Thin Economics; Thick Moralising: Red

Toryism and the Politics of Nostalgia

Roland Boer and Alex Andrews

Locality, family, moral economy, virtuous elites, common
popular customs – these are the buzzwords of what has come to be
known as red toryism, which seeks to breath life into the
conservative project in the UK. It valorises the local over the global,
family over its discontents (gays, single parents, promiscuity), virtue
over cynicism, common custom over bland commercial labels; in
short, a return to the progressive, communal values of
conservatism. The name most usually associated with red toryism –
also known as communitarian civic conservatism – is Phillip Blond.
Our brief in this paper is not a treatment of the whole red tory
doctrine, but a critical examination of its economic policies and how
they relate to theology, via morality.

Economics

In a nutshell, red toryism seeks to decouple conservative

politics from its dirty little relationship with (neo-)liberal economics,
an affair most successfully consummated by Margaret Thatcher and
her ilk. Always an ill match, the end of the affair was bound to
happen sooner or later. But rather than make it is a bitter and
rancorous separation, the Red Tories wish to make a virtue out of
the break-up, seeking a return to the conservatives’ old and trusted
partner of many years hence – an ancient, well-nigh medieval
collection of economic practices that have been lost in the rush to
capitalism and industrialisation. It is a bold move, and we would
rather listen to an intelligent conservative than a stupid liberal, even
2

though this conservatism has by no means convinced all

conservatives of its validity or its electoral usefulness.
Red tory economics may easily be organised in terms of a
diagnosis of what they see as the current malaise and a prognosis of
its cure. Our focus here is a relatively early piece by Blond called
‘Red Tory’ (Blond 2008h). One reason for using this text is that it
outlines a fuller argument than the brief pieces Blond has been
producing of late, which all make the same basic points but are now
geared to the cycles of public appearances, interviews, online news,
opinion fora and the flurry of facebook agitation (among many, see
Blond 2008g, 2008f, 2008b, 2009b, 2008e, 2008l, 2008a, 2008c,
2008k, 2009c; Blond and Pabst 2005b). This text also provides the
first statement of a study that, after much delay and much promise,
finally appeared at the beginning of the 2010 election campaign in
the UK – a book with awkward title of Red Tory: How Left and Right
Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It (2010), which has
underwhelmed its readers, confirms the suspicions of Blond’s earlier
pieces and says nothing that is not said in those pieces.1

Diagnosis

In the “Red Tory” essay Blond analyses what conservatives

call “broken Britain” – one of Blond’s empty and empirically
mistaken slogans taken from the conservative think tank, the Centre
for Social Justice, run by the former Tory leader Ian Duncan Smith

1
As Ragan puts it: ‘Blond writes a kind of polytechnic prose in which the various
jargons of philosophy, sociology, economics and theology are churned together as
in a concrete mixer. His method of argument is to connect strings of unrelated
assertions with the words ‘thus’ and ‘then’ and ‘hence’ … Red Tory is like a 300-
page Sunday sermon, preached by an autodidact country parson whose shelves
are stuffed with old blue and white Pelican books on subjects like modern
psychology, literature, sociology, government and economics, which the parson
(in civilian life, Blond used to be a lecturer in theology) believes must hold the key
to the alien and ugly civilisation he encounters on his parish rounds.’ (Raban
2010: 22). Blond has also been planning to complete a book on theology and
perception called The Eyes of Faith, of which only an essay has appeared (Blond
2005). But then he has not completed his PhD either, ostensibly under the
supervision of John Milbank. There is only so much a man can do; stopping to
think at length and produce some careful and patient studies laying out his
position is not one of them.
3

(see www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk and the critiques by Womuth

2010; Derbyshire 2009).2 Beneath the bluster a rather simple
pattern operates in Blond’s analysis: monolith versus fragments,
monopolisation versus disintegration, centralisation versus
atomisation. On the one hand we have a massive monolith – the
centralised state or monopoly capital – and on the other the
atomised life of individuals. While the former suck in all power and
wealth, the latter lead lives of meaningless and futile consumption.
There are both unoriginal and original elements to the way Blond
deploys this schema; the catch is that the unoriginal dimensions
undo the original ones.
Let us begin with what initially seems original. Blond argues
that this opposition – both political and economic – is a result of
certain developments in twentieth century UK. Apart from a brief
laying of the blame at the feet of the French and American
Revolutions, he identifies three key moments in his own potted
history: the embrace (especially by the left) of the welfare state
after 1945, the slide (again by the left) into the self-centred
libertarianism of the 1960s, and then the seduction (now of the
right) by laissez-faire economics. If the first couple of betrayals
provide the two terms of his grand opposition, the betrayal by the
right is the most egregious of all, since ‘advanced capitalism’
embodies this opposition within itself: it is, according to Blond, both
‘individualist’ and ‘monopolist’, the latter using the rhetoric of the
former to advance its agenda.3
The problem for Blond is that this relatively original narrative
is undermined by the unoriginal parts of his analysis. We restrict
2
Other slogans include: the left and right are exhausted; young people these days
prefer to turn to religion rather than Marx (Blond 2008g, 2008h, 2008k; Coombs
2009).
3
Liberalism, the left, libertarianism and laissez-faire are among the many
enemies of the Red Tory faith. In a longer version of this study, we argue that
these enemies include anything that starts with L (see our starting list), big things
such as secularism, the centralised state and the monopolised market, foreign
things such as immigration, Islam and China, and icky things like abortion and
homosexuality (Blond 2008d, 2008i; Blond and Pabst 2005a, 2006b, 2008, 2007,
2006a; Derbyshire 2009).
4

ourselves to two points. First, the tension between monopolisation

and fragmentation has been identified as a crucial feature of
capitalism again and again since at least the nineteenth century.
Capitalism generates an oppressive uniformity by rendering every
individual the same; yet it simultaneously produces all manner of
fragmentations (Taylorisation) through the process of
commodification and reification. Hegel, Marx, Žižek, Hardt and Negri
– these and more have recognised and fruitfully engaged with this
fundamental contradiction at the heart of capitalism, not least of
which is the point that in the very act of each individual pursuing his
or her own agenda, that individual contributes to the collective
project of liberalism.
If this well-known tension within capitalism has been
recognised since the nineteenth century, then Blond’s curious
twentieth century narrative is simply misdirected. The same applies
to the political side of his narrative, now operating in terms of the
monstrous and centralised state over against the pulverised
individual. Is this too a product of twentieth century developments?
Not at all, for it was first identified by Hegel and then developed by
Marx: while human life under capitalism was increasingly
fragmented into religious, political, economic and private spheres,
the state itself became abstracted as an ideal and all-pervasive
form. Marx applied this analysis to both the secular state (in his
debates with Bauer (Marx 1844a, 1844b)) and to political theory (in
his arguments with Hegel (Marx 1843a, 1843b; see also Leopold
2007: 69-74)). In short, his argument means that the bourgeois
state is no improvement over what went before, for it operates with
a fundamental alienation between the state and what Marx,
following Hegel, calls ‘civil society’, that is, social and economic
structures. In other words, the state is – like Feuerbach’s argument
that God is a projection of human beings – a projection out of the
social and economic web of life. It is, therefore, an abstraction, a
secondary projection that seems to be primary. And it leads to a
5

split within each human being, between the citizen of the state and
the flesh-and-blood person. Needless to say, this projection, this
split that characterises the existence of the state is fundamentally
alienating.
So the problems Blond feels he has identified are by no means
new to the twentieth century, nor even to the UK. They are endemic
to capitalism itself and to the bourgeois state as it has developed
under capitalism. This would mean that in order to overcome what
can be only be called systemic economic and political alienation is
to do away with the system in question and start anew. Is this what
Blond proposes?

Prognosis

By and large, no. At times Blond hints that the whole system
in which these oppositions are endemic must be swept aside and
that we need to begin again. But those moments appear as a return
to something lost, to a precapitalist mode of economics that can
only be called feudal. More often, however, select features of an
idealised and romanticised form of feudal social and economic
existence are deployed to ameliorate the sharp edges of life under
capitalism (Blond 2008e).
All of which is captured in the keyword, localism (see also
Blond 2009a, 2008e, 2008l, 2008a). In essence, Blond proposes a
postmodern return to the iconic, idealised – and medieval – English
village (Blond 2008e). Here we find communities of citizens,
meeting to deal with everyday concerns of the village, markets
where produce from the land thereabouts is sold, guilds where
tradespeople may seek work and protection, families of at least a
nuclear but preferably an extended form (and definitely
heterosexual with both parents present), voluntary organisations
like the Lions or the cricket club, the vital role of the church in
everyday village life, and even the absent lord (of both a spiritual
6

and physical forms) who acts in a benignly paternal and somewhat

absent fashion.
As for the practical suggestions, Blond proposes that localism
be fostered through the reallocation of state funds, revising both the
tax structure and patterns of banking finance for housing and
business. For example, state funding (without seeing the slight
contradiction here) should be earmarked for local groups and
initiatives – schools, voluntary organisations, families, mutual
societies, cooperatives, worker control – rather than being delivered
through centralised programs. Restructuring taxation would provide
assistance to traditional families, especially those wishing to set up
a family business rather than work for a multinational. And revising
the way banks lend money would enable people to become ‘owners
of some realisable or tradable asset’ (Blond 2008h: 88), small
owners of capital in a way that would generate genuine ‘wealth’. On
this score, he proposes a version of assets welfare, with at-cost and
mixed equity loans to ensure a ‘property-owning democracy’ (p. 89).
What can be said about these proposals? Many of them are
stunningly unoriginal, for local resistance to the global has
characterised country towns and alternative movements for at least
the last half century. They are also extremely parochial, not merely
in terms of small-town attitudes, but also in terms of what Blond
calls ‘patriotic capital’ (with the requisite ‘Britain’ rather than
‘England’ or even the ‘UK’). Campaigns for people to buy products
of national producers have come in waves for well over a century,
most of them clever marketing ploys to increase sales. Further, it is
what may be called a time-lapse approach; as with so many
movements of apparent resistance to (the worse effects of)
capitalism, red toryism has simply opposed one form of capitalism
with another, or one level with another – small business versus
transnationals, local farmers versus agribusiness, the corner shop
versus the super-market.
7

In response, Blond et al would agree: localism is by no means

new, for it harks back to the theological doctrine of subsidiarity, in
which no function should be performed at any level that could be
performed by a level below it, so much so that the highest level
should perform only those actions that cannot be handled below it
(see the explicit invocation by Pabst 2010; Blond 2009a). In its more
economic form, subsidiarity becomes distributism, which has
appealed and continues to appeal to diverse groups such as the
Catholic anarchist Dorothy Day, the proto-fascists and Mussolini
admirers G.K. Chesterton and Hillarie Belloc (Cheyette 1993: 150-
205; see Raban 2010: 23), the British National Party, and
Mondragon in Spain (see, for example, Mathews 2009a, 2009b).
However, the theological form of subsidiarity, with its emphasis of
family, local church and voluntary association, is not quite as
ancient as Blond et al would have us believe. It appears first in Leo
XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891) and was subsequently elaborated in
Quadragesimo Anno by Pius XI (1931). Four points are worth nothing
about these texts: they established the tradition of Roman Catholic
Social Thought in reaction to the rapid successes of the socialists in
the nineteenth century, they are feverishly anti-socialist (see Boer
2010), they defend private property and they assume a hierarchical
system as the basis of subsidiarity, for one must have a ladder of
command in order to move down to the appropriate rung. We will
see this structural hierarchy appear in other elements of red tory
doctrine, especially in its invocation of virtue and benevolent
paternalism.
More substantially, however, Blond’s proposals should be seen
not as a cure but as a symptom of global capitalism in its current
form. Rather than seeing localism as a resistance to the uniformity
of transnational capital, localism is actually one shape such late
capitalism takes. In the dialectic of globalisation and localisation,
the more globalisation becomes a reality (and we are only just
beginning to see that final reality), the more localism takes off.
8

Witness the regional claims of Scotland, Wales, Cornwall in the UK,

or Quebec’s consistent push for independence form Canada, or the
push for regional identities in the former USSR, or indeed the
Balkans (Blond’s approach may be described as a ‘Balkanisation of
Britain’). The value of such localism is that it supplies the raw
materials and research arms for capitalism’s perpetual search for
what is new – style, fashion, taste.
Indeed, Blond strikes us as a city-slicker who one day happens
upon a village in the hills. Struck by the impossibly idyllic nature of
the place, he visits the real estate office and finds that the office is
full similar types and that most of the sales – now with inflated
prices – are to those like himself full of Arcadian myths of ‘Merrie
England’ (Ragan 2010: 23). (But then, if he should buy a place and
happen to move into town, he will soon find that bucolic bliss is
impossible without village idiocy.)
In the midst of all this rehashing of old ideas, there is a
glimmer of a truly radical proposition. In setting up the proposals for
making everyone the owner of a tradable asset, Blond points out
that wages are ‘no longer enough to secure the fundamentals of
life’. But, on the verge of a breakthrough, he does not take the next
step and argue that wage labour itself is a problem, that it embodies
a pattern of exploitation in its very structure and should therefore
be abolished in any alternative system. Or that private property – to
go a step further – is the real blockage in the system and must be
abolished for any communal ownership to succeed. Instead, he
offers some limp half-measures that involve some tinkering here
and there but leave the system itself in place. At moments like
these, the ‘Tory’ is typed in ever larger and bolder letters, while the
‘Red’ fades into minuscule type.

Thick Moralising

Thus far we have been exegeting the key essay from 2008
called ‘Red Tory’, itself the basis of the book of the same name.
9

Towards the end of the essay and the book, Blond turns to what he
calls the revival of ‘civil society’, embodied in his new hero and tory
leader, David Cameron. But he means something very different from
Hegel or Marx, for Blond stresses that element in ‘civil’ that denotes
good manners, high (as in ‘quality’) culture, moral values and virtue:
‘A recovery of a national virtue culture is required’ (Blond 2008h:
90). In his subsequent talks, pamphlets and opinion pieces, Blond
does little if anything to develop the sketchy economic proposals
and everything to enhance his moral arguments, especially the
recovery of virtue.
No matter what the topic –medicine, education, evolution,
Islam, abortion, gay marriage, multinationals, banking,
unemployment, immigration, the pope or his fop – Blond
deliberately invokes the terminology of goodness and virtue (Blond
2009d). Needles to say, locality, family, community are good, while
multinationals, wealthy individuals and mass culture are evil. Barely
concealed within such a moral terminology is a theological coding
that Blond owes to radical orthodoxy and his teacher, John Milbank –
as some commentators have noted (see especially Coombs 2009,
2010; Derbyshire 2009).
In a combined piece, Blond and Milbank (2010) argue that a
proper return to virtue will recognise that people are born unequal
(the target is, not unexpectedly, liberalism) in terms of talents,
capabilities and opportunities: ‘By virtue we mean here a
combination of talent, fitness for a specific social role, and a moral
exercise of that role for the benefit of wider society’. They are after
a ‘justifiable inequality’ that seeks ‘to link social and economic
prestige with virtue’ (Blond and Milbank 2010). A properly
egalitarian society will recognise such inequalities, they argue (fully
cognisant of the oxymoron), enabling people to realise their
potential within those strictures. Some will find that fulfilment in
sweeping the streets of cleaning toilets, while others will realise
their virtues in government, the control of financial institutions and
10

education. Those with some knowledge of radical orthodoxy will

recognise the analogia entis of Thomas Aquinas behind this
argument: all life should be understood as an analogy of being,
running on a descending scale from God, down through the angels
to the pope and clergy to the rest of human beings and then
eventually the animal and plant kingdoms. According to this divinely
ordained hierarchical schema, some are simply better placed when
the virtues were first handed out (on the inescapable hierarchy and
anti-democratic tenor, see Surin 2009).
Virtue, then, is not merely an abstract idea or collection of
noble qualities to which we should all aspire. It has everything to do
with birth, wealth and class. In their own way Blond and Milbank
unwittingly reveal the material truth of virtue. If we go back to
ancient Greece, then virtue belongs to those who are wise, just,
good, brave and noble. But it also happens to belong to those who
are beautiful, lucky, wealthy, propertied, well-born and the pillars of
society. Of course, those lacking in virtue are also stupid, unjust,
bad, cowardly, ignoble, ugly, unlucky, poor, destitute, ill-born and
the dregs of society.4
Also, their analysis fails to answer the question as to who
decides on the virtuous and the unvirtuous; in the time of ancient
Greece and Rome it was clearly the ruling classes. Perhaps a hint
comes from the informal title given to Blond in the lead-up to the UK
elections in 2010: the ‘philosopher king’ of the Conservative leader,
David Cameron. Such a pompous and self-aggrandising figure was,
of course, proposed by Plato as the ideal ruler, the only one with
wisdom and virtue enough to do so. Like Plato, the philosopher king

4
See the excellent comments by Ste. Croix (2006: 338-9; 1972: 371-6), who notes
a host of related terms: hoi tas ousias echontes, plousioi, pacheis, eudaimones,
gnōrimoi, eugeneis, dunatoi, dunatōtatoi, kaloi kagathoi, chrēstoi, esthloi, aristoi,
beltistoi, dexiōtatoi, charientes, epieikeis – all for the ‘good’ propertied classes; for
the ‘bad’ unpropertied classes we have hoi penētes, aporoi, ptōchoi, hoi polloi, to
plēthos, ho ochlos, ho dēmos, hoi dēmotikoi, mochthēroi, ponēroi, deiloi, to
kakiston.
11

was also elitist, aristocratic and a passionate enemy of democracy

(see further Wood 1997: 142-3; 2008: 50-98; Rose 1992).5

But let us take the fight into the corner of radical orthodoxy
itself in order to play off its chest-thumping theological correctness
against itself (that is, we return fire with fire). Radical orthodoxy
encounters a tension when its insistence on a traditionally Catholic
theology is juxtaposed to some of the strongest aspects of its
rhetoric of condemnation. While Catholicism stresses the centrality
of the doctrine of justification by works, radical orthodoxy often
makes it appear that nothing good can come of even the best
intentioned liberal or secularist, since their lack of belief in key
doctrines always ensures their praxis spirals into nihilism. Rather
than believing the spirit blowing where it wills and unlike
Catholicism after Vatican II, which has stressed the potential for
good in all human works regardless of their origin, radical orthodoxy
too often and too easily slips into an intellectualist variant of
justification by faith: holding a certain set of
theological doctrines will ensure that your work is always
ineffective, and in the contrary case that Christian belief (of a
certain type!) is the only answer to the world’s ills. As Jeffrey Stout
asks, if radical orthodoxy believes that all human life is imbued with
grace, why not liberal democracy, liberal theology or secular society
also? (see Stout 2004: 103-5)6
5
A more recent example, of whom Anthony Giddens is the prototype, would be
the “communication consultant to the prince – a defector from the academic
world entered in the service of the dominant whose mission is to give an
academic veneer to the political projects of the new State and business nobility”
(Bourdieu and Wacquant 2001: 5).
6
Indeed, as Stout notes, theologies of this kind tend to reinforce the boundaries
between religious thought and the secular they intend to overcome: “Theologies
designed to articulate, defend, and reinforce resentment of the secular are
symptoms of the disease they meant to cure. They are the ideological expression
of the enclave society. Their social function is to legitimate identification with the
enclave as the primary social unit. The main means they employ to generate
solidarity within the small group is the bashing of [theological] liberals, practiced
as a form of ritual sacrifice … [it] threatens to condemn the world outside of the
church to utter darkness. From within radical orthodoxy's refuge of aggressive
like-mindedness, prophetic denunciation of the secular 'other' and unmasking of
liberal theological error ritually reinforces the enclave boundary [between
12

Despite Blond occasional disavowals (see Derbyshire 2009;

but compare Blond 2009a) of the theological roots of his position,
Milbank has made it clear that in his opinion red toryism is the
political wing of radical orthodoxy. In a notorious incident in 2009-
10, he went so far as to take on for a few months the persona of
‘Alasdair Maclagan’ in order to defend red toryism against its
detractors, continuing to do so even when his cover was blown.7
Maclagan aside, the omnipresence of radical orthodoxy should come
as no surprise, since Milbank and his ilk (Adrian Pabst has also
teamed up with Blond on occasions (Blond and Pabst 2005a, 2005b,
2006b, 2006a, 2007, 2008)) have always sought to absolutise
theology as the fons et origo of all social, political, economic and
personal reality.8
Apart from moralising and the absolutising of theology, two
other deep influences of Radical orthodoxy are relevant here: re-
enchantment and benevolent paternalism. Time and again, Milbank
has argued that capitalism, secularism, liberalism, communism and
Protestantism (this one more recently) have led to a baleful process
of disenchantment the world (see Milbank in Žižek and Milbank
2009). This argument is an unoriginal and it is wayward, for it
assumes a prior enchanted state and neglects that the very
narrative on enchantment-disenchantment and re-enchantment is
produced by the very modernist, secularising tendency it seeks to
overcome. For Blond and red toryism, however, it translates into the
politics of nostalgia that is embodied in the sense that an elusive
golden age has past (see also Blond 2008m; Derbyshire 2009).
All of which leads to benevolent paternalism, manifested in an
increasing support of the pope and assertion that only a ‘Catholic’

religious and non-religious], rather than healing

the world” (Stout 2004: 114-115).
7
See http://stalinsmoustache.wordpress.com/2009/12/30/who-is-alasdair-
maclagan; http://stalinsmoustache.wordpress.com/2009/12/30/alasdair-maclagan-
aka-john-milbank-lurking-in-the-internet;
http://stalinsmoustache.wordpress.com/2010/01/01/1483.
8
See the criticisms of such absolutising and an argument for the relativising of
theology in
13

position is correct. The only path to peace, it is argued, is through a

recovered Christendom that knows what is best for everyone. Blond
is also rumoured to be in favour of monarchy for the same reason.
Indeed, such paternalism imbues the whole project, from overseas
the development of localism to determining who is virtuous.9 The
deep problem with advocating such a wholesale recovery of the
‘catholic’ ideal is that in its traditional sense ‘catholic’ operates
through a universalism of exclusion rather than inclusion (see Boer
2007: 219-28), that the very definition of ‘catholic’ relies on
excluding heretics (mostly liberals), Jews, Turks (as Muslims used to
be called), women, gays and so on. Radical orthodoxy is no
different.
However, the last word on the matter of benevolent
paternalism falls to John Milbank, who invokes nothing less than The
Lord of the Rings in his politics of nostalgia:

And in this way Christ is now King upon the earth and so it

follows that there should be always also a secular fusion of

democratic dispersal with monarchic liberality and objectivity.

Indeed this should run almost in the direction of monarchic

anarchy, as clearly recommended by Tolkien in the Lord of the

Rings (no law in the Shire; but the orderly echo of remote

kingship). Or (to use the local example), perhaps in the spirit

of Robin Hood… (Milbank 2009: 8).

Conclusion

Thin economics; thick moralising – so much have we argued.

Much more remains to be written in analysis, not least of which is
the British exceptionalism of red toryism. It is closely tied in with the
9
For Pabst, the “local requires a certain kind of locally driven paternalism” (Pabst
2010).
14

idiosyncratic cycles of British politics in which ‘New Labour’ had by

2008 and 2009, after 14 years in office, worn out its welcome and in
which the Conservatives were sprucing themselves for power. In this
context Blond became one of a number of peddlers of opinion, deft
manipulators of ‘think tanks’ (Blond runs Respublica) and the buzz
that seems to accompany those who flock to a shift in the power
base (Blond 2008j, 2008f, 2008b, 2009b; see the assessments by
Crabtree 2009; White 2009). This is also the context for the false
apocalyptic sense of fin de siecle and a new dawn that seeps
through much red tory rhetoric (Blond 2009c; Derbyshire 2009). The
problem is that it assumes the particular concerns of the UK are also
those of the rest of the globe – a problem that bedevils many former
imperial centres.
In the end red toryism is far more Tory than Red. No surprise
in such a verdict, but at least it highlights the very awkward
marriage between conservatism and liberalism in which liberal
economic policies are wedded with conservative social policies. Red
toryism seeks a hasty divorce so that the conservatives can go it
alone. But as they do so, they may find themselves in bed with
other partners, for the great heroes of Blond are G.K. Chesterton
and Hilaire Belloc, or ‘Chesterbelloc’ as George Bernard Shaw first
called them (taken up by Raban 2010: 23). Both sought to apply
Roman Catholic Subsidiarity into the practice of Distribution, both
constructing a mythical idyllic medieval England with its wholesome
villages and lush countryside. But Chesterbelloc was also anti-
democratic, or rather, against any form of parliamentary
government, favouring a hierarchy of virtue and the return of the
aristocracy, and thereby finding in Mussolini a great champion.
Indeed, in The Cruise of the Nona, Belloc writes of Mussolini:
‘Meeting this man after talking to the parliamentarians in other
countries was like meeting with some athletic friend of one’s
boyhood after an afternoon with racing touts; or it was like coming
upon good wine in a Pyrenean village after compulsory draughts of
15

marsh water in the mosses of the moors above, during some long
day’s travel over the range’ (Belloc 1983: 164). He goes on to say,
‘Society in Italy had to reach the point of acute peril before that
reaction took place which saved the country; but what a fine
reaction it was, not only in its virtues, but, what is more important,
in its spirit! What a strong critical sense Italy had shown!’ (p. 163).10
Change Italy for England and the last quotation may well have come
from Blond.

Works Cited

Belloc, Hilaire

1983 [1929] The Cruise of the Nona. London: Century Publishing.

Blond, Phillip

2005 “The Politics of the Eye: Toward a Theological Materialism.” In Creston

Davis, John Milbank and Slavoj Žižek (eds.), Theology and the Political:
The New Debate, 429-62. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

2008a “Allow Me to Suggest, George.” The Guardian (27 September). Available at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/27/conservatives.tory
conference.

2008b “David Cameron Needs a Fourth Way.” The First Post (7 May). Available at:
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/33518,news-comment,news-
politics,cameron-needs-a-fourth-way.

2008c “A Deeper Shade of Blue.” The Guardian (21 August). Available at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/21/conservatives.eco
nomy.

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