Available in paperback for the first time, this book examines a decade of extraordinary ferment in ideas, and the battles about those ideas out of which 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 to reflect on key texts and arguments in which they were closely involved during that decade, and debate them with contemporary historians. It ranges over a wide field, encompassing politics, economics, women's liberation and popular culture. It also engages 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.

1. Introduction: The benighted decade? Reassessing the seventies - Lawrence Black and Hugh Pemberton
2. The politics of economic decline in the 1970s - James Alt
3. The politics of declinism - Jim Tomlinson
4. A time for confession - Samuel Brittan
5. Brittan on Britain: decline, declinism and the 'traumas of the 1970s' - Roger Middleton
6. Alternative European and economic strategies - Stuart Holland
7. The challenge of Stuart Holland: the Labour Party's economic strategy during the 1970s - Mark Wickham-Jones
8. Jam today: feminist impacts and transformations in the 1970s - Lynne Segal
9. Women and the 1970s. Towards liberation? - Pat Thane
10. Stanley Cohen's Folk Devils and Moral Panics revisited - Bill Osgerby
11. Penguin Books in the long-1970s: a company not a sacred institution - Peter Mayer
12. Penguin Books and the 'market place for ideas' - Dean Blackburn
13. Afterword: The future of the 1970s - Lawrence Black and Hugh Pemberton

Editors

Lawrence Black is Reader in History at Durham University

Hugh Pemberton is Reader in Contemporary British History at the University of Bristol

Pat Thane is Research Professor at King's College, London and a Fellow of the British Academy