"These early British measures, like Bismarck's, illustrate the affinity between aristocracy and socialism. In 1904 Winston Churchill left the Tory party—the party of the aristocracy—for the Liberal party. As a member of Lloyd George’s cabinet he took a leading role in social reform legislation. The change in party, which proved temporary, required no change of principles—as it would have a half-century earlier, when the Liberal party was the party of free trade abroad and laissez-faire at home. The social legislation he sponsored, while different in scope and kind, was in the tradition of the paternalistic Factory Acts that had been adopted in the nineteenth century largely under the influence of the so-called Tory Radicals—a group drawn in considerable part from the aristocracy and imbued with a sense of obligation to look after the interests of the working classes, and to do so with their consent and backing, not through coercion. It is no exaggeration to say that the shape of Britain today owes more to Tory principles of the nineteenth century than to the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Milton Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (1980), pp. 99-100
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paternalistic_conservatism
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Paternalistic conservatism
9 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Paternalistic conservatism →
Related Quotes
"It is necessary to explain that when one speaks of the P.S.U.C. ‘line’ one really means the Communist Party ‘line’. T…"
"When Hitler] talked of National-Socialism what he really meant was military-Socialism, Socialism within a framework o…"
"[T]here were from the beginning two different strands within Socialism: one was the Right-wing, authoritarian strand,…"
"‘Conservative’ or ‘right-wing socialism’ can be defined as that type in which institutional aggression is employed to…"
"[C]onservative socialism and democratic socialism differ only in the motivations behind them and in the social group …"
"Even in the Social-Democratic Party, petty bourgeois Socialism has its defenders."
"From the moment Mussolini declared himself in favor of the war, Italian Socialists smeared him for his heresy. ... Fr…"
"Hence the final years of the 18th century saw a last desperate effort by the people to reimpose the older moral econo…"
"When women took to their piazzas and fields in Sicily in 1892–94, they focused their anger on those who directly chal…"
"Local economies gave shape to women’s protests, whether they were based in subsistence agriculture, market cultivatio…"