THE ISSUES OF THE WAR

By the outbreak of the First World War, then, Pluralism had served to sharpen Barker's conception of the state and to reinforce his commitment to it. No denigrator of the state, his intention in taking up Pluralist issues was to bring the state back into credit by the logic of Pluralist thought itself. At the end of his book Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the Present Day (1915), he conceded the case for a new, ‘federalistic’ theory of the state to match recent developments in Irish Home Rule, Welsh disestablishment, trade-union rights following the Trades Disputes Act of 1906, and growing denominationalism in education. But he warned against undermining the state too much: ‘The State and its institutions are with us and we must make the best of them.’

Arguments in favour of the sovereign state had become especially compelling for him with the outbreak of the First World War. We have seen that ‘The discredited state’ concluded with the confident prediction that in times of crisis, the sense of citizenship would override all other loyalities and identities. This was certainly true of himself. Whatever – slight – misgivings he may have felt towards the state prior to the First World War, they quickly dissolved in the wave of patriotism which swept English public life in 1914. Even in 1916, with the introduction of conscription, he remained steadfast in his commitment to the principle of state sovereignty.