The Quest for National Efficiency: a Study in British Politics and Political Thought, 1899-1914
Author: Geoffrey Russell Searle
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 1971
Total Pages: 294
ISBN-13: 9780520017948
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPosts
The Quest for National Efficiency
Author: G. R. Searle
Publisher: Humanity Books
Published: 1989-12
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781573923347
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDr. Searle's book, first published in 1971, provides a lucid and important illumination of late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain focused through the theme of "competitiveness" and possible national "decline" which permeated so many fields of human activity and policy. This is not a political history of the traditional type nor a "history of ideas" study, but, rather, an examination of the interaction between the worlds of politics and political ideas. At this level The Quest for National Efficiency makes a significant contribution to the historiographical debate about Britain's decline during the twentieth century. But there is a second way of reading Dr. Searle's work: as, to use Barbara Tuchman's phrase, a "distant mirror." The period under review is the decade following the death of Queen Victoria yet the narrative, while set against very different circumstances, provides many "reflections" of dilemmas familiar to readers in the early 1990s. There are many similarities between Edwardian Britain, the Britain of the 1960s when the book was written, and the contemporary United States. The parallels are not labored, but their existence adds an extra dimension to this fascinating study. It is for this reason that the republication of The Quest for National Efficiency will be seen as relevant.
Breeding Superman
Author: Dan Stone
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Published: 2002-02-01
Total Pages: 208
ISBN-13: 1781386226
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBefore the First World War there existed an intellectual turmoil in Britain as great as any in Germany, France or Russia, as the debates over Nietzsche and eugenics in the context of early modernism reveal. With the rise of fascism after 1918, these debates became more ideologically driven, with science and vitalist philosophy being hailed in some quarters as saviours from bourgeois decadence, vituperated in others as heralding the onset of barbarism. Breeding Superman looks at several of the leading Nietzscheans and eugenicists, and challenges the long-cherished belief that British intellectuals were fundamentally uninterested in race. The result is a study of radical ideas which are conventionally written out of histories of the politics and culture of the period.
Birth Control and the Population Question in England, 1877-1930
Author: Richard A. Soloway
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2017-10-10
Total Pages: 403
ISBN-13: 1469640007
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSoloway examines the origins of the modern birth control movement in England in the wider context of the dramatic decline in fertility that first became apparent in the 1880s. He concludes that the response of individuals and organizations drawn into the debate over birth control and the consequences of diminished fertility mirrored their attitudes toward the profound social, economic, moral, political, and cultural changes altering Great Britain and its influential position in the world. Originally published 1982. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
T.H. Green and the Development of Ethical Socialism
Author: Matt Carter
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
Published: 2016-11-16
Total Pages: 217
ISBN-13: 1845406729
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book uncovers the philosophical foundations of a tradition of ethical socialism best represented in the work of R.H. Tawney, tracing its roots back to the work of T.H. Green. Green and his colleagues developed a philosophy that rejected the atomistic individualism and empiricist assumptions that underpinned classical liberalism and helped to found a new political ideology based around four notions: the common good; a positive view of freedom; equality of opportunity; and an expanded role for the state. The book shows how Tawney adopted the key features of the idealists' philosophical settlement and used them to help shape his own notions of true freedom and equality, thereby establishing a tradition of thought which remains relevant in British politics today.
Time and Politics
Author: Ryan A. Vieira
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2015
Total Pages: 209
ISBN-13: 0198737548
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe first cultural and transnational history of modern procedural reform in the Westminster parliamentary system in the nineteenth century, explaining how and why governments in Britain and the British world gained control over parliament through the application of new concepts of time and efficiency.
The Party of Patriotism
Author: Nigel Keohane
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-12-05
Total Pages: 260
ISBN-13: 1351884441
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe First World War was a period of turbulent and unprecedented political upheaval that witnessed contrasting fortunes for Britain's major political parties. This book demonstrates how the Conservative Party was able to respond effectively in these years by refining a wartime patriotism that ensured its unity as a party, helped define its electoral fortunes and shaped ideological cohesion. Concepts of patriotism determined not only attitudes to the prosecution of the war, to voluntary and forced military enlistment, but also to class politics, Irish Unionism, democratic reform and the relationship between citizen and state. Fundamental conclusions about modern Conservatism emerge: its organic ideological genesis into a property-defending party; its peculiar willingness and capacity to adapt not only to the immense challenges of 'total war', but also to the new political climate awakened by the conflict. Conservatism was therefore at once flexible and ideological. Filling the historiographical gap created by an overemphasis upon its rival Liberal and Labour parties, and using previously unused party sources, this study sheds new light on many aspects of the war, of Conservative Party history and its regeneration following three disastrous general election defeats in succession, and of British politics in the twentieth century.
The 'Creed of Science' in Victorian England
Author: Roy M. MacLeod
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2024-10-28
Total Pages: 371
ISBN-13: 1040234240
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe nineteenth century, which saw the triumph of the idea of progress and improvement, saw also the triumph of science as a political and cultural force. In England, as science and its methods claimed privilege and space, its language acquired the vocabulary of religion. The new ’creed’ of science embraced what John Tyndall called the ’scientific movement’; it was, in the language of T.H. Huxley, a militant creed. The ’march’ of invention, the discoveries of chemistry, and the wonders of steam and electricity culminated in a crusade against ignorance and unbelief. It was a creed that looked to its own apostolic succession from Copernicus, Galileo and the martyrs of the ’scientific revolution’. Yet, it was a creed whose doctrines were divisive, and whose convictions resisted. Alongside arguments for materialism, utility, positivism, and evolutionary naturalism, persisted reservations about the nature of man, the role of ethics, and the limits of scientific method. These essays discuss leading strategists in the scientific movement of late-Victorian England. At the same time, they show how ’science established’ served not only the scientific community, but also the interests of imperial and colonial powers.
Universities and the State in England, 1850-1939
Author: Keith Vernon
Publisher: Psychology Press
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 296
ISBN-13: 9780713002355
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book studies the development of the modern university system in England from the mid-nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Second World War, focusing on the role of the state.
After the Victorians
Author: Peter Mandler
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2005-08-16
Total Pages: 279
ISBN-13: 1134911785
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWritten by a team of eminent historians, these essays explore how ten twentieth-century intellectuals and social reformers sought to adapt such familiar Victorian values as `civilisation', `domesticity', `conscience' and `improvement' to modern conditions of democracy, feminism and mass culture. Covering such figures as J.M. Keynes, E.M. Forster and Lord Reith of the BBC, these interdisciplinary studies scrutinize the children of the Victorians at a time when their private assumptions and public positions were under increasing strain in a rapidly changing world. After the Victorians is written in honour of the late Professor John Clive of Harvard, and uses, as he did, the method of biography to connnect the public and private lives of the generations who came after the Victorians.
