Author Description

La 4e de couv. indique : "The 1970s is commonly characterized as a dismal decade of economic and political failure from which Britain was rescued by Thatcherism. The editors of this volume argue that this is too simplistic and a barrier to understanding a period of fundamental importance in the trajectory of postwar British history. Most notably, it was a decade of extraordinary ferment in ideas. Out of the battles waged around these ideas emerged the Britain of the late-twentieth century.Reassessing 1970s Britain takes an innovative approach to examining these new ideas and their impact. It assembles a strong list of contributors who were influential in the 1970s in generating and disseminating ideas designed to achieve major social and economic change (James Alt, Samuel Brittan, Stuart Holland, Lynne Segal and Peter Mayer) to reflect on key texts and arguments from the decade in which they were closely involved, and debate the ideas developed within those texts with contemporary historians who are experts on this period. It ranges over a wide field, encompassing politics, economics, women's liberation, and popular culture and 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 Bristish history, economic history, cultural history, politics, gender studies, and cultural studies."