Tom Nairn

Tom Nairn (born 2 June 1932) is a Scottish political theorist of nationalism. He is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University, UK.

Thomas Nairn
Born (1932-02-06) 6 February 1932
Freuchie, Fife, Scotland
Nationality British
Institution Durham University, RMIT University
University of Edinburgh
Field political science, political economy, nationalism
School or tradition
 political science and political economy
Alma mater Edinburgh College of Art ,
University of Edinburgh (MA)

Life

Nairn was born on 2 June 1932 in Freuchie, Fife. He attended Dunfermline High School and the Edinburgh College of Art before graduating from the University of Edinburgh with an MA in Philosophy in 1956. During the 1960s he taught at various institutions including the University of Birmingham (1965-6), coming to prominence in the occupation movement at Hornsey College of Art (1967–70), after which he was dismissed. He was at the Transnational Institute, Amsterdam from 1972–76, and then worked as a journalist and TV researcher (mainly for Channel 4 and Scottish Television, Glasgow) before a year at the Central European University with Ernest Gellner (1994–95) and then setting up and running a Masters course on Nationalism at University of Edinburgh (1995-1999). In 2001 he was invited to take up an Innovation Professorship in Nationalism and Cultural Diversity at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia, leaving in January 2010. Returning to the UK he was fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study of Durham University (2009).

Outline of his arguments

He is considered one of the key thinkers of the British New Left. From 1962, with Perry Anderson in New Left Review, he developed a thesis (the "Nairn-Anderson thesis") to explain why Britain did not develop in a 'normal' way,[1][2] which was defined as the continental European movement to anti-clericalism and Republicanism since the 1789 French Revolution.

Nairn has long been an advocate of European integration, an argument he put forward in The Left Against Europe (1973),[3] when leftist opinion in the UK was very much against the idea.

He has been an advocate of the devolution of power to the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly, and criticised the 1990s–2000s Blair Labour government for not giving those bodies enough power.

An anthology of NLR articles, The Break-Up of Britain (1977, revised 1982) is the best known of Nairn's books on the nationalism theme. It is a Marxist critique of the emergence of worldwide nationalism. Essentially, Nairn contends that imperialism from the core countries (Western Europe) amongst the peripheral nations (Africa, Asia, Australia, etc.) motivated the peripheral elites to mobilize their exploited masses. As such, they created powerful myths and stories based on local artefacts and local happenings. The peripheral intelligentsia, as he denotes them, were inspired by both romanticism and populism. In a chapter devoted to him, Enoch Powell is placed in both traditions.

His republican inclinations meant that his The Enchanted Glass (1988) was one of the earliest serious modern investigations into the British Monarchy from an abolitionist perspective. It won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award. Here and elsewhere Nairn uses the term 'Ukania' to suggest the irrational and Ruritanian nature of the British constitutional monarchy. His original source for the term is the nickname "Kakania" that Robert Musil uses for the dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy in The Man Without Qualities. An updated edition of The Enchanted Glass (published by Verso) appeared in 2011.

Criticisms

One of the most powerful critiques comes from ethno-symbolist Anthony D. Smith, from the London School of Economics, who contends that Nairn never defines the term "nationalism". What Smith says, however, is that Nairn characterises it as a "militant movement by the community vis-à-vis the imperialists, and this movement supplied the notion of a shared destiny."

Honours

Member of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia (2009)

Major works

Books

Articles and media He has written many articles for the London Review of Books and contributes regularly to openDemocracy as well as other publications.

References

  1. ↑ Nairn, Tom (November–December 1981). "The crisis of the British state". New Left Review (New Left Review) I (130).
  2. ↑ Thompson, Willie (September 1992). "Tom Nairn and the crisis of the British state". Contemporary Record (Taylor and Francis) 6 (2): 306–325. doi:10.1080/13619469208581213.
  3. ↑ Nairn, Tom (1973). The left against Europe. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. ISBN 9780140217650.
Tributes from Perry Anderson et al.
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