Democracy and Political Culture

Democracy and Political Culture: Studies in Modern British History attempts to give a total picture of the political-social culture of Great Britain in the twentieth century. To do so it chooses a number of particular subjects which nonetheless stand for this culture as a whole and which together allow us to reach a number general conclusions about modern British history. In this sense it is a successor to McKibbin''s previous collection of essays The Ideologies of Class (1991) while it also takes up a number of the themes of his Classes and Cultures (1998). Above all it is a study of British democracy and asks the questions: what does it mean to describe Britain as a democratic society and how might we measure it against other comparable societies? To do so McKibbin has chosen not only more ''global'' subjects - Britain''s social structure and the sources of political authority; the social and political effects of the first world war; Britain''s electoral and party system; its literary culture; its sporting culture and the relation of that culture to the rest of the world as well as to Britain itself; and a comparison of Britain''s political culture with one of the closest comparable societies Australia and what that tells us about Britain - but also individual studies of three men very prominent in British life who in different ways both contributed to Britain''s political culture and were also students of it: J.M. Keynes an economist Harold Nicolson a politician and writer and A.J. Cronin a novelist. All three represented British political culture in its broadest spectrum.