Events and Reunions for Old Members

You are warmly invited to join Professor Catherine Marshall, Professor in British Studies (political history) at Cergy Paris Université and Oliver Smithies Visiting Fellow at Balliol College (2022-23), for her Balliol Online Lecture, What is Political Deference and Can it Help to Repair the British Constitution?

What is political deference? Is there any point today in trying to retrieve a type of political respect specific to the Anglo-British constitution, which has been discarded as analytically worthless and politically broken since the 1970s? In this Balliol Online Lecture, Professor Catherine Marshall will retrace the genealogy of political deference back to Walter Bagehot in the mid-Victorian period and retrieve its value for the present UK system of government, at a time when its vulnerability has been exposed. She will explore how we might retain some form of the older positive idea of deference – an ethics of deference – while adapting it to a new political landscape in which British constitutional principles have been compromised.

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Professor Catherine Marshall is Professor in British Studies (political history) at Cergy Paris Université and an Oliver Smithies Visiting Fellow at Balliol College (2022-23). Her most recent book is Political Deference in a Democratic Age: British Politics and the Constitution from the Eighteenth Century to Brexit (Palgrave, 2021). She has recently coedited an issue of the Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique on "One Nation Conservatism from Disraeli to Johnson" (Febuary 2023), and has just published an article, "Qu’est ce que le ‘johnsonisme’ des premiers temps ?", in L. Dalingwater and S. Porion (eds), Le Parti Conservateur Britannique au pouvoir: politiques, enjeux et bilan (2010-2020).

If you have any questions, please contact the Development Office. 

Event Details

Date: Tuesday 11 July 2023

Location: Online (Zoom)

Time: 5.00pm - 6.30pm

Cost: Free