Conservatives. ‘‘Toryism,’’ as Harold Macmillan once said, ‘‘has always been a form
of paternal socialism.’’
The outcome was a coherent and eVective program of government action.
Competititon for power moved the parties to adapt to the realities of governing
and winning oYce. How each saw these realities was conditioned by its public
philosophy. The outcome, however, was not some inevitable result of group
formation and cultural context. Essential to its achievement was also that process
of revisionism in each party and between them. Here a kind of collective thinking
took place, exhibiting once again that basic feature of modern liberalism, the truth
generating capacity of uncensored debate. I followed, wrote about, and in a very
modest way took part in the prolonged ‘‘rethinking’’ occasioned by revisionism in
Britain. General descriptions fail to convey the vitality and passionate nature of the
process. I can reproduce one inside moment of Labour revisionism which was
evoked by the publication ofThe New Fabian Essaysin 1952. We Harvard liberals
sympathized with the programs of social services and economic mangement being
pioneered in Britain. But we were disappointed by the confusion and sense of drift
in theEssaysand expressed our opinions in some highly critical reviews, as well as
in private conversations with the socialist dons and journalists with whom we
exchanged visits. One Sunday afternoon in the American Cambridge, following the
rural walk which was obligatory when our visitors were British, we got into a long
wrangle over public ownership. Finally, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. exploded, ‘‘Do you
really think that everything should be nationalized, even newspapers, magazines,
book publishing? How could you maintain freedom of the press under these
conditions?’’ Needless to say that was a powerful argument among a bunch of
aspiring authors. Thus, we social liberals dropped our grain of common sense into
the process of deliberative democracy by which policy preferences were trans-
formed as revisionism triumphed.
- 5 Party Government in Britain and America
In admiring American eyes, the key to the political success of postwar Britain was
‘‘party government.’’ In 1957 , noting that party cohesion had been increasing
markedly for some time, I sketched the Westminster model. Two-party competi-
titon, unity among partisans in the legislature and executive, a government pro-
gram based on a distinctive public philosophy. Moreover, the Westminster model
presumed that the two-party system would conform to a similar duality in the
preferences of the voters. And as it happened, during the glory days of the
collectivist polity British voters did tend to think and act in terms of two classes,
the working class and the middle class, their party preferences strongly correlating
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