Conflict and cohesion in the British labour party and French communist party

The article examines the differing organisational structures and political cultures which provide the bases for cohesion in the PCF and British Labour Party. It argues that the electoral decline of the two parties since the late 1960s, and the rise of new political forces to challenge their primacy on the Left, have generated growing internal conflict in each case. Despite the greater pressures towards unity in the PCF such conflicts have threatened the existing bases of cohesion in both parties. The article concludes by considering the possibilities of surmounting the current problems.     

Shorter notes

John B. Dwyer, Seaborne Deception: The History of the U.S. Navy Beach Jumpers (New York: Praeger, 1992).

A.B. Feuer (ed.), Coast‐watching in the Solomon Islands: The Bougenville Reports, December 1941–1943 (New York: Praeger, 1992).     

Conservatism and the rhetoric of rhetoric

There is currently a revival of the intellectual tradition of rhetoric as a reaction to modernism. Because of rhetoric’s links with conservatism, this revival’s own rhetoric needs to be examined. A revival of an aesthetic rhetoric could easily be backward-looking and draw upon the backward-looking, conservative traditions within the history of rhetoric. On the other hand, if the revival stresses the pragmatic features of rhetoric it might be seen either as an adornment to those skills of persuasive selling, encouraged today by pragmatic conservatism, or as a development of today’s science of persuasion. Despite the obvious links to romantic and to pragmatic conservatism, rhetoric does contain the possibility for a radical critique of modernism; this would unite aesthetics and pragmatism, form and style, and raise the image of free and unending argumentation.