Rebecca Goldsmith
What does it mean to write history in our current political climate? The questions we ask as historians are inevitably shaped by the landscape we collectively inhabit, and our individual vantage points on that landscape. The imprint of present politics on history writing can nevertheless be more or less easy to detect. Its influence is clearly discernible in the wave of recent interest in global, material and economic histories (think, for instance, of the number of historians currently researching the history of coal). These projects have cropped up in the face of recurring global economic shocks and the ongoing climate emergency. Often blending an interest in political economy and the Anthropocene, such research reflects a keen awareness of the forces shaping politics today.
The significance of global, material and environmental forces in politics today might well encourage us to look anew at politics in the past. Our contemporary context exposes the degree to which domestic politics and policymaking is downstream of global economic and geopolitical changes. This reality acts as a clear reminder that, while politicians’ efforts matter, the context in which they operate is never fully of their own making. We might therefore pursue a more contingent understanding of the scope for political agency in the past.
Relatedly, as I have written elsewhere, the recent ‘vernacular’ turn in modern British political history speaks to the heightened gap between politicians and those they claim to represent in the present.[1] The dissonance and disillusionment with mainstream politics and political leaders, laid bare in the course of the 2016 Brexit referendum and its aftermath, has contributed to a newfound emphasis on the need to discover the attitudes of ‘ordinary’ people in the past, defined in contradistinction to the ideas of political and cultural elites.
In this way, political history written today feels very different to the kind of work produced as part of the ‘new political history’ in the 1980s and 1990s. Then, historians placed increased emphasis on the scope for creative agency on the part of politicians, paying greater attention to political culture and language. In doing so, they sought to qualify the power of material, structural factors in shaping electoral outcomes. Yet there are parallels too, between political history produced in that moment and what it means to be a political historian today.
In the last few years, we have seen the apparent collapse of two-party politics in Britain amid the emergence of an increasingly fluid, volatile political system. ‘Swing’ voting is increasingly common, albeit often restricted within left-wing and right-wing ‘blocs’.[2] Likewise, in the 1970s and 1980s political historians were forced to contend with class dealignment in British politics. The fixed, class-based polarisation of the immediate post-war years began to unravel in the face of increased cross-class voting, as working-class voters abandoned Labour, calling into question historians’ assumptions about the relationship between class and political identity. Then, historians sought alternative conceptual tools and methodologies, including culture and language, to better account for popular political behaviour in the past. Now, the stable voting patterns and two-party system of the mid-twentieth century appear increasingly exceptional. Our research should avoid taking the formation, and survival, of such norms for granted.
Parallels between contemporary politics and the 1970s are frequently drawn, and for good reason. Then, as now, the political landscape is characterised by destabilising, global energy shocks, the rise of the far right, and conflict in the Middle East. Stuart Hall’s 1979 essay on ‘The Great Moving Right Show’ has been cropping up regularly on Bluesky and other outlets over the last few months, invoked as prescient commentary for our current times. Yet, in that piece Hall warns against those who neglect ‘everything particular and specific to this historical conjuncture’. History, as he says, is not a neat ‘series of repeats’.[3] So, what is specific to our present historical conjuncture, beyond the aforementioned resonances with the 1970s? Political historians are well placed to caution against invocations of the past which fail to do justice to the alarming particularities of our present moment. In a Euro-American context, this ‘moment’ comprises not only the emboldening of the far right and the radicalisation of political elites, but also a sustained ideological attack on liberalism – its norms, values, and associated institutions – manifested in changing attitudes towards Europe and the international order, as well the politics of race and migration, citizenship and reproductive rights.
This renunciation of liberalism has coincided with the retirement of a generation of modern British political historians, for whom liberalism (in its various guises, vernacular, economic and political) has formed a crucial underlying theme of their research and, in their various attitudes towards the concept, a central axis of their disagreements.[4] Political history written in the current moment might be seen to reflect a heightened awareness of the fragilities of liberalism, its internal contradictions and limitations, as in Camilla Schofield’s recent research on working-class men’s clubs and the racialised politics of sociability in late industrial England. Schofield’s work speaks to the illiberal underbelly of post-war liberal democracy and indeed, the capacity of different, coherent ‘liberalisms’ to fall on different sides of debates about race and inclusion.[5]
We might also see the imprint of the present retreat from liberalism in recent efforts to qualify its influence on twentieth-century statecraft. Charles Troup’s recent research into the history of cost-benefit analysis has rescued the social democratic credentials of this formulation. Troup suggests the use of this technique in government after 1947 proves that ‘the post-war regime did not just project the designs of interwar liberals’.[6] In turn, he argues, surprisingly but convincingly, that the forms of economization promoted by this technique are better associated with social democracy than neoliberalism.[7] This qualification of liberalism’s ascendancy (in either its classical or neoliberal form) in the political economy of twentieth-century Britain may suggest a similar, heightened sensitivity to the ideology’s limits and parameters.
Writing political history in our present political context reaffirms the need for historians to avoid a certain complacent teleology that assumes progress is either largely inevitable or linear. But if progress is not inevitable, neither is collapse. Even in a world that is frequently declared ‘post-liberal’, there are convivial and progressive currents out there, in the present as well as the past, for those who wish to find them.
Rebecca Goldsmith is a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, researching class, politics, identity and the ‘vernacular’ in twentieth-century Britain.
[1] R. Goldsmith, ‘Towards the vernacular, away from politics? Political history after the “new political history”’, Political Quarterly 94:2 (2023), 272-278, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-923X.13262.
[2] https://benansell.substack.com/p/bloc-parties.
[3] S. Hall, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, Marxism Today (January 1979), 14.
[4] https://history.berkeley.edu/james-vernon; https://experts.exeter.ac.uk/26770-jon-lawrence/about; https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/people/prof-peter-mandler.
[5] C. Schofield, ‘In Defence of White Freedom: Working Men’s Clubs and the Politics of Sociability in Late Industrial England’, Twentieth Century British History 34:3 [now Modern British History] (2023), 515-551.
[6] C. Troup, ‘Roads to Economization: Valuing Life, Limb, and Leisure in the Social Democratic State’, Modern British History 36:4 (2025), 16.
[7] Ibid., 16-17.