These unstable times between political and moral worlds throw up the possibility of a darker turn, towards a vision of life and politics inimical to human flourishing.
Doomed to live in interesting times, we're desperate for an alternative to the failed consensuses of the recent past, looking to a bleak future of class war in an increasingly medieval world. Left social-liberalism and Right economic-liberalism are unable to answer satisfactorily the deep, searching questions we have about what our origins and ends are, and about conflicting visions of the good life.
Post-liberalism, an emerging politics grounded in solidarity, reciprocal relationality and taking life and politics as a gift for which we should show gratitude, is one alternative. These unstable times between political and moral worlds throw up the possibility of a darker turn, towards a vision of life and politics inimical to human flourishing and the essential dignity of the human person, the embodied soul.
A warning from the past can be found in Bernhard Dietz's book Neo-Tories: The Revolt of British Conservatives against Democracy and Political Modernity. This concise but densely written academic book recounts the development of a revolutionary, anti-modernity, authoritarian Tory school of thought in Britain among disaffected Conservative grandees and intellectuals in the 1920's and 30's.
Given the mediocrity of academic output from the wastelands of the humanities and social sciences, Dietz's book is a wonderfully balanced analysis of this clique of elite traditionalists, neither falling into caricature of this group as "literally Hitler" nor "on the one hand, on the other" fence sitting.
Who were these Neo-Tories? No-one really knows of them, a relative anonymity reflected in their own time. They included then-popular historians like Charles Petrie and Arthur Bryant; writers like Douglas Jerrold and William Sanderson; anti-Semites warm-hearted towards fascism like Anthony Ludovici and Francis Yeats-Brown; and aristocrats like Gerard Wallop, 9th Earl of Portsmouth, styled Viscount Lymington. Together, these upper-class men and their looser ideological affiliates sat well on the right of the interwar British Conservative movement, simultaneously in but on the edge of this world.
What did the Neo-Tories believe? Dietz shows in exhaustive detail that they mainly defined themselves in opposition to that which they detested, namely the Conservative Party, embodied by prime minister Stanley Baldwin. This group saw Baldwin and his interwar Conservative party as having abandoned true Toryism. Instead the party had sold its soul to the liberal-democratic mob spirit of the age, prostituting itself for votes from the lower orders. This played into the Neo-Tories' obsession with a sense of cultural, spiritual and in some cases, explicitly racial degeneration. The Neo-Tories saw England careering towards annihilation, from degeneration within and invasion from without.
As Dietz writes, the pervasive pessimism found in the written and spoken words of the Neo-Tories was deeply rooted in the immediate catastrophe of the First World War, one that had disproportionately culled Britain's elite class, mown down leading their men on Flanders fields. This pessimism was endemic to interwar Britain, as Richard Overy shows in The Morbid Age. The Neo-Tories saw the war as both a cultural and racial disaster, while also trying to salvage the shattered image of war itself as test and tempering of the noble masculine spirit. While lamenting the destruction of England's finest, they also savagely attacked the view of the war of the poets, defending the bravery, stoicism and steadfastness of those who fought, against the pacifist nature of the fast-accepted "wasteful war" view.
This cultural pessimism rooted in fear of a degeneration of the English people and their national soul was tied to a repudiation of the progressive Whig historiography that held history as an ever-upward march of evolutionary advancement. The Neo-Tories saw the recent catastrophe of war partly grown from deep roots in English history, a tale of inexorable decline since the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that brought the Protestant William of Orange to England and her throne by force over the Catholic Stuarts. Despite this the Neo-Tories also defended the British Empire as an example of English greatness, and never reconciled these contradictions in their worldview.
Dietz details how the Neo-Tories harked back to a mythic vision of medieval Merrie England, one where the monarch had ultimate power and sovereignty, and where the lower orders were kept in place physically and socially by an order of trade guilds, feudal lords and the Catholic Church, conscripted by the Neo-Tories as the embodiment of the finest in old pagan and newer Christian traditions for national greatness. Anti-urbanism pervaded Neo-Tory thought, rooted in their racial-spiritual worldview, with cities hives of festering moral depravity, class conflict and racial intermixing. Man cleaved from soil soon forgot the bonds back to his ancestors.
Their vision of Merrie England was never really fleshed out however, and involved some inventive historiography; historians like Bryant attempted to show how modern democracy was an import foreign to English soil, and that the corporatist state achieved through some variant of GK Chesterton's economic theory of distributism was really the ideal English vision of political-economy.
This repudiation of Whig history in favour of an anti-liberal historical pessimism led some Neo-Tories to feel a warmth towards Mussolini's Fascism and Hitler's Nazism that make for grim reading. It's a somewhat strange experience to read of men invested in the eugenics that would have someone like myself euthanized for national fitness. Ludovici and Lymington were the most racialized in their worldview, feeling an affinity for Hitler's racial millenarianism. Lymington linked blood and soil in calling for England's cultural regeneration tied to racial revitalization. Mussolini's fascist state was seen as an exemplar in neutralizing democracy's inherent flaws, albeit through destroying democracy via the implementation of a corporatist state in modern times with a sovereign dictator as leader.
As one would expect from this, Dietz writes that the Neo-Tory relationship to anti-Semitism was unfortunately typical of the time in interwar Britain. However, while those like Yeats-Brown and Ludovici hated Jews and wrote screeds about them, most just exhibited disdain and dislike, but rarely rose to outright hatred and were dismissive of conspiracies concerning Jewish plots for world domination.
This partly explained why many of the Neo-Tories cooled on fascism, viewing it with aristocratic contempt for its violence, appeals to the middle-classes and recruitment of worker loyalty, while also viewing it as a foreign phenomenon suited to the soil of Italy but not of England. With exceptions like Bryant, these same reservations applied, but even more so, to Hitler's Nazi rule. As Dietz writes, as a result of these perceived and real sympathies combined with limited outreach, the Neo-Tories never came close to political power for lack of mass appeal and lack of urgency derived from felt civilizational peril rife in Weimar Germany.
What Dietz achieves is to show the risks in times of ideological ferment, when everything seems possible. Dietz reminds us that prudence and tolerant humility are crucial when formulating philosophical alternatives to late-modern neoliberalism. Our time is pregnant with possibility of a post-liberal vision of politics centred on relationality, solidarity and the common good. Neo-Tories is a reminder of paths that we should not travel. This book is not light reading, but more than rewards patient study of its arguments, and is one that deserves an audience from both sides of the political aisle.
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