Mass-Observation, Left Intellectuals and the Politics of Everyday Life
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9737930 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alexandre Campsie (0000-0001-7433-7173, Sidney Sussex College , Cambridge, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 131 |
| Issue | 548 |
| Pages | 92-121 |
| Publication date | 2016-02-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The English Historical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-8266 • E-ISSN: 1477-4534 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/ehr/cew052 |
| OpenAlex | W2269103788 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 12 |
This article examines the careers of a number of left thinkers who broke with the Communist Party of Great Britain in the late 1930s, committing themselves instead to a ‘politics of everyday life’ based on social investigation. Central to this moment was the social research organisation Mass-Observation, the sociologists of which argued that democracy should be built around the vibrancy and irreverence they identified in ordinary culture. This ambition gained its fullest application during the 1940s, as a number of former M-O researchers became influential in the social reconstruction effort, in Labour Party policy circles and, later, in post-war academic sociology. By tracing the sociological arguments of unaligned left intellectuals from the 1930s to the 1950s, this article emphasises the rich plurality of influences at play within British progressive thought in the mid-twentieth century—influences which spanned the worlds of far-left activism, literature, art, the social sciences, town planning and parliamentary politics. It also helps us to reassess the genesis of the first ‘New Left’ in 1956. This is often hailed as the moment when British socialists first started to appreciate ordinary culture, freed from political dogmatism. In fact, left intellectuals had been engaging with the politics of everyday life for at least two decades previously. Indeed, the nostalgic accent which some New Left writers placed on the traditional working-class group was but one facet of a more heterogeneous political tradition—one concerned to think beyond ‘class’ altogether, and to examine how culture operated at the level of the individual
Aesthetics · Art · Communism · Democracy · Everyday life · Media studies · New Left · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Data Analysis and Archiving · Gender Studies · Law
Mass Observation, Counterculture and the ‘Art of Living’
Mass Observing British politics
Unmarried’ housewives and ‘‘up-graded’ women’
Mass-Observation and Vernacular Politics at the 1945 General Election
The Social Scientific Turn in Modern British History
Archiving the Covid-19 pandemic in Mass Observation and Middletown
Mass-Observation, surrealist sociology, and the bathos of paperwork
Economic Direction and Generational Change in Twentieth-Century Britain
Temporalities, Ritual, and Drinking in Mass Observation's Worktown
Mass Observation, Apathy, and Electoral Politics in England, 1937–1950
The Authority of Feeling in Mid-Twentieth-Century English Conservatism
Roger Noel Armfelt (1897-1955)
| Unique citing works | 12 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,33 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2026 (10) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 12 |