The eminent historian who believes ‘centrists' are extremists

Telegraph

14-03-2025

'I do enjoy argument very much,' says Prof Jonathan Clark. 'When my wife wants to be mean to me, she says 'you would have made a good lawyer.' Somebody once said [the same] to Samuel Johnson. Johnson got angry and replied 'why do you say that to me now, when it's too late?''
At 74, it is possible Clark has left it too late for a law conversion course. As a provocative historian of 17th and 18th British and American history, however, he has had his share of contentious debates. He helped to coin the term 'long eighteenth century' to describe the elongated period between the beginning of the Nine Years War in 1688 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Now his latest book takes on his biggest challenge yet: the entire notion of the Enlightenment.
But it is Clark's views on how history relates to contemporary politics that are moving him out of the history pages and into current affairs. As well as being a strident critic of what he calls 'Wokeish' language, Clark has coined the term 'far-Centre' to characterise those in every party who 'depict themselves as balanced moderates, as experienced technocrats, as the only sensible adults in the room,' he wrote in The Telegraph in January. These extreme centrists are more radical for being unable to recognise their own positions. 'The most intolerant people of all are those who insist most loudly on their moderation.'
Rather than traditional ideologies, he says, these Centrists cling to shibboleths about climate change and human rights, protected by lawyers rather than voters. 'All parties are saying 'our opponents are extremists, they are far- something '' Clark says, over tea and cake at his home in Northumberland. 'But according to what scale? What do [far-Centrists] believe? They don't believe very much coherently. There is no grand ideology.'
Clark lives at Callaly Castle, just outside Alnwick, a Grade I listed pile, mostly built in the 17th century by the Clavering family, which has been subdivided into several handsome residences. Clark's neighbours include the financier Jeremy Hocking and the former Labour MP Chris Mullin. Courteous and punctilious, dressed in a suit and tie, Clark seems mildly out of time in an era when some historians seem to spend more time on social media than in the library.
He shows me into a grand drawing room decorated with ornate plasterwork. As Catholics, the Claverings hoped to 'fling open the doors and welcome Charles Edward Stuart' and his triumphant Jacobites in the event of an invasion. This house would have been a power centre of the restored monarchy. Clark points out apparently-innocuous paintings that are in fact full of Jacobite symbols: a cottage with an open door, an oak tree, two herons fishing in the lake. '[Herons] were Jacobite icons,' he says. 'They're very quiet, they stand there silently and then suddenly they strike.'
Clark argues that although the Enlightenment has come to look like a single neatly defined idea, it was in fact composed of many different strands of thought developed at many different times. During the 18th century, Clark says, while 'enlightenment with a small e was everywhere, the Enlightenment was nowhere.' But in the 20th century, particularly after the Second World War, the Enlightenment was enshrined as a single concept, a period of secular and scientific liberalisation across Europe, from which many modern beliefs can be traced.
At a seminar in Oxford two days after we meet, Clark defends his idea from good humoured but firm criticism by postgraduates and fellow academics in a packed room. One line of dissent is that Clark is fighting an old battle; that few modern historians of the Enlightenment would argue it is the kind of single concept he presents.
Perhaps this is because for Clark, attacking the old view of the Enlightenment is also about breaking this connection with more recent social and political theories that he says are running out of steam. Twentieth century movements for religious, racial and sexual equality all took the Enlightenment as a founding myth. If the Enlightenment is tired, so are other ideas.
'The Enlightenment is an ideology, a doctrine and therefore it shares the experience of all the great ideologies, from conceptualisation through development, popularisation, hegemony, decline, to de-conceptualisation,' he says. 'I think of myself as a de-conceptualiser.'
Although the Enlightenment was coined in the 19th century as the German Aufklärung, Clark argues it was not until after the Second World War that it started to gain real traction in European thought. Whatever Nazism had been, the Enlightenment was its opposite. Over the following decades it became inseparable from liberalism and social reform. As Clark puts it, the Enlightenment was 'the abstract programme which makes possible modernity', and became 'a shorthand for all those people who have adopted causes of social reform, whether it's education or state schools or the health service or the quality of daily life.'
He sees the exhaustion of political thought everywhere around him. 'At the last general Election I realised all the great ideologies have run out of steam. Liberalism was famously defeated by socialism; socialism ran out of steam and Tony Blair abandoned it. Conservativism was abandoned by Margaret Thatcher, who turned it into [Friedrich] Hayekian radical individualism. It was a great symbolic moment in the Conservative party when they threw Roger Scruton under the bus.'
The dearth of ideas was brought home to him when he did what he had never done before and read the party manifestos. 'They are, intellectually, remarkably shallow and astonishingly lightweight,' he says. 'The Lib Dem manifesto doesn't express liberalism. The Labour manifesto doesn't express socialism. The Conservative manifesto makes no mention of conservatism. They're a collection of ideas scrambled together at the last moment. What draws them together? Nothing. They are not eternal truths. They are ideologies which have all hit the ground.'
He is unsure about what will fill the vacuum. In Britain, he says 'some sort of reunion between the Conservative party and Reform has become inevitable,' and that he was pleasantly surprised by what he found at a Reform UK meeting.
'I went along wondering if I would find a collection of loonies and nutcases, racists and extremists,' he says. 'But no, I found a collection of people who struck me like the Conservative party would have been 20 years ago.'
Then there is Scottish Nationalism, 'which may revive', and radicalised Islam which is 'powerful and may grow'. We speak days before the German election, when it looks as though the AfD might do well. 'It might be a good thing if AfD becomes a larger organisation,' he says. 'If you have proportional representation, whoever you vote for you get the same government. Germany has had the same government since the Second World War.'
Perhaps the scariest force of all is 'wokery', or 'wokeish', which Clark sees as a grave threat to the intellectual fabric of the country. 'Without a new English, Wokeish will win,' he wrote in an essay titled 'Bonfire of the Verities' for The Critic last year.
'The language of Wokeish is a wide application of the language of victimhood, which has been permitted by the rapid proliferation and diffusion of universal human-rights language,' he says. 'Everyone is now a victim. They're not poor, they're not suffering from disease. They're victims. The lever one has on society is to claim to be a victim. Nobody is interested if you say you are poor. There are many real victims in the world, but wokery ignores them. That's why it's objectionable.' Equally, however, he says it is possible that a Trump-esque movement will be replicated elsewhere, and 'we will look back on wokery as a strange short-term aberration.'
Clark has seen first-hand the effect of wokery on university life, where it has perhaps been most pronounced. He was born in 1951 and grew up in Surrey. His father was an electrical engineer and his mother was a housewife. After grammar school he went on to study history at Downing College, Cambridge. He briefly worked at the London Stock Exchange before he returned to academia, via teaching posts at Cambridge and All Souls, Oxford. In 1989, he was teaching a seminar at Oxford when he noticed a graduate student had dropped her glove. 'I picked it up and said 'I think you've dropped your glove.'' He and Catherine married seven years later, around the time they moved to the University of Kansas, where Clark was appointed Joyce C. and Elizabeth Ann Hall Distinguished Professorship of British History, where they stayed for 20 years.
Reflecting on his early time in academia, he says debate was much freer. 'There was much more free speech then,' he says. 'Looking around me at Cambridge, there were giants. Their lives had been messed up by war and revolution and disaster but somehow they had struggled through. This was reflected in their willingness to think seriously about serious subjects. Now everything is identical and homogenised.
'It's still difficult to get a job in academia but it's more of assimilating oneself to the identical image,' he adds. 'The academic world has been trivialised.'
He retired from teaching in 2018, and he and Catherine swapped a townhouse in Oxford for their Northumbrian castle, where life is pleasantly social and 'one of the local sports' is dinner parties. 'Geographically, I'm between Chris Mullin, who's slightly north of me, and Jeremy Hosking slightly south of me. I'm in the middle. There's no difficulty or antagonism at all. Chris Mullin and I get on fine.' One wonders whether a radical-Centrist would get such a warm welcome, if one were to make it to Northumberland.
'North Northumberland is where you move to if you want to live in superb countryside but you don't want to mix with the people from the Cotswolds,' he adds. 'I've never lived in the Cotswolds but I can imagine them being part of group-think. We are more open to debate than they are likely to be.'