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

Despite its dubious ancestry, the word "revolution" by now has a Pavlovian effect on some historians: applied to any event, it leads at once to eager expectations of radical structural change, profound discontinuity, a sweeping away of the old order. We may indeed wonder whether England has ever experienced a revolution in the extensive terms of the social scientists' definitions in the 1640s, 1688 or 1714, or even under the later impact of "Industry". How much was destroyed in the Civil War? Apart from the large extent to which royalist peers and gentry retained their estates, local studies suggest the widespread and deeply rooted survival of Anglican religious loyalties and practices, even reinvigorated by the experience of persecution.

Like most things under threat today, our experience of it began with the Reformation. Medieval England was part of European Christendom: it never developed a unitary concept of sovereignty while the papacy effectively claimed jurisdiction over things that were God's. The break with Rome made the difference, and Henry VIII's Act in Restraint of Appeals contained the key phrase "the Realm of England is an empire"—that is, a jurisdiction from which there was no appeal... English lawyers responded to these events by devising a new attitude to the integrity of the state. Sovereignty was not a concept that had emerged in the Roman law tradition of the continent which continued for centuries to include a host of local and corporate privileges, immunities and independent jurisdictions. The English common law swept all these away and created a single, level playing field.

PCism...is about manipulating public doctrine for private ends. The form it takes depends on the nature of national values. In America, PCism derives from three unchallengeable ideals. The ideal of equality is used to promote the interests of women and racial minorities, often ending in very inegalitarian provisions such as quotas. Collective moral improvement is used selectively to deny people what will supposedly harm them, formerly alcohol, soon tobacco. The sanctity of the individual is interpreted to demand parity of esteem for unconventional lifestyles, especially homosexuality, and can be exploited in all sorts of ways through the new sexual harassment industry. In Britain, the pattern is different. None of these things have gained nearly as much ground as in the United States, but the same technique of making a sectional self-interest unchallengeable and using totalitarian methods to inhibit criticism is used in favour of regional cultures against metropolitan culture; used in our endlessly various class war by plebeians against patricians, and, especially, used in that strange crusade of denigration of our national institutions.