Modern Britain, 1750 to the Present

Introduction

The critique of the British state and the growth of political movements dedicated to its reform did not come out of thin air. They were made possible by the emergence, from Locke to Wollstonecraft, of new ‘Enlightened’ ideas about the nature of government and the rights of men and women. These ideas reached unprecedented numbers of people through the spread of print culture and new forms of association. This was, in turn, part of a broader set of developments known as the Enlightenment that produced a proliferation of new and competing ideas, critical of received wisdom and inherited structures of authority, that extended far beyond politics and were discussed by more and more people in an increasing variety of forms and venues. While the state placed real limits upon what it was possible to publish or say, it nonetheless presided over a dramatic expansion of both the content and form of public debate. This was a remarkable transformation given that during the seventeenth century society had been literally torn apart in the Civil War and Revolution by debates over the nature of religious and political authority. The central question of this chapter is, then, how did society become civil enough that sectarian and political debate became relatively normal, despite occasional outbreaks of large-scale violence like the Gordon Riots and the Peterloo Massacre? Measured in terms of the proliferation of public debate, and appeals to a public as the legitimate basis of support for a position, as well as the numbers and types of voluntary associations, Britain's civil society was the first to emerge from the ancien regimes of Europe.

And yet we should not rush to celebrate an apparent British genius for pluralism, voluntarism and civility. As we saw in Chapter 1, it was what reformers characterized as the unrepresentative and tyrannical nature of the British state – and the continuing dominance of it by the monarchy, aristocracy and Anglican Church – that often helped catalyse debate. In portraying Britain as an ancien regime, reformers were influenced by Enlightened ideas that emanated primarily from the continent of Europe and were informed by imperial encounters further afield. Not all forms of Enlightenment were necessarily radical, even though they commonly included the belief that scientific experimentation and reasoned debate, not the dogmatic application of theology or custom, were the way to understand and organize the world.