The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (review)

The title of Peter Mandler's new book made me worry a bit: as far as histories of ideas go, "from Burke to Blair" promises not merely decline but bathos. And indeed, Mandler makes the Blairite invocation of national character seem even more nauseating than Margaret Thatcher's. No doubt the subtitle was crafted by publishers eager to attract a crossover readership. Far from being a breezy anecdotal survey, The English National Character offers a strong, revisionary narrative of the modern British discourse about national identification and its accessory terms, including not just character but race and culture. The book evolved, writes Mandler, from a "slightly surly conviction that existing literature had oversimplified British ideas about 'nation', starting with the idea of 'heritage'" (243). He seeks to do justice to those ideas by applying historical and analytic specificity to one of them, national character, by which he means the association of nationality with a set of psychological traits, a personality type. Some of us on the literary and cultural wing of the humanities have tended to use the term rather loosely, mixing it up with other terms such as "national identity." National identity, Mandler shows, is a much more recent rubric, mobilized in the 1960s as a flexible alternative to the by-then calcifying trope of character (while the currency of "heritage" dates from the late Thatcher years). No less historically specific, if longer-lasting, English national character began to cohere in the debates around the 1832 Reform Bill. One hundred and seventy-five years later, it has more or less decomposed. If Burke articulated a concept struggling to be born, the promotional frenzies of the Blair regime rang its death-knell.

National character is available for analysis, then, as it occupies a determinate period of cultural modernity, from the aftermath of the French Revolution to the aftermath of World War II. Mandler convincingly distinguishes the equivalence of national consciousness with "the character of a people" from pre-modern patriotisms trained on the sovereign, law, or Parliament (25). In other words, national consciousness needed the conceptual body of "the people" and a statistical rather than allegorical typology to assume the form of character. The book's subtitle might mislead the reader into expecting Burke to be cast as the godfather of an essentially conservative discourse. Instead, Mandler argues, national character was largely the creation of radical and liberal ideologies, meant to locate virtue with the people and so justify democratic reform, in opposition to a Burkean conservativism that would continue to identify national virtue with leaders, traditions, and institutions throughout the nineteenth century. Conservatives carried forward the "civilizational" discourse of eighteenth-century Whig conjectural history, while the roots of the liberal idea of national character (with its racialist offshoots) went back to the radical Gothic theorists who promoted the idea of an ancient Saxon constitution. Only late in the nineteenth century did conservatives begin to "[annex] this idea when they found they had to reconcile themselves to mass democracy, and mass democracy to them" (213). National character enjoyed its heyday (and Mandler's argument becomes most nuanced) in the years from 1918 to 1945. Its demise is ascribed to the usual suspects: individualism, consumerism, globalization, post-imperial decline, the "break-up of Britain," etc.

Despite this perhaps too convenient closure, the book is generally admirable for its resistance to a straightforwardly directional history. Mandler tracks the unpredictable vicissitudes of national character as it morphs and fluctuates according to generation, event, and political climate. This contingent, untidy, back-and-forth conceptual movement is well rendered, as are the multiplicity and instability of the traits held to constitute national character at different times (and often at the same time), including the figure of the archetypal Englishman: the residual, early-Victorian John Bull, the douce "Little Man" of 1920s and 1930s newspaper caricature, or the gentleman, who...