What kind of democracy was Britain in the twentieth century? This question has preoccupied Ross McKibbin throughout a long and productive scholarly career. Its animating presence is felt in his early studies of the Labour Party and his much-celebrated essays on working-class politics and culture, as well as in his landmark Classes and Cultures: England 1914–51 (1998) and Parties and People: England, 1914–1951 (2010). This latest collection of essays, some previously published, some freshly written, adds further shade and texture to the distinctive account of recent British history for which McKibbin has become so well known in the field.

Democracy and Political Culture is organized around an eclectic series of “case studies,” as McKibbin describes them. The volume opens with reflections on the figure of the “rentier” in the thought of John Maynard Keynes, a pen-portrait of the diarist and MP Harold Nicolson, and a discussion of A. J. Cronin's best-selling 1938 novel, The Citadel. It continues with an expansive survey of the two-party system and a pair of essays on sport, before closing with a comparative analysis of politics and social relations in Britain and Australia. Each chapter is self-contained but linked, as McKibbin explains, by themes that will be familiar to faithful readers of the earlier works.

The first three essays deal, in different ways, with the fading of what McKibbin terms Asquithian Liberalism, by which he means the tradition of self-consciously progressive rule by an upper middle-class elite that dominated Edwardian politics. Keynes and Nicolson were both discombobulated by the precipitate decay of this tradition in the years following the First World War. Politics, they felt, had become unbalanced. With Liberalism in retreat as an electoral force, politicians and voters were circling a void that had once represented “the interests and capacities of the educated class and the nation as a whole” (3).

Keynes is interesting to McKibbin because he asked many of the questions that McKibbin has posed and sought to answer in his own historical work. Who were the winners and losers of the reordered social and political landscape that emerged between the wars? And how should we group them—land versus capital, finance versus industry, the salaried versus the waged, savers versus borrowers? To what extent did the party system capture or clarify these shifting social cleavages? Why did efforts to manage the economy create such a muddle, and why could not policy makers find a way out? As a self-styled economic radical, Keynes thought he saw these problems more clearly than his contemporaries, be they Treasury officials entranced by fiscal orthodoxy, Conservative ministers pursuing measures that were “deeply rooted in our general way of doing things,” or tribal class warriors on the left (18). Yet the “rentier,” McKibbin argues, is better understood as a product of Keynes's politics than of his economic theory. Ill-defined and impossible to map onto any actually existing group or interest, Keynes's preoccupation with this figure indicated his wider struggle to reconcile a conflictual model of society with a deeply engrained faith in liberal reformism.

Harold Nicolson's fruitless quest for a political home after resigning from the diplomatic service in 1929 stemmed, as McKibbin sees it, from the same dilemma. As a protectionist, Nicolson saw no future with the Liberals, flirted with Oswald Mosley's New Party and was returned in 1935 as National Labour MP for West Leicester. Yet he never felt at ease with the working-class electorate or the middle-class Conservatives whose votes had secured him the seat, especially in light of his ever-growing opposition to Neville Chamberlain's foreign policy. McKibbin shows that Nicolson's ambivalence towards the established parties was social and cultural as much as it was ideological. He disliked businessmen (“their faces are heavy and hard and their voices thick and loud” [33]) and heartily disapproved of “toffs” evacuating their children privately to North America after 1939. Of the working class, Nicolson wrote in 1931 that it had “no sense of fair play, and no common sense” (40), and, like Keynes, he detected an inflexibility of thought among the trade unionist leadership. (He also expressed, although McKibbin does not mention it, highly derogatory views of female voters.) The war changed Nicolson's mind on much of this, encouraging in him “a kind of patriotic social democracy” (42) that was expressed though enthusiastic support for the Beveridge report and Nicolson's decision, in 1947, to bite the bullet and join the Labour party (although not without noting cattily in his diary the “comradely fifth rateness” of some of its grassroots supporters (44).

Cronin's The Citadel, which sold more copies any other hardback novel of the 1930s and is the subject of McKibbin's third essay, tackles similar problems, although differently framed. As a semiautobiographical medical drama, the novel describes a society in which the wrong ideas hold sway and the wrong people are in charge. The “new man,” personified by the forward-thinking and socially mobile protagonist Andrew Manson, is kept down by the prejudice and defensiveness of a corrupt medical establishment. For Cronin's left-leaning, middle-class readership, the values of “expertise, technological advance, and social disinterestedness” (70) marked the path forward, sweeping away a creaking political structure ill suited to solve modern problems. This vision had its moment in the late 1930s but was quickly eclipsed by Labour's postwar election victory, which enthroned a social democracy closely identified with the working class and its institutions. As McKibbin shrewdly observes, Keynes's intellectual stature ensured that his ideas would endure, but Cronin, like Nicolson, found himself on the losing side of the argument, even if both men had managed to ask some of the right questions between the wars.

The chapters on the two-party system and Australia and Britain elaborate more loosely on these characteristically McKibbinite themes, but the remaining two essays take an unexpected turn. “Sport between ‘Play’ and ‘System’” is an erudite and extended reflection on the conceptual difficulties of defining sport and interpreting its historical significance. “Sport as Religion and Emotion” is a dazzling piece of social and cultural analysis that ranges from contemporary artistic representations of the footballer as God to the mourning rituals surrounding sporting disasters. It is perhaps regrettable that McKibbin does not apply some of the methodological inventiveness and historiographical range on display here to the earlier chapters, which cite hardly any scholarship published in the last decade, apart from McKibbin's own. In this respect, Democracy and Political Culture marks the continuation of an ongoing and somewhat eclectic conversation between McKibbin and his earlier scholarly selves. As ever, however, it is one worth listening to attentively.