Britain's social mores have changed beyond recognition since the 1950s. Then more than half the population regularly attended church, and almost everyone had experienced some socialization into the Christian faith; now less than 10 percent attend church, and the rest have almost no acquaintance with the religion that once dominated its culture. In the wake of that change has come the decriminalization or destigmatization of homosexuality, abortion, illegitimacy, and divorce, and the rise of alcohol consumption, drug taking, and criminality.

Three things distinguish Christie Davies’ account of these changes from the conventional conservative complaint. First, he provides a mass of empirical evidence, imaginatively reconstructed from a wide variety of sources and presented in a way that makes it easy to see the patterns.

Second, because he goes back beyond the golden age of respectability, he is aware that “many aspects of moral Britain … were only a phase, perhaps just an interlude, in the history of a rough people” (207). Many of the indices of deviance that worry us now were as high or higher in 1850. Hard drinking and drunken brawls were commonplace in the eighteenth century; there was a steady decline in alcohol consumption after 1900, and only after the 1960s did public drunkenness again become a major social problem. In the long view, the relatively low indices of deviant behavior found in 1900 or 1920 were unusual. Or, to put it another way, when conservatives say that we need to get back to basics, we need to ask, “How far back?”

Third, Davies is well aware that the benefits of moral consensus come with costs and hence that the collapse of respectability has improved the lives of some. Group cohesion requires the subordination of individual preference. It may not also require scapegoating, but it usually gets it: those who from choice or necessity plough a different furrow almost invariably find their lives made a misery. This is explicitly recognized in his discussion of homosexuality. Although the Christian tradition always offered ideological resources for those who wished to constrain and punish same-sex sexuality, Davies uses a displaced functions argument to make the point that variations in practical attitudes had much to do with concerns about national identity. Many church leaders and politicians used homosexuality as a convenient target for their deep anxieties about more subtle threats to the British “character” that was assumed to lie behind its national identity and hence prosperity and political power. The collapse of national pride allowed the emergence of Gay Pride: a serious blow to those who value moral cohesion above all else but a welcome change to libertarians.

An important theme in the explanation of the moral changes is the replacement of the idea of responsibility by what Davies calls “causalism.” For the moralist, behavior is the result of a choice made by an autonomous and discerning individual who could have behaved differently and hence who deserves either punishment or reward. Its alternative, causalism, is not a coherent consistent philosophy but a mix of utilitarianism and sociology. It defended changes to sociomoral laws on the grounds of reducing harm in the aggregate regardless of moral status. Importantly, for the contrast with the United States and many European countries, the relaxation of constraints was not defended on the basis of rights. The point was not that homosexuals had a right to bugger each other; it was that criminalizing the behavior created unnecessary suffering. The implicit sociology in causalism is the view that many of the activities criminalized and stigmatized by moral Britain were not the product of free choice at all but were, more or less, the result of circumstances.

Davies’ detailed analyses of the parliamentary debates over abortion, the abolition of the death penalty, or the legalization of homosexuality offer plenty of examples of causalist thinking triumphing over moralism, but I am not persuaded that the former is so new. Evangelical Christians who tried to tame the worst effects of industrialization were causalists up to a point. William Wilberforce, Elizabeth Fry, and Lord Shaftesbury promoted legislation to force social reform precisely because they believed that the poor could not be held responsible for their failure to respond to the saving gospel if they were forced to live and work in conditions so dreadful as to distract from concern over the soul.

We may also wonder if Davies does not make too much of the “dog that did not bark”: the absence in British liberal argument of a strong doctrine of basic human rights. His concentration on elite debate and textual analysis may have caused him to miss a powerful strand of demotic thought: such popular expressions as “she should mind her own business” may not be the currency of jurists and legislators, but the apparent differences in elite discourse between countries may hide similarities in the way that lay people think about behavior.

A third reservation concerns the final and only-briefly-introduced theme of the book: the idea that the introduction of alien European notions of entrenched human rights into Britain threatens “the existence of Britain as a nation that makes its own decisions about law and morality” (208). The recent Dutch and French referenda and the expansion of the European Union have put paid to any idea of an integrated federal European state, and if Davies wants to worry about sovereignty he would do better to look at economic and military power.

These minor reservations do not change the fact that this is an extremely well-written, thoroughly researched, and ably documented account of some of the major changes in culture that should be read by anyone who wishes to understand Britain and that provides a stimulating contrast with the culture wars of the contemporary United States.