Abstract
The British political system is in crisis but not the kind of crisis conventionally diagnosed. The state is not in some long-term terminal decline. Since its original creation in 1707, it has been reinvented by successive exercises in statecraft. The history of the state does not determine its future; on the contrary, statecraft allows scope for both different versions of our history and different routes to the future. The book is about how the future is uncertain – as is the past, or at least our understanding of it.
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Notes
- 1.
As in Gamble’s 1981/1994 classic study of decline.
- 2.
Butterfield 1931: 11.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
This is my translation; most translations from the original put in ‘error’, but omit ‘forgetting’, which occurs right at the start of the sentence: Renan 1882.
- 6.
Anderson, B. 1991.
- 7.
Burke 1790/1964: 93.
- 8.
Ibid: 87.
- 9.
- 10.
Renan 1882; Ibid.
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Moran, M. (2017). Introduction: Imagining and Reimagining ‘Britain’. In: The End of British Politics?. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49965-9_1
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