In today’s globalised and instantly shareable social-media world, heads of state have to watch what they say, just as much – and perhaps even more so – than what they actually do. The rise of ‘Twiplomacy’ and the recent war of sound bites between Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton speak to this ever-increasing trend. With these witty refrains in mind, test your knowledge of world leaders and their retorts – do you know who said what?
The post How well do you know your world leaders? [quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.
Can solidarity exist? Or is it just a fantasy, a pious dream of the soft of heart and weak of brain? Gross inequality, greed and prejudice: these manifestations of selfishness which stalk our world may seem to invite our condemnation and to call for an alternative – but what if they are part of the natural order?
The post Solidarity: an art worth learning appeared first on OUPblog.
The week of the UK general election has finally arrived. After suffering weeks of incessant sound-bites, you will soon be free of political jargon for another few years. Phrases like “long-term economic plan” have been repeated so often that they have ceased to mean anything. From Margaret Thatcher to Harold Wilson, from Benjamin Disraeli to Winston Churchill, British prime ministers and politicians have uttered phrases that have echoed throughout history. How many of these famous political quotes do you remember?
The post How many of these famous political quotes have you heard before? appeared first on OUPblog.
By David Ellwood
“The Americanisation of British politics has been striking this conference season,” declared The Economist last autumn. “British politicians and civil servants love freebies to the US ‘to see how they do things,’” reported Simon Jenkins in The Guardian in November. Among the keenest such travellers is Michael Gove, the Education Secretary. Talking to the Daily Telegraph in February 2014, Gove spoke of the entrepreneurial spirit he found in California, and how his contacts with Microsoft and Google were helping him bring the skills of Silicon Valley to Britain. Perhaps Gove simply didn’t know how many UK governments of recent decades have journeyed along the same road, with the same aims. When Chancellor, Gordon Brown was tireless in his efforts to get British business “to rival America’s entrepreneurial dash,” as he told the same Daily Telegraph in December 2003, with speeches, conferences, educational programmes and other gestures, including visits from stars such as Bill Gates and Alan Greenspan.
One of the resources the British governing class most often turns to in its search for a successful, competitve identity for their country is ‘America’. Not American policy or money of course, not even that ‘Special Relationship’ which London clings on to so forlornly. Instead it’s an inspirational version of the United States: a source of models, examples, energies, ideas, standards; an invoked America whose soft power influence and prestige never fade. It is a form of virtual political capital which governments from Thatcher to Cameron feel they can draw on to compensate them for all their frustrations in Europe, their humiliations in the wider world and the intractability of their problems at home.
Overlooked by all the commentators without exception, there has long been an American question in Britain’s identity debate. It has not been put there by artists, experts, army officers, sports personalities or even Rupert Murdoch. It has been imported systematically and with great persistence by the governments of the last thirty years, and with it they have brought a series of possible answers. The underlying purpose has been to solve the identity crisis by way of ceaseless efforts to ‘modernise’ the nation, to renew its democracy but also to raise its ranking in those league tables of world competitiveness which the land of Darwin takes so seriously, and — of course — to distinguish it from everything supposedly going on in the European Union. Where better than America to find inspiration and encouragement for this permanent revolution of change the governing class repeatedly insists on?
A visionary image of the United States was central to Margaret Thatcher’s political revolution of the 1980s. As she told a Joint Session of Congress in 1985: “We are having to recover the spirit of enterprise which you never lost. Many of the policies you are following are the ones we are following.” Employment policy was one of the first examples, with reforms explicitly modelled on Reaganite ideology and experience. Even the wording of legislation was directly copied. Under Thatcher, Blair and Brown, certain public sectors, in particular the school and university systems, were reformed again and again in the hope of hooking them up to the motor of economic growth in the way their equivalents were thought to function in the United States. Since the 1980s, the Home Office has been the most zealous of departments in importing American methods and innovations. Simon Jenkins says: “An American friend of mine spent much of his time showing British officials around New York’s police department after its recent success in cutting crime.” Labour’s recent prime ministers were both enthralled by America’s examples. Gordon Brown proposed that school children should swear allegiance to the Union Jack, that there be a British Fourth of July, and a museum celebrating great documents of British democracy. Blair and Brown were the ones who started introducing American private health care firms into the running of the NHS.
David Cameron has followed the American path laid down by Thatcher, Blair, and Brown with zeal and ambition at least equal to theirs. The Tory foreign policy platform for the 2010 election was written by a Brit sitting in the Heritage Foundation in Washington. Just as the outgoing Labour administration created a British Supreme Court, the incoming coalition has set up a new National Security Council, with a National Security Adviser. In November 2012 the country was called upon to elect its first police commissioners, and there was talk of a single school commissioner. Now the Prime Minister talks of life sentences really meaning life in prison. All of this is based on American precedents. But Cameron’s affiliations in America seem to be deepest in parts of California where even Tony Blair did not reach, in particular the Google Corporation. A featured speaker at Google Zeitgeist conferences, Cameron is said to believe that the internet revolution as configured by Google, “meshes with the modern conservative mission – flattening hierarchies and empowering people…” Across Silicon Valley, Cameron and his strategists see a land where “a dynamic economy meets the family-friendly work-place…where hard-headed businessmen drink fruit smoothies and walk around in recycled trainers,” as an admiring journalist put it.
The evidence of the last 40-odd years suggests that in their failure to invent a generally agreed moral theme or narrative of change for their society, the British governing class clings to the America of their imaginations to fill the void. Not because the creed of Americanism as such, far less American politics as currently displayed, can provide the cohesiveness required but simply because US experience over time appears to show how a uniquely powerful machine of national pride and aspiration, embodied in institutions, rituals, stories, and proclaimed values, can keep a multicultural nation glued together and provide ever-lasting hope of renewal. With its exceptional levels of child poverty, social inequality and numbers of people in jail, the governments of the last 30 years may not have got the Americanised Britain they dreamed of. But this has not discouraged them. After all, Ministers know that their enthusiasms can always count on a far warmer reception across the Atlantic than anywhere else in the world, including in Britain itself.
David Ellwood is Senior Adjunct Professor of European Studies at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Bologna Center. He is the author of The Shock of America: Europe and the Challenge of the Century. His first major book was Italy 1943-1945: The Politics of Liberation (1985) then came Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America and Postwar Reconstruction (1992). The fundamental theme of his research — the function of American power in contemporary European history — has shifted over the years to emphasize cultural power, particularly that of the American cinema industry. He was President of the International Association of Media and History 1999-2004 and a Fellow of the Rothermere America Institute, Oxford, in 2006. Read more from David Ellwood on OUPblog.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only current affairs articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: Supreme Court of the United States. By US Capitol. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
The post America and the politics of identity in Britain appeared first on OUPblog.
Knopf will publish the first volume of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher‘s authorized biography on May 21.
Margaret Thatcher: From Grantham to the Falklands will be the first of two books written by journalist Charles Moore. The $35 hardcover will be 912 pages long with 24 pages of photographs. Knopf plans a first printing of 100,000 copies. Here’s more from the release:
Drawing on an extraordinary cache of letters to her sister Muriel, Moore illuminates Thatcher’s youth, her relationship with her parents, and her early romantic attachments, including her first encounters with Denis Thatcher and their courtship and marriage. Moore depicts her determination and boldness from the very beginning of her political career and gives the fullest account of her wresting the Tory leadership from former prime minister Edward Heath at a moment when no senior figure in the party dared to challenge him. He writes about Thatcher’s close relationship with Ronald Reagan and her contentious relationship with Alexander Haig. The book also explores in great detail the obstacles and indignities that Thatcher encountered as a woman in what was still overwhelmingly a man’s world.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
By Peter W. Sinnema
Self-help isn’t what it used to be. At least, its early renditions were cast in a style alien to the contemporary ear.
The concept was first named (and voluminously expounded) by Samuel Smiles in his 1859 best-seller, Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance. Erstwhile apothecary, railway secretary, newspaper editor, and biographer, Smiles’ birth in Haddington, Scotland marks its bicentennial on December 23. If this populist Victorian sage is worth remembering for anything, it must be for his original self-help book, translated into Dutch, French, German, Italian, Danish, Japanese, Croatian, Czech, Arabic, Turkish, and various native languages of India within his own lifespan, and purchased by more than a quarter-million readers by the time of the author’s death in 1904.
Smiles’ own moral and professional diligence embodied the cardinal virtue of his homespun philosophy: perseverance. He outlined his gospel of “energetic individualism” in refreshingly simple terms, encouraging humble mechanics and beleaguered artisans to own and cultivate the “power of self-help, of patient purpose, resolute working, and steadfast integrity” as they struggled to improve their lot in the new age of mass industry. Smiles promoted self-help as practiced or habitual independence, a disciplined husbandry of the inner man “effected by means of … action, economy, and self-denial.”
Given that Smiles published his aphoristic opus at a time when the nascent welfare state was represented by the grim apparatus of the workhouse—that infamously unpleasant asylum for the destitute reorganized under the oppressive Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834—present-day readers may be taken aback by the animosity with which Smiles condemned all “help from without”: states and statutes could do nothing to “make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober.” Smiles denied the power of institutions to ameliorate individual vice and ignorance, and in anticipation of Margaret Thatcher’s notorious declaration that “there is no such thing as society,” he regarded nations as nothing more than aggregates of individual conditions. The remedy for social evil and decay thus resided “not so much in altering laws and modifying institutions, as in helping and stimulating men to elevate and improve themselves by their own free and independent individual action.”
Smiles ran with his self-help idea for some forty years, enjoying social and commercial success with books on related themes such as Character (1871), Thrift (1875), and Duty (1880). Dying only three years after the state funeral of Queen Victoria, Smiles was quickly typecast as a spokesman for the worst hypocrisies of his era. In his socialist masterpiece The Ragged-Torusered Philanthropists (1906), Robert Tressell lambasted Self-Help as bourgeois propaganda “suitable for perusal by persons suffering from almost complete obliteration of the mental faculties,” while more recently E. J. Hobsbawm added Smiles to his list of “self-made journalist-publishers who hymned the virtues of capitalism” (The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848: 1961). Surely these are justifiable indictments of a man whose best-known work opens with the parsimonious bromide, “Heaven helps those who help themselves”!
Before we relegate Smiles’ invocation of self-mastery and laborious endurance to the dustbin of history, however, we’d do well to recall the singular contribution made by his account of “indefatigable industry” to our contemporary culture of self-help. True, Smiles’ highly repetitive and at-times cumbrous tribute to the “spirit of self-help” can read like a naïve, even perverse plumping of mere doggedness in the face of a hostile world. But then, repetition is of decisive rhetorical importance for Smiles, just as it is for any effective self-help author of the twenty-first century.
Smiles’ secular hagiography of “labourers in all ranks and conditions of life, cultivators of the soil and explorers of the mine, inventors and discoverers, manufacturers, mechanics and artisans, poets, philosophers, and politicians” derives its affective grit, its capacity to inspire and reform, from iterative structure. Self-Help’s biographical exemplars (there are literally hundreds of them, from Charles Abbott and Peter Abelard to John Ziska and Francesco Zuccarelli) are invariably martyred—to unsympathetic wives, malicious priests, ruthless state functionaries, failed technologies—but ultimately to the requisites of gripping narrative and readerly pleasure. In the end we want to emulate these suffering stalwarts because, as Smiles himself pointed out in his revised 1866 preface to Self-Help, the redundant plotline of affliction-perseverance-success “proved attractive … by reason of the variety and anecdotal illustrations of life and character which it contains, and the interest which all more or less feel in the labours, the trials, the struggles, and the achievements of others.”
Even the most erudite self-help guru must embrace the compositional obligations of repetition and (auto)biographical exemplarity that originated with Smiles. Kathleen Norris’s moving exploration, at once recondite and unsentimental, of the acedia that grips our Western culture, the spiritual torpor that is self-help’s universal, symptomological object, is a case in point. Her study of the “restless boredom, frantic escapism, commitment phobia, and enervating despair that plagues us today,” driving millions to the bottle or the therapist’s office, acquires its poignancy from her insistence that the pressing question, “Why care?” can only be answered “by relating [her] personal history with acedia, telling stories from … infancy, childhood, and adolescence” (Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life: 2008). Norris’ self, exposed, diagnosed, and at least partly healed through the telling of personal history, is the modern-day version of Smiles’ paradigmatic, self-motivated individual in expectant pursuit of “elevation of character, without which capacity is worthless and worldly success is naught.”
Peter W. Sinnema is Professor of English at the University of Alberta. His teaching and research focuses on Victorian literature and culture. He is the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Self-Help by Samuel Smiles. A bestseller immediately after its publication in 1859, Self-Help propelled its author to fame and rapidly became one of Victorian Britain’s most important statements on the allied virtues of hard work, thrift, and perseverance.
For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only literature articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: By Samuel Smiles (d. 1904) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
The post Self-help isn’t what it used to be appeared first on OUPblog.
.jpg)
