A set of reflections on British society and culture, this volume falls into two principal parts. The first consists of a pair of essays published in new Left Review in the 1960s. Origins of the Present Crisis - which suggested a general schema for the analysis of class and power in modern Britain and their relation to its decline; and Components of National Culture, which looked at the pattern of intellectual disciplines associated with the post-war political consensus. One premise of these accounts was a conception of bourgeois revolution, whose critique is sketched in a short intermezzo from the mid 1970s. The second part contains two essays published in the late 1980s which review the conjectures of the original texts in the light of the developments - political and intellectual - of the subsequent decades. The Figues of Descent reconsiders the problem of national decline; A Culture in Contraflow traces some of the intellectual reversals of the recent period.
The book concludes with a survey of the political conjuncture after the fall of Thatcher, which considers the prospects of the Labour Party within the context of the wider changes that have reshaped European social democracy in these years. "English Questions" was published together with "A Zone of Engagement", on European and American ideas at the crossroads between history and politics, by the same author.
- ISBN10 0860913759
- ISBN13 9780860913757
- Publish Date 24 March 1992
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 15 January 1998
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Verso Books
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 370
- Language English