Like most things under threat today, our experience of it began with the Reformation. Medieval England was part of European Christendom: it never dev… - J. C. D. Clark

In any period, as we now see, we have been asked to believe that the rich are always getting richer, the poor always getting poorer, the middle class always rising, the aristocracy always about to disintegrate. The old scenario no longer convinces: it fails to identify and date the real transformations which did occur. Revisionist historians of the ancien regime in England, 1660–1832, being aware that "class" emerged as a terminology only in the last decade or so of their period, and then only as a minority dialect, looked back with incredulity and amazement on the Old Guard in the early-Stuart period, labouring to explain the English Revolution in terms of class conflict, of rising or declining classes, or the aspirations of a bourgeoisie.

The monarchy is not the only target: from right to left, across a spectrum from the police via the church to the BBC, such bodies seem to be valued chiefly as targets. Yet institutions such as these are peculiarly important in the social fabric of unrevolutionised Britain just as they are peculiarly unimportant in societies such as America that have had the slate wiped clean by a great social upheaval... [N]o nation can exist without some modest pride in its institutions and its achievements, and Everyman as well as the Prince has an interest in being free to feel at one with what he coolly and neutrally observes. Political correctness does to our national culture what the architecture of brutalism did to our urban landscape. The Prince was right again.

To attempt to write the history of liberalism before the 1820s is thus, in point of method, akin to attempting to write the history of the eighteenth-century motor car. There were, of course, forms of transport which performed many of the functions which the motor car later performed, the sedan chair among them. Yet to explain the sedan chair as if it were an early version of the motor car, and by implication to condemn it for failing so lamentably to evolve into the motor car, is to turn a modern error of scholarly method into a failure of men in a past society.
To stretch explanatory categories so far that they lose their specific reference and become mere holdalls for our ahistorical assumptions about the eternal nature of human motivation is to condemn us merely to explore the inner landscape of the assumptions and to deny us any perception of a need to locate those assumptions in time.