Understanding the United Kingdom in time

Hegel says somewhere that it is only at the time of its dissolution that an entity reveals its principles in their true form and to their fullest extent. Nowhere is this truer than in the case of the United Kingdom. Taken vaguely for granted, unexamined and untheorized, it is only when it is faced by threats from within and without, only when there is talk of ‘the break-up of Britain’, that serious attention has turned to its character.

On turning in that direction, what scholars have discovered mostly is a conceptual hole. There is a good deal of constitutional history (though not much on constitutional law or constitutional theory); there is some excellent political, social and economic history; and there is sterling work in the history of political thought, though mostly for earlier periods.