Politics and the People A Study in English Political Culture, 1815}}}1867 [Paperback]

An ambitious reinterpretation of nineteenth-century English politics using oral, visual and printed records.This challenging and imaginative book provides a unique narrative of nineteenth-century English political history. It traces the decline of the radical potential of England's popular libertarian political tradition with the invention of a 'liberal' constitution during the nineteenth century.This challenging and imaginative book provides a unique narrative of nineteenth-century English political history. It traces the decline of the radical potential of England's popular libertarian political tradition with the invention of a 'liberal' constitution during the nineteenth century.This ambitious and provocative study provides a unique narrative of nineteenth-century English political history. Based on extensive research the book draws on critical theory to read and interpret a vast range of oral, visual and printed sources, in an attempt to expand our conception of the politics of the period. Read in the context of such sources, nineteenth-century English politics becomes resolved into a story about the struggle to define the nation's constitution, past, present and future. It suggests the existence of a popular strain of English libertarian politics, albeit one whose radical and democratic potential was gradually closed down. In short, despite the invention of a liberal constitution in this period, politics became less (not more) democratic, a lesson which the author sees as pertinent for many struggling to live in, or establish, liberal democratic constitutions in our own times.List of plates; List of tables; Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction: a new political history; Part I. Politics, Community and Power: 2. Power legislated: the structure of official politics; 3. Power imagined: the culture of official politics; 4. The medium and the message: power, print, and the public sphere; Part II. The Language of Organisation: 5. A language of party?; 6. Organisation asl,