This paper examines some of the assumptions that underlie our analyses of the popular radicalism and popular loyalism of the 1790s. It is centrally concerned with the relationship between political ideas and languages and political agency, but it focuses this concern on asymmetries in the explanations given of the different movements – asymmetries which have often derived from Whiggish assumptions about the steady progress of the democratic movement for political reform or Marxist influenced accounts of the rise of a working class movement. In discussing the explanations of radicalism and loyalism in the 1790s I also hope to shed some light more generally on the nature of radical movements, and the relationship between political theory, ideology and political practice. Both questions turn out to be integrally related to the issue of explanatory asymmetry.

In the 1960s and 1970s there was a rough consensus in British political science that working class support for Labour needed no explanation, whereas working class conservatism did. That is an explanatory asymmetry. It arises from the view that there is a natural class constituency for labour and a natural identification of class interests on the part of members of the working class with Labour, which makes working class toryism exceptional. Things have subsequently changed – although scholars disagree about by how much and since when – but leaving this aside, there is a similar asymmetry in many accounts of the 1790s.