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Country Matters: The Growth of Political Stability a Quarter-Century On

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Norma Landau
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Like Professor Roberts, I, too, think that re-evaluation of J. H. Plumb's The Growth of Political Stability, 1625-1725 poses interesting questions. However, unlike Professor Roberts, I do not think that the scholarship of the past quarter-century has undermined the foundations of Plumb's book. In large part, our assessments differ because we interpret Plumb's book differently. Roberts questions Plumb's identification of the structures that stabilized English politics; but Roberts does not present Plumb's diagnosis of what had been destabilizing English politics, and why. I consider that diagnosis the foundation of Plumb's book, for I read Plumb as arguing that the government of independent gentlemen—even if it be government by independent gentlemen—is no easy matter. How to govern effectively without arousing the ire of those whose autonomy effective central government would inevitably infringe? How to avoid attracting the enmity of powerful landowners, of merchants with power of their own, and of a populace with an experience of rebellion egregious even for seventeenth-century Europe? Roberts does not argue with Plumb's diagnosis of the causes of instability. However, his own solution to that problem implies that Plumb's book is ill-founded, for Roberts never mentions the problems intrinsic to governing the independent. Instead, he proposes that England achieved stability because English politicians elaborated constitutional conventions that subordinated the monarch to Parliament, and because the Church of England no longer had to fear for its existence. Roberts is dancing to a Whig beat, but Plumb played a Country tune.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , Summer 1993 , pp. 261 - 274
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1993

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References

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35 “The Growth of Political Stability Reconsidered,” p. 240.

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