Irish independence.^7 But although Hancock was close to his father, and
attached significance to faith, religion simply does notfigure inAustralia
(Davison 1978, pp. 504–5).^8
However, by far the greatest omission, in terms of possible mitigating
factors, was the middle class. Hancock shared the superficial disdain for sub-
urbia of his friends from Melbourne University days, including Vance and
Nettie Palmer, and Esmonde Higgins, Nettie’s communist brother; as David
Walker has noted,‘it is reasonable to suggest that Hancock’s parties of initia-
tive and parties of resistance, which has proved so persistent a notion, is a
variation upon the theme of the two Australias that was central to the
Palmers’criticism of 1920s Australia;‘the one creative, original and truly
Australian, the other sterile, derivative and suburban’ (Walker 1976,
p. 205).^9 But the result of looking down on the middle class was to blind
Hancock to what Allan Martin rightly described as the‘firm bourgeois reality’
of late nineteenth-century Australia, from which‘stemmed on the one hand a
liberalism which shaded into, and sometimes interpenetrated, the more read-
ily defined radicalism of Labor, and on the other, a conservativism which
always acted as a moderating political influence’(Martin 2007, p. 69; on the
conservative tradition, see also Melleuish 2014).
It was not only the conservative tradition Hancock overlooked—a tradition
that, Martin went on to say,‘was powerful not because it rested on big capital
or social privilege, but because it drew its real strength from those urban
groups which had spearheaded the main 19th century drive for democracy’;
he missed, even more importantly, the currents of thought that‘firm bour-
geois reality’had spawned. Going from the drive for self-improvement of mid-
nineteenth-century‘moral enlightenment’—a faith, Michael Roe wrote, that
‘reflected, in exaggerated strength, liberal principles’and which‘urged that
everyone could, indeed must, become good, wise, prosperous, and respon-
sible’(Roe 1965, p. 6)—to early twentieth-century vitalism (Rowse 1978,
pp. 35–77; Roe 1984), these movements’impact went far beyond the realm
of ideas.
Rather, their emphasis on the role that expertise had to play in devising
‘a new art of statecraft for a new nation’(Osmond 1985, p. 53) provided
the intellectual impetus for what was probably the most distinctive and
enduring feature of Australia’s governance: ‘the long-established pattern,
(^7) On the role of the churches in social reform, see Bollen 1972; on religion in Australian life
generally, see Carey 1996. 8
Much like Tocqueville, Hancock seems to have been somewhat distant from organized religion
in his thirties, but never turned against it, and returned to it later in life. His interest in religious
thought, with particular reference to his biography of Jan Smuts, is explored in Tsokhas 2001. 9
The notion of parties of initiative and resistance has a long history in Australian political
culture, and was made explicit by William Pember Reeves in 1894: see Sinclair 1965, p. 207.
Tocqueville, Hancock, and the Sense of History