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

came to a crashing halt in his novel The Strange Death of Liberal England. The story Dangerfield tells how the British Liberal Party fought off a challenge from the arch-conservative House of Lords but then succumbed to a combination of revolutions: the Irish demands for Home Rule; the campaign for women's suffrage; and a series of strikes brought on by labor. Combined, these factors effectively destroyed the party and the philosophy that had governed England for decades; manifesting "strange death" as the title. However, the irony, as Dangerfield shows, Liberalism was a politics at war with itself. 
Whatever their political convictions may have been, the Englishman of the '70s and '80s were something of a Liberal at heart. He believed in freedom, free trade, progress, and the Seventh Commandment. He also believed in reform. He was strongly in favor of peace--that is to say, he liked his wars to be fought at a distance and, if possible, in the name of God. If fact, he bore his Liberalism with that air of respectable and passionate idiosyncrasy which is said to be typical of his nation, and was certainly typical of Mr. Gladstone and the novels of Charles Dickens. 
As the century turned, liberalism started to become more of a good idea in theory, but not practical. Liberalism was still embodied in a large political party; it enjoyed the support of philosophy and religion; it was intelligible, and it was English. But it was also slow; and it so far transcended politics and economics as to impose itself upon behavior as well. For a nation which wanted to revive a sluggish blood by running very fast and in any direction, Liberalism was clearly an inconvenient burden, but the part still had to run.
By 1910, the Liberals had reached a point where they could no longer advance; before them stood a barrier of Capital which they dared not attack.

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

core. 

The tale is a tragedy, as the decent England of shopkeepers hurls itself upon the rocks, the confrontation with the Lords destroying the one remaining brake upon this urge to suicide. Christianity, capitalism, free trade, Victorian morality and patriarchy may all have been problematic, but the furies unleashed in their stead were catastrophic and, combined the the Great War, left Britain merely a shell of its former self in just a few years. Yet Mr. Dangerfield, as his line about "sluggish blood" suggests, welcomes these changes and even the violence that they carried with them. He's particularly dismissive, unfortunately so, of the Tories and of conservatism, the party and the philosophy that might have prevented what was to come. 

It's especially curious then, but I think telling, that he closes the book with a longing-filled portrait of the poet Rupert Brooke, the final flower of the culture of pre-War.

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

world.

When you look at the England of 1914-1978 (roughly from the War until Margaret Thatcher), when progressivism was given its head, and compare it to those diminishing vistas of which Mr. Dangerfield speaks, it seems to me awfully difficult to argue that the conservatives weren't right and that the British middle classes should not have tossed over their progressivist cant in favor of conservatism. They should have fought to keep the clock hands where they were. Of course, Mr. Dangerfield was writing in 1935, when it was still possible to believe that Progressivism's other children--socialism, communism, fascism, nazism--might turn out better than had Liberalism, but still, his failure to even consider the alternative does take something away from what's otherwise a marvelous book.