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Appeasement: A Study in Political Decline, 1933-34
What a fascinating book it is. I read it at one sitting, It was so exciting. It is a book with much wider implications than might appear at first glance, for it raises a basic question of how can men who are good, upright, intelligent, and trained to public service make such fantastically bad mistakes of judgment and of conduct. How Rowse brings it all back - the sense of rushing into the abyss, the desperate feeling that nothing could save us, the impatience amounting to despair with good men who did wrong - Henry Steele Commager. A fascinating book. A remarkable personal document, and throws real light on he psychology of some of the leaders of Britain - notably Sir John Simon, Lord Halifax, and Geoffrey Dawson of the Times - in that unhappy hour for the country. It proves that Mr. Rowse, who had come from the working-class people and was highly sympathetic with Labor, saw more deeply into affairs than these leaders did; and that he and some of his associates felt a passionate aversion to the policy of appeasement, which did them great credit. It will be valuable to future historians for this, and for its insights into the political and international complications of the time, - Allan Nevins.
123 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 1963
About the author
A.L. Rowse
307 books14 followersAlfred Leslie Rowse, CH FBA, known professionally as A. L. Rowse and to his friends and family as Leslie, was a prolific Cornish historian. He is perhaps best known for his poetry about Cornwall and his work on Elizabethan England. He was also a Shakespearean scholar and biographer. He developed a widespread reputation for irascibility and intellectual arrogance.
One of Rowse's great enthusiasms was collecting books, and he owned many first editions, many of them bearing his acerbic annotations. For example, his copy of the January 1924 edition of The Adelphi magazine edited by John Middleton Murry bears a pencilled note after Murry's poem In Memory of Katherine Mansfield: 'Sentimental gush on the part of JMM. And a bad poem. A.L.R.'
Upon his death in 1997 he bequeathed his book collection to the University of Exeter, and his personal archive of manuscripts, diaries, and correspondence. In 1998 the University Librarian selected about sixty books from Rowse’s own working library and a complete set of his published books. The Royal Institution of Cornwall selected some of the remaining books, and the rest were sold to dealers.
One of Rowse's great enthusiasms was collecting books, and he owned many first editions, many of them bearing his acerbic annotations. For example, his copy of the January 1924 edition of The Adelphi magazine edited by John Middleton Murry bears a pencilled note after Murry's poem In Memory of Katherine Mansfield: 'Sentimental gush on the part of JMM. And a bad poem. A.L.R.'
Upon his death in 1997 he bequeathed his book collection to the University of Exeter, and his personal archive of manuscripts, diaries, and correspondence. In 1998 the University Librarian selected about sixty books from Rowse’s own working library and a complete set of his published books. The Royal Institution of Cornwall selected some of the remaining books, and the rest were sold to dealers.
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February 4, 2022
A. L. Rowse’s Appeasement remains one of the earliest and most forceful indictments of British foreign policy in the 1930s. Published in 1941, at the height of the Second World War, the book exemplifies the contemporary “guilty men” school of interpretation, assigning moral and political blame to Britain’s ruling elites for their failure to confront fascist aggression until it was too late. Though written under the shadow of war, Rowse’s work is more than a polemical tract; it is a meditation on the decay of political judgment, the erosion of national will, and the consequences of moral cowardice in the face of dictatorship.
Rowse situates appeasement not merely in the policies of Neville Chamberlain, but in the wider decline of Britain’s governing class. He argues that the leadership of the 1930s embodied a narrow provincialism, a complacent self-interest, and an inability to grasp the realities of power politics. The crisis, for Rowse, was cultural as much as political: the British elite, long accustomed to imperial security and the avoidance of continental commitments, could not adjust to the brutal dynamics of Hitler’s Europe. This thesis aligns Rowse with contemporaneous critics such as Cato (Michael Foot, Frank Owen, and Peter Howard) in Guilty Men (1940), yet his analysis extends beyond immediate recriminations into broader reflections on political psychology and the failure of statesmanship.
Stylistically, Appeasement is characteristic of Rowse’s prose—forceful, lucid, and polemical, though not without moments of rhetorical excess. His judgments are uncompromising: the policy of appeasement is depicted not as a tragic necessity born of weakness, but as a disgraceful abdication of responsibility. Figures such as Chamberlain, Baldwin, and Halifax are presented as culpably blind, while Churchill is portrayed as the lone voice of prescience. The book thus exemplifies the wartime mythologization of Churchill as the embodiment of national will and foresight.
From a historiographical standpoint, Appeasement is very much a product of its time. Later scholarship—most notably the revisionist works of the 1960s and 1970s by historians such as A. J. P. Taylor, Donald Cameron Watt, and R. A. C. Parker—complicated Rowse’s stark moral framework, showing that Britain’s strategic and economic limitations made appeasement more understandable, if not defensible. Yet the value of Rowse’s work lies precisely in its immediacy: it captures the raw moral outrage of those who believed their country had been betrayed by shortsighted leaders, and it gave early shape to the enduring negative connotations of the term “appeasement.”
Rowse’s Appeasement is less a detached historical study than a moral and political intervention. While later historians may find its judgments overstated, it remains an important document of the wartime intellectual climate and a testament to the way historical interpretation itself is conditioned by political crisis. Its enduring significance lies in its rhetorical power and in its framing of appeasement not merely as a failed policy, but as a symbol of political decline and moral weakness.
GPT
Rowse situates appeasement not merely in the policies of Neville Chamberlain, but in the wider decline of Britain’s governing class. He argues that the leadership of the 1930s embodied a narrow provincialism, a complacent self-interest, and an inability to grasp the realities of power politics. The crisis, for Rowse, was cultural as much as political: the British elite, long accustomed to imperial security and the avoidance of continental commitments, could not adjust to the brutal dynamics of Hitler’s Europe. This thesis aligns Rowse with contemporaneous critics such as Cato (Michael Foot, Frank Owen, and Peter Howard) in Guilty Men (1940), yet his analysis extends beyond immediate recriminations into broader reflections on political psychology and the failure of statesmanship.
Stylistically, Appeasement is characteristic of Rowse’s prose—forceful, lucid, and polemical, though not without moments of rhetorical excess. His judgments are uncompromising: the policy of appeasement is depicted not as a tragic necessity born of weakness, but as a disgraceful abdication of responsibility. Figures such as Chamberlain, Baldwin, and Halifax are presented as culpably blind, while Churchill is portrayed as the lone voice of prescience. The book thus exemplifies the wartime mythologization of Churchill as the embodiment of national will and foresight.
From a historiographical standpoint, Appeasement is very much a product of its time. Later scholarship—most notably the revisionist works of the 1960s and 1970s by historians such as A. J. P. Taylor, Donald Cameron Watt, and R. A. C. Parker—complicated Rowse’s stark moral framework, showing that Britain’s strategic and economic limitations made appeasement more understandable, if not defensible. Yet the value of Rowse’s work lies precisely in its immediacy: it captures the raw moral outrage of those who believed their country had been betrayed by shortsighted leaders, and it gave early shape to the enduring negative connotations of the term “appeasement.”
Rowse’s Appeasement is less a detached historical study than a moral and political intervention. While later historians may find its judgments overstated, it remains an important document of the wartime intellectual climate and a testament to the way historical interpretation itself is conditioned by political crisis. Its enduring significance lies in its rhetorical power and in its framing of appeasement not merely as a failed policy, but as a symbol of political decline and moral weakness.
GPT
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review