Books in Brief: The Whig World

THE term “Whig” is a pregnant one, but with what exactly? Some have treated Whiggism as a set of doctrines: Friedrich Hayek, rejecting “conservatism,” called himself instead an “Old Whig.” Others have treated it as a personality archetype: Thomas Jefferson wrote that the terms “Whig and Tory belong to natural as well as to civil history,” for they “denote the temper and constitution of mind of different individuals.” Still others have questioned the very idea of Whiggism, and argued that no such thing ever really existed.

To rescue us from confusion comes Oxford don Leslie Mitchell, who has distilled a lifetime of scholarship in a single volume, The Whig World. Mitchell defines the Whig not ideologically or temperamentally, but sociologically: The Whigs, he argues, were a distinct (and exclusive) social class. Nothing like them has existed before or since: the opulent, ancestorworshipping, morally libertine, politically unpopular aristocrats who championed science, progress, reform, property, and, above all, liberty. Mitchell elucidates these characteristics in ten chapters, brimming with winsome anecdotes about such Whigs as Lord Byron and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. For the layman, The Whig World brings the fusty abstraction “Whig” to life.

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Austin W. Bramwell

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THE term “Whig” is a pregnant one, but with what exactly? Some have treated Whiggism as a set of doctrines: Friedrich Hayek, rejecting “conservatism,” called himself instead an “Old Whig.” Others have treated it as a personality archetype: Thomas Jefferson wrote that the terms “Whig and Tory belong to natural as well as to civil history,” for they “denote the temper and constitution of mind of different individuals.” Still others have questioned the very idea of Whiggism, and argued that no such thing ever really existed.

To rescue us from confusion comes Oxford don Leslie Mitchell, who has distilled a lifetime of scholarship in a single volume, The Whig World. Mitchell defines the Whig not ideologically or temperamentally, but sociologically: The Whigs, he argues, were a distinct (and exclusive) social class. Nothing like them has existed before or since: the opulent, ancestorworshipping, morally libertine, politically unpopular aristocrats who championed science, progress, reform, property, and, above all, liberty. Mitchell elucidates these characteristics in ten chapters, brimming with winsome anecdotes about such Whigs as Lord Byron and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. For the layman, The Whig World brings the fusty abstraction “Whig” to life.