Tom Nairn
Biographic Data
| ID | 220853 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tom Nairn |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tom |
| FAMILY NAME | Nairn |
| SIGNATURE | NAIRN T |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 239 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1962 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Scotland and Europe
As a homage to Tom Nairn (who passed away on 21 January 2023), the editorial board of SNM has decided to republish Nairn’s article ‘Scotland and Europe’ (first published by the New Left Review in 1974), encouraging readers and scholars to keep critically engaging with Nairn’s seminal works and theses on nationalism
The Bourgeois Nemesis
In 1964, NLR produced a set of texts aiming to explain the crisis-ridden state of post-war Britain by analysing the unique class compact that governed its longstanding capitalist regime. Behind the Nairn–Anderson theses stood an earlier formulation of these ideas, ‘La Nemesi borghese’, published by Nairn in the Italian Marxist journal Il Contemporaneo, appearing here for the first time in English
The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-nationalism
Union on the Rocks
The New Furies
Global Matrix: Nationalism, Globalism and State-Terrorism
Global Matrix: Nationalism, Globalism and State-Terrorism
The authors explore three main questions: What is the cultural- political nature of contemporary globalization? How adequate, particularly in the context of nation-states, is a politics of democratic nationalism? How are we to understand new and old nations in the context of changes across the late twentieth century
Deserted by History: In Memory of the Red Paper on Scotland, 1975
I think one can profitably begin by reflecting on the timing of the Red Paper on Scotland. It came out in 1975, after the period of nationalist break-through in Scotland, the same year as Wilson's referendum on taking Britain into the European Economic Community, and following on some notable workingclass agitation (displayed on the front cover the Upper Clyde shipyard occupation). It burst upon us after all these exciting indicators of change an…
A Myriad Byzantiums
After ethnic definitions of collective identity, is a new scenery—hybrid cultures intertwined with a universal genome—becoming visible? Could St John Perse’s cosmopolis on the Bosphorus furnish a template for a world beyond national and multicultural imaginings
Mario and the Magician
British politics under the wand of Redemption, as the new leitmotif of the party system. Similarities and contrasts between the ex-imperial states of UK and France, as New Labour shuffles towards listless re-election
Farewell Britannia: Break-Up or New Union
Has the Northern Ireland Agreement injected a fatal shot of constitutionalism into the archaic Ukanian state? Responding to Pocock and Mulhern, Tom Nairn looks forward to a rearrangement of islander relations, but warns that without its own reconstitution England could become a fatally regressive anomaly in the archipelago
Ukania Under Blair
Great Britain has finally yielded a parliament to Scotland. But the Labour regime in London still clings convulsively to the totems of Ukania, in Tom Nairn’s savage updating of Robert Musil. New Labour’s eupeptic rhetoric of youth as a sure sign of a system being wheeled into the terminal ward
Virtual Liberation or: British Sovereignty Since the Election
I have been invited to talk about what has befallen the Sovereignty of the United Kingdom since 1 May 1997, on a platform just vacated by our last and greatest Scottish Secretary of State. With an adroit mixture of optimism, shrewdness and lawyerly attention to detail, Mr Dewar has added farther to the momentum of the moment, the general sense of a tide of change carrying us forward into a new period of history
Reflections on Nationalist Disasters
Seventy-five years ago there occurred an event, obscure at the time, from whose terrible consequences the world of 2000 ad has not yet completely recovered. The place was Munich, capital of the historic Kingdom of Bavaria and now the second city of the recently formed all-German Reich
Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited
Sovereignty After the Election
I desire a perfect Union of Lawes and persons, and such a Naturalizing as may make one body of both Kingdomes under mee your King. That I and my posteritie (if it so please God) may rule over you to the world’s ende; Such an Union as was
Ernest Gellner 1925-1995: Appreciation
Breakwaters of 2000: From Ethnic to Civic Nationalism
A considerable part of world opinion has grown convinced that the end of history has led to a return of ethnic nationalism. The return is mainly a threat, and a permanent one in the sense that few can see any general cure for the fragmentation or anarchy now
Beyond Reason? Ethnos or Uneven development
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
The House of Windsor
Genuine socialists have always detested the Windsor monarchs. They appear to confront a nation sucked into helpless crown-worship, without a single ounce of decent republicanism in its make-up. While they dream of communism, the country has not advanced out of this old feudal rhapsody. The ‘serious’ bourgeois Sunday
The Crisis of the British State
Ireland, mounting street violence in the greater English cities, the disintegration of the Labour Party (and hence of the old two-party stability), continuing separatist agitation in Wales and Scotland, a renewed economic crisis after the brief reprieve of North Sea oil—these may appear, at first sight, signs of
The Future of Britain’s Crisis
‘The outstanding feature of the British situation since the Second World War has been unreality . . . On balance the wonder is that the system has remained afloat and changed course to the extent that it has. So far the repeated lesson of history that the loss
The Twilight of the British State
‘External conflicts between states form the shape of the state. I am assuming this “shape” to mean—by contrast with internal social development—the external configuration, the size of a state, its contiguity (whether strict or loose), and even its ethnic composition . . . We must stress that in
The Modern Janus
The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure. It may have had others as well, and some of these have been more debated: Marxism’s shortcomings over imperialism, the State, the falling rate of profit and the immiseration of the masses are certainly old battlefields. Yet none of
The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-nationalism
Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited
Sovereignty After the Election
I desire a perfect Union of Lawes and persons, and such a Naturalizing as may make one body of both Kingdomes under mee your King. That I and my posteritie (if it so please God) may rule over you to the world’s ende; Such an Union as was
Virtual Liberation or: British Sovereignty Since the Election
I have been invited to talk about what has befallen the Sovereignty of the United Kingdom since 1 May 1997, on a platform just vacated by our last and greatest Scottish Secretary of State. With an adroit mixture of optimism, shrewdness and lawyerly attention to detail, Mr Dewar has added farther to the momentum of the moment, the general sense of a tide of change carrying us forward into a new period of history
The Modern Janus
The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure. It may have had others as well, and some of these have been more debated: Marxism’s shortcomings over imperialism, the State, the falling rate of profit and the immiseration of the masses are certainly old battlefields. Yet none of
Scotland and Europe
For a number of reasons this seems an appropriate moment to reconsider the problem of Scottish nationalism. With its November 1973 electoral victory in the Govan Constituency the Scottish National Party has recovered from its setbacks in the 1970 general election. At the same time the Kilbrandon Commission
Enoch Powell: The New Right
Every nation, to live healthily and to live happily, needs a patriotism. Britain today, after all the changes of the last decades, needs a new kind of patriotism and is feeling its way towards it
The British Political Elite
Class-divided societies have almost always been governed politically by a small minority. In general, this chosen few is a small group even in relation to the ‘ruling class’ itself, in the Marxist sense, the class which possesses or controls the economic wealth of society through the institutions of
Crowds and Critics
This book—which may be said to have the clarity, simplicity, and explanatory flexibility of a metaphysical system—is an erudite and fascinating work of immense distinction. In it, the fruits of human action en bloc have been wisely tabled and formulated. Original and massively documented, it provides us with
Landed England
English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century: G. E. Mingay, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century: F. M. L. Thompson. Both from series “Studies in Social History”, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963, 40s. 310pp., 45s. 368pp. respectively
Hugh Gaitskell
He had scarcely drawn his last breath, when the halo was stuck above his head. It was like some preposterous historical mistake. Who would have believed Hugh Gaitskell fit for such an exalted place in the national pantheon? Who, dredging through the speeches and few writings of this
The British Political Elite
Class-divided societies have almost always been governed politically by a small minority. In general, this chosen few is a small group even in relation to the ‘ruling class’ itself, in the Marxist sense, the class which possesses or controls the economic wealth of society through the institutions of
The English Working Class
The English working class is one of the enigmas of modern history. Its development as a class is divided into two great phases, and there appears at first sight to be hardly any connection between them
The Nature of the Labour Party (Part II)
What is the main justification of Labourism, put forward by socialists at its birth and still advanced by its apologists? What is the cry that rings out at every Labour Party Conference, to repress all serious dissent and maintain the incredible system intact? That Labourism attains the unity
The Nature of the Labour Party (Part I)
The British Labour Party is obviously one of the greatest political forces of the capitalist world. With its six million and more members, it is by far the largest of social-democratic parties. The twelve million votes cast in its favour at the last General Election were the votes
Labour Imperialism
Unique among governments of the Left, the Labour Government has done more than fail its friends: it has even disappointed its enemies. Disillusion over its foreign policy is almost universal. The liberal opponents of socialism have been criticizing its inert conservatism for some time; now even the pillars
Hornsey
This fiftieth issue of New Left Review opens with a critique, by Perry Anderson, of the structures of bourgeois culture in Britain. The task of forging a revolutionary and internationalist political culture in this country has always been a central preoccupation of the Review. This involves attacking the
The Three Dreams of Scottish Nationalism
Modern Scottish Nationalism has led a fluctuating, intermittent existence since 1853. Now, quite suddenly, it has become a more serious political reality. In the past it has gone through many renaissances, followed by even more impressive and longer-lasting collapses into inertia; but the present upsurge looks likely to
Enoch Powell: The New Right
Every nation, to live healthily and to live happily, needs a patriotism. Britain today, after all the changes of the last decades, needs a new kind of patriotism and is feeling its way towards it
The Fateful Meridian
‘The history of a party’, wrote Antonio Gramsci, ‘cannot fail to be the history of a given social class . . . writing the history of a party really means nothing but writing the history of a country from a particular, monographic point of view, throwing one aspect
British Nationalism and the EEC
The Left against Europe? (Special Issue)
‘I imagine that by about the turn of the century something like a United States of Socialist Europe will exist. A timid and conservative prefiguration of these United States is naturally the Common Market, for even conservative, bourgeois politicians are beginning to sense that the nation state, at
Immigration under Capitalism
The authors of Immigrant Workers begin by observing that ‘The race relations approach has dominated research on immigration in Britain’. This approach has been mainly liberal in outlook, and frequently followed American models; ‘few British social scientists have paid any attention to . . . immigrants in the
Scotland and Europe
For a number of reasons this seems an appropriate moment to reconsider the problem of Scottish nationalism. With its November 1973 electoral victory in the Govan Constituency the Scottish National Party has recovered from its setbacks in the 1970 general election. At the same time the Kilbrandon Commission
The Modern Janus
The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure. It may have had others as well, and some of these have been more debated: Marxism’s shortcomings over imperialism, the State, the falling rate of profit and the immiseration of the masses are certainly old battlefields. Yet none of
The Twilight of the British State
‘External conflicts between states form the shape of the state. I am assuming this “shape” to mean—by contrast with internal social development—the external configuration, the size of a state, its contiguity (whether strict or loose), and even its ethnic composition . . . We must stress that in
The Future of Britain’s Crisis
‘The outstanding feature of the British situation since the Second World War has been unreality . . . On balance the wonder is that the system has remained afloat and changed course to the extent that it has. So far the repeated lesson of history that the loss
The House of Windsor
Genuine socialists have always detested the Windsor monarchs. They appear to confront a nation sucked into helpless crown-worship, without a single ounce of decent republicanism in its make-up. While they dream of communism, the country has not advanced out of this old feudal rhapsody. The ‘serious’ bourgeois Sunday
The Crisis of the British State
Ireland, mounting street violence in the greater English cities, the disintegration of the Labour Party (and hence of the old two-party stability), continuing separatist agitation in Wales and Scotland, a renewed economic crisis after the brief reprieve of North Sea oil—these may appear, at first sight, signs of
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
Beyond Reason? Ethnos or Uneven development
Breakwaters of 2000: From Ethnic to Civic Nationalism
A considerable part of world opinion has grown convinced that the end of history has led to a return of ethnic nationalism. The return is mainly a threat, and a permanent one in the sense that few can see any general cure for the fragmentation or anarchy now
Ernest Gellner 1925-1995: Appreciation
Political and Economic history of UK and US (12 works) · Political science (9 works) · Politics (8 works) · Scottish History and National Identity (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Nationalism (7 works) · History (6 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Bourgeoisie (4 works) · Class (philosophy (4 works)