Politics and the people

This ambitious and provocative study provides a new narrative of nineteenth-century English political history. Based on extensive research the book draws on recent 'postmodern' critical theory to read a vast range of hitherto neglected oral, visual and printed sources, in an attempt to expand our conception of the politics of the period. Read in this way, nineteenth-century English politics resolved itself into a story about the struggle to define the nation's constitution, past, present and future. It suggests the existence of a popular strain of English libertarian politics, albeit one that was used in many different ways. However, the book is also about the erosion of the radical and democratic potential of both this libertarian tradition and the constitution. Ironically, the invention of England's liberal democratic constitution depended upon the demise of the democratic forms of popular politics which accompanied the ascendancy of print and organised mass party politics. Thus, despite the inclusion of many men within the constitution, politics became less (not more) democratic: a phenomenon which the author sees as pertinent for many struggling to live in, or to establish, liberal democratic constitutions in our own times.