hearts to envy those who saw it, and who never lived to see the new