This book examines a decade of extraordinary ferment in ideas, and the battles about those ideas out of which emerged the Britain of the late-twentieth century.

In addressing the ideational contours of the decade, Reassessing 1970s Britain takes an innovative approach. It assembles a group of actors who were influential in generating and disseminating new ideas in the 1970s to reflect on key texts and arguments in which they were closely involved during that decade, and debate them with contemporary historians. It ranges over a wide field, encompassing politics, economics, women’s liberation, and popular culture. It also engages with the ways in which such ideas were disseminated to a wider audience.

Reassessing 1970s Britain will be of interest to lecturers and students in a wide range of disciplines: modern British history, economic history, cultural history, social history, politics, gender studies, and cultural studies.

1. Introduction: The benighted decade? Reassessing the seventies
Lawrence Black and Hugh Pemberton
2. The politics of economic decline in the 1970s
James Alt
3. The politics of declinism
Jim Tomlinson
4. A time for confession
Samuel Brittan
5. Brittan on Britain: decline, declinism and the ‘traumas of the 1970s’
Roger Middleton
6. Alternative European and economic strategies
Stuart Holland
7. The challenge of Stuart Holland: the Labour Party’s economic strategy during the 1970s
Mark Wickham-Jones
8. Jam today: feminist impacts and transformations in the 1970s
Lynne Segal
9. Women and the 1970s. Towards liberation?
Pat Thane
10. Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics revisited
Bill Osgerby
11. Penguin Books in the long-1970s: a company not a sacred institution
Peter Mayer
12. Penguin Books and the ‘market place for ideas’
Dean Blackburn
13. Afterword: The future of the 1970s
Lawrence Black and Hugh Pemberton

Lawrence Black Hugh Pemberton Pat Thane