The value of elitism, the frailties of parliamentary democracy, the human need to conserve, and the mourning that is aroused by loss are the threads that tie together these essays. Seven of the chapters are individual commemorations of intellectuals who were Fellows of the same Oxford college, and whose thinking was conservatory rather than either briskly progressive or obscurantist regression. This first chapter is intended to disentangle the skein of threads, and to give a clarifying introduction to the clerisy called All Souls College, Oxford.

Stuart Hampshire was elected as a Fellow there in 1936, and again in 1955. I start with his lecture on conflict resolution given at Harvard in 1996. In it he examines the belief that ballot-box democracy is the form of government that ensures the fairest, most complete, and feasible representation of a state’s citizens. ‘The implication’, Hampshire says, ‘is that the more democratic the state is in this sense the better, because it is a good thing that the most popular policy, the most strongly supported, should prevail.’ He shrinks, though, from accepting that systems of governance based on giving primacy to the weight of numbers possess an unchallengeable superiority:

One purpose in writing this book is to renew discussion of such ideas, and to show their place in the history of European thought.

Five decades before Hampshire addressed his Harvard audience, Bertrand Russell broadcast the BBC’s inaugural Reith lecture series in 1948–49. As Hampshire recalled,

The truths that this archetype of the English intelligentsia spoke to his nation would be impermissible on the BBC 70 years later: they would be condemned as disrespectful of the will of the people, and insulting to those outside an educated minority.