Manchester University Press Reassessing 1970s Britain

This book examines a period which was the fulcrum around which postwar British history moved. In popular discourse the 1970s is commonly characterized as a dismal decade of economic and political failure from which the country was apparently rescued by Thatcherism. The editors of this volume argue that this is both simplistic and a barrier to understanding a period of fundamental importance in the trajectory of postwar British history. Most notably, it was a decade of extraordinary ferment in ideas. Out of the battles waged around these ideas emerged the Britain of the late-twentieth century. In addressing the ideational contours of the decade, Reassessing 1970s Britain takes an innovative approach. It assembles a group of actors who were influential in generating and disseminating new ideas in the 1970s (James Alt, Samuel Brittan, Stuart Holland, Lynne Segal and Peter Mayer) to reflect on key texts and arguments from the decade in which they were closely involved, and debate the ideas developed within those texts with contemporary historians who are experts on this period. It ranges over a wide field, encompassing politics, economics, women's liberation, and popular culture, as well as engaging with the ways in which such ideas were disseminated to a wider audience. Reassessing 1970s Britain will be of interest to lecturers and students in a wide range of disciplines: modern British history, economic history, cultural history, social history, politics, gender studies, and cultural studies.