British Journal of Politics and International Relations,

Vol. 1, No. 2, June 1999, pp. 252–266

British decline or the politics of declinism?

RICHARD ENGLISH AND MICHAEL KENNY

Books reviewed
C. Barnett (1987; 1st edn. 1986) The Audit of War: The Illusion
and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation. Basingstoke: Macmillan,
viii + 359pp., ISBN 0-333-43458-7.
P. Clarke and C. Trebilcock (eds) (1997) Understanding Decline: Perceptions
and Realities of British Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, xv + 313pp., ISBN 0-521-56317-8.
B. Collins and K. Robbins (eds) (1990) British Culture and Economic
Decline. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 208pp., ISBN 0-297-820-38-9.
A. Gamble (1994) Britain in Decline: Economic Policy, Political Strategy
and the British State (4th edn). Basingstoke: Macmillan, xxi + 263pp.,
ISBN 0-333-61441-0.
W. Hutton (1996a) The State We’re In (revised edn). London: Vintage,
xxix + 370pp., ISBN 0-099-36681-9.
P. Kennedy (1989; 1st edn. 1988) The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers:
Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. London:
Unwin Hyman, xxviii + 898pp., ISBN 0-006-86052-4.
D. Marquand (1988) The Unprincipled Society. London: Fontana,
viii + 292pp., ISBN 0-006-86153-9.
S. Pollard (1982) The Wasting of the British Economy: British Economic
Policy 1945 to the Present. London: Croom Helm, viii + 199pp., ISBN
0-709-92083-0.
S. Pollard (1989) Britain’s Prime and Britain’s Decline: The British Economy
1870–1914. London: Edward Arnold, xii + 324pp., ISBN 0-340-53913-5.
© Political Studies Association 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA 252
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M. J. Wiener (1992) English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial

Spirit 1850–1980 (2nd edn). Harmondsworth: Penguin, xi + 217pp.,
ISBN 0-140-13696-7.

Are debates about ‘decline’ still pertinent as Britain faces the twenty-first
century? One of the foremost preoccupations of Britain’s political elite,
and of leading intellectuals throughout the twentieth century, has been
with the question of ‘decline’: whether it has occurred, why it has done so
and what should be done to remedy it. Indeed, decline may provide one of
the defining motifs of political discourse in the ‘short’ twentieth century
(Hobsbawm 1994). This essay surveys the extensive interdisciplinary lit-
erature on British decline, and asks whether this still provides an appropri-
ate analytical ‘frame’. Though ‘decline’ has long been the object of political
and historical analysis, we argue for an intepretative shift so that the
phenomenon of ‘declinism’, a state of mind relatively autonomous of the
actual, historical decline of Britain as a world power, comes more clearly
into view. Our sense of the inadequacies of declinist narratives has been
sharpened by recent interviews with some of the leading intellectual com-
mentators on this aspect of British politics: Correlli Barnett, Samuel Brittan,
Jonathan Clark, Stuart Hall, Will Hutton, David Marquand, Sidney Pollard,
Bill Rubinstein and Martin Wiener (collected in English and Kenny
1999).

Defining decline
The simplest definition of ‘decline’ suggests that the term refers to a trace-
able process whereby Britain diminished as a world power: an historically
observable phenomenon which can be neatly defined, measured and demon-
strated. This is sometimes termed ‘absolute decline’. In this guise, decline
arguments have been found wanting in intellectual circles and have rarely
been seriously maintained. As we shall see, there are simply too many senses
in which aspects of life have improved in qualitative and quantitative terms
for such a notion to be sustainable when applied to British experience
in an aggregated fashion, or to the economy as a whole (Supple 1997;
Gamble 1994).
The predominant usage of decline is therefore in the ‘relative’ sense, in
relation to rivals. In these respects, it has appeared to many that there has
been a striking diminution in British power, defined in terms of military
power, international weight and economic productivity. It should be noted,
however, that, while relative decline of this kind is an apparently traceable

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process, it is also one rich in ambiguities, and indeed always has been so.
Decline arguments have, since the late nineteenth century, attracted a strong
set of counter-arguments, and these have in many respects dislodged explan-
ations that rely upon declinist teleologies. In the current climate, the balance
between declinists and sceptics appears to have tilted towards the latter.

Decline theories and counter-arguments1

The ‘cultural critique’
Perhaps the best known theories of decline are those sometimes referred to
under the umbrella term ‘cultural critique’. The central notion here is that
key features of British culture have proved damaging to competitive eco-
nomic performance. In particular, the argument is that British middle- and
upper-class cultures have had an especially deleterious effect on entre-
preneurial life. The elite preferred continuity, preservation and antiquity to
change, innovation and novelty. Romantic and pastoral idealism obscured
from view the realities of hard-headed economic decision-making. Public
schools and leading universities shared a bias against business, science,
industry and technology with the result that the elite products of these
institutions were unable to offer first-class economic leadership: universities
were a way out of, not into, industry; and industrial management was of
poor quality. Training and education were inadequate, and short-termism
hampered many areas of economic and political life. The arguments of
Correlli Barnett and Martin Wiener have been profoundly stimulating and
influential here: indeed, the decline debates are unimaginable without their
contributions (English and Kenny 1999; Wiener 1992; Barnett 1987).
Yet, a strong and often persuasive counter-reaction to this thesis has
emerged. Bill Rubinstein’s more systematic and empirically developed
research into wealth and the wealthy in Britain has led him to argue that
British strength has rested on finance and commerce, rather than on
industry (1981; 1987). This digs at the roots of much cultural-critique
thinking: if the economy could flourish primarily on the foundation of
finance and commerce, then de-industrialisation need not entail national
economic decline at all. Indeed, Rubinstein argues that Thatcherite political
economy was a reversion, whether witting or not, to the economic strengths
at the heart of the British pattern of development (Rubinstein 1990; 1993).
Rubinstein is not alone in challenging Wiener’s attack on the public
schools and the old universities, and other features of the latter’s argument
have also been assailed (Robbins 1990; Harvie 1985; Edgerton 1996).

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Similarly, many aspects of Correlli Barnett’s thesis (and indeed his research
methodology itself) have been convincingly questioned by specialist scholars
(Edgerton 1991; Tomlinson 1997; Clarke 1997; Contemporary Record
1987). Rather than seeing Britain as anti-technological, anti-scientific and
anti-industrial, some historians contend that in fact Britain has been
a powerful twentieth-century scientific force, that British engineers and
scientists have played a leading part in industry and government, and that
the state has been an important supporter of technology and science
(Edgerton 1996). Again, Wiener’s emphasis on the anti-industrial impact
of rural preoccupation has also been questioned. Peter Mandler has recently
pointed out that: cultures absorbed in their rural past are not necessarily
anti-modern; England between 1880 and 1914 was actually less charac-
terised by a nostalgic interest in the countryside than were other European
countries; and inter-war England was again less absorbed in rural nostalgia
than other European cultures and was certainly not backward-looking
(1997). Indeed, it is worth asking just how many pre-First World War
English people, let alone Scots, Welsh and Irish, were in fact preoccupied
by a rural-nostalgic approach. Enthusiasts for such an approach can be
found, but it is doubtful whether they were truly representative.
In particular, two central points emerge from the extensive controversies
generated by the provocative claims of Barnett and Wiener. First, even if
the arguments about British culture were conceded, and there is consid-
erable doubt on this point, could one demonstrate beyond reasonable
doubt the connection between such features of British culture and the
retardation of economic growth? No wholly convincing causal connection
has yet been established. Second, if relative British failure is to be sub-
stantially explained by recourse to cultural explanations of this type, then
it is necessary to demonstrate that Britain’s rivals were less flawed by such
supposed cultural hindrances. Attacks on the cultural critique have fre-
quently focused on the fact that Britain’s competitors were at least as likely
to exhibit the same cultural tendencies as those which supposedly inhibited
British competitiveness. As Bill Rubinstein has rightly pointed out, modern
industrial economies have been built in cultures containing many anti-
capitalist elements; indeed, British culture may well have been less hostile
to industrial development and entrepreneurship than that of its rivals (1993).

The economy
If cultural arguments have been significantly questioned, then what of more
directly economic theories? One line of argument involves the identification

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of problems allegedly associated with particular economic actors. Much

attention has been focused by commentators and politicians on the
negative economic impact of poor industrial relations and an obstruction-
ist trade union movement, and on the danger of monopolistic practices
with which unions have been associated (the different ‘declinist’ arguments
about labour are set out in Coates 1994, ch. 2). The counterpart of this
focus upon the unions has been a critique of the backward character of
British management (Barnett 1987). Other economic players singled out as
culprits include British entrepreneurs during the 1870–1914 era. This
period has been extensively analysed in an impressively detailed literature
and it remains clear that in many areas Britain was then losing ground to
its competitors. Can this be attributed to entrepreneurial failure? It has
been suggested that British entrepreneurs were reluctant to pick up on new
technologies, that they exhibited a conservative attitude to change and
improvement, that their businesses were poorly organised and that they
operated in an unhelpfully short-termist fashion (Pollard 1989). Elbaum
and Lazonick (1986) argue that Britain was impeded from making a suc-
cessful transition to mass production and corporate modernisation in the
twentieth century by an inflexible nineteenth-century institutional legacy
of atomistic economic organisation (Kirby 1992).
Important economic explanations of British decline have been forthcom-
ing from Marxist sources (Coates and Hillard 1987). Particular attention
has been focused on the failure to adapt to new technologies in the 1890s,
the preference instead being for a retreat into the satellite world of
colonies, and it has also been suggested that the failure of British manu-
facturing resulted from the weakness of that fraction of the owning class,
dependent for survival on the manufacturing sector of the economy. Per-
haps the most significant overarching contribution to decline debates from
a Marxist pedigree was Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn’s account of the
‘peculiar’ pattern of British socio-economic development, which they first
laid out in a seminal series of articles in the 1960s (Anderson 1963; 1987;
Nairn 1963; 1964). In essence, their argument was that British historical
development was unique for the absence of a truly bourgeois revolutionary
moment. This had left a major legacy upon indigenous development: the
aristocracy absorbed the emergent industrial bourgeoisie from the early
nineteenth century onwards and ruled within a state form that remained
ancien régime in kind. Anderson and Nairn have subsequently extended
their initial historical overview in the light of other scholarly developments.
Most significant has been their appropriation of a related explanation of
British decline, namely that the dominance of finance over industry in the

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British economy has seriously damaged the nation’s competitive perform-

ance (Anderson 1987). If manufacturing is the foundation of the economy,
then the predominance of British finance helps explain British under-
performance. In part, this relates also to the charge of under-investment,
which has been made forcefully by economic historians such as Sidney
Pollard (1982): that the comparatively low level of investment in Britain
has been one of the most important factors retarding economic growth.
How are we to assess these economic arguments, each of which focuses
attention on a particular ‘pathology’ of British economic life which is
deemed to have hampered development? Each can be brought into doubt
in the light of a range of scholarly and intellectual developments, leaving
‘decline’ a questionable framework for considering a range of economic
questions. The notion of apportioning blame onto particular economic
actors, typically trade unions in the 1970s, has been extensively under-
mined by a range of empirical and theoretical findings amongst economists
and political economists, not least those that stress the significance of
different factors and structures upon economic performance (Hall 1986).
Suggestions that entrepreneurial failure lies at the root of British non-
competitiveness have also been countered, with some questioning the extent
of ‘failure’ in the first place and others suggesting different causes for
failure (Pollard 1981; Habakkuk 1962; McCloskey 1973; Sandberg 1974).
More generally, the supposed centrality of manufacturing to modern
economic life, a key feature especially of left-wing declinist writing, has
been brought into question across the political spectrum. Undoubtedly,
Britain’s share of world exports in manufacturing fell sharply between the
1880s and the 1980s; and the troubles of British manufacturing during the
post-1960 era have been painful, and have appeared prominently in decline
debates. But while it is clear that British manufacturing has experienced
decline, opinions vary greatly as to the relevance of this to the overall
economy. Just how significant is a reduction in the relative importance
of manufacturing? To some, manufacturing industry is the main source of
productivity gains, wealth and growth for the economy as a whole and,
according to such a view, de-industrialisation represents the key to the
decline debate. To others, however, the economy might flourish and might
be judged anything other than declining, despite the weakness of the manu-
facturing sector (Rubinstein 1993; see also his arguments in English and
Kenny 1999).
Moreover, theories seeking to explain transformations in the political
economy of different (post-)industrial states have suggested that the erosion
of a manufacturing base and the forms of production associated with

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the era of ‘Fordism’ may signal the arrival of a new ‘accumulation regime’
organised around different materials and outputs and ‘heralding shifts into
the ‘information economy’’ (Castells 1997), ‘post-Fordism’ (Amin 1994),
the post-industrial society (Bell 1973), or the era of ‘flexible specialisation’
(Hirst 1997). Such theories, though debatable, suggest that the decline of
manufacturing in Britain might be seen as a particular instance of a larger
transformation, however traumatic, in this particular context.

Institutions
A third group of explanations of British decline might be termed ‘institu-
tional’. British decline as a world power has occasioned a search for culpable
parties, and the institutions of the political, financial and administrative
system have frequently been depicted as the culprits. A recent example is
Will Hutton’s argument concerning the supposedly sclerotic nature of much
British institutional life (1996a). His writings give prominence to criticisms
of key structures in Britain and press the claim made by others that
institutional arrangements can hinder (or foster) productivity. Numerous
commentators have alleged different institutional weaknesses: the finance-
industry relationship (Ingham 1984); the City-Treasury-Bank of England
‘nexus’ (Pollard 1982); the military-fiscal state which emerged from the
seventeenth century and powered the drive for imperial expansion, fuelled
by the political economy of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ (Cain and Hopkins
1993); and the corporatism of the post-war years (Middlemas 1979).
Though these are all significant theses in their own right, here there is
space only to observe one important characteristic common to all: they each
rely upon the idea of path dependency to suggest that societies can be locked
into particular development trajectories. Once the initial conditions are estab-
lished, it becomes almost impossible to break out of them. Studies of differ-
ent sectors and industries confirm the vicious cycle which affected each at
different points. But path-dependency thinking has been heavily criticised in
the institutionalist literature. Critics reply that: ‘[h]armful and sub-optimal
patterns can persist for a time but provided a society remains reasonably open
and pluralist, older patterns will become outmoded and will eventually be
displaced’ (Gamble in English and Kenny 1999). Similarly, the arguments
developed by Hutton, with their strong echoes of the Nairn and Anderson
thesis, have been taken to task by some critics for substituting concern
with the political-constitutional forms of political life for substantive issues
of political economy (a perennial hazard of institutionalist explanations):
what evidence is there that political-institutional ‘modernisation’ would

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necessarily spill over into the economic sphere (Hay 1995)? Again, in a
sustained critique, Desai (1996) questioned Hutton’s obsessive concern
with relative GDP growth rates, his critical fixation with the City, his
analysis of Thatcherism and his use of Keynes (see Hutton’s reply, 1996b).

The state
In institutional accounts, much attention has been paid to the role of the
British state and its relationships with other economic actors and domains.
Some have forcefully argued that it has done too much. To the economic
commentator Samuel Brittan, for example, democracy brought overgovern-
ment, with economic intervention by the state holding back rather than
encouraging growth (1977). The perversion of the market order during the
twentieth century has indeed been held by some to have caused British
decline, with an erosion of industrial competitiveness being so marked that
calls grew for the rolling back of the state. According to this view, govern-
ment should intervene less in the economy, public expenditure should be
cut back and taxation consequently lowered (Green 1987).
To others, however, the state has not done enough. David Marquand, in
particular, has argued that Britain suffered from not possessing what
he labelled a ‘developmental/entrepreneurial’ state (1988). Greater priority
should have been placed by the state, in post-war Britain, on the modern-
isation of the economy. Too weak and too distanced from business, the
state did not provide the assistance with funding, research and development
necessary to promote long-term growth and programmatic modernisation.
Marquand pinpoints the exceptional character of British political culture,
forged in the hey-day of Empire and laissez-faire, and argues that this
saturated the minds of the political and bureaucratic elites which governed
Britain into the twentieth century. This kind of argument has been
bolstered latterly by Michel Albert’s (1993) characterisation of a ‘Rhenish’
model of capitalism, based upon the features of the Japanese and Germanic
economies, which is deemed to be the antithesis of the Anglo-American
model, with its limited patterns of state intervention, lack of planning
instruments and shareholder driven economic culture. The developmental
state thesis, like some of the other theories discussed here, also relies on a
pathological understanding of British failure, locating the origins of the
latter in the absence of characteristics found in rival economies.
Some have held that the state spent too highly on the military. It has
been argued that too great a concentration on military expenditure, par-
ticularly once a power’s relative decline has begun, will further deepen that

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power’s problems by diverting resources away from necessary investment

and wealth creation (Kennedy 1989). High military expenditure has been
linked to lower growth and lower investment, and has arguably helped
ensure that Britain fell behind its economic competitors. The thesis here is that
high military spending narrows investment in civilian production, absorbs
large numbers of research scientists, because of guaranteed governmental
purchase, and therefore leads to soft management and an uncompetitive
spirit in central industrial sectors. This can be connected to the ‘imperial
thesis’ on decline: in short, that Britain’s world role undermined the domestic
economy. Maintenance of the Empire necessitated high spending on defence
industries; did this distract attention from domestic investment and recon-
struction? Was military-financial ‘overstretch’ crucial to the decline of
British power (Kennedy 1989)?
As with other theses on decline, the above arguments all carry some
weight. But they are all now open to serious political and intellectual chal-
lenge, and carry far less conviction than they once did. The argument that
rolling the state back from economic life would necessarily bolster the
competitiveness of British industrial performance has received a critical
pounding since the Conservatives held office in the 1980s and 1990s. Even
former advocates of neo-liberal political economy now express regret about
the ‘revolutionary’ and destabilising impact of such policies (Gray 1993).
Few now confidently maintain that the neo-liberal argument about decline
still holds (for an exception see Crafts 1988). In terms of the developmental
state argument, there are equally strong grounds for scepticism. In part this
comes from the faltering performance of Germany and Japan since the
late 1980s, but also from the argument that the British economy would be
adversely affected by the adoption of the institutional structures and
policies of such states (Desai 1996). The proponents of ‘developmental’
arguments have qualified some of their earlier positions in the light of
events and historiographical developments: David Marquand has incorp-
orated the ‘revisionist’ thesis about British historical development pro-
pounded by the historican Jonathan Clark as well as the ‘gentlemanly
capitalist’ interpretation of British historical development offered, in par-
ticular, by Cain and Hopkins (Marquand 1997; Marquand in English and
Kenny 1999).
As to the argument that military spending damaged other areas of the
economy, it is true that until the late 1860s the state spent more on
military research and development than on their civil equivalents. But was
the economy as a whole damaged as a consequence? The British state has
in fact significantly funded civil research and development. Indeed, by

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international standards, there has been considerable state and private in-
vestment in this area; it is simply not true to argue that military expenditure
has occurred at the expense of civil research and development. Moreover,
it is far from accepted that higher levels of spending on the latter would in
fact have solved the problems of British industry (Edgerton 1996). Again,
our understanding of British political and economic history has been
greatly enriched by decline debates, but primarily through the detailed
work of those sceptical about overarching declinist theses.

From decline to ‘declinism’

It should be clear that arguments about decline have shaped our under-
standing of British political and economic development. But it should also
be evident that on both empirical and conceptual grounds, the arguments
of decline sceptics can be perceived as holding increased intellectual sway.
In our own reading of the literature, it appears both that the notion of
an inexorable or pathologically driven decline is exaggerated and mis-
leading, and that overarching explanatory models for British failure have
been seriously undermined by detailed scholarly research. A number of
general points underline such conclusions. First, the kind of monocausal,
generalist theories which have frequently underpinned declinist argument
look threadbare when examined in detail under relevant specialist scholarly
microscopes. Second, the disaggregation of British experience into its vari-
ous component parts demonstrates clearly that there has not been a uni-
form or evenly consistent decline, however appealing such an idea has
been to some. The picture is a complex and varied one, which undermines
grand narratives of British failure. Third, ‘rise and fall’ theories of state
fortunes have been, in very broad terms, challenged by a line of thought
which stems from the arguments of economic historians who use the ‘back-
wardness thesis’. This suggests that such exaggerated accounts of states’
fortunes are improbable because all societies are interdependent in modern
economic settings, and backwardness cannot persist for long for a particu-
lar state (Gershenkron 1962). Sooner or later, the country or industry that
is behind will catch up. Decline is therefore only ever a temporary phe-
nomenon and to be expected in the normal pattern of development, which
will always be uneven, but which over time will tend to even up advan-
tages (Feinstein 1992).
More generally, declinist historiography rarely incorporates the con-
sideration of contingency and chance, the prospects of reversing trends,
and questions of historical agency: could different policies have been

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pursued at different points? At what moments might this have been pos-
sible or impossible? This is because a combination of teleological, patho-
logical and structuralist arguments have often been adopted. Interestingly,
the period of greatest anxiety about decline has coincided with the greatest
prosperity in British history. Are not living standards a crucial measure of
economic performance and, if they are, is it plausible to suggest that modern
British experience is really best approached in terms of decline? Equally
important here is the question of need and expectations, the latter being
especially linked to more popularised decline sentiment:

economic and social progress almost inevitably increases dissatis-

faction by making the definition of need more demanding, constantly
raising the ‘poverty line’ as average incomes grow, and transforming
the public judgement of what are acceptable standards of social exist-
ence (Supple 1981, 342).

Thus, it is increasingly difficult in the late twentieth century for a political

system and civil society to satisfy wants, which are both more plural and
complex, than it was a hundred years earlier. The absence of any serious
attention by political and social historians to the changing pattern of
popular and elite ‘expectations’ represents a major constraint upon our
understanding of the discourses of declinism (Supple 1997).
Yet, despite all this, ‘decline’ has been a persistent theme in British intel-
lectual and political life, and its persistence requires some explanation in
terms of the internal dynamics of intellectual and political argument, rather
than in some supposed external reality of British decline. Indeed, rather than
simply abandoning decline and its attendant scholarship, we propose two
different interpretative foci which would avoid replicating the errors of
previous debates, and which should open up new fields of understanding
for scholars from a variety of disciplines. The first involves shifting atten-
tion from an evaluation of decline to consideration of the phenomenon of
‘declinism’. This refers to ideological perceptions of decline, to diagnoses
of its condition or causes and, perhaps, to projects explicitly aimed at re-
versing it; it also points to the discursive construction of decline narratives
by political actors drawing from a multitude of sources (Eccleshall in
English and Kenny 1999) and the need to deepen our understanding of the
power and range of such argumentation.
Our second suggestion specifically concerns intellectuals: we need to
explore the fascination with decline characteristic of so many leading British
intellectuals. Though Ian Budge (1993) has pointed to the political role of

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decline talk, it would also prove fruitful to consider intellectual arguments

concerning decline as part of the complicated and difficult relationship
between the political system and external intellectual voices. For the latter,
declinism might usefully be regarded as a recurrent ‘trope’, as literary
theorists put it, which provides a powerful and emotive way of framing
arguments in relation to the political class. It is therefore interesting to note
how prominent declinist arguments have made scholars who were previously
known only to small academic circles. This has occurred on occasions when
their arguments reach the ears of political groups at moments of crisis and
ideological transformation for the latter. A less instrumentalised reading
might wonder if ‘declinists’ have projected on to the British state their own
sense of disillusionment and disappointment about failed political ventures
(Jonathan Clark presents the controversial thesis that many contemporary
‘declinists’ have emerged from the ‘soft centre’ of British political life in the
1980s (in English and Kenny 1999)), or about the collapse of many of
the ideological ‘narratives’ through which intellectuals have sustained
themselves. Marxism is the most obvious candidate here, but liberalism and
some forms of conservative nationalism might be considered. Similarly,
Gamble (1991) has connected the growth of ‘declinism’ with the weak-
ening of three of the prevailing historiographical narratives through which
British history has been understood: he labels these the ‘Whig’, ‘Tory’ and
‘Radical’ perspectives. In their place, as part of a larger shift to a more
pessimistic and iconoclastic consciousness, the idea of decline has figured
prominently in many historical and political accounts. But in many
respects declinist arguments offer mirror images of such narratives, differ-
ing only in their fateful understanding of national historical development,
in opposition to Whig ideas of ineluctable political progress. Not surpris-
ingly, such arguments can induce a sense of political paralysis and pes-
simism about policy alternatives, because they stress the embedded character
of the structural properties undermining British capitalism. It may well be
that increased scepticism towards teleological or ‘stadial’ views of histor-
ical progression amongst historians finds parallels in the political science
community’s questioning of ‘structuralist’ arguments in some important
areas (Hay 1995); declinist pathologies and their underlying ‘narratives’
are decreasingly potent in such an intellectual climate.

Conclusion
Decline has been a concept central to late twentieth-century discussions of
British economic performance and national identity alike. Yet, there are

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serious analytical grounds for doubting whether this ‘trope’ remains useful
in pinpointing and diagnosing the principal processes within British polit-
ical economy. Nor is this to argue that a form of economic triumphalism
founded upon mythological British virtues, historically the reverse side of
the coin to breast-beating about decline, should be installed in favour of
the latter. Though these are extremely difficult phenomena to judge, there
is evidence that intellectuals are becoming more sensitised to the limitations
of the narratives which have underpinned the teaching and interpretation
of central periods in British history. These are increasingly seen as ob-
structing rather than aiding our understanding of the peculiar and typical
ways in which the British polity and economy have developed. Pinning
down the causes of, and remedy for, decline has, for a long time, repre-
sented a kind of ‘holy grail’ for historians and political commentators in
Britain. Our suggestion is that this approach to decline should now be sup-
planted by a more extensive analysis of the political construction of declinist
arguments in different periods, with particular attention paid to the role of
declinism in the relationship between intellectuals and British politics.

Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank David Marsh and three anonymous
referees for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

Notes
1. The categories deployed here to organise the literature on decline should clearly be treated
with flexibility. The boundaries between them are, in certain cases, necessarily blurred:
some writers could arguably be included under more than one heading. Nevertheless, we
believe that as an organisational framework, these categories have considerable value in
clarifying the nature of decline debates.

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Dr R. English Dr M. Kenny
School of Politics Department of Politics
Queen’s University Belfast University of Sheffield
21 University Square Northumberland Road
Belfast BT7 1PA Sheffield S10 2TU
email: r.english@qub.ac.uk email: m.kenny@sheffield.ac.uk

266 © Political Studies Association 1999.