Annan was thought to be dependably Labour, as at the time he was.  After Wilson brought the party back to power in 1964, it having been thirteen years in opposition, Annan received a peerage.  Soon he became one of what in Britain are known as "the great and the good"--the liberal-minded, formerly the conservative-minded, who fill committees, chair inquiries, and serve on the boards of artistic institutions such as the State opera companies and the National Gallery.  In other words, the Establishment.

Before Wilson, the Great and the Good and the Establishment had been Whiggish-Conservative or at least traditionalist.  The term "the Establishment," as we know it, was invented, or at least popularized, by the British journalist Henry Fairlie in the mid-1950s, when Annan's Age was not yet in charge.  Shorn of its nuances, Fairlie's argument was that stuffy traditionalists got all the best jobs, such as prime minister, archbishop of Canterbury, governor of the Bank of England, director general of the BBC, and editor of The Times (which in the mid-1950s could still plausibly be regarded as the Establishment's notice board).  According to Fairlie, they protected one another and those who thought like them, and were--in some vague way--responsible for the country's decline.  Wilson's Labour Party exploited this tale.  When he was eventually given the chance to form a government, Wilson changed little in the way of the economy.  He simply continued the interventionism of Harold Macmillan in the last phase of the Conservatives' thirteen years.  But, unwittingly, Wilson did change the Establishment.  His electoral victories in 1964 and 1966 meant that there was now a Commons majority for abolition of capital punishment, legalization of homosexuality, easier abortion, and easier divorce.  These policies became associated, in the Conservative mind, with Roy Jenkins--the first home secretary in history to be an admired figure in the London salons.  The Whiggish wing of the old Establishment had long supported such causes, but were restrained by the Tory wing and by the Conservative majority in the Commons.

The Wilson government also presided over more egalitarianism in state schooling and the near-hegemony of progressive teaching methods--pupils being encouraged to "express themselves" rather than learn by rote.  Add to all this the 1960s "youth culture" and we can see that it would have been difficult for any Establishment of the middle-aged and elderly to retain much mystery or grandeur.  Shorn of its influence over both the classroom and the bedroom, the old Establishment found itself presiding over nothing established.  Different kinds of people therefore became archbishops of Canterbury and chairmen of committees.  The new Establishment was anxious to make it clear that it was not at all stuffy, that it thought "youth" had much to teach it, rather than the other way around.  The Times' music critic wrote an article reverentially analyzing the Beatles' harmonic structure.  Another critic said they were the greatest song writers since Schubert.  The Times was worried about whether the anti-drug abuse laws were being too harshly enforced in a case involving Mr. Mick Jagger (he was acquitted).

The Bloomsbury or the Higher Academic Bohemia of the previous day--the world in which Annan had been brought up--became the Establishment of the new day.  We can be sure that Annan knew this was going on, that his hour--and that of his friends--had come.  For he is quite a student of Establishments: "Our Age was preternaturally critical of...the Establishment--the network of people and institutions with power and influence who rule the country....The Establishment is always keen to move things along a little, make small adjustments to the way things are run, but opposes major change.  It has strong links, some would say is identical with the bien pensants who regard themselves as the guardians of morality and manners."

As Annan reached his prime, the bien pensants changed the morality and manners.  So the Establishment changed too.  Naturally, he was in the thick of it.  This apotheosis is the bigger theme of his book.  But always he remembers that it was a matter of people.  If you are no annalist, he has chosen the only readable method.  G.M. Trevelyan was mocked, especially by the annalists, for describing his Social History of England as "history with the politics left out."  But it seems a fair enough description of social history.  Otherwise, one type of historiography must always be subsumed in another.  Everything becomes part of everything else, and distinctions are lost.  Annan's is history with the anonymous forces left out.  Naturally, many of the influential people of His Age thought that they were the embodiment of anonymous social forces.  But all the time Annan shows that a certain view or taste prevailed because of the force of a certain personality: a Keynes, a Cyril Connolly, a Bertrand Russell, and in the end a Margaret Thatcher, who tried to overthrow much of what His Age had done, and partly succeeded.

Annan's thinkers were not acting in a vacuum.  Their thoughts, in one generation, were the actions of the politicians and civil servants in the next.  A well-known passage by Keynes, one of the heroes of His Age, has been proved right, not least as it applied to the influence of Keynes himself: "The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood.  Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.  Practical men, who believed themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."  Annan may only have written about the thinkers, and the doers they influenced.  But the effect of their actions on the rest of us in Britain can be traced to them far more easily than it can to any anonymous social force.  Never was a country so governed by the ideas of some defunct economists and political philosophers, except the Soviet Union.  Annan has written a work of the higher gossip about the people who propagated those ideas, but it is also the best history yet written of the Britain from Attlee to Thatcher.

The story he tells, perhaps without always realizing that he is telling it, is of how the advanced thoughts of, say, a Bloomsbury country house weekend in the 1920s--about work, sex, politics, life--first scandalized the people running the country and were eventually encouraged to spread to every public housing estate, so that the upholders of the traditional "repressive" order are now in the minority, and are more repressed than repressing.  Admittedly, Annan does not see it this way.  He thinks that, on the whole, it is good that the average proletarian Briton of today has views which are quite like those of Virginia Woolf or E.M. Forster--on sex and on the social order, if not on literature.  But Annan is fair.  Constantly, he admits what His Age thought was a good idea in theory--such as egalitarianism in education--proved not so good in practice.

He mentions, for example, the "new towns" built in the countryside to liberate people from the slums.  At first, all the great and the good, accustomed as they were to assuming that they had the right to plan other people's lives, assumed that they were a good idea.  Of one of these towns, Milton Keynes--halfway between London and Birmingham--Annan writes that, as the years passed, it was "criticized not for its understanding but for its neglect of how people lived....People complained that cosiness has vanished.  The drab street in an old town with its pub and corner shop in which families gossiped was superior to the town based on research that showed how people were likely to live.  The revolt against planning began."

One of his last chapters is called "Our Vision of Life Rejected."  It is a reference to Mrs. Thatcher.  She arrived, and rejected His Age.  "It was she who led the hissing as Our Age made its exit from the stage."  Furthermore, "Our Age believed in government by discussion.  Out of discussion came a policy, a policy which was further modified by more discussion.  Bargains and trade-offs were not considered signs of weakness, they were considered sensible compromises.  If agreement could not be reached, the dissenters must not be alienated.  Margaret Thatcher thought this nonsense...."

Inevitably, "the educated classes were dismayed that she rejected their interpretation of politics."  But the reader senses that Annan knows that someone such as she had to come along in the end.  He even defends her over the Falklands when the rest of His Age was raging against her:

Sensible men in 1982 knew that Galtieri and the other thugs were no reincarnation of Hitler any more than Nasser had been.  But sensible men often neglect something that cannot be measured which is of immense importance to any country in peace as well as in war.  National morale.  De Gaulle restored France's morale after Algeria: that decent, sensible, uncorrupt politician, Mendes-France, could not have done so.  No statesman was ever more criticized by intellectuals than Adenauer: yet by refusing to do what sensible men thought right--to grovel in repentance for the bestialities committed by his countrymen during the war--he won a settlement first with the West and then with the Soviet Union.  Even more galling for sensible men was the sight of Ronald Reagan, a man with the slimmest of pretensions to statesmanship, rallying the United States when Americans were shaken by the debacle of Vietnam, the shame of Nixon's resignation and the humiliations inflicted by Carter's moralistic foreign policy.

Essay Types: Book Review