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The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair, by Peter Mandler; pp. x + 348. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006, $35.00, £19.99.
The title of Peter Mandler's new book made me worry a bit: as far as histories of ideas go, "from Burke to Blair" promises not merely decline but bathos. And indeed, Mandler makes the Blairite invocation of national character seem even more nauseating than Margaret Thatcher's. No doubt the subtitle was crafted by publishers eager to attract a crossover readership. Far from being a breezy anecdotal survey, The English National Character offers a strong, revisionary narrative of the modern British discourse about national identification and its accessory terms, including not just character but race and culture. The book evolved, writes Mandler, from a "slightly surly conviction that existing literature had oversimplified British ideas about 'nation', starting with the idea of 'heritage'" (243). He seeks to do justice to those ideas by applying historical and analytic specificity to one of them, national character, by which he means the association of nationality with a set of psychological traits, a personality type. Some of us on the literary and cultural wing of the humanities have tended to use the term rather loosely, mixing it up with other terms such as "national identity." National identity, Mandler shows, is a much more recent rubric, mobilized in the 1960s as a flexible alternative to the by-then calcifying trope of character (while the currency of "heritage" dates from the late Thatcher years). No less historically specific, if longer-lasting, English national character began to cohere in the debates around the 1832 Reform Bill. One hundred and seventy-five years later, it has more or less decomposed. If Burke articulated a concept struggling to be born, the promotional frenzies of the Blair regime...