Veteran MPs and Conservative Politics in the Aftermath of the Great War: The Memory of All That. By Richard Carr.
Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: Richard Carr’s new book explores the interaction between the First World War and British politics after 1918 and provides a long needed accompaniment to the myriad studies that focus on the cultural legacy of the war in the same period. Carr adopts the ‘generational theory’ of Karl Manheim in order to analyse the political image, ideas, and actions of those he has elsewhere termed the ‘phoenix generation’ of Conservative MPs: those who saw uniformed service in the First World War. Carr argues that there was a generation of MPs that drew similar lessons from their experience of conflict. He shows that such men often spoke the same progressive language when it came to questions of domestic economic and social policy and that such views were heavily influenced by the experience of war. However, there were clear limits to any generational ideological synthesis. Carr finds them in debates over Empire, foreign policy, and, contrary to received wisdom, appeasement (in May 1940, over two-thirds of Conservative ex-servicemen backed Chamberlain’s foreign policy, the same proportion as the government as a whole). Finally, Carr demonstrates that these men were ‘leapfrogged’ after 1940 by a younger generation, not burdened by the legacy of war and influenced heavily by the neo-liberal and anti-statist writings of Friedrich von Hayek, who took the Conservative Party in a different direction after 1945.
DOI: 10.1093/tcbh/hwu025
Author: T. J. Cridford
Institution: Queen Mary University of London
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2396969069