This article contests the argument that British political thought in the 19th century was exceptional in European perspective in lacking a strong concept of nationhood and nationality. On the one hand it argues, with reference to Mazzini, Michelet and Renan, that continental European theories of nationality were by no means as dependent on a strong concept of race as a focus on Germany might imply. On the other hand, it identifies the Liberal Anglican tradition (Thomas and Matthew Arnold, F.D. Maurice, Arnold Toynbee) as a current of thought which generated an important but certainly non-racial concept of nationhood, as part of a general rehabilitation of community in the face of what these thinkers took to be utilitarian neglect.key words: Matthew Arnold, F.D. Maurice, nation, nationalism, race, Toynbee, Victorian Peter Mandler has recently offered a powerful rebuttal of the increasingly fashionable notion that already in the middle of the 19th century British culture and thought were permeated with organic concepts of race and nation. 1 He has instead stressed the continuing vitality of an older, 'civilizational', tradition of thought which regarded nationhood as atavistic. He challenges the argument, advanced by cultural historians such as Catherine Hall, that imperial crisis in India, Ireland, Jamaica and elsewhere had a remorselessly nationalizing and racializing impact on British political thought. For Mandler, 'the ladder of civilisation, rather than the branching tree of peoples and nations, remained the dominant metaphor'. 2 The former metaphor, tied to the idea of a 'universalising "civilisation"', implied a more or less uniform human nature, whereas the latter took human nature to be nationally differentiated. 3 He argues that organic nationalism made few inroads in Britain before the First World War, and even concludes that it was only in the inter-war period, with the emergence of a conservative nationalism, that the idea of the nation came to play a central role in British political thought.
