Chris Bertram gives Iain Murray a bit of a poke:

Iain Murray is quite an enthusiast for the concept of the “anglosphere”, the idea that there is a set of institutional and cultural characteristics that set the English-speaking countries of the world apart and which explain their unique good fortune. No doubt there’s something in the idea, although if I were being mischievous – which I am! – I would gesture in the direction of Mr Podsnap from Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend … Of course, Iain isn’t a little Englander like Mr Podsnap, but there is something about the “Anglosphere” which has, if I may put things somewhat paradoxically, a whiff of Little England writ large.

Mr Podsnap provides a rejoinder to the ringing quote from John Adams that Iain uses as his slogan. Adams says “Let it be known that British liberties are not the grant of princes and parliaments”, which leaves open the question of where they did come from. Mr Podsnap fills us in: “We Englishmen are Very Proud of our Constitution, Sir. It Was Bestowed Upon Us By Providence. No Other Country is so Favoured as This Country.”

Iain enthusiastically endorsed a map of attitudes from The Economist as evidence that the Anglosphere’s reality is “staring [us] in the faceimage” (emphasis, three exclamation marks and all). Chris points out that it actually shows England to be closer to Austria, Italy, France and other several other countries than to the United States.

As you might imagine, this puts Iain in an uncomfortable position. In response, he is forced to claim that “Britain is an outlier within the Anglosphere”. (In other news, Ohio is an outlier within the Midwest.) Oddly, the very first bit of recommended reading on Iain’s blogroll—- higher up even than Glenn Reynolds—- is An Anglosphere Primer by James C. Bennett, which says right away that

Nations comprising the Anglosphere share a common historical narrative in which the Magna Carta, the English and American Bills of Rights, and such Common Law principles as trial by jury, presumption of innocence, “a man’s home is his castle”, and “a man’s word is his bond” are taken for granted… The Anglosphere, as a network civilization without a corresponding political form, has necessarily imprecise boundaries. Geographically, the densest nodes of the Anglosphere are found in the United States and the United Kingdom [Emphasis added.]

As Chris says, there’s something to the idea. England’s political institutions are very different from those of corporatist Europe. But they’re also very different from those of the United States. I don’t think there’s anything in the idea that can’t be found in more common and (and more nuanced) analyses of comparative political culture.

Being forced to relegate England itself to the status of Anglosphere Outlier is bad news for another reason, too. It suggests that Iain et al have an idealization in mind, rather than an accurate empirical description. Their focus is on what, in their view, constitutes the real nature of Angloness, rather than its actual manisfestations in places like England. Thus, the Magna Carta, the King-in-Parliament, and other good stuff gets in, but then we get special pleading for the parts that they don’t like so much: England is “more class-structured, has constitutional problems that allow more for dependency and oppression than other Anglosphere countries and it has been affected more by socialism than the others.” Its strong class system, unwritten constitution and experience of working-class mobilization are, I think, at least as constitutive of England’s political culture as the other stuff. I imagine the same winnowing process could be done for other countries in the Anglosphere, keeping the bits you like, labelling them as essentially Anglospheric, and tossing out the rest. This starts to sound like those old Marxist debates about who got to be in the “real” working class. The end product is a political program disguised as an empirical analysis. Fans of the Anglosphere should be careful that they don’t end up sounding like its real center is somewhere round about here.

Update: Further developments are here.