Tom Nairn RIP

[hitmouse]

Not someone I can claim to know a huge amount about, apparently he's passed on:

Neal Ascherson · On Tom Nairn

Unlike Althusser’s, Tom Nairn’s Marxism would grow almost unrecognisably open and eclectic. Many on the left never...

www.lrb.co.uk

 

[danny la rouge]

Not someone I can claim to know a huge amount about, apparently he's passed on:

Neal Ascherson · On Tom Nairn

Unlike Althusser’s, Tom Nairn’s Marxism would grow almost unrecognisably open and eclectic. Many on the left never...

www.lrb.co.uk

Yes, I thought about mentioning this then forgot. I read Break Up of Britain, Enchanted Glass and Faces of Nationalism. Always interesting and thought provoking.

 

[RD2003]

I always found his book on the miners' strike very useful in arguments.

 

[JimW]

Not aware of him, for I am woefully badly read, so looked around for obits and found this one at the FT: Subscribe to read | Financial Times
Liked the quite for him on pre-1970s Scottish nationalism, "a junta of corporal punishers and Kirk-going cheese-parers”.
EP Thompson's disagreement about his and Anderson's thesis sounds interesting and would be grateful if anyone can poitn to a summary of that.

 

[yield]

Not aware of him, for I am woefully badly read, so looked around for obits and found this one at the FT: Subscribe to read | Financial Times
Liked the quite for him on pre-1970s Scottish nationalism, "a junta of corporal punishers and Kirk-going cheese-parers”.
EP Thompson's disagreement about his and Anderson's thesis sounds interesting and would be grateful if anyone can poitn to a summary of that.

E.P. Thompson: The Peculiarities of the English (1965)

E.P. Thompson: The Peculiarities of the English (1965)

www.marxists.org

 

[JimW]

E.P. Thompson: The Peculiarities of the English (1965)

E.P. Thompson: The Peculiarities of the English (1965)

www.marxists.org

Thanks!

 

[JimW]

Really enjoying that yield and Thompson is persuasive. Sad how relevant this bit remains:

"Old Corruption has passed away, but a new, and entirely different, predatory complex occupies the State. It is surely to this new complex, with its interpenetration of private industry and the State (Government contracts, especially for war materials, of an unprecedented size, subsidies, municipal indebtedness to private finance, etc.), its control over major media of communication, its blackmail by the City, its reduction of the public sector to subordinate roles, and its capacity to dictate the conditions within which a Labour Government must operate – it is surely to this new Thing, with its vast influence reaching into the Civil Service, the professions, and into the trade union and labour movement itself, rather than to the hunting of an aristocratic Snark, that an analysis of the political formations of our time should be addressed?"