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For ordinary people today, the future seems dark and forbidding. In generations gone by, parents looked forward with optimism, confident their children would do better. Not anymore. Standards of living continue to fall. Our institutions seem redundant, our cities dilapidated and dysfunctional. Electoral systems seem incapable of driving positive change. What is there to be optimistic about?
A multiplicity of escalating pressures and a growing fear of the future encourage people to look to the past to identify something positive, and the bittersweet sting of nostalgia now plays a key role in working-class politics and community life. But how should we understand our increasingly common retreat into nostalgia?
In this sweeping ethnography, Simon Winlow explores our common desire to take refuge in the past, and what it means for our political future.
In The Politics of Nostalgia, Winlow takes us out onto the streets of our forgotten towns and cities to reveal lives destabilised by economic insecurity and high-paced cultural change. In these places, nostalgia is reshaping the political views of ordinary people, but not in the ways we tend to assume. This is a daring analysis of a nation tumbling downwards, a nation in which more and more people see only dark days ahead... The Politics of Nostalgia runs contrary to so much mainstream analysis of contemporary Britain, and it will be awkward reading for many who would prefer to look away from the reality of our nation today. Nonetheless, it offers an essential examination of where we are now, and where we appear to be going... It's also a reminder that a much better Britain existed in the near past, and, with sufficient public investment, a better future is possible. Having given away our resources and past to those with no interest in Britain, the state needs to get us our resources in order to give us back our future.
Simon Winlow is Professor of Social Sciences at Northumbria University, UK. An internationally recognized criminologist and sociologist, he is one of the left’s most original thinkers and a key commentator on British politics and culture.
Introduction: Falling
Chapter 1. The New Politics of Nostalgia
Chapter 2. Fearing the Future
Chapter 3. Lost Roots
Chapter 4. Beyond Modernism
Chapter 5. Permanent Reform
Chapter 6. Intimations of Post-Sociality
Chapter 7. Towards a Better Future