ABSTRACT
This chapter is an essay in the politics of reputation. It examines several stages in the transvaluation of Cobden's persona: the contestation of the 'real Richard Cobden' in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the debate about 'the international man' after the First World War and Cobden's declining cultural significance in interwar Britain, and, the sporadic and limited reappearances of Cobden in international libertarian networks in the second half of the twentieth century. If in his own lifetime Cobden played a central role in the making of liberalism, his resurrection and decomposition in his after-life contributed to the decline of that liberal culture. After 1932 Cobden disappears from political iconography. Only two subsequent appearances have been discovered, and, tellingly, the one by G. Illingworth in the Daily Mail in 1944 links Cobden to the decline of British agriculture and shows 'Cobden & Sons, Family Butchers' ready at the farmgate, hoping to slaughter the Cow, threatening the nation's wartime food.
