Englishness and the Study of Politics

The definition of "Englishness" has become the subject of considerable debate, and in this important contribution to Ideas in Context Julia Stapleton looks at the work of one of its most wide-ranging and influential theorists, Ernest Barker. Infused with a strong cultural sense of nationhood, Barker's writings influenced a broad nonacademic audience, and their subsequent neglect graphically demonstrates the fate of a certain vision of Liberal England in the generation after World War One. With, however, the erosion of a particular sense of Englishness, Barker's ideas have begun to assume renewed resonance.