Tom Nairn: Old Nations, Auld Enemies, New Times

Selected Essays by Tom Nairn

Tom Nairn

• Publisher: Luath Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781910324387
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Ideologies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Tom Nairn has been the most forceful and original mind to confront, de-mask and anatomise the British state. The perception that Great Britain was a multinational state and not a united nation had never quite been lost over the centuries, but it was Nairn who almost single-handedly hammered this truth into the skull of British intellectuals and campaigners until it became – as it is today – practically uncontested by the political class.
NEAL ASCHERSON, London Review of Books

For the last fifty years Tom Nairn has been one of Britain's most consistently provocative and influential voices. No other writer has left so deep an impression on mainstream debates about Scotland, Britain and nationalism. No other writer has so thoroughly interrogated the United Kingdom's post-war crisis and decline.

Old Nations, Auld Enemies, New Times brings together, for the first time, the full span of Nairn's work, from his ground-breaking analysis of the British state in the 1960s and '70s to his more recent examinations of globalisation, the English question and Scotland's independence referendum.

Nairn stands alongside the great Scottish intellectual and literary figures of recent decades. Old Nations is the definitive Nairn collection – and an indispensable guide for anyone looking to understand the current moment in Scottish and British politics.

For originality of mind, Tom Nairn is without equal among his contemporaries. In fifty years, there has never been a time in my memory in which that he was saying went with the flow of opinion, on the left or at large ... All of this in a style of extraordinary vigour and beauty – and not least humour: writing as democratic as his own unswerving politics. One thinks: if only there were more like him. But that would be a contradiction in terms.
PERRY ANDERSON, New Left Review

Tom Nairn is well known both as a major contributor to debates about Scottish nationalism and the re-configuring of the current UK, and as a supremely thoughtful and witty writer. This collection of his writings illustrates the evolution of his ideas and will be invaluable. Whether one agrees with Nairn or not, his arguments always make one think afresh.
LINDA COLLEY, Professor of History, Princeton University

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editor’s Note
• Foreword Introducing Tom Nairn by Anthony Barnett
• Chapter One The British Political Elite
• Chapter Two The English Working Class
• Chapter Three The Three Dreams of Scottish Nationalism
• Chapter Four English Nationalism: The Case of Enoch Powell
• Chapter Five British Nationalism and the EEC
• Chapter Six Scotland and Europe
• Chapter Seven The Modern Janus
• Chapter Eight The Radical Approach
• Chapter Nine Scotland the Misfit
• Chapter Ten 1931 – A Repeat Performance?
• Chapter Eleven The New Exiles
• Chapter Twelve The English Dilemma
• Chapter Thirteen The Twilight of the British State
• Chapter Fourteen The House of Windsor
• Chapter Fifteen The Timeless Girn
• Chapter Sixteen Identities in Scotland
• Chapter Seventeen The Snabs
• Chapter Eighteen The Auld Enemy
• Chapter Nineteen Second-Rate Unionism
• Chapter Twenty Dark Forces
• Chapter Twenty-One Demonising Nationalism
• Chapter Twenty-Two Empire and Union
• Chapter Twenty-Three On Not Hating England
• Chapter Twenty-Four Hooligans of the Absolute
• Chapter Twenty-Five Gordon Brown: Bard of Britishness
• Chapter Twenty-Six Union on the Rocks?
• Chapter Twenty-Seven Globalisation and Nationalism: The New Deal
• Chapter Twenty-Eight A Republican Monarchy? England and Revolution
• Chapter Twenty-Nine A Nation’s Blueprint
• Chapter Thirty Old Nations, New Age
• Back Cover