This chapter explores the contradictions in Parnell’s political personality. Parnell emerged as a major political figure with a revolutionary aura. By the time of his death, many nationalists claimed to detect that he had, after all, a bias in favour of the Protestant landlord class from which he had sprung. There is no doubt that Parnell’s relationship with Katherine O’Shea, a woman with strong establishment connections, strengthened his conservatism, especially in the context in which the Land League movement, which he led, was losing momentum anyway. But this is not simply a matter of conjunctural transition but the emergence of underlying assumptions in Parnell’s mind which were present even in the most intense and heavy days of the Land War.

Strauss at the turn of the century was seen as an enfant terrible who used music as an instrument for candid, unsentimental, and realist explorations of the human experience. Although embraced by the public, critics attacked his works as self-indulgent; they found him glib and shallow, content with superficial drama punctuated by a desire to shock. After World War I, both the right and left dismissed his lush, hyperrealist aesthetic as a relic of a bygone era, one side lamenting that Strauss was too cosmopolitan and the other ignoring him as benignly irrelevant. When the preeminence enjoyed by radical modernism ended mid-century, a neglected historical reality came into view: the resilience of tradition. In that reassessment, Strauss’ innovations, with those of composers such as Pfitzner, Schrecker, Martinů, Korngold, Zemlinsky, Schoeck, and Braunfels, suggest an alternative formulation of the modern, one that helped define the trajectory of twenty-first-century music.

Kant developed an understanding of justice to enable free and equal citizens to coexist in ways that respected the moral status of each. Individuals owe each other the founding of states to coexist under public law that protects safety and integrity. An account of distributive justice is part of what we need to explain what sort of entity the state ought to be. But even though the modern concept had become available in the late eighteenth century, important intellectual movements organized around alternative responses to the social question arose roughly at that time. Rawls’s theory is a response to them that offers a substantial elaboration of the notion of social justice. Rawls does not merely defend one idea as central to distributive justice but integrates various approaches. Recognizing the breadth of the domain to which considerations of distributive justice apply makes it doubtful that a unitary criterion could guide distribution.

This chapter provides three regional case studies during 1945–65. Sheffield, selected for being after Hull the least religious city in the nation, shows the relentless power of an alienating evangelical and Nonconformist culture of the middle classes, which bombarded the working classes with middle-class solutions: teetotalism, Sabbatarianism, few pop music venues and contraceptive advice by middle-class volunteers. The result was, according to an influential interpretation by E. R. Wickham, the Anglican industrial missionary, proletarian and artisan alienation from the churches. Glasgow forms a contrast of the most highly religious industrial city in mainland Britain, but with a popular culture under aggressive licensing control, notably its public houses from which ‘civilising’ games, music, television and attractions for women were banned. Sexual culture was made as difficult as possible. Lastly, the Isle of Lewis shows a puritanical anti-alcoholic culture, based on the most orthodox of Calvinist churches, within which, despite overt conformity, there were notable attempts at popular resistance, including organised lawbreaking.

In this conclusion to the book, the author reflects on the outcome of the battle for Christian Britain, the decay of conservative Christian moral vigilantism and the rise of liberalism and progressivism in medical and moral law. The evidence demonstrates that it is simplistic to centre the leadership role for moral change upon London when the provincial case studies reveal rapid, singular and in some ways pioneering change taking place a considerable distance from the metropolis. The book also shows up the fallacy of thinking of mid-century change as a wholly harmonious transition from conservative to liberal Christianity. Rather, the complex pattern of contests, fought both in the public sphere and in a few cases (as with the demise of the Public Morality Council) in private, were vigorous ideological confrontations, generating considerable irascibility which to a certain extent survives into the early twenty-first century. Some intriguing outcomes of the contests are discussed, but, overall, the moral conservatives lost the battle for Christian Britain and left a dominant secularity.

What impact did the Scottish Enlightenment have on the American founding? Given the variegated, feisty composition of the Scottish Enlightenment, this chapter resists the idea that that movement had any single, unequivocal effect on America. It instead surveys the rich array of ways in which Scottish thought found its way into America and then examines a series of interactions between particular Scottish thinkers and particular American activists. What was Frances Hutcheson’s influence on Thomas Jefferson? Did David Hume or Adam Smith have a greater influence on Madison? What lessons did various American educational leaders take away from Thomas Reid’s response to David Hume? By looking in detail at these three cases, the chapter attempts to convey the flavour, as well as the content, of the reception of Scottish philosophy in America.