1. Introduction: The benighted decade? Reassessing the seventiesLawrence Black and Hugh Pemberton2. The politics of economic decline in the 1970sJames Alt3. The politics of declinismJim Tomlinson4. A time for confessionSamuel Brittan5. Brittan on Britain: decline, declinism and the ‘traumas of the 1970s’Roger Middleton6. Alternative European and economic strategiesStuart Holland7. The challenge of Stuart Holland: the Labour Party’s economic strategy during the 1970sMark Wickham-Jones8. Jam today: feminist impacts and transformations in the 1970sLynne Segal9. Women and the 1970s. Towards liberation?Pat Thane10. Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics revisitedBill Osgerby11. Penguin Books in the long-1970s: a company not a sacred institutionPeter Mayer12. Penguin Books and the ‘market place for ideas’Dean Blackburn13. Afterword: The future of the 1970sLawrence Black and Hugh Pemberton

This book examines a period which was the fulcrum around which postwar British history moved. In popular discourse the 1970s is commonly characterized as a dismal decade of economic and political failure from which the country was apparently rescued by Thatcherism. The editors of this volume argue that this is both 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. In addressing the ideational contours of the decade, Reassessing 1970s Britain takes an innovative approach. It assembles a group of actors who were influential in generating and disseminating new ideas in the 1970s (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, as well as engaging 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 British history, economic history, cultural history, social history, politics, gender studies, and cultural studies.