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THE AUTHORITY OF FEELING IN MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY ENGLISH CONSERVATISM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2020

EMILY ROBINSON Open the ORCID record for EMILY ROBINSON [Opens in a new window]
EMILY ROBINSON*
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
*
Department of Politics, Freeman Centre, University of Sussex, Brighton, bn1 9qee.a.robinson@sussex.ac.uk
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Abstract

Conservatism claims to be a philosophy of common sense and everyday experience, in which sensation takes priority over reason. This article asks how this was understood by both Conservative thinkers and grassroots members in mid-twentieth-century England, and how it sat alongside other ways of understanding the feelings and experiences of ordinary people, in a period in which these came to be regarded as a privileged form of political authority. The article shows that the Conservative everyday was rooted in individual sensory experiences, but always underpinned by the collective evocation of reverence, majesty, and awe. It traces understandings of the everyday and the awesome through political texts and grassroots publications, showing that the tension between them is what gives Conservatism its distinctive character. This is conceptualized in Burkean terms as the beautiful and the sublime. The latter guarantees order, hierarchy, and allegiance, while the former works to soften and socialize power – making it seem a matter of custom and common sense. The article suggests that this combination enabled Conservatism to adapt to the challenges of mass democracy but became ever harder to sustain in the emotional culture of post-war England, when feelings became a marker of personal authenticity, rather than cultural authority.

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Article
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The Historical Journal , Volume 63 , Issue 5 , December 2020 , pp. 1303 - 1324
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press.

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Footnotes

I am grateful to all those who have commented on versions of this article, from its beginnings at ‘The Philosophy of Conservatism’ workshop at the Ethics Centre, University of Zurich, in 2014, to more recent incarnations at the Birmingham Modern British Studies Conference, North American Conference on British Studies, the ‘De-Centring Conservatism’ conference at the University of Oxford, and as a research-in-progress paper at the Universities of York and East Anglia, all in 2017. Kit Kowol has been a constant source of insights; Claire Langhamer and Chris Jeppesen kindly commented on drafts. Their notes and those of the two anonymous reviewers were invaluable.

References

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2 Kit Kowol, ‘Missing the war: loss and post-war conservatism’, unpublished paper, Decentring Conservatism, St John's College, Oxford, 21 Sept. 2017.

3 Dunning, letter to the Kemp Town Post.

4 There are resonances here with Christopher Moores's recent work on the body politics of the moral right in late twentieth-century Britain, which he describes as ‘corporeal conservatism’. See for instance, ‘Corporeal conservativism: moral movements, bodies and brains’, North American Conference on British Studies, Vancouver, 16 Nov. 2019.

5 Corey Robin makes a similar argument, but his argument focuses almost exclusively on the fear and violence of the sublime, The reactionary mind: conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (Oxford, 2011), pp. 44–9, 219–23Google Scholar.

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9 My thinking on this topic has been shaped by many conversations with Jonathan Moss and Jake Watts, for which I am very grateful.

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28 Hearnshaw, Conservatism in England, p. 23.

29 Ibid., pp. 17–18.

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44 A Parent, ‘Supple young minds’, letter to The Right Angle, 2, Summer 1950, pp. 6–7.

45 A Schoolmaster, ‘Child communists in schools’, Home and Politics, Oct. 1927 (accessed as part of Uxbridge Division Review, 1), pp. 16–17, at p. 17. For more on the Young Britons, see Black, Lawrence, ‘The lost world of Young Conservatism’, Historical Journal, 51 (2008), pp. 991–1024CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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47 Parker, ‘Reason and instinct‘, p. 7.

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61 Enoch Powell, ‘Patriotism’, in Powell, Wrestling with the angel, pp. 1–8, at pp. 2–3.

62 See Schofield, Enoch Powell.

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64 See, for instance, Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell. I am grateful to Chris Jeppesen for this observation.

65 Kit Kowol, ‘The Conservative movement and dreams of Britain's post-war future’, Historical Journal, 62 (2019), pp. 473–93. For details of Jeppsen and Longair's wider project, see Sarah Longair, ‘Objects of colonial memory’, 2018: <https://history.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2018/02/02/objects-of-colonial-memory/>.

66 Chris Jeppesen, ‘The elephant not in the room: nostalgia, absence and the memory of empire’, unpublished paper. For details of Jeppesen and Longair’s wider project, see Sarah Longair, ‘Objects of colonial memory’, 2018: <https://history.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2018/02/02/objects-of-colonial-memory/>.

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71 Ibid., p. 470. Yet, as one of the anonymous reviewers of the present article pointed out, it could be argued that golf itself is sublime, in the way it pits a fallible human and a tiny (white) ball against a dramatic and vast terrain.

72 Quoted in ibid., pp. 494–5.

73 See Macfarlane, Robert, Mountains of the mind: a history of a fascination (London, 2003)Google Scholar.

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78 H. T. Symons, ‘What are liberty and freedom worth to you?’, News & Views, Brighton Pavilion Conservative Association, June 1951, p. 3.

79 Editorial, Kemp Town Post, 1, Sept. 1950, p. 2; Editorial, ‘Freedom’, Kemp Town Post, 2, Oct. 1950, p. 2.

80 ‘Captain Crookshank discusses first year in office’, Gainsborough Gauntlet, 1, Jan. 1953, pp. 1, 8, at p. 1.

81 For example, Vanguard, 1, Mar. 1954, p. 32.

82 Kit Kowol, ‘Art, class, and postwar Conservatism’, unpublished paper, presented at: ‘Reading Images’, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 8 June 2016.

83 A marriage is recorded between a James F. Dunning and Edith Irwin or Pallant in December 1939 in Kensington. The 1911 census shows a one-year-old James Dunning (no middle initial) living in Kensington, the youngest of six children living with Elizabeth and Benjamin Walter Dunning – a laundress and a coal carman (searches via Ancestry.com). Between 1948 and 1954, James and Edith Dunning lived at 15, St James Avenue (Kelly's directory of Brighton and Hove, 1947, 1948, 1954, 1956), a late Victorian redbrick terrace, with white plaster mouldings and large sash windows. Its four storeys each constituted an individual flat and the Dunnings seem to have occupied either the ground or lower ground floor, with access to, and perhaps sole use of, the garden. It was just off a busy shopping street, a block and a half from the sea, and a short walk to Brighton Pier.

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85 See, for instance, ‘Sally’, ‘Open letter to a sister’, Forward, 1, Aug. 1953, p. 22; Conservative Party Archive, posters collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

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87 The Scribe, ‘The end of the circus’, Conservative Clubs Magazine, 4, Sept. 1953, pp. 5, 11.

88 Rt Hon. Harold Macmillan MP, ‘Homes mean happiness’, Conservative Quarterly News: Wokingham Division Conservative Association, 1, Spring 1953, pp. 5, 9, at p. 5.

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92 Ibid., p. 6.

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101 Scruton, The meaning of Conservatism, p. 28.

102 Dunning, letter to the Kemp Town Post. For a suggestive argument that the everyday can only be glimpsed in retrospect, see Galperin, William H., The history of missed opportunities: British romanticism and the emergence of the everyday (Stanford, CA, 2017)Google Scholar.

103 Howard Johnson MP, ‘Month in Westminster’, Kemp Town Post, 1, Sept. 1950, p. 2. It is also worth noting that Johnson had a non-conventional relationship with the Conservative party, largely on the grounds of his opposition to blood sports. He briefly left the party to stand as a Liberal, and also became a Labour supporter later in life.