Tom Nairn, political theorist, 1932-2023

In 1992, Gordon Brown, then a rising star of the UK Labour get together, delivered a lecture on constitutional reform to a big viewers in central London. Afterwards, Brown approached the organiser of the occasion, Anthony Barnett, who recalled: “His first phrases to me . . . weren’t concerning the thousand folks however about one: ‘Was Tom Nairn right here?’”

Final week, Brown hailed Nairn, who has died on the age of 90, as “an ideal author [and] thinker”. Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish first minister, described him as “one of many biggest thinkers [and] political theorists . . . that Scotland has ever produced” — stirring tributes to the “mental godfather of the trendy Scottish independence motion” who by no means held a everlasting educational put up in his fatherland.

Thomas Nairn was born in 1932 in Freuchie, Fife, the place his father was the headmaster at an area faculty. Nairn studied philosophy on the College of Edinburgh and at Oxford, and in 1957 took up a scholarship on the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. This Italian sojourn would have an enduring affect on him.

It was in Pisa that Nairn found the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who died shortly after leaving a Fascist jail in 1937. He would later play a decisive position, together with Perry Anderson, in introducing Gramsci’s thought to the English-speaking world.

He thrived within the mental environment surrounding the Italian Communist get together, which was significantly much less stultifying than its moribund, Moscow-centric counterparts in different western European nations.

Tariq Ali, the author and leftwing activist, remembered assembly Nairn for the primary time in 1968. “His pursuits have been Italy and Gramsci, Marxism and the Labour get together,” Ali stated. “The truth that he was Scottish meant little to those that knew him on the time. That bit got here later.”

By the Sixties, Nairn ricocheted from one momentary instructing job to a different, setting a peripatetic sample that he wouldn’t break for the remainder of his skilled life. In 1968, he was dismissed from a put up lecturing in sociology at Hornsey School of Artwork after he supported a weeks-long pupil occupation.

The principal focus of his work throughout this era was on growing, in tandem with Anderson, an account of the morbid signs of the British polity and the apparently inexorable decline of the British economic system which got here to be referred to as the “Nairn-Anderson thesis”.

This traced the disaster of Britain’s political economic system again to its historic roots within the emergence of capitalism below a landed aristocracy. The absence in Britain of a “second” bourgeois revolution, of the type that had delivered extra “rational” states on the European continent, had lasting and deforming results, Nairn and Anderson argued.

The thesis, although influential, was not with out its critics. Most vocal amongst these was the historian EP Thompson, who present in Nairn and Anderson “a ruthlessness of their dismissal of the English expertise, which stirs uneasy recollections”.

After a interval instructing on the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, Nairn returned to Scotland within the mid-Nineteen Seventies. In 1975 he contributed to The Purple Paper on Scotland, a group of essays edited by Brown, who was then a youthful rector of Edinburgh college.

His return to his homeland coincided with the emergence of a brand new pressure of Scottish nationalism very completely different to earlier kinds propagated by what he memorably dismissed as “a junta of corporal punishers and Kirk-going cheese-parers”.

In his magnum opus, The Break-Up of Britain, printed in 1977, Nairn argued that this “neo-nationalism” emerged not from the “Celtic bloodstream”, as extra atavistic variations of Scottish self-assertion maintained, however from the “foundering of the British state” that he and Anderson had anatomised a decade earlier.

Different books adopted, notably The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy in 1988, during which Nairn dismembered “crown ideology”, a distinctively British type of “surrogate nationalism”.

The Scottish independence referendum in 2014 positioned Britain’s multinational state below unprecedented pressure. However the union has not damaged up — but. Interviewed in 2020, Nairn insisted that it was solely a matter of time. “In a single kind or one other, break-up is prone to come about.”