Hill, Alexander;
(2025)
The Politics of the Future in Britain, 1940-1979.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
In this thesis, I ask how ‘ordinary’ people made sense of the future between 1940 and 1979. I analyse a wide range of sources—Mass-Observation directives responses, transcripts from social science research and radio interviews, and children’s essays—to uncover the vernacular discourses people used to orient themselves towards change. I argue that many people considered their own personal futures to be projects, determined by their own choices. However, they found it increasingly difficult to project a collective future. I argue that two narratives of a collective future—one populist, and one meritocratic—had dominated vernacular politics in the 1940s and 1950s, but by the beginning of the 1960s people expressed profound doubts about ‘progress’ and a collective future. I begin by studying directive respondents in the Mass Observation Archive across the 1940s. I chart the rise and fall of a populist narrative of ‘the future’, one which was ‘hoping against hope’ for the triumph of ‘the people’. In Chapter Two, I explore archived social science material to argue that a vision of a meritocratic future dominated the vernacular politics of the 1950s: here, it was imagined that class hierarchies were being replaced thanks to affluence, education, and expertise. In Chapter Three, I explore archived radio interview transcripts and social science interviews, children’s essays, and documentaries, arguing that by the early 1960s a growing number of doubts surfaced about collective ‘progress’. In Chapter Four, I look at archived transcripts from radio interviews and essays from school leavers to explore the growth of new forms of individualism in the 1970s. I argue that a core part of these new forms of individualism was a widening of the horizon of personal futures. Finally, in Chapter Five, I explore how the vernacular politics of race fed off the collapse of these collective futures.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | The Politics of the Future in Britain, 1940-1979 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of History |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10203550 |
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