READING TOM NAIRN
Reading Tom Nairn: Writing, Politics, Scotland
I’m currently working on the first book-length study of Tom Nairn, modern Scotland’s most influential and elusive public intellectual.
Tom Nairn (1932-2023) was one of the most consequential Scottish writers of the twentieth century. At the news of his death, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon paid tribute to ‘one of the greatest thinkers, political theorists and intellectuals that Scotland has ever produced’. Though he led no movement or school, and spent nearly all of his working life outside the university system, his worldwide influence is unmatched by any Scottish scholar of his generation.
Yet there is no book-length study of Nairn’s career, and several of his key ideas remain contested or misunderstood. Undoubtedly original as a writer and polemicist, he did much of his best work as a ‘co-thinker’, theorising in tandem with figures including Perry Anderson, Ernest Gellner and Anthony Barnett. Never a line-holding party intellectual, Nairn faced hostility and marginalisation – in some cases, ex-communication – in every political tradition in which he made a major contribution.
From the New Left to nationalist theory to studies of British monarchy, his influence is both pervasive and elusive. Drawing on unpublished interviews and archival research, this book has three aims: to illuminate the distinctive qualities of Nairn’s writing, and its guiding sensibility; to centre Nairn’s thinking within the various movements in which it made an impact; to grasp Nairn’s complex political career in the light of his primary talent: that of an essayist and critic.