The Politics of Nostalgia: Class, Rootlessness and Decline (SocietyNow) - Softcover

Winlow, Simon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1837535515 ISBN 13: 9781837535514

Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited, 2025

Synopsis

For ordinary people today, the future seems dark and forbidding. In generations gone by, parents looked forward with optimism, confident their children would do better. Not anymore. Standards of living continue to fall. Our institutions seem redundant, our cities dilapidated and dysfunctional. Electoral systems seem incapable of driving positive change. What is there to be optimistic about?

A multiplicity of escalating pressures and a growing fear of the future encourage people to look to the past to identify something positive, and the bittersweet sting of nostalgia now plays a key role in working-class politics and community life. But how should we understand our increasingly common retreat into nostalgia?

In this sweeping ethnography, Simon Winlow explores our common desire to take refuge in the past, and what it means for our political future.

About this title

About the Author

Simon Winlow is Professor of Social Sciences at Northumbria University, UK. An internationally recognized criminologist and sociologist, he is one of the left’s most original thinkers and a key commentator on British politics and culture.

Edition details

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1837535515
• ISBN 13: 9781837535514
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208