Socialism, Nationalism and Tom Nairn’s Dream of Escape

Abstract

Abstract The relationship between socialism and nationalism in the thought of Scottish intellectual Tom Nairn has been of considerable historical interest. Focusing on the 1960s and 1970s, this article identifies a set of key themes that emerged during Nairn’s time within the London New Left, and which shed light on his move towards Scottish nationalism. It demonstrates that he gravitated towards Continental theory in the 1960s as it offered the prospect of political and personal emancipation from the conservatism of the British state. He in turn viewed the student movement of 1968 as an anti-authoritarian social formation ready to topple the establishment—though in a peculiarly intellectualized way that inoculated him from its wilder experimentalism. Nairn’s move towards nationalism in the 1970s was his way of furthering this project, though not straightforwardly. Echoing New Right critiques, Nairn argued that demands for Scottish independence stood alongside globalization and European integration as material forces sweeping aside the decrepit British state. He also used support for nationalism to admonish the ‘metropolitan-minded’ socialists of a New Left he was growing estranged from. Whether due to academic obscurantism or what he saw as a superficial concern with social movement politics, Nairn felt the English New Left was becoming divorced from its original aims of personal and cultural self-determination. Now back in living in Scotland, he saw nationalism as the best vehicle for escape. Nairn however simultaneously celebrated the utopianism and rooted pragmatism of Scottish nationalism, a distinctive position which characterises his career more broadly.