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Westminster's world: Understanding political roles
Book Reviews
313
Westminster's World: Understanding Political Roles, Donald D. Searing, (Harvard University Press, 1994); 498 pp., $49.94 H.B. In this book Donald Searing is concerned to study the culture of the British House of Commons (the House of Lords is ignored) rather than its institutions. His idea is to study the roles of M.P.s as revealed by in-depth interviews from a large sample of 521 out of the 630 members. Political roles he sees as particular patterns of interrelated goals, attitudes and behaviours. Searing aims to avoid the excesses of both sociological approaches of the 1960s, which saw norms and roles as determining behaviour, and economic approaches of the 1980s, which stress individual preferences and choices as the factors which determine behaviour. By adopting a motivational approach he hopes to reconstruct political roles as they are understood by the players whilst taking account of the institutional pressures and the impact of informal constraints. On the basis of the coded interviews and questionnaire responses Searing divides the Members in categories. Backbenchers comprise the following: Policy Advocates, Ministerial Aspirants, Constituency Members and Parliament Men; Leaders comprise the following categories: Parliamentary Private Secretaries (PPS), Whips, Junior Ministers and Ministers. These categories are frequently subdivided; thus Constituency Members are divided between Welfare Officers and Local Promoters. Years of work have gone into this overlong book and the detailed, but unattributed, quotations from M.P.s provide much fascination. The book sensitively shows how M.P.s are able to shape their own behaviour in a way which interacts with the complex institution around them. Party allegiance and ideology are shown not to be major determinants of behaviour. But here the problems begin. One wonders how worthwhile it really is to break down the categories. Thus of the Backbenchers the 'Parliament Men', (itself not a wholly convincing category), numbering a mere 31, are further broken down into sub-groups of 14, 14 and 3. An immense amount of time is spent examining whether the perceived motivational categories tie in with behaviour. Searing denies any tautology is involved here, but the result is page after page of very banal assessments. Thus it comes as no very stimulating revelation to learn that 'Specialists' among the 'Policy Advocates' prefer committee work to debates in the full House, or that Constituency Activists tend to spend more time in their constituencies than most other M.P.s. The reality is that this book tends not to address many of the questions that will be of concern to most political scientists. What factors outside Parliament shape M.P.'s motivations, roles and behaviour, for example? Virtually no attention is paid to outside pressures whether financial or otherwise. Key areas such as the influence of outside consultants or the media are glossed over. What economic and class interests does Parliament uphold? Why have M.P.s been so supine in allowing the extraordinary rise of increasing executive power in Britain over the past few decades? Why has public regard for politicians plummeted in Britain since the 1970s? Part of the problem stems from Searing's method of relying on M.P.s themselves to assess their behaviour. The result is an oddly sanitised and rather desiccated picture, with a lot of the murky passions of sex, power, money and the lust for publicity eased out. Some interviews with close observers, wives, lovers, paymasters, journalists and constituency chairpersons might have redressed the balance. Even within the contexts of Parliament itself some of the most obvious features of Westminster culture, such as the adversarial nature of the party system, are hardly touched on. The sections on those MPs with leadership roles seem more authoritative probably because they have a firmer root in institutional and political reality rather than the subjective motivations of the backbenchers. Searing himself tellingly admits in an appendix
Volume 21, No. 2, March, 1995
314
Book Reviews
(p. 409) that he sometimes 'learned more from watching Whips and backbenchers play their p a r t s . . , t h a n . . , from a week's worth of interviews.' This, no doubt, is because it was more possible to relate behaviour to the specifics of power politics. There is one further very odd thing about this book. The bulk of the research was undertaken in the early 1970s at the period when Norman Tebbit, David Owen and Roy Hattersley, (now all has-beens) were 'rising stars'. In Britain the New Right inspired research reviews may be stampeding us into premature publications, but conversely a twenty-year gestation period does seem excessive. Nor can the book be seen as a historical exercise, since Searing methods are not those of the historian. He does include some material, largely drawn from secondary sources on the 1980s. But the problem is that so much in both Parliament and British politics has changed since 1972/3, which still lay in the shadow of the post-War years. Again the political scientist will want to know crucially how things have changed. What impact has the rule of third parties, of departmental select committees, of more women M.P.s, of near single-party rule, of the media revolution of increasing corruption and the growth in unelected quangocrats had upon Westminster's world? John Greenaway
University of East Anglia
D.H. Lawrence: Language and Being, Michael Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 246pp., £35.00/$54.95 H.B. Michael Bell's account of Lawrence goes against the grain of much recent criticism. Foucault's hilarity about Lawrence's religion of sexuality, at the end of the first volume of his History of Sexuality, has frequently reechoed in critiques of a literary code that claimed aesthetic autonomy for its individual works and, in Lawrence's treatment, assimilated sexuality to a similar language of being. It has thus come to seem axiomatic that Lawrence is the paradigm not just of a writer who happened to get literature wrong but of a writer who got literature crucially and symptomatically wrong--in transmitting an aesthetic tradition that made him continually scan the horizon for something more, that made him imagine that there could be feelings which stood in need of expression, and that there were insistent but unacknowledged commands that novels needed to register so that they might be registered in life. This particular line of criticism of Lawrence is worth mentioning here largely because it scarcely occupies Bell, who notes Lawrence's 'current unfashionable status' but does not explain the rationales that determine and overdetermine it. Thus, Bell adopts explanatory terms--an emphasis on ontology, an emphasis on Lawrence's 'conscious problematising of language'--that will appear in some circles to provide rather less justification for Lawrence than for a renewed assault on both his particular novels and his conception of literature more generally. Critics have come to dismiss Lawrence not because he is seen to lack metaphysical claims but because he is seen to have them. Yet even though some critics will scarcely be reassured to hear Bell affirming that 'Lawrence's fiction is inescapably philosophical' (p.3), Bell's D.H. Lawrence: Language and Being is a remarkably intelligent and exacting analysis of Lawrence's artistic achievement. Briefly, his central claim is that Lawrence was an inheritor of the realist tradition of the novel by way of Kantian concerns. If Kantian philosophy registered--
History of European Ideas
313
Westminster's World: Understanding Political Roles, Donald D. Searing, (Harvard University Press, 1994); 498 pp., $49.94 H.B. In this book Donald Searing is concerned to study the culture of the British House of Commons (the House of Lords is ignored) rather than its institutions. His idea is to study the roles of M.P.s as revealed by in-depth interviews from a large sample of 521 out of the 630 members. Political roles he sees as particular patterns of interrelated goals, attitudes and behaviours. Searing aims to avoid the excesses of both sociological approaches of the 1960s, which saw norms and roles as determining behaviour, and economic approaches of the 1980s, which stress individual preferences and choices as the factors which determine behaviour. By adopting a motivational approach he hopes to reconstruct political roles as they are understood by the players whilst taking account of the institutional pressures and the impact of informal constraints. On the basis of the coded interviews and questionnaire responses Searing divides the Members in categories. Backbenchers comprise the following: Policy Advocates, Ministerial Aspirants, Constituency Members and Parliament Men; Leaders comprise the following categories: Parliamentary Private Secretaries (PPS), Whips, Junior Ministers and Ministers. These categories are frequently subdivided; thus Constituency Members are divided between Welfare Officers and Local Promoters. Years of work have gone into this overlong book and the detailed, but unattributed, quotations from M.P.s provide much fascination. The book sensitively shows how M.P.s are able to shape their own behaviour in a way which interacts with the complex institution around them. Party allegiance and ideology are shown not to be major determinants of behaviour. But here the problems begin. One wonders how worthwhile it really is to break down the categories. Thus of the Backbenchers the 'Parliament Men', (itself not a wholly convincing category), numbering a mere 31, are further broken down into sub-groups of 14, 14 and 3. An immense amount of time is spent examining whether the perceived motivational categories tie in with behaviour. Searing denies any tautology is involved here, but the result is page after page of very banal assessments. Thus it comes as no very stimulating revelation to learn that 'Specialists' among the 'Policy Advocates' prefer committee work to debates in the full House, or that Constituency Activists tend to spend more time in their constituencies than most other M.P.s. The reality is that this book tends not to address many of the questions that will be of concern to most political scientists. What factors outside Parliament shape M.P.'s motivations, roles and behaviour, for example? Virtually no attention is paid to outside pressures whether financial or otherwise. Key areas such as the influence of outside consultants or the media are glossed over. What economic and class interests does Parliament uphold? Why have M.P.s been so supine in allowing the extraordinary rise of increasing executive power in Britain over the past few decades? Why has public regard for politicians plummeted in Britain since the 1970s? Part of the problem stems from Searing's method of relying on M.P.s themselves to assess their behaviour. The result is an oddly sanitised and rather desiccated picture, with a lot of the murky passions of sex, power, money and the lust for publicity eased out. Some interviews with close observers, wives, lovers, paymasters, journalists and constituency chairpersons might have redressed the balance. Even within the contexts of Parliament itself some of the most obvious features of Westminster culture, such as the adversarial nature of the party system, are hardly touched on. The sections on those MPs with leadership roles seem more authoritative probably because they have a firmer root in institutional and political reality rather than the subjective motivations of the backbenchers. Searing himself tellingly admits in an appendix
Volume 21, No. 2, March, 1995
314
Book Reviews
(p. 409) that he sometimes 'learned more from watching Whips and backbenchers play their p a r t s . . , t h a n . . , from a week's worth of interviews.' This, no doubt, is because it was more possible to relate behaviour to the specifics of power politics. There is one further very odd thing about this book. The bulk of the research was undertaken in the early 1970s at the period when Norman Tebbit, David Owen and Roy Hattersley, (now all has-beens) were 'rising stars'. In Britain the New Right inspired research reviews may be stampeding us into premature publications, but conversely a twenty-year gestation period does seem excessive. Nor can the book be seen as a historical exercise, since Searing methods are not those of the historian. He does include some material, largely drawn from secondary sources on the 1980s. But the problem is that so much in both Parliament and British politics has changed since 1972/3, which still lay in the shadow of the post-War years. Again the political scientist will want to know crucially how things have changed. What impact has the rule of third parties, of departmental select committees, of more women M.P.s, of near single-party rule, of the media revolution of increasing corruption and the growth in unelected quangocrats had upon Westminster's world? John Greenaway
University of East Anglia
D.H. Lawrence: Language and Being, Michael Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 246pp., £35.00/$54.95 H.B. Michael Bell's account of Lawrence goes against the grain of much recent criticism. Foucault's hilarity about Lawrence's religion of sexuality, at the end of the first volume of his History of Sexuality, has frequently reechoed in critiques of a literary code that claimed aesthetic autonomy for its individual works and, in Lawrence's treatment, assimilated sexuality to a similar language of being. It has thus come to seem axiomatic that Lawrence is the paradigm not just of a writer who happened to get literature wrong but of a writer who got literature crucially and symptomatically wrong--in transmitting an aesthetic tradition that made him continually scan the horizon for something more, that made him imagine that there could be feelings which stood in need of expression, and that there were insistent but unacknowledged commands that novels needed to register so that they might be registered in life. This particular line of criticism of Lawrence is worth mentioning here largely because it scarcely occupies Bell, who notes Lawrence's 'current unfashionable status' but does not explain the rationales that determine and overdetermine it. Thus, Bell adopts explanatory terms--an emphasis on ontology, an emphasis on Lawrence's 'conscious problematising of language'--that will appear in some circles to provide rather less justification for Lawrence than for a renewed assault on both his particular novels and his conception of literature more generally. Critics have come to dismiss Lawrence not because he is seen to lack metaphysical claims but because he is seen to have them. Yet even though some critics will scarcely be reassured to hear Bell affirming that 'Lawrence's fiction is inescapably philosophical' (p.3), Bell's D.H. Lawrence: Language and Being is a remarkably intelligent and exacting analysis of Lawrence's artistic achievement. Briefly, his central claim is that Lawrence was an inheritor of the realist tradition of the novel by way of Kantian concerns. If Kantian philosophy registered--
History of European Ideas