Indignation is a powerful weapon. With it, the English empiricists saw off the continental system-builders: Comte, Hegel, Marx, Croce, Treitschke, Br… - J. C. D. Clark

Francis Fukuyama, that emblematic American commentator of the 1980s, gave only the last and most optimistic version of this benign intellectual isolationism. His vision of the irresistible triumph of American liberal capitalism around the world was normally read by Americans as an assurance that their victory would be bloodless. Everyone would soon largely agree with them... The most perceptive alternative analysis was that of the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington. His new model for international relations predicted a world divided into armed and antagonistic blocs on religious lines. Huntington's was the best argument, but it was Fukuyama who wrote the bestseller.

The joys and despairs not of romance but of house ownership are the staples of English conversation... Investment potential alone does not explain the cult status that house ownership occupies in the imaginations of the English: it has much older and more emotional roots. Not only do the English wish to own rather than rent, they own with a peculiar relish, and take a special delight in bricks and mortar which no financial asset of equal value could ever give. "An Englishman's home is his castle." This resounding phrase still echoes in our society.

Far from being uplifted by their history, the Scots have over many centuries been strikingly bad at maintaining and developing a useful sense of national identity. Worse, Scotland lost much of the self-image it once possessed. Medieval Scotland was a considerable achievement of dynastic politics over poverty and localism. It boasted four universities to England's two, and into the 16th century, Scottish culture was famous across Europe. This mental world of renaissance latinity sustained a Scots identity built around dynastic history and religion rather than the folk culture of Robert Burns. It was this which went disastrously wrong...
The Glorious Revolution, ardently espoused by Scots Presbyterians, began the break-up and suppression of this high culture of latinity, episcopalianism and dynastic legitimacy. With dour thoroughness, episcopalians and nonjurors were expelled from their posts as clergy, schoolmasters and academics, and were subjected to lasting and effective persecution.
Presbyterians hailed William III, and later the Hanoverians, as saviours of their religious and civil liberties; but, far more than in England, Scots were divided. Presbyterianism survived at the cost of sacrificing a national identity which had grown up in another mental world.