Reginald Bassett Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Reginald Bassett (1901–1962) was an English political scientist who started out on the left, being a member of the Independent Labour Party in his youth. He turned to the right in 1931, when Labour Prime Minister J. Ramsay MacDonald became head of a coalition government dependent on the votes of conservatives and cutting public expenditure in the face of the Great Depression (1929–1939). This political progression made Bassett’s writings critical of the prevailing Marxist-inspired criticisms of parliamentary government put forth by British political theorists Harold Laski; G. D. H. Cole; and Sir Oswald Mosley, who led the British Union of Fascists from 1932 to 1940.

Bassett left school young to work as an office clerk, and at the age of twenty-five he won a scholarship to study at Oxford. After graduation he spent fifteen years as an Oxford extramural tutor. In 1945 he became a tutor for trade union studies at the London School of Economics. In 1950 he received a tenured post in the Department of Government and was a professor there at the time of his death.

In The Essentials of Parliamentary Democracy (1935), Bassett endorsed the value of parliamentary tradition of government by discussion and consent. He interpreted parties as offering contrasting alternatives for policy, which were then resolved by compromises around a central position. Bassett offered a dynamic interpretation of how parties and politicians adapted to events rather than following ideologies to potentially revolutionary or counter-revolutionary extremes. The result was that while policies altered, a cross-party political consensus was maintained.

The victory in World War II (1939–1945) revived respect for established institutions of democracy among British academics. By the early twenty-first century, much of Bassett’s book appeared consistent with mainstream political science, just as it was with Whiggish nineteenth century British views. It shows its age in not allowing for the prospect of Parliament turning into an arena in which parties competed for votes by rancorously attacking their adversaries rather than deliberating about policies and party leaders, and television becoming more important than Parliament as the chief sphere of politics. At the time of its publication, Essentials of Parliamentary Democracy was an overt challenge to class conflict theories of British government and to Britons who sympathized with undemocratic forms of government in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or fascist Italy. No attention is given in the book to the New Deal, the domestic reform program instituted by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Bassett continued with his revisionist approach to contemporary history with studies of the absence of League of Nations action against Japan when it annexed Manchuria (Democracy and Foreign Policy, 1952) and of the events that led to Ramsay MacDonald resigning as the Labour prime minister and reassuming office as a National Government prime minister (Nineteen Thirty-One: Political Crisis, 1958). Bassett’s papers are deposited in the London School of Economics archive.

Bibliography:

Bassett, Reginald. The Essentials of Parliamentary Democracy. London: Macmillan, 1935.
Democracy and Foreign Policy. London: Longmans, 1952.
Nineteen Thirty-One: Political Crisis. London: Macmillan, 1958.