The conclusion considers the wider significance of the book’s arguments. The concept of ‘modernisation’ was a potent resource for projects for social-democratic renewal over the late twentieth century. Many had the potential to become defining influences on a Labour government – even if, at turning points in the early 1980s, the late 1980s and the early 1990s, they lost out due to a combination of social and economic, intellectual, institutional, and political forces. This means that the rise of New Labour was not inevitable and that its opponents were not straightforwardly ‘traditionalist’. It also means, however, that New Labour’s leaders drew heavily from the left when forging their own agenda, including policies and institutions that endure today. This has implications for the histories of Britain after the 1970s: the rise of neoliberalism, though important, should not obscure other pivotal forces, especially deindustrialisation, constitutional agitation, and popular individualism. The conclusion ends by using this history to suggest that ‘modernisation’ is an idea that is unusually prominent in the tradition of social democracy.

This chapter provides a study of commemorations of British Emancipation in the Atlantic world and their political meanings, exploring their transnational divergences and intersections in the cultural production of freedom. Starting with the Caribbean, it examines freedpeople’s celebrations of emancipation and how this at times conflicted with missionary and colonial elites’ directives on how freedom and slavery should be remembered and memorialized. In the United States, it traces the development of celebrations of August 1 and argues that these events arose out of attempts to shape public perceptions on the success of the experiment. August 1 enabled abolitionists and African Americans to publicly merge political and intellectual thoughts with the transnational triumph of British Emancipation toward an antislavery strategy at home.

The abandoned and contentious state of nationalist rituals in schools embodies the realities of everyday legitimation reflected in the striking expressions of the lack of national belonging among students across the schools. By exploring both school rituals and student narratives, this chapter is concerned with how legitimation is lived in the everyday and how citizenship is imagined from below. The first part of the chapter discusses the organization of the morning assembly (tabur) in the different schools and the performance of its nationalist components. The second part develops the key themes that emerge from observations and interviews with students and teachers relating to the narratives of national belonging and citizenship, and their classed and gendered dimensions. It tracks the influence of Islamist narratives on school activities and everyday discourses and shows how students and teachers articulate themes of Islamism and neoliberalism.

This chapter considers the possibility that even if populism is in tension with our best conceptions of democracy and respect, it could nevertheless correct the deficiencies of actually existing democracy. It asks whether it is permissible to promote populism, if this can correct some of the flaws that contemporary democracies truly have. Thus, the posed question is not whether populist parties can correct democracy, as this question might be understood by an external observer. Instead, the analysis proceeds from the participant attitude and asks whether we, or anyone, as fellow participants in democracy can endorse and promote populism because it has positive effects on a non-populist understanding of democracy. Applying the publicity condition first suggested by Kant and later expounded by Rawls, the contention is that we cannot. We cannot publicly both endorse populism and say we do so because it improves democracy understood in non-populist terms. The publicity condition rules out the possibility of promoting one set of ideas (populism) for the sake of another set of ideas (non-populist democracy). The argument for promoting populism for the sake of non-populist ends cannot be publicly communicated without frustrating those very ends.

The Introduction situates the nineteenth-century heyday of petitions and petitioning within a series of literatures. First, it places the book in the context of existing understandings of British political culture and debates about popular politics that have hitherto focused primarily on political languages and electoral culture, whereas the book redirects attention to practice and forms of political activity outside of voting. A study of petitions and petitioning furthermore challenges revisionist accounts that have emphasised the ‘closing down’ of popular politics or the growing regulation of subjects by the Victorian state. Second, it traces the tracing the genealogy of petitions within British history over the longue durée. While the was part of a common trend towards mass, collective, public petitioning across Europe and North America, the UK experience was exceptional. Third, the Introduction underlines the book’s intervention into a number of important debates within social and political science concerning collective action and social movements, theories and practices of representation, and trajectories of democratisation. Finally, the Introduction provides a chronological overview of petitions and petitioning during the long nineteenth century and an outline of the book’s structure.

The conclusion summarises the key findings of the book. Not only were petitions and petitioning a central, and hitherto, missing component of our understanding of UK political culture, but these practices contributed to the transformation of political culture. The remainder of the conclusion considers how a study of petitionary culture reconnects and pushes forward the currently fragmented field of nineteenth-century political history, before considering three major implications of the book for the wider historiography. First, it demonstrates that UK political culture was even more inclusive than previously thought, thereby qualifying the emphasis on the exclusivity of the political nation. Second, it charts how the authority and legitimacy of the Commons in particular, and Parliament more generally, was renewed by petitions, although it could also, on occasion, be challenged by petitioners. Third, it shows how the UK state was transformed by the continuous interaction with petitioners, and restores the place of the people within accounts of the relationship between state and subjects. Ultimately, petitions and petitioning were part of a broader social phenomenon that decisively reshaped the modern political culture of the UK.

This chapter discusses the concept of ‘civic epistemology’ in relation to the IPCC and the governance of climate change. Civic epistemology refers to ’the institutionalised practises by which members of a given society test and deploy knowledge claims used as a basis for making collective choices’ (Jasanoff, 2005: 255). Differences in civic epistemologies seem to be directly related to how scientific climate knowledge – presented in IPCC assessment reports – relates to political decision-making at different scales—national, regional, global. The concept is especially rich because it enables a nuanced understanding of the role of IPCC assessments in national climate governance and in meeting the challenges of building more cosmopolitan climate expertise. Both of these aspects are important if emerging institutional arrangements that seek to govern global environmental change are to be understood. Through a critical review of the civic epistemology literature related to the IPCC, this chapter investigates how the cultural dimensions of the science–policy nexus, in different national and geopolitical contexts, conditions the legitimation and uptake of IPCC knowledge.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s political orientation has proven surprisingly difficult to characterize. During his own lifetime and political career, Tocqueville was a self-identified liberal and a figure on the French centrist-left. However, his political thought in the twentieth century has increasingly become associated with the conservative Right, especially in the United States. In this chapter, Richard Boyd identifies five major elements of Democracy in America that have strong affinities for central tenets of political conservatism. He further demonstrates how different figures on the conservative Right in the United States have drawn on these dimensions of Tocqueville’s political thought to bolster various strands of conservative thinking and policy. Whether a matter of foreign affairs, welfare reform, criticisms of the administrative state, affirmations of the centrality of religion to political life, or complaints about modernity and cultural decline, thinkers on the Right have found abundant intellectual resources in Democracy in America. As Boyd demonstrates, however, the Right has often deployed these arguments selectively and sometimes even at cross purposes in light of changing domestic and geopolitical circumstances.