Tom Nairn

Tom Nairn was the author of The Break-Up of Britain and The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy. His work in New Left Review in the 1960s, along with that of Perry Anderson, gave rise to what became known as the Nairn-Anderson thesis, which argued that many of Britain’s failings were the result of capitalist development that came too early and wasn’t accompanied by a bourgeois revolution that would have resulted in a modernisation of state institutions. Many of the pieces he wrote for the LRB considered the same issues: nationalism, the nature of what he called the Ukanian state and the hold of the monarchy.

Mrs Thatcher’s Spengler

Tom Nairn, 24 January 1980

In the Preface to Book I of The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler proudly declared that his work was ‘a German Philosophy’. There was no incompatibility between this and a history of the world. For universal history showed the Germans to be the most important people in the ‘Faustian Civilisation’ of Europe, itself the motor of modern development. German philosophy alone had scaled the mental heights where the whole of this mighty process could be comprehended. Hence world-history was Teutonic self-understanding, and part of its preparation for dominance in the coming Age of Caesarism.

Pieces about Tom Nairn in the LRB

Dazed and Confused: Are the English human?

Paul Laity, 28 November 2002

The organisers of the Festival of Britain in 1951 knew what to celebrate. At the start of the opening ceremony – a service in St Paul’s – the King praised the nation’s...

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On with the Pooling and Merging: The Incomparable Tom Nairn

Neal Ascherson, 17 February 2000

Throughout this book, the poet Douglas Dunn provides epigraphs and quotations. His final contribution occurs in the last section, ‘Epilogue: The Last Day’, a sort of diary of what Tom...

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Acts of Violence in Grosvenor Square: Memoirs of a Revolutionary

Christopher Hitchens, 4 June 1998

I was just beginning to write about 1968 when I learned of the death in New Orleans of Ron Ridenhour, the GI who exposed the massacre at My Lai. He was only 52, which means that he was in his...

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Pallas

R.W. Johnson, 7 July 1988

Tom Nairn has, for many years, been pondering the peculiarities of the British state with impressive intelligence and originality. His earlier work, The Break-Up of Britain, remains a landmark...

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