The death rattle of the landed order, like the death knell of capitalism, has been clearly heard dozens of times over the last hundred years and more. Yet there is a suspicion that the sounds have been mis-heard misinterpreted, for collapse and decomposition have never followed the symptoms of sickness and crisis. The Churchill family have played their part in crying ‘wolf’. In 1885 the 8th Duke of Marlborough, reflecting on ‘the organised agitation against the present ownership of land’, asserted that ‘were there any effective demand for the purchase of land, half the land of England would be in the market tomorrow’. He had inside information, the Blenheim estate being heavily indebted. A generation later his son, the 9th Duke, having helped stave off disaster by marrying Consuelo Vanderbilt, wrote in his turn to The Times. Under the heading ‘Old Order Doomed’ and the shock of the 1919 Budget, with its ‘confiscatory’ increase in death duties to a rate of 40 per cent on estates of £2 million and over, he stated that ‘[the] fortresses of territorial influence it is proposed to raze in the name of social equality’ and forecast that ‘the new tax must make it impossible for the heirs of these men—[the landed magnates]—to carry on the tradition’. Whether the heirs have carried on the tradition is debatable, but it is indisputable that in 1989 his grandson, now the 11 th Duke, is still seated in Blenheim Palace, surrounded by an estate of 11,500 acres. That may be no more than half the acreage owned by his great-grandfather but it is nevertheless a very large estate, and a principal reason for placing the IIth Duke among the 200 wealthiest people in Britain.

ANYONE who has attended an academic memorial service or a funeral has directly experienced the tradition of memorial preaching. I define this largely, and include any sermon about a dead person not a saint, whether or not it was given at a service linked to burial. I have not included purely secular addresses, though they are closely related. The subject lends itself to comparative treatment because memorial preachers of different periods have tried to bring out the significance of a person's life and death in the light of the religious and other values of the society to which both preacher and deceased belong. This provides the common basis without which comparative history is uninstructive.

THE ‘history of ideologies’ is now very much the vogue since Professor Quentin Skinner's fine study on The foundations of modern political thought. Whether or not one agrees with all aspects of his interpretation of Bodin—and Dr Parker might argue that it fails to draw out sufficiently the moral philosopher inside the jurist, while Professor Rose might prefer to stress the Judaizing tendencies of the theorist as a central preoccupation—it is a testament to the decisive impact made by Skinner on the history of political thought that no-one has challenged his new and radical approach. It is no part of the purpose of this paper to do so. Indeed, an understanding both of Bodin's predecessors and of the ideological conflict of the 1570s which influenced the drafting of the Six bookes of a commonweale (the title given to the République by its first English translator, Richard Knolles) is fundamental before any appreciation of the theorist can be made free from distortion. It is no use at all asserting that Bodin started from scratch, even on the issue of sovereignty, where he made his most original contribution. Bodin himself minimized his originality, basing his commentary on the powers historically enjoyed by French kings. The French king had traditionally regarded his authority as that of princeps legibus solutus, as an absolute ruler above the law. If the French king had been unable to do those things described by Bodin, in the view of that author, ‘il n'estoit pas Prince souverain’. Bodin also noted the contribution of the canon lawyers of the Middle Ages to the development of his political theory and remarked that Pope Innocent IV was he who best understood the nature of sovereignty.

THIS paper provides a preliminary and exploratory account of some of the ways in which eighteenth-century parliaments helped to shape English social policy. At the heart of this study lie a body of measures, several hundred strong, which came before Parliament in the course of the eighteenth century. These were general rather than local measures, applying to the country as a whole. They dealt with such matters as the relief and regulation of the poor, repression of vice (variously conceived), handling of insolvent (and therefore perhaps imprisoned) debtors, and prevention and punishment of crime.

WHEN rebellion broke out in England in 1642, the political nation had been, for over a decade, obsessed with medieval precedent and its gothic past. Practices and institutions which had seemed defunct revived, during the 1630s, into new and sometimes controversial life. Trial by combat was reintroduced in appeal of treason in 1631, and confirmed by the judges in 1637 as a legitimate legal procedure even in disputes of property; in 1636 a bishop was appointed to the Lord Treasurership for the first time since the reign of Edward IV; in 1639 England went to war without the summons of a Parliament for the first time since 1323; and the following year the Great Council of Peers met, for the first time since the reign of Henry VIII, to deal with a revolt of the Scottish nobility. At Court, the king was encouraging a gentleman of his Privy Chamber, Sir Francis Biondi, in his labours on a massive survey of the baronial struggles in England from Richard II to Henry VII—a work which, when it appeared in 1641 as The Civill Warres of England, was shortly to be endowed with a profoundly ironic topicality.

‘CIVIL philosophy’, Hobbes declares in an oft-quoted boast at the start of De Corpore, is a science ‘no older … than my own book De Cive.’ As Hobbes explains in De Cive itself, and later in Leviathan, the failure of all previous efforts has simply been due to their ‘want of method.’ The method hitherto followed, especially in the universities, has been to rely on the authority of selected writers and books. The universities, indeed, have come to rely so heavily on one particular writer that their teachings no longer deserve to be called philosophy, but merely Aristotelity. This approach, however, is nothing but ‘a signe of folly’, one that is ‘generally scorned with the name of Pedantry.’ The only scientific way of proceeding is to follow the methods of geometry, which requires its practitioners to ‘begin at settling the significations of their words’. Only by this means can we hope to avoid the insignificant speech of the Schoolmen, and thereby lay the foundations for a genuine science of political life. For ‘the foundation of all true Ratiocination is the constant Signification of words.’

The theme which I have been asked to consider refers to the whole of Europe, but the terms on which it has been defined made it clear that the focus of interest was still to lie in Britain. I shall bear that focus in mind.

After a brief review of the debate relating to entrepreneurship and culture in Britain in the late Victorian and Edwardian period, the period with which I shall be more specifically concerned, and a similarly cursory examination of the role of entrepreneurship in economic theory and in the writings of economic historians in recent decades, I shall turn to the main theme, entrepreneurship and its cultural setting in the decades before World War I in the rest of Europe. A return to the British problem will complete the paper.

DO ‘welfare states’ enhance or subvert economic enterprise, civic virtue, private moral character, the integrity of social life? Though these questions have a piquantly contemporary ring in modern British politics, they are nevertheless old quandaries in the history of social policy. Since the seventeenth century, if not earlier, practitioners, theorists and critics of public welfare schemes have argued for and against such schemes in contradictory and adversarial terms; claiming on the one hand that social welfare schemes would supply a humanitarian corrective to the rigours of a market economy; and on the other hand that they would support and streamline market forces by enhancing individual and collective efficiency. Similarly, for several hundred years models of civic morality which emphasize independence and self-sufficiency have jostled with alternative models which emphasize paternalism, altruism and organic solidarity. Few phases of social policy in Britain and elsewhere have not contained elements of more than one approach. Even the New Poor Law, notorious for its subordination to market pressures, nevertheless harboured certain residual anti-market principles and often lapsed into practices that were suspiciously communitarian; whilst Edwardian New Liberalism, famous for its philosophy of organic solidarism, in practice tempered social justice with the quest for ‘national efficiency’. These varying emphases have all been reflected in the fashions and phases of welfare state historiography—fashions and phases that appear to have been at least partly determined by the vagaries of prevailing political climate. Thus, in the aftermath of the Second World War, historians tended to portray the history of social policy as a series of governmental battles against private vested interests—battles in which the mantle of civic virtue was worn by an altruistic administrative elite, while civic vice was embodied in the motley crew of doctors, landlords, employers and insurance companies who viewed social welfare as a commodity in the market.

GENERAL medical practitioners are a dominant element within the medical workforce. They are the largest specialism, currently accounting for about two-thirds of the senior medical personnel employed by the National Health Service (NHS). They exert a strong political influence by virtue of their importance in the British Medical Association (BMA) and its complicated representative and negotiating machinery.

ABBOTS in politics were surely a medieval commonplace, one might be tempted to say: what have these two egregious examples, Wala of Corbie (826–34, ob. 836) and Bernard of Clairvaux (1115–53), to say to us which countless others could not also say? If my two were not unique, however, they were comparative rarities, in that they became involved in politics (if that is the right word), not because of their feudal obligations, nor because they sought to propagate monastic reform on the basis of the observance of their own monastery, nor again because they associated the glory of their own house with a particular cause or royal line, but avowedly for the sake of moral principle, incurring enmities in the process, and, cloistered monks as they were, acting to some extent against the interests and wishes of their own flocks. The monk-bishop was a common enough figure, and the greatest men of this type, pre-eminently Augustine of Hippo and Pope Gregory the Great, have given us profound thoughts about how contemplation could and should be kept alive amidst the cares of the active and pastoral life. But neither Wala nor Bernard became a bishop, and paradoxically the latter's widespread and non-institutionalised influence might have been diminished had he done so. As one of Bernard's biographers felicitously but ingenuously put it in recounting that the saint had actually refused many bishoprics, ‘from under the bushel of his humility he gave a greater light to the church than others raised to the chandeliers’.

WHY was the Mau Mau movement in colonial Kenya believed to be so evil? It was the horror story of Britain's empire in the 1950s. Less of a military or strategic threat, it was thought to be more atrocious than either the Communists in Malaya or the Cypriot EOKA. It has lived in British memory as a symbol of African savagery, and modern Kenyans are divided by its images, militant nationalism or tribalist thuggery. This essay explores some of these constructions of Mau Mau.