Vernon Bogdanor

Jeremy Paxman has written an excellent book, but it is not the book that he set out to write. His central argument is that, since the empire had a formative influence on modern India, it must also have had a formative influence on modern Britain. If it influenced the colonised, it must have influenced the colonisers. But that, surely, is a fallacy. For the British empire was, for most of its history, an elite project. There is little evidence that it ever enthused the British people, except perhaps in the decade following Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, when Beatrice Webb found ‘all classes’ to be ‘drunk with the sightseeing and hysterical loyalty’.

Francis Fukuyama is rare amongst scholars in being unafraid to ask large questions. He first achieved fame, if not notoriety, by his thesis that, with the collapse of communism, we had reached the ‘end of history’. The rise of terrorism and the return of authoritarianism in parts of the Soviet empire led to this thesis being caricatured as implying the end of all political conflict. What Fukuyama meant, however, was that, for the first time, there were no longer ideological challenges to the dominance of liberal democracy. He reasserts this conclusion in The Origins of Political Order: ‘Liberal democracy as the default form of government has become part of the accepted political landscape at the beginning of the 21st century.

Twice in the 20th century, men have sought to create a new world order. The League of Nations, conceived with high hopes as a result of the Treaty of Versailles, failed catastrophically. At the outbreak of the second world war, it was to be found solemnly engaged in the task of standardising European railway gauges. The United Nations, by contrast, was born in a mood of profound disillusionment in 1945. It was not, so it seemed, only the League that had failed, but also the conception of man that had been embodied in it, a conception that had been torn apart so savagely by the Nazis. Unlike the League, the United Nations has survived, but its position has all too often been that of the man who passed by on the other side.

Cecil Rhodes hoped that the scholarships established through his will, would, by creating educational ties between the Empire and the Anglo-Saxon world, ‘render war impossible’. The scholars, he insisted, should not be weedy bookworms, but manly, robust types, Plato’s guardians, a society of the elect. The 20th century has not been kind to such ideals; yet the scholarships have proved of enormous value to Oxford, giving it that wider international perspective and connection with the world of public affairs which differentiate it so markedly from the Other Place. In his will, Rhodes insisted that no candidate should be disqualified on account of race or religion.

Having It So Good follows hard on the heels of Dominic Sandbrook’s Never Had It So Good, which appeared last year. Both are doorstoppers — over 600 pages long — and the reader groans as he picks them up. Soon, no doubt, literary editors will be asking reviewers to weigh books rather than write about them. Having It So Good is, in fact, two books rolled into one. The first, on the high politics of the period, offers an outstanding interpretation of the 1950s, and is likely to become the new orthodoxy against which, no doubt, younger historians will come to react. But Hennessy is more ambitious, insisting, in uncharacteristically pompous terms, that he ‘comes from a British historical tradition that is uneasy with high politics absorbed neat’.

Those who can, do; but all too often they cannot resist pontificating as well. John Lukacs is a historian of Hungarian origins and conservative inclinations with a number of important if idiosyncratic books to his credit, including biographical studies of Churchill and Hitler. His aim in Democracy and Populism, however, is more far-reaching. He seeks to do nothing less than provide that ‘new science of politics’ for the ‘new world’ of democracy which Tocqueville called for over 150 years ago but which has not yet been forthcoming. Lukacs believes that the old categories — socialist, liberal, conservative, even perhaps Left and Right — have lost their meaning.