Search results for ""Author Marc Stears""

Challenging, forensic, compelling'' SATHNAM SANGHERAPure centrist erotica. A myth-busting chronicle of bad-tempered, Brexit-riven England'' SUNDAY TIMESWonderfully evocative. Too honest, too nuanced and too deep for any party manifesto'' MATTHEW PARRISAfter an election where people voted for a politics that our new Prime Minister describes as ''treading more lightly on people's lives'', this must-read book charts a gentler course for a country that has suffered the ructions of profound change in recent decades. Some politicians will still talk of restoring an English birthright of liberty and the swashbuckling self-confidence to rule the waves. Others yearn for the old-fashioned morality which they claim once civilised a savage world or want to look inwards to a story of an enchanted island that can stand alone and isolated against the world. But England, by Tom Baldwin, the bestselling biographer of Keir Starmer, and Marc Stears, an in

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From a major British political thinker and activist, a passionate case that both the left and right have lost their faith in ordinary people and must learn to find it again.This is an age of polarization. It’s us vs. them. The battle lines are clear, and compromise is surrender.As Out of the Ordinary reminds us, we have been here before. From the 1920s to the 1950s, in a world transformed by revolution and war, extreme ideologies of left and right fueled utopian hopes and dystopian fears. In response, Marc Stears writes, a group of British writers, artists, photographers, and filmmakers showed a way out. These men and women, including J. B. Priestley, George Orwell, Barbara Jones, Dylan Thomas, Laurie Lee, and Bill Brandt, had no formal connection to one another. But they each worked to forge a politics that resisted the empty idealisms and totalizing abstractions of their time. Instead they were convinced that people going about their daily lives possess all the insight, virtue, and determination required to build a good society. In poems, novels, essays, films, paintings, and photographs, they gave witness to everyday people’s ability to overcome the supposedly insoluble contradictions between tradition and progress, patriotism and diversity, rights and duties, nationalism and internationalism, conservatism and radicalism. It was this humble vision that animated the great Festival of Britain in 1951 and put everyday citizens at the heart of a new vision of national regeneration.A leading political theorist and a veteran of British politics, Stears writes with unusual passion and clarity about the achievements of these apostles of the ordinary. They helped Britain through an age of crisis. Their ideas might do so again, in the United Kingdom and beyond.

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This is a major work of history and political theory that traces radical democratic thought in America across the twentieth century, seeking to recover ideas that could reenergize democratic activism today. The question of how citizens should behave as they struggle to create a more democratic society has haunted the United States throughout its history. Should citizens restrict themselves to patient persuasion or take to the streets and seek to impose change? Marc Stears argues that anyone who continues to wrestle with these questions could learn from the radical democratic tradition that was forged in the twentieth century by political activists, including progressives, trade unionists, civil rights campaigners, and members of the student New Left. These activists and their movements insisted that American campaigners for democratic change should be free to strike out in whatever ways they thought necessary, so long as their actions enhanced the political virtues of citizens and contributed to the eventual triumph of the democratic cause. Reevaluating the moral and strategic arguments, and the triumphs and excesses, of this radical democratic tradition, Stears contends that it still offers a compelling account of citizen behavior--one that is fairer, more inclusive, and more truly democratic than those advanced by political theorists today.

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