In 1935, George Dangerfield famously identified the “strange death of liberal England” in a series of crises preceding the Great War. Liberalism, Dangerfield argued, went to its grave not as another casualty of war but, rather, upon the exhaustion of a political temper that proved unable to accommodate claims that were at once contrary and absolute. This wide-ranging volume of essays—edited by Duncan Tanner and the late Ewen Green, and dedicated to Peter Clarke—attends to the existence and persistence of the liberal temper before, during, and after the First World War, in the form of cultural values and moral sentiments that informed the behavior of a range of intellectual and political figures. Each of the essays begins by relating its subject to an aspect of Clarke's work, and the principle theme that emerges is the inadequacy of the “economic” as an isolated category of explanation.

The introduction, cowritten by Tanner and Green, situates the volume, and the work of Peter Clarke more generally, in the context of broader developments in intellectual and political history since the 1970s. These developments came to emphasize less the validity of ideas, as formulated by experts and transmitted to politicians, so much as their use, as adopted by situated actors for reasons of their own. “The contributors look at how ideas are refracted, tailored and utilised—consciously or unconsciously—by political writers or cultural figures,” Tanner and Green explain, adding that, as a result, “the value of ideas is reasserted, not as ‘expert’ opinion influencing events, but as mechanisms through which pre-existing orientations are given credibility and meaning” (26–27). Economic ideas remain central to political life as depicted in this volume, but since ideas can serve multiple purposes, and individuals face competing pressures, material interests or economic commitments only partially explain the decisions of political actors. A second aim of the introduction is to assert the conceptual sophistication of this approach, despite a tendency among some of its most prominent practitioners to wear their theory lightly. The editors regret that “the impact of the less consciously theoretical is easily passed over (or misrepresented) because it does not wear its conceptual originality on its sleeves” (26), and their introduction partially remedies this oversight by relating this vein of work in intellectual and political history to more explicitly theoretical trends.

Part 1, “Economic Ideas and Political Leaders,” considers the relationship between particular political figures and broader economic currents in four distinct cases. James Thompson examines debates regarding the minimum wage during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. He shows that these debates were not confined within national borders and that questions about wages were always invested—and understood to be invested—with political, ethical, and moral concerns. John A. Thompson exerts pressure upon economic interpretations of America's entry into the First World War. He seeks not to repudiate economic explanations exactly so much as to expand our conceptions so that they include the fact of America's economic implication in the international political system. Duncan Tanner draws upon a collection of Ramsay MacDonald's papers at the University of Manchester to reveal the role of personal qualities and individual decisions in the Labour government's efforts to manage the 1929–31 crisis—efforts, he shows, that cannot fully be understood through the familiar lens of adherence to “orthodoxy.” And Boyd Hilton contributes a remarkable reinterpretation of Robert Lowe, chancellor under Gladstone from 1868 until the prime minister assumed that position himself in 1873. The twists and turns in Hilton's intricate essay cannot adequately be conveyed here, but generally speaking he poses the question of why Lowe was replaced in 1873, and he answers that question by recovering the contrary intellectual formations that molded Gladstone and Lowe despite their superficially similar commitments to liberal economic orthodoxy.

Part 2, “The Use and Abuse of Economic Ideas: Keynes and His Interpreters,” consists of three essays that examine the interpretation and reinterpretation of John Maynard Keynes. Richard Toye and Ewen Green contribute nicely paired essays on the shifting relationships between Keynes and the Labour and Conservative parties (respectively). These relationships were often complicated during Keynes's lifetime, as Toye shows in his recovery of the wary embrace between Keynes and Labour during the interwar period, but they became considerably more straightforward after Keynes's death, as figures across the ideological spectrum jostled to claim Keynes's benediction for their own preferred policies. These two essays testify to the aptness of Clarke's distinction, developed in The Keynesian Revolution and Its Economic Consequences (Cheltenham, 1998) and discussed by Tanner and Green in the introduction, between the histories of “Keynes” and of “Keynesianism.” Eugenio Biagini's chapter demonstrates the existence of that dynamic in postwar Italy as well. Biagini's essay also points to a welcome dimension of this volume as a whole: although the essays carefully examine particular figures making particular decisions in particular contexts (indeed, that is the emphasis of the empirical, contextual approach advocated in the introduction), their scope ranges to include examples from Europe, the United States, and Australia, in addition to Britain.

Part 3, “Economic Forces and Their Significance,” further interrogates the category of the “economic” in the intellectual and economic history of twentieth-century Britain. Rather than identifying the category's inevitable implication with moral and ethical concerns, Stefan Collini instead recovers its emergence as a “synoptic” concept in interwar cultural criticism (274). His fascinating essay shows that T. S. Eliot, R. H. Tawney, F. R. Leavis, L. C. Knights, and others came to associate “modern” society with the emergence of particularly economic modes of behavior and thought during the seventeenth century—a move that shifted the target of the cultural criticism they inherited and transmitted from the fact of industrialization to the developments that enabled it. The volume closes with Barry Supple's consideration of the moral dimensions of some of the century's most significant economic developments, including structural changes (such as the shift from heavy industry), the abandonment of national autonomy (in favor of European integration), and debates over public expenditure (especially regarding pensions). Supple shows that these developments involved moral and political choices as much as economic adaptations, and he counsels “less heroic devices” than the ideal of egalitarianism in the course of future efforts to reconcile economic adjustments with moral commitments: “Such apparently banal strategies,” he concludes, “may do most good and least harm in the exercise of the moral choice which must—or at least should—underpin our reactions to economic change” (306). Dangerfield might have been surprised by its survival, but he would have recognized the sentiment, and Supple's tempered conclusion serves as a fitting end to this splendid collection of essays on the survival of liberal England.