| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,800,000)
Fiscal Year 2006: ¥1,300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,300,000)
Fiscal Year 2005: ¥1,500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,500,000)
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| Research Abstract |
The main purpose of the project is to examine and understand popular conservatism in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. The Primrose League, founded in 1883 by Randolph Churchill and his friends in the Conservative Party, can be regarded as by far the most important voluntary political society to popularize conservative political thinking among the working men, upon the activities and discourses of which the project has its main focus.
The success of the League could be chiefly explained in the following three ways. Firstly, what might be called the 'politics of pleasure', which the League vigorously developed, proved to be quite attractive to the working men. Secondly, the League's arguments against Irish Home Rule, clearly presented in a simple contrast between the good and the evil, was effective in mobilizing the working men. Thirdly, the League could rely on the active participation of women, who had not been thought to be responsible political citizens, by making it possible for them to be both political and feminine.
The political ascendancy of the Conservative Party during the period between 1886 and 1905 owed much to the phenomenon of popular conservatism, strongly promoted by the League. In order to understand the dynamics of British politics in the age of democracy, the examination of the League would be indispensable. My book published in December 2006 tries to assess the importance of the role played by the League in the transformation of British politics at the turn of the century.
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