Several members and friends of Democratic Left Scotland raised concerns about how heavily the Notes at an Impasse document drew on a particular interpretation of British history which Tom Nairn advanced in the 1960s and 1970s.
The ‘Nairn-Anderson theses’, which inform Tom Nairn’s 1977 book The Break-Up of Britain (reissued several times, with additional forewords, prefaces and afterwords), were first developed in a series of New Left Review articles from 1963, The series began with Perry Anderson's Origins of the Present Crisis and Tom Nairn's The British Political Elite, both published in 1 / NLR 23 in 1963. This body of work constitutes a landmark in British historiography, but it has not gone unchallenged. An early and trenchant critic was E.P. Thompson who, in 'The Peculiarities of the English' (published first in 1965’s Socialist Register and collected in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, 1978), questioned the assumption of Nairn and Anderson that the French Revolution was the very model of a bourgeois revolution. This was the basis of their argument that England's ‘premature’ and ‘rudimentary’ essay in the genre between 1640 and 1688 had long-lasting and debilitating consequences for British culture and politics. England, Thompson countered, had done it in one way, France in another.
David Edgerton offers more recent criticisms of the Nairn-Anderson theses. In The Rise and Fall of the British Nation (2019), he takes issue with ‘declinist’ accounts of twentieth-century Britain, arguing that from the 1940s the old imperial state, with its liberal, capitalist and genuinely global political economy, gave way to something new, the ‘British nation’. Forged in the crucible of total war amidst widespread revulsion against the domestic and foreign-policy disasters of the inter-war years, this phase in British history reached its apogee under Harold Wilson’s governments, first from 1964 to 1970 and then again, after a brief and turbulent Conservative intermission, from 1974 to 1976.
Labour's efforts to create a developmental state with the will and capacity to revamp the British economy and reform the country's institutions came to grief in the intractable inflationary conflicts of the 1970s, which culminated in the collapse of the Social Contract in the winter of 1978-9 and opened the way to the Thatcherite counter-revolution of the 1980s. But the demise of the post-war settlement and the ensuing change of policy regime provide no reason to dismiss the experience of the preceding three decades as being of little consequence. Furthermore, in their grand narrative sweep from the 1600s to the mid-twentieth century, Nairn and Anderson ignored major changes of policy regime, including the hard road travelled from the forced abandonment of laissez-faire in the First World War to the emergence of managed capitalism in the 1930s and 1940s.
Published 18 November 2023. The illustration is the 2014 portrait of Tom Nairn by Sandy Moffat, which was commissioned by Democratic Left Scotland and is held in the collection of The McManus Galleries & Museum, Dundee.