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What is a conservative disposition? And can it supply any insights into the UK's changing constitution? We offer answers to these questions by identifying core elements of a conservative disposition and exploring how it offers contingent guidance to public lawyers striving to make sense of a changing constitution. Our goal is to show why a conservative disposition remains relevant to public lawyers, in large measure because, rather than despite, the constitution is changing. We examine the disposition's relationship with change and review how a conservative disposition offers open-ended guidance on when to pursue change, how to pursue it, how much of it to pursue at any point in time and what reasons should motivate it. After evaluating arguments against the relevance of a conservative disposition to constitutional thought, we relate conservative arguments to two important proposals for constitutional reform: the withdrawal of the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights and a written constitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the final decades of the twentieth century, history in British higher education experienced major challenges that highlighted fundamental issues of educational purpose and value. As the hitherto private world of university history teaching and learning began to open up to public scrutiny, what emerged was a statement of what one subject representative body called 'the traditional standpoint of historians' on undergraduate history education. Drawing particularly upon evidence from national discipline consultations and recent rethinking of the representation and uses of tradition, this article argues that the appeal to the educational past was more complex than public statements suggested and that more critical scrutiny of history's educational traditions might play an important role in imagining pedagogic and professional futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the rhetoric of analytic philosophy in Great Britain. Among the characteristics of British analytic philosophers are their attempt to align their discipline with science and willingness to invoke the additional prestige of tradition. The article points out that philosophers who recognize that philosophy was not science are liberated intellectually. Philosophers are commended for their increasing interest in attempts to situate their discipline historically.

In 1665, Spinoza thought about what, in the western tradition, has been called philosophy: their forms have established specific context about how the knowledge of things and the men must be. The war between England and Holland, in 1665, as well as the writing --in process-- of the Theological-Political Treatise, allowed him to distinguish between philosophy and philosophizing. The last one requires the work of shaping an exposition which includes both the explanation of ideas product of reason, as well as those derived from the passions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author analyzes the conflicts over the spoken English in the BBC Radio Four in the 1970s. The author said that more traditionalist attitude towards language existed in one corner of the BBC. The article also argues that this traditionalism drew its strength both from outside forces of conservatism and John Reithian ethos within the Corporation, and this had the effect of both delaying and moderating the degree of creative and verbal freedom. The author opines that the range of language on air continued to widen as more and more regional voices and outside contributors took to the microphone. The author concludes that the broadcasters were attuned more strongly than ever to the tastes and obsessions of listeners as a result of ongoing debate over language.

This article suggests that recent predictions of the death of British conservatism are based upon a misunderstanding of the doctrine. Examination of conservative thinking in the twentieth century indicates that essential to the doctrine is not a Whiggish endorsement of prudent statecraft but a commitment to inequality. However, Conservatives have often drawn a veil over this commitment by depicting the sound polity as one of ordered liberty and by representing their doctrine as a form of naturalism. An understanding of the doctrine suggests that British and American conservatisms are not so far apart as is often claimed, and also that the former is unlikely to have reached its 'endgame'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the survey data on seven countries (France, the former West Germany, Great Britain, the United States, Japan, Italy, and the Netherlands), unidimensional scales of Traditionalism, Materialism, and Sense of Alienation were constructed. It was demonstrated that the effects of individual background variables such as sex, age, and educational level vary across countries and across attitudinal dimensions. Next, using Japan as a reference category, the effect of being in each of the other six countries on the three scales was tested. Finally, in order to explore what aspects of "country" that affect individuals' attitudes, the effects of macrocontext (the economic condition, religious environment, and polity type) were tested. It was found that the macro characteristics of a country is as significant as individual background variables in explaining individual attitudes. Further work in theoretical and empirical understanding of the mechanisms in which macro context affects individuals' attitudes is suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opinion. Focuses on postmodernism in academic history in Great Britain. Details on the battle between postmodernist and traditionalists in relation to history; Reference made to the concept of objectivity; Factors which influence the writing of history; Information on postmodernist theories of history; Opposition to the relativism of postmodernism.

The Asian British and the indigenous British have different underlying attitudes to family living and family structure and to the rights and obligations of individuals within the family. The data presented here were part of a survey covering many aspects of the experiences and attitudes of Asian parents born in the country of origin, and their young people now aged 18 - 21 years and resident for at least 10 years in Britain (120 families). A British control group was used where comparisons were relevant, as on this issue. Differences in traditionalism or 'old-fashioned attitude' were hypothesized between generations and between ethnic groups and were found. Quotes from respondents themselves are used to discuss and to illustrate the differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a stable society one would expect political socialization to be an education in traditionalism. In a society where the political temperature is low, one would expect to find the young being effectively de-politicized, learning to accept and endorse the status quo, to assimilate the orientations to politics of their elders, and in particular to share with them certain consequential perceptions of what are and are not the salient issues of politics. In Great Britain, the majority leave school at 15 years, ignorant of workings of the political system and content to be so. The minority who stay on are carefully inducted into received constitutional orthodoxies and a view of their social environment that wholly inhibits critical thinking a naive pragmatism that assumes that British institutions work and they work as satisfactorily as they could reasonably be. What is striking about British youth in the past decade is the growth of a youth culture that has imposed a socially marginal and distinctively non-adult identity on the young in return for few economic and recreational opportunities.