Ideology and actuality are everywhere in conflict, but no-where in Western Europe is that conflict so strenuously denied as in Britain. The mechanism of denial is peculiarly effective: it is the assertion that ideology is what other people suffer from. The British elites, with whose mode of thought this essay deals, claim that they face the world equipped only with a few simple and lucid notions, distilled by common sense from everyday experience. In fact, they do have an ideology—which so pervades the atmosphere that long-term residents of the British isles think of it as something natural, like damp, fog, or driving on the left-hand side of the road.

National self-examination is perhaps an American obsession—alternating significantly with outbursts of confidence. Britain’s fixation, by contrast, is national self-congratulation—not unmixed with discreet undertones of doubt. On what, precisely, does the average Briton congratulate himself and his countrymen? Oddly, he deals rather negligently with what outsiders think of as Britain’s most considerable achievements: its political stability, its generally unblemished record in maintaining civil liberties, the ways in which it has rid itself of some of the worst legacies of having been the first industrial, and the leading imperialist, power. Perhaps this sort of self-congratulation would be too crude an exercise. Crudity, in British culture, is discouraged. Moreover, explicit reassurance about Britain’s past achievements might have the paradoxical effect of redirecting attention to the present, to new problems which have still to be solved or, in many cases, broached. Britain’s ideological self-confidence can be maintained only if the degree of public awareness of society’s contemporary conflicts is low. But this is not simply a mechanism adopted by the elite to avoid criticism. Buffeted by reverses in the past decade, and quite unsure of the durability of their successes, those who belong to the elite themselves require antidotes to doubt. They have found one: they keep congratulating themselves on their method, even if this is supposed to consist in the absence of method.

Questioned about the distinctively British way of doing things in politics and social affairs generally, the articulate business executive, higher civil servant, publicist, professional, politician (and trade union leader) might well reply in roughly the following terms: the supreme object of public activity in Britain is the maintenance of consensus; compromise and concession are indispensable means to this end.¹ Conflict has not always been settled in this way, the answer would continue, but now we have a method for doing so which minimizes tension. Moreover, we proceed empirically, taking problems as they come; our solutions are pragmatic, designed to settle immediate difficulties and not necessarily anticipating the future—which we can’t in any case fully visualize. That the liberty and spiritual well-being of the individual is our shared aim need hardly be mentioned. We prefer to leave it to the individual to say where his liberty and spiritual integrity are involved, and a useful rule of thumb for doing so is simply to allow citizens (and groups) to consult their convenience.

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For the moment the issue is not whether this schematic picture of public life in Britain is true or false (it is, as we might suspect, something of both, and the omissions are striking). What is remarkable, however, is that it finds an elegant parallel in the writings of a set of academic philosophers—men like Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, and Michael Polanyi—intent on telling all mankind how to conduct its affairs. These philosophers in general refer only incidentally to Britain. Their insistence on the limitation of social thought to problems immediately given, their repudiation of ideology, is supposed to be universally valid. But it is striking that their view of how politics ought to be conducted fits so well the ordinary Briton’s account of how affairs are conducted in his country.

People are now tired, these writers tell us, of grand systems of theory designed to give a comprehensive account of man and society, to dissect the past and sketch the future. The time has come to dissolve the large problems confronting us into their component elements, and to work at these piecemeal, until some pragmatic solution is devised. Such solutions will hardly last forever, but they may make society a bit more tolerable, and so allow men to get on with the ordinary business of living. Abstract approaches to social conflicts can produce ills far more profound than those they are supposed to diagnose and cure. They can blind men to reality, which refuses to be comprehended in some over-all way. Worse still, they can make men see themselves as servants of some higher historical destiny. They may thus legitimize compulsion, even savage retribution, against those who stubbornly refuse to accept the theoretical conclusions of some abstract system, either by failing to espouse the values it dictates or by behaving in some manner not predicted by the system. But abstract systems have an even deeper flaw: they refuse to see that men are as they are, neither more nor less. Social thought which takes as its point of departure some other version of human nature, some imaginative conception of its potential, must end in Utopian futility or totalitarian ruthlessness. These general truths are not (as is sometimes asserted) a justification for an unreasoning conservatism. Rather, they constitute the only plausible progressive doctrine, since they alone open men’s eyes to the difficulties of the real (as opposed to the specious) present. They prevent men from pursuing fantasies which, whether benign or not, can only fail of their intended consequences.

It is at this point that the philosophers in question descend to survey the British scene. They hold that in the British context the customary disputes between conservatism and progressivism assume a sickly, nay morbidly, abstracted cast—the work of European ideologues or American pedants. In Britain everyone, or at any rate everyone worthy of notice, accepts the above assumptions. Political conflict has to be resolved within this framework. Of conflict, there is, of course, no end. The point is that in Britain (and in any other country well enough advised to follow the British example) such stresses do not become the focus of moral passion. They are ideologically de-fused, and seen for what they are: inevitable but not irreparable dislocations. The political and social stability of Britain is living verification of these notions.

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It is a philosophical feat of no small order to celebrate simultaneously the essential Britishness of British politics, and to derive from it prescriptions applicable to all of mankind’s ideological ills. Not surprisingly, this feat has been accomplished by a European group of thinkers, long resident in the British isles. Deeply affected by the European tragedy, these thinkers not unnaturally tend to regard Britain as an island in the political as well as the geographical sense. The writings of Professors Berlin, Polanyi, and Popper, are adduced wherever British self-congratulation seeks intellectually reputable credentials. Foreign voices have also been heard. The books of an Israeli, Professor J. L. Talmon, have been praised by the Times itself, and Mr. Raymond Aron has been honored as though he were a modern Montesquieu, looking admiringly across the Channel from Paris.²

It is only fair to say that the writings of these men are far more varied (and far more contradictory) than I have made out. They do, however, lend themselves, despite the intentions of their authors, to what is in effect a demand for the extirpation of social philosophy. Since they have developed a viewpoint which implies, and sometimes states, that Britain is about as good a society as we are going to get, they ought not to be too surprised if, under their influence, some people find further social thought superfluous.

That something is seriously wrong with the philosophical discussion of politics in contemporary Britain is suggested by this: discussions are usually about the propriety or efficacy of different ways of thinking about politics, rarely about politics themselves. Certainly the thinkers mentioned above have dominated the scene at a time when substantive social philosophy is not so much in disrepute as simply missing. Professor Michael Oakeshott is said to be the most important conservative philosopher in Britain. Yet he has written virtually nothing since his celebrated 1951 Inaugural Lecture as professor of politics at the London School of Economics—when he indicated that the best politics consisted of doing nothing, or as little as possible, and the ideal political philosophy consisted of thinking of nothing.

The fact is that all social philosophy in Britain today seems to move on a plane remote from the actual conflicts being fought out in British politics. In short, the philosophers who have put a gloss on the self-congratulatory exercises of the men engaged in public affairs have done so without examining too closely whether the latter really act as they say they act.

Whether or not those who rule Britain are—as these philosophers suppose—restrained by firm conventions and gifted with profound insight into the working of things, one fact is certain: they are not self-conscious empiricists. They operate with ideas of one kind or another, most of them unexamined and many of them far from internally coherent. The elite, indeed, often engages in internecine ideological warfare. Their ideas, of course, are influenced by the advantages they themselves possess.

Even a cursory view of recent British history suggests that this is a society in which conflicts over power, property, and status have been prolonged and bitter. Ideological division has accompanied these conflicts, and stability has often been the result not of consensus, but of the uneasy balance of a multiplicity of antagonistic forces. Thus the current insistence on a more sanguine reading of the British social situation is in some measure defensive. Britain’s abrupt decline as a world power has disoriented many people of all classes, particularly those old enough to have experienced the Empire when it was intact and working. The full implications of the change have hardly been faced: the problems it entails are painful and extremely difficult of solution.

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British complacency over having evolved an infallible technique for dealing with domestic problems is paralleled by delusions of grandeur in the international sphere. The conversion of Empire into Commonwealth is, of course, more than a change in nomenclature. The United Kingdom is no longer the dominant center of an empire. Its government, instead, has to struggle against the centrifugal tendencies intrinsic to an association of nations which includes India, South Africa, Ghana, and the Central African Federation. No amount of pragmatic statesmanship can absolve a British government of the necessity of having to choose, soon, between its white cousins and its former black subjects. Last January, Mr. Macmillan evoked the “wind of change” in a speech delivered in South Africa. Until now, successive British governments have tried to ride out the gale. A doctrine of “devolution” has been elaborated, but it is surprising how little has been done to alter Britain’s economic relationships with the former colonial areas. Public opinion has been given bromides on Britain’s duties of leadership: the crisis ahead has been conjured out of the general consciousness. On this particular point, informed and uninformed public opinion come together, for imperial nostalgia is a unifying sentiment. Most of Labor’s working-class supporters refused to accept the pious liberal platitudes with which Mr. Gaitskell in 1956 attacked the government over Suez. Many of them had, in one sense, enjoyed colonialism while on military service overseas. Tory colonial policy of a retrograde sort has been denounced by radical anti-colonialist opinion with a moral fervor worthy of Gladstone, yet neither party to the debate seems prepared to consider the problems posed by the role of the Afro-Asian states in world affairs. The Suez defeat was treated by the Tories as an unspeakable humiliation, by the opposition as a just retribution. Hence Macmillan could liquidate the Suez adventure only by laying down a smokescreen, insisting on Britain’s destiny and rectitude. Similarly, his Colonial Secretary, who is trying to find a way out of the Central African dilemma into which his predecessors marched, has to insist that Tory policy is continuous and unchanged.

The point is that these procedures are the opposite of “empiricist,” if the word has any determinate meaning at all. British policy, whether the actual one of the government or the ideal one proposed by the opposition, staggers under a heavy ideological burden. Each side seems to live in the past. The government’s supporters tend to ignore the implications of the Afro-Asian vote in the United Nations and the explosive stuff of nationalist discontent. The opposition cherishes sentimental views of the liberation movements in the colonial areas: one-party rule in the new states is not a phenomenon it can deal with easily. Both sides talk a good deal of British “responsibility” in these areas, a responsibility many of the inhabitants would be just as glad to see Britain shed. The more intractable the situation in what was once the Empire, the greater the danger of an ideological and practical immobilism on the part of the British elite.

Similar difficulties mark Britain’s relationships to Europe and the United States. Despite, or perhaps because of, the decline of empire, many people in public life act as if Britain’s real interests lay east (or south) of Suez. Europe may be uncomfortably nearby to be sure (a general has even expressed the view that the proposed Channel tunnel would be a grave danger to national security). What occurs there must remain, however, of peripheral interest to Britain—except insofar as Continental holidays afford the inhabitants of this island light relief from the serious business of being British. The fact that the postwar economic revival of Western Europe has enabled the Continental countries to compete against Britain in markets previously all its own, has not yet been assimilated. The remarkable resurgence of Western Germany is an occasion for resentment rather than sober analysis, the more so since the Federal Republic has appeared at times to enjoy American favor.

That the United States has displaced Britain as a world power is another fact the elite finds it difficult to live with. It takes refuge in the fantasy of an avuncular relationship to the United States, which occasionally dissolves (as at Suez) to be replaced by dismay and chagrin. Much of the current British discussion of mass culture carries overtones of resentment and fear at “Americanization”—emotions not shared by the working-class youth for whom America is a curiously vivid utopia. In general the relationship to America epitomizes a situation in which the louder the talk of “empiricism,” the more stereotyped and rigid the approach of British society to its problems.

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The British elite is at the moment very heterogeneous and as such even more difficult to comprehend than its opaque predecessors. “Hard-faced men who did well out of the war” were alleged to have entered the governing class after 1918; soft-faced men who did well out of the peace appear to predominate now. Actually, differences of generation and personality make the members of the elite a good deal less uniform than their critics seem to think. These distinctions in turn reflect differences in the types of power exercised by the elite. The criteria that dictate decision vary from group to group. The pragmatism that some see everywhere in British social life may be nothing more than the uncertain and shifting outcome of ideological differences at the top. Yet one thing about postwar Britain is clear: the businessman has never had quite so much prestige and influence. Business is, however, internally divided. Old and new wealth, financial and manufacturing interests, exporters and home market producers, technically rationalized and stagnant sectors, jostle one another and impose contradictory pressures upon the government. That businessmen are pragmatic enough to wish to maximize their profits will surprise nobody. The ways in which they conceive of doing so vary. There is much less “community service” ideology than in the United States, except for three or four large firms whose directors may not read their own advertising copy. Business of course supports the Tories, and has a number of representatives—of strikingly disparate abilities—inside the Cabinet, but important sectors of business are deeply critical of the government’s reluctance to go into the European Common Market, and other aspects of its policy.

The newer industrial managers see themselves as the most productive element in society. Ready as they may be to effect compromises with the unions, they assign themselves a correspondingly important role in the general distribution of power and influence. Together with their collaborators in the mass communications industry, they are not averse to remaking Britain—into a society of consumers. The consumers, in their view, ought to be able not merely to buy the goods produced by industry, but to raise up their children for the technical, and in fortunate cases the managerial, posts connected with it. Industry’s demand for scientific and technological manpower might in any other society lead to a certain democratization of educational opportunity. In Britain this has occurred only to a limited extent. Instead, industry has taken to endowing the private schools. Those who suppose that the more enterprising men in business are interested in a society without status differences are wrong. Parvenus themselves, they are in important respects susceptible to the attraction of the old prestige hierarchy, even if their own successes modify it appreciably. Older sorts of business interests take a skeptical view of the society of consumers which prosperity appears to be shaping. Possibly they have been influenced by the (often imitative) aristocratic traditions affected by certain quarters in the City, London’s financial center. Possibly their skepticism reflects a rentier attitude toward sound money or the natural disinclination of those who deal internationally in the pound to allow domestic economic growth to result in a steady inflation. At any rate important sections of British business tend to see the economy in rather less expansive terms. One suspects that they themselves work less hard than many of their colleagues, and that they engage in price-fixing, market closure, and a number of other restrictionist practices which exactly match the attitudes of the more backward trade union leaders. The City itself has recently witnessed some exceedingly bitter infighting. A set of lively intruders has appeared, quite disrespectful of the City’s accepted gentlemanly conventions. They have at times even competed successfully with the older houses without asking permission.

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The new mass communications industry, based on commercial television and the daily and weekly press, purveys an image of a classless Britain—in which everyone appears to be a member of the new middle class. The problems dealt with in the new media are generally those of decorum, taste, and the acquisition of money and manners—not of relationship to society as a whole. It is the ideology of status, packaged for the mass market and it has excited opposition, not alone from the left but from the right—from the so-called Establishment.

The Establishment is named after the Established Church, and the designation is supposed to convey some of those traits associated with the latter: pomposity and arrogance, hypocrisy and compulsive deference toward authority. The Establishment is supposed to be a network of interlocking cultural directorships connecting the universities, the more sedate sections of the press, the more respectable politicians, the BBC, and “responsible” opinion generally. Its aim, according to the critics, is to smother radical thinking. It functions supposedly by personal contacts, discreet pressures, an unwritten but effective code of what can and cannot be said. Some critics, more conspicuous for their zeal than for their exactitude of analysis, have widened the term to include every institution they dislike so that “Establishmentarian” has become a term of abuse for those more or less comfortably settled at or near the top of society, particularly if they appear to be colorless conformists. Anti-Establishment passions go so deep that at the recent election for the Chancellorship of Oxford University (an honorary office), the left supported Macmillan because his opponent, Sir Oliver Franks, was thought to be even more typically “Establishmentarian”: he had been an Oxford don, head of an Oxford college, a wartime civil servant, ambassador to Washington, and is now head of a bank—discharging all of his functions with elegance and offending no one.

If the term Establishment has any meaning at all, it applies only to those guardians of the present system who exude a faintly fusty odor. The order they are defending is in general that of pre-war Britain, with its relatively solid upper-middle-class values and its sharp demarcations between strata. In pre-war Britain, needless to say, critics of the Establishment held that it was defending the values of society before 1914. Today one can say that there is something of a directorate in the cultural apparatus, but its shape is difficult to outline. Moreover, it is no longer a power group defending a position by holding to a definite set of values. The Establishment today resembles nothing so much as a disembodied set of values seeking to attach itself to a power group. Its hostility to the newer tendencies in British society and culture suggests that a good deal of power has passed elsewhere.

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The Tory party has to represent all these groups—and to win elections besides. Little wonder that it too displays an amalgam of ideas and impulses in uneasy equilibrium. The aristocratic tradition is by now hardly visible. The departure of the melancholy Lord Salisbury appears to have ended it, and the recent appointment of a nullity from the House of Lords to the Foreign Secretaryship does not presage a revival. The Tories are more restrained about their internal disputes than the Labor party, and these internal differences rarely find explicit expression. The erratic course of British policy since 1951 may be explained as a higher form of experimentalism. It also reflects the Tories’ ideological difficulties.

Of the Liberals little need be said. The Labor party remains the great oppositional force in Britain. Important sections of it, however, are not prepared to advocate the reconstruction of society. They wish to attain social justice within a system whose major contours would be rather like the ones we see now. Grouped behind Mr. Gaitskell, these reformers are unequivocally opposed to many of the present inequalities and to the aesthetically repellent aspects of the new prosperity. What they propose is “a modest program of social reform,” a phrase used by Mr. Gaitskell during the last election. No reasonable person can doubt that their aims are sensible and sound, as far as they go; they would, if transposed to America, realize the Utopian aspirations of the more advanced Democrats. Yet their proposals fail to take account of the institutional resistances in the present system. The thinkers who cluster about Mr. Gaitskell justify their politics by insisting on the necessity of an empirical approach, but they are no less ideological than their left-wing opponents. Labor’s reformists are generally middle-class intellectuals; their image of Britain’s future emphasizes equality of opportunity, a euphemism for a society in which access to the middle class would be free and easy. Their view of the possible is derived from their conception of the desirable, if in a less obvious way than the views of their utopian opponents inside the Labor party.

There are two sorts of Labor utopians: old socialists who talk as though capitalism had not changed since the 1930’s and youthful radicals, generally without the political influence of the old left, who feel that socialist concern should shift to the quality of human experience in daily life and to the problems of world society. Not surprisingly, they have concluded that only a total revision of social institutions can alter the character of human experience. On the whole, the new utopians seem unable as yet to make of their critical impulses a rigorous and substantive critique of modern society. They have a set of ideological attitudes and not yet a system of ideas. But one may say that insofar as “empiricism” does dominate British political thinking, the young are fed up with it. This group at least deals with phenomena which appear to have escaped the attention of the older empiricists: youth culture, generational conflict, and mass culture. These questions have not been assimilated to the categories of contemporary British political discourse. Perhaps they are unassimilable. If so, the new utopians have a point in complaining that the empiricism they oppose is not really empirical.

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This account of what might be termed opinion-making groups in Britain does not deal with the consumers of ideology, the population about whose wants students of politics argue. Public-opinion-poll data are not very illuminating on popular ideology, and the British inhibition on systematic self-examination has precluded the development of sociological inquiries which might tell us more. It is characteristic of the current situation that fierce arguments on popular taste and opinion are conducted with little reference to the available material, much less to new evidence. Many middle-class intellectuals are suspicious of, and indeed hostile to, the general populace. Left-wing intellectuals are often indistinguishable, in this regard, from more conservative ones. What is certain is that the actual or potential capacities of ordinary men in this country to develop opinions is seriously underrated. The “empiricists” speak of men as they are, yet they seem singularly ignorant of their fellow countrymen. Indeed, the most striking thing about contemporary British “empiricism” is that it has become an ideology. In the heroic days of British politics in the 19th and early 20th centuries, empiricism as a method may have been genuine. Today’s versions of it are programmatic and insubstantial, counters in argument rather than methods for exploring reality. The conversion of a method into a slogan is a sign that the country has yet to face its present ideological difficulties; its reluctance to do so is an indication that the social conflicts which underlie ideological divergence are deep and enduring. Once this defense is broken, new interpretations of British society more in accord with contemporary realities can be developed. But it will probably acquire a major assault to make the breach.

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¹ I stress the word articulate because some American commentators—suffering, I suspect, from unrequited love for Britain and deep disappointment in their own country—have portrayed the British elite as composed largely of educated, cultivated, and wise men. The proportion of such types may well be high by contrast with the composition of the dominant classes in other countries, but it nonetheless strikes some of those who have to live in England as rather low, and not increasing. Many men in important posts have attended Oxford or Cambridge, but this in itself does not mean that the country is run by philosophers. British university education, and the secondary schooling that precedes it, is exceedingly specialized. It does not encourage a general view or intellectual risk-taking of any sort. Nor does the superior cultivation of some recent political leaders in England mean as much as Anglophile Americans think. Anthony Eden's interest in Persian art is no doubt more admirable than Eisenhower's addiction to detective stories, but it did not save him from his own misreading of modern history.

² It has been pointed out to me that Anthony Crosland, the eloquent intellectual spokesman for the present leadership of the Labor party, also thinks in these general terms. Why then single out these European thinkers? The answer is that Crosland's views on Labor party policy took root in ideological ground previously tilled by the philosophers.