Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite. Class, Politics, and the Decline of Deference in England, 1968–2000

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite is both the author and the protagonist of her first monograph. Class, Politics, and the Decline of Deference in England, 1968–2000 is, on one level, an impressive effort at reading sociological sources on class against the grain. The result is a persuasive demonstration that deference to one’s social betters was in decline throughout the post–World War II period, as an increased discomfort with class categories and a rising emphasis on the (seemingly opposed) values of individuality and ordinariness together conspired to gradually drive class “underground.” But the book can also be read as a bildungsroman of a young left-wing political historian who starts off wanting to determine “whether Thatcher and Blair had killed off class, or whether, alternatively, the decline of the Labour Party was the inevitable long-run result of the shrinking of the working class,” only to discover that “these questions are all overdetermined by a belief...

Class (philosophy) · Deference · Epistemology · Political science · Politics · Social class · Sociology · Working class · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy