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It is often assumed that 'Hayekian' or 'neoliberal' influences lay behind Conservative attacks on socialism in 1945 and subsequent calls to 'set the people free' in 1950 and 1951. This assumption has had consequences for our understanding of late-1940s Conservatism and for wider interpretations of post-war politics. Heeding recent calls to reconnect the inter-war and post-war parties and to pay closer attention to how opponents and contexts generate arguments, this article revisits senior Conservatives' rhetoric between 1945 and 1951 to break the link between neoliberal influence and freedom rhetoric. First, it argues that the rhetoric of 1945 was derived from a distinctly Conservative lineage of interwar argument and reflected strategies developed before the publication of F. A. Hayek's 'The Road to Serfdom'. Second, it demonstrates that senior Conservatives' emancipatory rhetoric in opposition after 1945 was neither a simple continuation of these themes nor primarily a response to the public's growing antipathy towards rationing and controls. Rather, such rhetoric was a complex response to Britain's immediate economic difficulties and the political challenges presented by austerity. Finally, the article sheds new light on the strategy that governed the party's campaigns in 1950 and 1951. Churchill and others' calls to 'set the people free' stemmed from a belief that the rhetorical opportunity lay in reconciling liberty with security. In that sense, the leadership had moved beyond begrudging compromises with the 'Attleean settlement' and was instead attempting to define a new identity within the parameters of the welfare state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

British abolitionist literature, much like abolitionist politics generally, struggled to imagine a post-emancipationist world in which freed Africans and former white slave owners could co-exist peacefully within the British Empire. In this essay, I will explore how Peter Newby’s The Wrongs of Almoona (1788) and William Hutchinson’s The Princess of Zanfara (1789) sought to resolve this racial tension by imagining freed African men reconciling with their white counterparts. Specifically, I will argue that to that end, these writers appropriate the conventions of “she-tragedy,” a dramatic genre that not only focuses on the plight of a female victim but also on rapprochement between male characters. However, this attempt to infuse “masculine” values of nobility, restraint, and egalitarian fraternity into abolitionist literature can provide only a partial response to anxieties over emancipation, since this racial rapprochement depends on first excising the presence of the African woman from the plantation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blackstone, in the last volume of his Commentaries in 1769, defined freedom of the press as merely 'laying no previous restraints upon publications, and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter [seditious libel] when published'. That 'criminal matter' included most criticism of government and its officials. Many neo-Blackstonians, most prominently the late Leonard Levy along with numerous other British and American scholars, argue that at the time of America's First Amendment and Fox's Libel Act '[e]vidence does not exist to contradict the assertion that [freedom of press] was used in its prevailing common law or Blackstonian sense to mean a guarantee against previous restraints' while allowing 'subjection to subsequent restraints for licentious or seditious abuse' (Leonard W Levy, Emergence of a Free Press 191 (OUP 1985). Levy and others assert that 'not even [Blackstone's] critics had questioned his narrow definition of a free press' and that '[n]ot one of the [British] libertarians' even discussed that 'seditious libel . . . was a crime', but instead 'accepted in substance the Blackstone--Mansfield definition'. Levy contended that belief that criminalisation of seditious libel conflicted with protection of freedoms of press and speech did not appear in Britain or America until the debates over each country's sedition laws in the last few years of the 1790s, long after the First Amendment and Fox's Libel Act.). This article reevaluates the understanding of freedoms of press and speech that existed when Blackstone claimed to summarise the common law. It describes the broad liberties articulated in English books and tracts at that time--not only those cited by Levy but ten times as many not noted by him--as well as in English newspaper essays and articles not considered by him. The conclusion is that the dominant understanding of liberties of press and speech in preserved publications, from the 1770s to the early 1790s, was an expansive meaning of those liberties and a belief that they conflicted with criminalising seditious libel. Only a declining minority, led by Crown judges, viewed those liberties in the narrow way Blackstone purported to summarise and that Levy ascribed to the supporters of Fox's Libel Act and to the framers of the First Amendment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies theories of self, of life history narration and specifically the ‘epiphanic moment’ and the ‘coherence system’ to explore the facility demonstrated by women in the oral history interview to display a cathartic reconstruction of the self as they recount their maturation in the years following the Second World War. It draws upon a series of life history interviews with a cohort of the post-war generation of British women for whom the educational and professional outlook was bright, enabling them to construct a lifestyle and outlook very different from that of their mothers. They founded lives upon a liberationist practice, but rarely upon liberationist ideology and movements. The article makes two key points. First, it reveals how individuals articulate selfhood within the framework of what has been described as the ‘late modern project of the self’. Second, it develops the theory of narrative coherence by exploring the strategies used by female interviewees to narrate a self in the context of a period of personal and societal change. Ultimately, it shows that this generation of women came to embrace a new model of autonomous womanhood predicated upon ‘self-worth, entitlement, self-propulsion and independence’, which set them free from the material and discursive constraints that had hobbled their mothers’ generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]