The Persistence of Party: Ideas of Harmonious Discord in Eighteenth-Century Britain. By Max Skjönsberg. Cambridge University Press, 2021. 373pp. Pb £22.99.

Abstract

Max Skjönsberg's The Persistence of Party is a hugely valuable contribution to both the history of political thought and British political history. The core thesis of the book is simply ‘that the idea of party dominated political discourse in eighteenth-century Britain’ (p. 2). The parties in question were defined not by tightly knit bureaucratic organisations but by a joint commitment to certain political principles. In this sense, the origin of modern political parties can be traced into the Enlightenment.

The study fills a conspicuous gap in the history of political thought of Britain in this period, which – when it has not been focused on the economic aspects of ‘the science of the legislator’ – has mainly been concerned with debates about the balance of the Constitution: whether it was leaning more toward monarchy or democracy, and what needed to be done to redress the perceived imbalances. We have plenty of studies of party ideology, of course, particularly the varieties of Whig and Country thought, but none exploring the question of the value of party itself at any length.

There has been some acknowledgment among political historians that modern party organisations were foreshadowed in the eighteenth century, by the well-oiled political machine constructed by the Whig Junto in the reigns of William and Anne, for example. Equally, O'Gorman's admirable study of the emergence of the two-party system focuses on the half century after the accession of George III. Like the historians of political thought, however, they have paid scant attention to the path-breaking endeavours throughout the eighteenth century both to make sense, historically and sociologically, of the Whig-Tory divide that framed political life and to create a new kind of political organisation based on ideological principles other than those of dynastic and religious loyalty. Skjönsberg's book provides an incisive contextual analysis of these two intertwined conversations.

It was the Huguenot historian Rapin who inaugurated the debate about the role of party in British politics, with his pioneering attempts (in his Histoire d’Angleterre,1724–7) to trace the development of the Whig-Tory divide from the reign of James I to his own times. There is an ambivalence to Rapin's account, as Skjönsberg presents it, since he insisted on the importance of the Tory-Whig dichotomy in British politics while viewing party ideology as largely a cloak for self-seeking designs, a psychology laid bare, he believed, by the readiness of political actors to ditch their principles when they impeded their political ambitions. By presenting his position from several angles, however, Skjönsberg shows that it was less inconsistent than it appears at first sight. There was, for example, a very real disagreement between the parties over foreign policy, with the Whigs favouring interventionism and land war, the Tories isolationism and naval conflict. Moreover, even if calls to rally behind the Whig and Tory banners were, at bottom, political power plays, such appeals would not have been made had the leaders not banked on their resonance with the rank and file. Rapin understood, in other words, that ideas need not be sincerely held to shape political behaviour.

The book does not return to the philosophical history of party until chapter four, when the attention turns to Hume. For Bolingbroke, the subject of the intervening chapters was less interested in giving a detached examination of party politics than in justifying the formation of a ‘systematic opposition’, whereby non-Jacobite Tories and Patriot Whigs would unite to combat the allegedly oligarchic tendencies of Walpole and his ‘cronies’. The chronological structure is vital to Skjönsberg's objective, however, of providing a proper contextual account of the arguments. After all, Hume's attempts to take the heat out of politics by offering a more impartial history of the parties only make sense against the backdrop of the partisan struggles between Bolingbroke and the Court Whigs. Moreover, the sequential approach allows him to sustain the narrative of political developments which occasioned the writings in question.

This dedication to illuminating the political circumstances which the writers were trying to influence proves particularly instructive in the case of Bolingbroke. While Bolingbroke has often been portrayed as an anti-party writer, Skjönsberg shows that perhaps his primary objective was to legitimise the idea of a unified opposition dedicated to combatting the corruption of the Walpole administration, that is, the use of burgeoning government revenue and offices both to enrich themselves and bend parliament to their will. This required him to dispel the prevailing idea of party as simply a byword for faction, which he did by means of a simple distinction: a faction sought power to advance their own interests, a ‘national’ party to promote the well-being of the nation. It was a radical challenge to the political thinking of the day, since it suggested that something more was needed than the usual constitutional safeguards to preserve political liberty.

In terms of the bigger picture, what Skjönsberg's analysis shows is that despite having very different objectives, Rapin, Bolingbroke and Hume all vindicated party politics as adding vigour to the Constitution by providing another buffer against the total monopolisation of power by one individual or set of men. A lot came down, however, to the composition of the parties themselves and the conditions in which they operated. For Hume, for example, such struggles promoted harmony only where the moderates in each party prevailed over fanatics and (what was the same thing) where members were driven mainly by interests rather than principles.

Skjönsberg has expressed disquiet in various forums about the growing tendency among historians to view scholarship as a form of political activism. Among historians of political thought, this approach tends to divide thinkers into a cast of heroes and villains, reflecting the historian's own ideological standpoint – which is hardly optimum in a subject supposedly dedicated to reducing the distorting effects of our preconceptions and prejudices on the reading of historically important texts. But this raises the question of what is to be gained from the more clinical approach to historical retrieval favoured by Skjönsberg.

The beginning of an answer may be found, perhaps, in Hume's analysis of party politics, as detailed in chapters four to eight of the book. Hume's aim, as is well known, was to offer a philosophical account of British politics, aloof from the party struggles of the day. Of course, when political writers in the eighteenth century declared themselves above the political fray, it was often as a prelude to entering it on behalf of one of the combatants – the point being to assert that their views were the product of objective reflection unlike the polemics of their opponents (Bolingbroke being a case in point).

From the fact that he fell foul of both sides of the political divide, we can infer that he succeeded in producing a relatively detached view of British political life. The advantage of ‘independent’ over party history, as Hume saw it, was that it promoted that ‘harmonious discord’ which gave vigour and balance to political life. It did so, among other things, by encouraging a critical attitude to the party origin myths employed by Whig and Tory propagandists to forge partisan identities. Above all, it undercut all claims to a pure ideological heritage by showing how, since the Glorious Revolution, the Whigs had morphed into a Court Party, the Tories into a Country Party.

At the same time, Hume endeavoured to understand all the belligerents in the party struggles of the period on their own terms. His recognition, for example, of the superiority of the Stuart claim to the throne, in terms of the hereditary principle at least, shows that he meant even the Jacobite cause to have a fair hearing. Hume's hope was that the humility engendered by a more nuanced self-understanding would help prevent the opposition of interests from descending into bigotry, as well as facilitating civilised debate. Ultimately, impartial historical analysis would accelerate the transition – underway since the accession of Pitt the Elder – from a Whig-Tory divide to a Court-County one, that is, from a politics still explosively infused with superstition and enthusiasm to one based on the more rational pursuit of interest. Leaving aside the obvious scholarly benefits – relative objectivity, complexity and depth of understanding – the pay-off for attempting to rise above the ideological fray is a history that is more likely to nurture a more civil and humane political and intellectual culture. Moderation can be a hard sell, however, for a complex view of things offers little to stir the affections. For the very reason, that it resists playing to the ideological gallery, such an approach is at a distinct disadvantage to partisan history in the battle for hearts and minds, particularly in times of acute social division. This is borne out by the reception of Hume's historical project, of course, which, while it won devotees among a small constituency of committed moderates, was generally disparaged by the partisan mainstream.

It is testament to the persuasiveness of Skjönsberg's argument that the one out-and-out anti-party writer treated in the book looks like an outlier. For the Anglican clergyman John Brown, the shift from a politics of principle to the one based on interest, which Hume welcomed, was highly detrimental to the Constitution. As the streams of government patronage increased, the jockeying for influence and financial gain among MPs would intensify, throwing the state into discord. The solution was not, however, the formation of a party based on principle, as Bolingbroke had maintained, but the institution of ‘national union’. As such unity could only be preserved where virtue and religion had the ascendence over bribery and corruption, the state was obliged to take the lead in nurturing a more virtuous citizenry. Hence, Brown campaigned for a system of national education, while expressing admiration for Spartan institutions.

It was Burke who took up the cudgels for party, once more, after the accession of George III. Because they have long been viewed as a pivotal moment in the history of party politics, his efforts to instigate a ‘concerted opposition’ have been pored over endlessly by scholars. Viewing the Rockingham Whigs’ campaign, however, against the backdrop of a political culture in which the notion of a principled opposition was nothing new and in which it was accepted that party ‘was inseparable from free governments’ (p. 249) gives it a new complexion, most obviously by showing it to be less radically new than is often imagined.

Although, in terms of the narrative of the book, however, Burke was the heir to Bolingbroke's campaign to vindicate party, the sophistication and breadth of Burke's vision clearly set it apart from Bolingbroke's rallying call. While they adopted ‘country tactics’, the Rockingham Whigs saw themselves as the descendants of the ‘Old Whigs’, among whom Burke included Walpole. What distinguishes Burke from Bolingbroke as a theorist of party is the thoroughgoing and persuasive way in which he integrated the case for tightly-knit parliamentary groupings into the dominant conceptions of the Constitution. In De l'esprit des lois (1748), Montesquieu had argued that the aristocracy provided a crucial restraint on monarchs, occupying ‘the intermediate channels’ through which their power flowed. According to Burke, the Whigs had been the intermediate power under the first two Georges. As an aristocratic party, their wealth ensured their independence from the Crown – to the extent, at least, that government was seldom allowed to stray from promoting the public good. Because their interests were deeply entwined with those of their constituents, they were naturally inclined to advance their welfare, while being impervious, however, to the turbulent passions of the populace, thanks to their education and experience.

It was the alleged conspiracy of George III, however, to subvert this balance of power – by sidestepping the usual channels of governance in favour of a ‘secret cabinet’, and generally augmenting his own power at the expense of the Whig hegemony – that persuaded Burke of the urgent need to ‘associate’ on a more formal and explicit basis. Though the Whigs would remain a party of principle, the perilousness of the situation required a certain level of pragmatism; ‘angelic purity’ had to be sacrificed to party unity. Conversely, however, Whigs would sometimes have to resist the lure of office – the solvent of Country party unity in Bolingbroke's time – for the sake of party solidarity. Revealing the continuity, then, between Burke's agenda and that of Bolingbroke in no way diminishes the importance of the former in the history of party.

One might expect that such a ground-breaking study would stimulate further research in the field, for example, by encouraging scholars to trace the narrative into the opening decades of the nineteenth century, when something like a two-party system began to emerge. Various trends in the subject, however – related in complex ways to the explicit politicisation of historical scholarship – militate against this. Most importantly, as the cultural and global turns in historical scholarship continue to subsume the subject, the history of domestic ‘high politics’ before the twentieth century is increasingly becoming a marginal affair, often denigrated by practitioners as elitist and insular – an astonishing circumstance, given the obvious urgency of the subject, and one providing potent ammunition to those intent on downsizing the humanities on the grounds of their irrelevance to everyday life. The hope, of course, is that works like Skjönsberg's will inspire a new generation of historians who view the origins of our political life as worthy of study. Should they emulate the non-partisan spirit of his analysis, all the better.