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exploration has waned somewhat, and we are left with ‘vestigial traces of its language’, we can see that biography continues to be transient, framed by the concerns of the present. 55 While the preoccupations of pathography and psychobiography have inflected the way in which Livingstone’s life-narrative has been written, another major source of revisionism has been provided by
If revisionism did not break the original frame built by the totalitarian pioneers of the study of Stalinism, neither did subsequent scholarship. In the 1990s, historians became interested in the subjective aspect of Stalinism: how was it experienced by individuals? A related group explored a comparative angle: how different was Stalinism to other modern societies? Others moved into the post-war years and soon the Second World War. Finally, ‘totalitarianism’ was reinvented as a term, a revival which was eased by the compatibility of most ‘revisionist’ and
experience – which Fitzpatrick pointedly ignored – Cohen criticized her for ‘minimizing’ and ‘obscuring’ Stalin's crimes, a charge he would repeat nearly verbatim during The Russian Review debate a year later. He left it open if Fitzpatrick was motivated by ‘an overreaction to the revelatory zeal of cold-war sovietology, the highly focused nature of social historical research, or an unstated political desire to rehabilitate the entire Stalin era’. He added dismissively: ‘such elliptical scholarship is not real scholarly revisionism’. Whatever common ground there had
Chapter 1 Inverted revisionism and the subversion of the liberal international order The international order is, it is commonly agreed, facing serious challenges. Incipient trade wars are simmering both east and west. While the European Union struggles to maintain its cohesion, the wars in Syria, Afghanistan and the Sahel continue to rage, and geopolitical tensions between Russia and the West continue to escalate. The challenges are grave, not only by virtue of their magnitude but also because they are antithetical to the ideals and institutions of the liberal
Eternal life Again and again in this book, the term ‘totalitarianism’ has served as a historiographical beacon. We have seen how ‘revisionism’ was construed as totalitarianism's other in the historiographical fights of the 1980s. We encountered Moshe Lewin's flirtation with the term, and his groping for alternatives, before exploring the work of Richard Pipes, a major proponent of understanding the Soviet Union as ‘totalitarian’. We demonstrated how the unrevisionist revisionist, Sheila Fitzpatrick, used the concept, while arguing against the
7 The parliamentary Labour right, Labour Party revisionism(s) and the roots of New Labour Introduction One important consequence of the failure to acknowledge the complexity, divisions and fragmentation of the ‘old’ Labour right in the 1970s has been an inability to conceive of parallels and continuities between so-called ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Labours. As noted at the outset, much of the recent literature on the Labour Party has been concerned to identify and explain the origins, ideological and political character and trajectory of New Labour from different
1 Revisionism and the battle over Clause IV, 1951–63 Within the party, the 1950s were characterised by conflict between Labour’s fundamentalist and revisionist wings. Labour’s fundamentalists were led by the charismatic and oratorically brilliant, but politically volatile, figure of Aneurin Bevan. Throughout his political career, Bevan argued that public ownership remained integral to the implementation of socialism.1 Hugh Gaitskell, who became Labour leader in 1955, was the political figurehead of Labour’s revisionists.2 As Stephen Haseler has detailed, the
This study is concerned with the ‘Old’ Labour right at a critical juncture of social democratic and Labour politics. It attempts to explain the complex transition from so-called ‘Old Right’ to ‘New Right’ or ‘New Labour’, and locates at least some of the roots of the latter in the complexity, tensions and fragmentation of the former during the ‘lean’ years of social democracy in the 1970s. The analysis addresses both the short- and long-term implications of the emerging ideological, organisational and political complexity and divisions of the parliamentary Labour right and Labour revisionism, previously concealed within the loosely adhesive post-war framework of Keynesian reformist social democracy, which have been neglected factors in explanations of Labour's subsequent shift leftwards, the longer-term gestation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the evolution of ‘New’ Labour. It establishes the extent to which ‘New’ Labour is a legatee of at least some elements of the disparate and discordant Labour right and tensions of social democratic revisionism in the 1970s. In so doing, the analysis advances our understanding of a key moment in the development of social democracy and the making of the contemporary British Labour Party. The book represents a significant departure in analyses and explanations of both the problems and demise of post-war social democracy and decline of ‘Old’ Labour and the origins and roots of ‘New’ Labour.
Although the reputation of Englands first queen regnant, Mary Tudor (died 1558) had remained substantially unchanged in the intervening centuries, there were always some defenders of that Catholic queen among the historians of Victorian England. It is worth noting, however, that such revisionism made little if any impact on the schoolroom history textbooks, where Marys reputation remained much as John Foxe had defined it. Such anxiety as there was about attempts to restore something of Marys reputation were made more problematic by the increasing number and increasingly visible presence of a comprehensive Catholic hierarchy in the nineteenth century, and by high-profile converts to the Catholic faith and papal authority. The pre-eminent historians of the later Victorian era consistently remained more favourable to the reign of Elizabeth, seen as the destroyer,of an effective Catholic church in England.
This article focuses on a cycle of late 1960s true crime films depicting topical mass/serial murders. It argues that the conjoined ethical and aesthetic approaches of these films were shaped within and by a complex climate of contestation as they moved from newspaper headlines to best-sellers lists to cinema screens. While this cycle was central to critical debates about screen violence during this key moment of institutional, regulatory and aesthetic transition, they have been almost entirely neglected or, at best, misunderstood. Meeting at the intersection of, and therefore falling between the gaps, of scholarship on the Gothic horror revival and New Hollywood’s violent revisionism, this cycle reversed the generational critical divisions that instigated a new era in filmmaking and criticism. Adopting a historical reception studies approach, this article challenges dominant understandings of the depiction and reception of violence and horror in this defining period.