Neo-Tories: The Revolt of British Conservatives against Democracy and Political Modernity (1929–1939)

Description

The danger to British democracy in the interwar period came from a different source to that which has thus far been assumed. It came from a network of radical conservatives who challenged the political system and sought to replace it with an authoritarian corporate state. In this book, Bernhard Dietz provides the first systematic analysis of this network and its members, which are called Neo-Tories. With strong links to the European right, yet a minority back home, this group of British conservatives are all the more fascinating today because it is on their ultimate failure that the success of British democracy rested. Cover Half-title Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations 1. Introduction 1.1 What is a Conservative? 1.2 The Neo-Tories in British research 1.3 A ‘conservative revolution’ in Europe? 1.4 Methods, structure, investigation period, sources 2. Lost Generation? A Group Biography of the Neo-Tories 2.1 The ‘lost’ generation 2.2 Journalists and politicians on the right wing of the Conservative Party 2.3 ‘What I am afraid of is the feminine man’: masculine ideology and anti-feminism 3. Counter-Narratives of History: The Fight for Interpretation 3.1 ‘The lie about the War’: war memoirs in opposition to a pacifist interpretation 3.1.1 The First World War in British public opinion 3.1.2 The war books in the British press 3.1.3 The war books controversy 3.1.4 The anti-pacifism of the Neo-Tories 3.2 The historical view of the Neo-Tories 3.2.1 Tory interpretation of history 3.2.2 ‘The Inglorious Rebellion’: 1688–9 and the Neo-Tories 3.2.3 The Merry England of the Middle Ages as a golden age 4. Neo-Toryism as a World View 4.1 Racial and civilizational downfall: degeneration as a central theme 4.1.1 Degeneration and national decline? A hundred years of eugenic thought in Britain 4.1.2 The fear of British degeneration in the interwar years 4.1.3 Degeneration in the Neo-Tory line of argument 4.1.4 The city as place of degeneration: anti-urbanism in Neo-Tory political thought 4.2 Democracy on trial: critique of the system in the land of the Mother of Parliaments 4.2.1 ‘The twilight of democracy’: the end of the democracies as a historical process 4.2.2 The tyranny of the masses: critiques of democracy in Britain after 1929 4.2.3 ‘The system is not good in England, but in India it will be much worse’: critiques of democracy and the rebellion against the government’s plans for India 4.3 True Toryism: visions of a radical conservatism in opposition to the Conservative Party 4.3.1 The revival of conservatism as an intellectual force: Criterion, Ashridge, Right Book Club 4.3.2 The Neo-Toryism of the English Review Group 4.3.3 Stanley Baldwin: the anti-hero of the Neo-Tories 4.3.4 Absolute monarchy and the corporatist state as goals of Neo-Tory political thought 4.4 Italy as example? The response to Italian Fascism among the Neo-Tories 4.4.1 Fascism and universalism 4.4.2 The Neo-Tories’ concept of Europe 4.4.3 The difficulty of a positive reaction to Fascism due to the impact of violence 4.5 ‘Little use to expel Jews to-day, for we all have become Jews’: the consensual antisemitism of the Neo-Tories 4.5.1 British antisemitism: a ‘special path in reverse’? 4.5.2 Theoretically anchored antisemitism as a part of the anti-Whig historiography 4.5.3 Fighting Judaized values rather than expelling the Jews 4.5.4 Appeasement and antisemitism 5. Political Practice on the Right Wing of the Conservative Party 5.1 From the world of letters to the world of politics: from the establishment of the Everyman magazine to the Lord Lloyd dinner in autumn 1933 5.1.1 Lord Lloyd as British dictator: Neo-Tory plans in summer and autumn 1933 5.1.2 The Lord Lloyd dinner in November 1933 5.2 ‘We do not wear a black shirt’: political clubs in proximity and in contrast to the British Union of Fascists 5.2.1 The formation of the January Club 5.2.2 The January Club and the Windsor Club 5.2.3 The British Movement 5.3 Friends of Nationalist Spain: successes and failures of a rightist intellectual pressure group 5.3.1 The significance of Spain to the Neo-Tories 5.3.2 The Neo-Tories and the Franco rebellion 5.3.3 Friends of Nationalist Spain 5.3.4 Guernica and Neo-Tory propaganda 5.4 Appeasement as focus and finale of the Neo-Tories 5.4.1 The ideologically motivated appeasement policy of the Neo-Tories 5.4.2 Austria, Munich, Prague, Danzig: way points in the policy of appeasement 5.4.3 Appeasement and Neo-Tory patriotism before and after the outbreak of the Second World War 6. Conclusion Notes References Index