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Folk Devils Fight Back
“The current set of moral panics being orchestrated by the Conservative government surfaced early in February 1993 with the death of two-year-old James Bulger. The flurry of debate which followed revolved around the breakdown of the family, the growth of crimes committed by children, and the powerlessness of . . .” read more
Second-Hand Dealers in Ideas: Think-Tanks and Thatcherite Hegemony
“[T]he ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the . . .” read more
Edward Thompson and the New Left
“The death of Edward Thompson on 28 August takes from us the most eloquent voice on the British Left, a historian who transformed his craft, a writer of some of the best English prose of the twentieth century, a thinker who knew that ideas were not a world . . .” read more
Anti-Hegemony: The Legacy of William Blake
“This has been a long, and perhaps strange, way into William Blake. On one matter I am impenitent. Blake can’t have dreamed up a whole vocabulary of symbolism, which touches at so many points the traditions which I have discussed, for himself ab novo. Nor can he have . . .” read more
Harold Laski: An Exemplary Public Intellectual
“Before proceeding with this review, I should, as they say, declare an interest. I came to know Harold Laski as a student at the London School of Economics (then evacuated in Cambridge) between 1941 and 1943; and I was fairly close to him after I came back to . . .” read more
The Sole Survivor
“This Review is two hundred issues old. All sorts of things can be hung on commemorative hooks, and one of them is rueful retrospect. About five crises ago I found myself before an audience of us academics, trying to persuade them that a National Government would be . . .” read more
The Personal and the Political
“Sheila Rowbotham: Your new book, Outsiders, suggests to me a general feature of your work—an awareness of class as a general feature of society but also of the cultural nuances which bind or separate people into or between classes. Was there something in your family background which . . .” read more
The Entrails of Thatcherism
“Margaret Thatcher was leader of the Conservative party for almost sixteen years and Prime Minister for eleven years. Under her leadership the Conservatives won three general elections and re-established themselves as the dominant party in the British state, while Labour declined to its interwar level of support. It . . .” read more
Toward a More Representative Voting System: The Plant Report
“Reform of the British electoral system has been much discussed in recent years. It is advocated by all centre parties—by the present Liberal Democrat Party, by its predecessors the Liberal and the Social Democrat Parties, and by the Green Party as well. The Labour Party, as a body, . . .” read more
The Question of Electoral Reform
“Representative government in the United Kingdom has a very special character with respect to that elsewhere in Western Europe. In the first place, the British House of Commons at Westminster is the only parliament in Western Europe which neither now nor in the recent past has been elected . . .” read more
The Ruins of Westminster
“Britain, or the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as it is still officially known, resembles an ungainly, dilapidated, half-refurbished Victorian pile threatened by the simultaneous onslaught of subsidence, storm damage, woodworm and dry rot. This year brings an election that could be dangerously inconclusive and . . .” read more
The Autonomy of Scottish Politics
“The Scottish Assembly referendum in 1979 took place in the context of intense political divisions. All sections of the labour movement were divided on the issue, and particularly in local government where many local councillors supported the ‘No’ campaign. The Scottish National Party was divided: although official policy . . .” read more
Citizenship and Charter 88
“The great written constitutions, from which the idea of constitutional reform unavoidably borrows some of its aura, have set out to redefine the fundamental relationships of citizens, society and government as these were perceived at the time of their writing. The American Declaration of Independence asserted the rights . . .” read more
The Case for Dismantling the Secret State
“smear, which describes in meticulous detail the activities of the security services, over many years, in seeking to discredit and destroy the Left in British politics, and Harold Wilson in particular, is by far the most important book that has been published on this subject. It . . .” read more
What Did I Do During Thatcherism?
“For all the moral claptrap, Thatcherism entered my personal life by way of a temptation or bribe. In 1982 I was grinding away at an academic career. I had been at it since the early sixties and, like most of my colleagues, was gasping for early retirement. To . . .” read more
A Reply to David Edgerton
“In his article ‘Liberal Militarism and the British State’ (nlr 185, January–February 1991), David Edgerton questions certain facts, calculations or interpretations of mine in my book The Audit of War about the British aircraft industry between the wars and during the Second World War. Let me take . . .” read more
Liberal Militarism and the British State
“The British contribution to the Gulf war, the Cold War rhetoric of Margaret Thatcher, and the fresh memory of the Falklands war remind us of the military propensities of the British state. Yet Britain has not had conscription since the fifties, its generals keep out of political life, . . .” read more
The Idea of the Primitive: British Art and Anthropology 1918-1930
“The idea of the primitive has long been a potent and highly influential current in British thought and history. In particular, the period 1918–30 saw primitivism established as an important theme in writing on art and anthropology. Analysis of the concept may therefore usefully begin there—with a span . . .” read more
A Culture in Contraflow--II
“A movement from modes of production to those of communication, which marks the historical anthropology of Jack Goody was, of course, also one of the central themes of the work of Raymond Williams. The parallels in the development of an original cultural materialism in the two bodies of . . .” read more
Still a Question of Hegemony
“The analysis in nlr 179 by Bob Jessop, Kevin Bonnets and Simon Bromley of Thatcherism’s current difficulties in terms of the weaknesses of its economic strategy, demonstrates the power and indispensability of ‘traditional’ political economy. But it also shows some of the limitations of that approach. They . . .” read more
A Culture in Contraflow--I
“Few subjects can be so elusive as a national culture. The term lends itself to any number of meanings, each presenting its own difficulties of definition or application. Towards the end of the sixties, I tried to explore what seemed one significant structure to fall under such a . . .” read more
Farewell to Thatcherism? Neo-Liberalism and 'New Times'
“There can be no doubt that the Thatcher government over the last year or so has encountered a crisis of public confidence: some even believe the end of Thatcherism is nigh. Signs of impending doom were already discerned in June 1989 when the Conservative party suffered its first . . .” read more
Commercial and Industrial Capital in England: A Reply to Geoffrey Ingham
“In response to Perry Anderson’s ‘Figures of Descent’ (nlr 161), I attempted in my contribution (nlr 167), as part of a more general critique, to defend the traditional Marxist view of British capitalism and the British Empire as being rooted in industrial and not in commercial . . .” read more
Hillsborough, 15 April 1989: Some Personal Contemplations
“When news of the Hillsborough disaster began to reach me, I was still living in Ottawa, Canada—only two weeks before returning to take up an academic position in England. A phone call from a Canadian relative giving the bare outline of the events was followed by ever more . . .” read more
Gramsci and Marxism in Britain
“Outside Italy, nowhere more than in Britain have Gramsci’s writings exercised so prolonged, deep or diversified an influence. Some of this has been channelled through the academic disciplines of history, political science and cultural studies, but much of it has worked directly upon the theory and practice of . . .” read more
Gender and the Rise and Fall of Class Politics
“Is gender an autonomous form of social stratification? Does it form a compound with other bases of social inequality? How is it related to class, the ‘master’ concept of stratification theory? These questions have been forced into focus in recent years through the emergence of the married yet . . .” read more
Corporate Reconstruction and Business Unionism: The Lessons of Caterpillar and Ford
“Technological determinism has recently emerged as the favoured theme of those who seek to challenge the centrality of class politics within the British labour movement. This somewhat uncharacteristic perspective is used to argue that new production technologies are directly creating a new political environment. Production processes, it is . . .” read more
Taking Monarchism Seriously
“The institution of monarchy presents one of the most glaring paradoxes of British society and British history. It is a monarchy unique in the developed capitalist world in remaining unmodernized, undemocratized and utterly mystified. Elsewhere, in Scandinavia and the Netherlands, the institution survives as a kind of hereditary . . .” read more
Meditations on a Theme by Tom Nairn
“In China an immemorial throne crumbled in 1911; India put its Rajas and Nawabs in the wastepaper-basket as soon as it gained independence in 1947; in Ethiopia the Lion of Judah has lately ceased to roar. Monarchy survives in odd corners of Asia; and in Japan and Britain. . . .” read more
Commercial Capital and British Development: A Reply to Michael Barratt Brown
“Despite their overtly historical nature, Anderson and Nairn’s essays on British development were profoundly theoretical. The identification of British ‘peculiarity’ or ‘exceptionalism’ involved a challenge not only to Marx and Engels’s commentaries on the times in which they lived, but also to the general Marxist theory of capitalist . . .” read more
Exception or Symptom? The British Crisis and the World System
“Perry Anderson is too modest in his claims for New Left Review’s interpretation of English history, recently restated in ‘The Figures of Descent’. He suggests (p. 27) that ‘the consensus of at any rate the local left’ upheld the criticisms of that interpretation in Edward Thompson’s famous essay . . .” read more
Away With All the Great Arches: Anderson’s History of British Capitalism
“The golden age of British History is now over, according to David Cannadine, not only as a nation but also as a subject of study—‘an account of the British past which reconciled repeated revolutions with a belief in ordered progress and which thus appeared to be simultaneously unique . . .” read more
Conservatives and Corporatism
“In the course of her closing speech at the Conservative Party Conference in 1984 Mrs Thatcher held high a copy of the 1944 White Paper on employment policy and triumphantly revealed that it carried on its cover the name of Margaret H. Roberts. While it may be intriguing . . .” read more
Class Politics: The Lost World of British Communism (Part III)
“The schism in British Communism, like many of those in Marxist political formations, resembles nothing so much as a war of ghosts in which the living actors are dwarfed by the spectres they conjure up. The debate on the ‘British way’—the major issue at the 1977 Congress when . . .” read more
The Limits of Labourism: 1987 and Beyond
“Labour’s campaign for the next election started on 12 June 1987, the day after the Party’s third successive defeat at the polls. Neil Kinnock said as much, and although many politicians make declarations of this sort Kinnock was for once not indulging in rhetoric. He made a similar . . .” read more
The Origins of the Administrative Elite
“A quarter of a century ago, Perry Anderson wrote a path-breaking article challenging the framework that historians had established for explaining, among other things, political change in 19th-century Britain. His analyses at that time, along with the work of Tom Nairn, have received reinforcement from subsequent research and . . .” read more
Problems of Marxist History
“Harvey Kaye is an American professor of Social Change and Development, an enviable title probably not yet adopted anywhere in conservative Britain. It must come more naturally to the American mind, in a country where things are always changing, even if as a rule circularly. One thing that . . .” read more
The Figures of Descent
“The debates aroused by a number of theses on Britain, published in New Left Review some twenty years ago, had at their centre a dispute over the character of the dominant class in Hanoverian and Victorian England, and the nature of the state over which it presided. These . . .” read more
The Formation of British Capitalism
“Periodically a book illuminates and orders a complex and vexed question not so much by discovering anything new or by fresh theory, but simply by looking at it systematically and avoiding premature conceptualization. In setting out to close ‘the most outstanding lacuna in the understanding of our recent . . .” read more
Municipal Enterprise and Popular Planning
“The appearance of a series of major reviews of the Greater London Council’s London Industrial Strategy (lis) in socialist publications, notably Mike Rustin’s thoughtful article in nlr 155, reflects its impact on the wider debate among socialists about strategies to confront the economic crisis. But socialist . . .” read more
Proportional Representation: A Socialist Concept
“I submit that proportional representation is a fundamental socialist concept. I argue, furthermore, that no socialist seriously committed to democratic, accountable representation can advocate any other electoral system. My argument, however, is completely different from that put by the sdp/Liberal Alliance. When we look back across the . . .” read more
Restructuring the State
“This article contrasts two strategic options for the Labour Party and the Left in the approach to the next election in Britain. One, the option chosen by the Labour leadership, is to seek to recapture the votes lost to the Alliance parties since 1981 by occupying their political . . .” read more
A Strategy for Labour: Four Documents
“The papers reproduced in this issue of nlr were all submitted to, and rejected by, the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party. The arguments contained in them reflect some of the concerns and views of a very substantial body of opinion, not accepted by the leadership . . .” read more
Labour’s Future and the Coalition Debate
“Slightly adapting Dr. Johnson, we can say that the prospect of political execution concentrates the collective mind wonderfully—on the elementary need to survive. This has been the preoccupation of the Labour Party, especially its leadership, in the wake of its catastrophically poor performance in the 1983 general election. . . .” read more
Staying Power: The Lost World of British Communism (Part II)
“The Communist Party, in my recollection of it (I left the Party in 1956), was singularly free of what are known, in more conventional political formations, as ‘rows’. Succession struggles of a kind endemic in social-democratic parties were unknown, and indeed for the first ten years of its . . .” read more
Capital Flight and Exchange Controls
“The difficulties faced by a Labour Government in carrying out socialist policies in the UK assume their most dramatic form in the threat of capital flight. If free movement of financial capital is allowed, domestic UK interest rates are bound by a golden chain, via Euromarkets, . . .” read more
Lessons of the London Industrial Strategy
“In the past few difficult years for the Left in Britain, the greatest cause for hope has been the initiatives of the new ‘city socialism’ of the metropolitan county councils such as the glc. They have succeeded in demonstrating the positive value of public provision—in transport and . . .” read more