Statesmen In Disguise

This book recovers Aristotle's understanding of the roles of rhetoric and prudence in public leadership, comparing it to the other major political theories of leadership: utilitarianism, as advocated by J.S. Mill, and duty-ethics, as advocated by Immanuel Kant.

Traces the Early Evolution of Britain’s System of Scientific Advice In twenty-first-century Britain, scientific advice to government is highly organized, integrated across government departments, and led by a chief scientific adviser who reports directly to the prime minister. But at the end of the eighteenth century, when Roland Jackson’s account begins, things were very different. With this book, Jackson turns his attention to the men of science of the day—who derived their knowledge of the natural world from experience, observation, and experiment—focusing on the essential role they played in proffering scientific advice to the state, and the impact of that advice on public policy. At a time that witnessed huge scientific advances and vast industrial development, and as the British state sought to respond to societal, economic, and environmental challenges, practitioners of science, engineering, and medicine were drawn into close involvement with politicians. Jackson explores the contributions of these emerging experts, the motivations behind their involvement, the forces that shaped this new system of advice, and the legacy it left behind. His book provides the first detailed analysis of the provision of scientific, engineering, and medical advice to the nineteenth-century British government, parliament, the civil service, and the military.

A defining feature of Victorian Britain was its fascination with statistics, and this study shows how data influenced every aspect of Victorian culture and thought, from the methods of natural science and the struggle against disease, to the development of social administration, and the arguments and conflicts between social classes.

Argues that the legacies of Victorian public health in England and Wales were not just better health and cleaner cities but also new ideas of property, liability, and community.

A new title in the Oxford Handbooks in History series, offering an authoritative view of British political history from 1800 to 2000, engaging with the sweeping changes in the ways in which Britain was governed, the duties of the state, and its role in the wider world, and suggesting avenues of future research.

This book offers an original interpretation of the history of falling fertilities in Britain between 1860 and 1940. It integrates the approaches of the social sciences and of demographic, feminist, and labour history with intellectual, social, and political history. It exposes the conceptual and statistical inadequacies of the orthodox picture of a national, unitary class-differential fertility decline, and presents an entirely new analysis of the famous 1911 fertility census of England and Wales. Surprising and important findings emerge concerning the principal methods of birth control: births were spaced from early on in marriage; and sexual abstinence by married couples was a far more significant practice than previously imagined. The author presents a new general approach to the study of fertility change, raising central issues concerning the relationship between history and social science.