Political Movements in Urban England, 1832-1914

The old canard that political historians can be characterised by their resistance to ideas is firmly refuted by Matthew Roberts's new textbook, which scrutinises the modern literature on Victorian and Edwardian popular politics with flair and verve. Roberts writes as a revisionist, eager to show the way in which political history has developed new and sophisticated thinking in a post-Marxist age. The student reader (the main audience for this book) will find references to most of the key historians who have written on the subject in recent years. For Roberts, many of the assumptions of the 1960s and 1970s (particularly about class and the merits of electoral sociology) have been overturned and in their place has emerged a diverse but sophisticated set of approaches exemplified by figures such as Gareth Stedman Jones, Patrick Joyce, Eugenio Biagini and Jon Lawrence. These are proponents of what Roberts calls the ‘New Political History’ (a phrase employed so often that he renders it as the acronym NPH), even if they have rather different agendas. Broadly speaking, NPH stands for an anti-reductionist approach which insists that the connections between social life and its representations in political life, language and ideas are far more complex and difficult than we used to think. There is a great deal here about the impact of the linguistic turn, but also new thinking about the relationship between ordinary people and the political process. For example, it has become common to argue that political parties create constituencies as much as reflect them. Students understandably find these debates very complex, but they will be clearer after reading this book

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Marxist philosophy · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Reductionism · Sociology · Subject (documents · Australian History and Society · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Philosophy · Political and Economic history of UK and US

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