Introduction to the Special Issue

The authors in this volume are collectively engaged with a historical puzzle: What happens if we examine the decade once we step out of the shadows cast by Thatcher? That is, does the decade of the 1980s as a significant and meaningful periodisation (equivalent to that of the 1960s) still work if Thatcher becomes but one part of the story rather than the story itself? The essays in this collection suggest that the 1980s only makes sense as a political period. They situate the 1980s within various longer term trajectories that show the events of the decade to be as much the consequence as the cause of bigger, long-term historical processes. This introduction contextualises the collection within the wider literature, before explaining the collective and individual contributions made. In a now well-known set of essays collected from Marxism Today, Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques compiled a series of pieces delineating the shape of the ‘new times’ that they felt characterised 1980s’ Britain. Building on Hall’s analysis of the politics of Thatcherism from 1979, the essays explored—amongst other concerns—the social and cultural developments that flowed from an increasingly ‘post-fordist’ economy, the implications of the breakdown of the post-war consensus, the challenges to Keynesian economic frameworks and the shifting sociopolitical solidarities emerging as rivals to class.1 Whereas Hall’s earlier work encouraged the left to take Thatcherism seriously as a hegemonic project, now Hall and Jacques wanted to challenge accounts of the 1980s that positioned ‘Thatcherism’ centre stage as the driving force of the decade. They wanted to argue that Thatcherism was not inevitable; to decouple the social, economic, institutional and cultural conditions of the 1980s from the ascendency of ‘Thatcherism’. Embedded within such a position was a broader and longer view of social and cultural change in ‘post-fordist’ times. Cumulatively, the ‘new times’ essays contended that Britain had qualitatively, but incrementally, changed during the 1980s. Diversity, fragmentation and differentiation were replacing homogeneity and standardisation as the defining characteristics of advanced capitalist societies. If this analysis was often rooted in an understanding of longer and deeper historical processes, the arguments were unequivocally motivated by a politics of the present and future. The subtitle of the collection—‘the changing face of © 2017 the author(s). published by informa UK Limited, trading as taylor & Francis Group. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons attribution-nonCommercial-noDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.