| Review of: | Warfare State Britain, 1920-1970 by David Edgerton |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Michael Rustin |
| Reviewed in: | The Political Quarterly |
| Date accepted online: | 02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 77, Issue 4, Pages 501-520 |
Britain's scientific-military complex
Edgerton's account of why the 'Warfare State' has not been given its due place in the understanding of modern Britain is a complicated even quirky one, and his quarrels with rival arguments make it not always easy to follow. He wishes to clarify the influential role that scientists and technologists have played in British economic development, with the active support of government, and he sees this as having been obscured by a number of misrepresentations. The author is Professor at the Centre for the History of Science and Medicine at Imperial College London, and it is from this location, close to practical science, that he seeks to establish the contribution of scientists to modern British society and state.
Edgerton is highly critical of what he calls 'the declinist thesis', the idea that became fashionable during the 1960s that British was in a long-term economic decline, and that this was in part the consequence of the longstanding bias within British culture and government against the industrial and the technical, and the higher value instead ascribed to literary and classical culture. Edgerton notes how this thesis ideologically underpinned the 'white heat of technological revolution' agenda of the 1964 Wilson government, and how useful it was in constructing antagonism to the allegedly 'aristocratic' and 'gentlemanly' hegemony of the Conservatives of the time. He acutely notes the wide assent that this thesis achieved in this period (which stretched from reforming liberals and technocrats to Marxists such as Perry Anderson), but he argues nevertheless that the thesis was essentially false, and was self-serving for its technocrat advocates.
Edgerton is scathing about C. P. Snow's 'Two cultures and the scientific revolution' argument of 1959, which he notes propelled him into office in the subsequent Wilson government. He rather unexpectedly argues that F. R. Leavis' fierce attack on Snow's thesis, as the shallow work of a vulgar technocrat who showed himself unqualified to speak for science, was correct, notwithstanding the fact that Leavis was writing as a defender of the value of English literature. Edgerton also takes note of the perceptiveness of another critic of the conventional wisdom, noting Edward Thompson's insistence, in his argument in 'The Peculiarities of the English' against the Anderson-Nairn thesis of bourgeois failure in England, on the robustness of the British empirical scientific tradition. Edgerton also notes appreciately that Thompson's critique of 'exterminism' (a new military-industrial mode of production developed on both sides of the Cold War) recognised the extent to which Britain was indeed a 'Warfare State'. Edgerton's hostility to the 'declinist' thesis and its misrepresentation of British science leads him to appreciate critiques by its most radical antagonists. He is so hostile to the 'declinist' thesis that he develops the notion of 'anti-history' to characterise the work of many intellectuals who, in their advocacy of science, in reality obscured its entrenched and solid influence throughout the period. Among those so characterised as 'anti-historians' are C. P. Snow and the physicist and Nobel laureate P. M. S. Blackett, the military historians Liddell-Hart and Fuller (for their critique of the alleged anti-technological outlook of the prewar army), Christopher Freeman, Martin Wiener and Corelli Barnett. Few rival contributors to these debates seem to go unscathed.
Edgerton is critical not only of the 'declinist' thesis and 'anti-history', but also of the misleading emphasis given to the role of universities in the discussion of science policy. He points out that whereas in the United States, during the Second World War and subsequently, much important science was 'contracted out' to university research institutes, in Britain this was not the case, university departments being primarily assigned to the work of teaching and thus of providing qualified recruits for research that would be undertaken in the direct employment of the state. He also holds that leading socialist scientists, such as P. M. S. Blackett, with their ideological commitment to planning and the role of science, also misrepresented the actual history of science policy, in part to legitimise their own key role as advisers to government. Edgerton's sympathies are much more with the less visible cadres of practical scientists who managed the research programmes that were undertaken during this period than with the public advocates of science and technology. The deficit in research and development expenditure that the 'declinists' held in the 1960s to be responsible for British economic decline has been shown not to have existed, he says.
However, Edgerton is more successful in his critique of the misrepresentations of science and its relation to war in Britain than he is in developing the concept of the 'Warfare State' as an alternative description of the British polity, in contrast to that of the 'welfare state', for example. He is stronger on particulars, and as an empirical critical of ideological arguments, than he is as a builder of new social theory. The underdevelopment of his concept of the 'Warfare State' may also be a consequence of the dates (1920-70) at which he chooses to begin and end his narrative. Since the latter date, after a period of apparent demilitarisation, the influence of military identifications and commitments on the British polity has repeatedly made itself evident. The Falklands War of 1982 rescued the fortunes of the then highly unpopular Thatcher government, and was followed by Britain's participation in the Gulf War in 1991. The New Labour governments that have been in office since 1997 have been just as committed to the active use of arms as the Conservatives had been, and Blair has adopted the role of war leader with no less fervour than Thatcher. One notes too the continuing British public interest, if not obsession, with the events of the Second World War, and the high prestige in which the armed services (in contrast to politicians and governments) are held by the public. The crisis of esteem and influence that has afflicted many of Britain's traditional elite institutions-the monarchy, the peerage, the Anglican church and even the judiciary, which is now having to defend itself against the executive-seems to have uniquely been escaped by the military, whose prominent spokespersons give the impression of belonging to a fully modernised organisation, and who often seem to be in better touch with reality than the politicians who send them on their various missions.
Blair's commitment to a new liberal imperialism ('The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of Northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: they too are our cause,' he told the Labour party conference in October 2001) and his close alliance with the Bush administration, which he believes underpins this, suggests a broader continuity in the British polity with an imperial role that, despite decolonisation, is continually being reinvented rather than renounced. This idea of Britain's global role ensures the continuing importance of war-making capacity to British policy-makers, and suggests that the significance of Edgerton's idea of a 'Warfare State' has a broader resonance than the field of arguments (concerned largely with the relations between arms economy and state) that he advances for it. If one sees a British military-imperial orientation, however 'modernised' it may have become, as still mainly the inheritor of 'landed' rather than bourgeois traditions, there may even be something more to be said for the 'declinist' thesis, which lamented the persistence of aristocratic culture in British society, than Edgerton allows.
Edgerton's well-documented account of the place of warfare within the British state invites further rethinking of its nature and evolution.