'One-nation'

Question 1

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Answer 1

 Although the governments of Canning and Peel served to stem the effects of the French Revolution, the threat of disorder persisted in the 1800s, fuelled by demands for greater democracy.
 Socialism, with its stress upon class conflict was a new and grave threat.
 Disraeli and Bismarck understood that the case for orderly change would have to be refined
to offset class conscious politics (Marxism).
 Importance of the nation thus emerged.
 Disraeli and Bismarck argued that a society’s classes were all members of the same national
‘family’ and that revolutionary politics represented an attack on the nation itself. All classes
had a vested interest in defending.

Question 2

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Answer 2

 One-nation conservatives updated Burke’s notion of an organic affinity between the richer
and poorer classes arguing that the aristocracy had the paternalistic duty to ‘elevate the
conditions of the people’.
 Endorsed state sponsored reform.
 Became associated with legislation that tempered the effects of laissez faire capitalism on
behalf of working class, e.g. in UK: Factory Act 1874, Artisan Dwellings Act 1875, restricting
freedom of factory owners and landlords.
 Bismarck’s chancellorship in Germany led to what historians regard as the first welfare state,
providing workers with state backed insurance against sickness, accident and destitution in old age. Also led to imposition of tariffs and import controls, confirming conservatism’s ambivalent attitude to free market capitalism.