Irish Nationalism and British Democracy

by Eric Strauss

Originally published in 1951, this study of the Irish nationalist movement examines social forces behind the ceaseless agitation in Ireland from the 18th to the 20th Century and gives an account of the influence of the Irish question on the political development of Great Britain. It analyses the forces which moulded Irish and English history during the period 1801-1921. In particular it shows in what way Irish problems affected the important developments of English history during the last century and a religious toleration, the Great Reform Bill, the Repeal of the Corn Laws, the growth of the modern party system, and the Parliament Act of 1911 which crippled the House of Lords and firmly established British democracy.

Genres: History

307 pages, Hardcover

First published August 11, 1975

Reviews

[Tiarnán · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enjoyable study of Irish nationalism from a Marxisant perspective.

Hits a lot of the classical heroic 'bourgeois revolution' notes that are common in materialist narratives of Irish history; but offers a bit more depth and detail than the usual leftist takes. The comparative, class-based, analysis of the divergent evolutions of the Irish v. British political systems and aristocratic rule in both countries prior to the Famine is what really sets this book apart; and it's here that Strauss hits at some key insights that place him close to the 'Political Marxist' school, rooting the evolution of distinct political systems in specific relationships of surplus extraction. At other times he's a bit more confused and lapses back into a dependency school type 'colonial surplus extraction explains Ireland's social backwardness' sort of analysis that, to me, reverses the direction of causality. The post-Famine stuff and the influence of the Irish party on the Westminster party system, reform of the Lords, etc., is less original but still worth reading if, like me, you're fairly ignorant of the whole period. He also has the merit of basically admitting the Ulster Unionists were right (in their time and place) and that partition of some sort was probably inevitable given the dependence of Ulster industry on tariff-free trade with the rest of the UK and its Empire, which most 'green Marxists' even to this day fail to acknowledge.

Bit of a curio this in terms of its publishing history. First written in the early 1950s and published (in the US at least) by Columbia University Press, a fairly prestigious academic publisher. Received a couple of hostile reviews, and was used as a bit of a punching bag by the Althusserians later on. Can't find any info about the author online, apart the fact that he was Austrian, and that he made one totally unrelated contribution to an ILP publication in the interwar era; published alongside some of the few British Trotskyists of the period. Was he a Trot, then? Or just some sort of fellow traveller a la Orwell? Really seems to be zero other information out there (no other relevant books connected to the name), in the era of google. Unless anyone knows German and can help me out. So I'm compelled to imagine some random Austrian Marxist in the 1940s just developed a deep interest in Irish history and decided to rectify the gap in the market for a class-based analysis in the period he published in. Greaves' biography of Connolly didn't come out until 1961, and then there was a relative 'explosion' of Marxist writing on Ireland from the late 60s/early 70s onwards (Farrell - the Orange State, Bew/Patterson/Gibbon, and so on) - until it died down from the late 70s on - so this book was something of a forerunner in its time.