Tom Nairn - Curmudgeon extraordinaire

A Scottish intellectual giant passed from us at the weekend, aged 90,

Upon his passing, Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon called Tom Nairn “one of the greatest thinkers, political theorists and intellectuals that Scotland has ever produced” while Alex Salmond credited him with “providing the intellectual base which turned Scottish nationalism from a romantic notion to a powerful left wing challenge to the British state”. Gordon Brown, for whose “The Red Paper on Scotland” Nairn wrote in 1975 an influential essay, wrote: “He disagreed with me on many things but his books and scholarship will long be remembered.”

The best way to honour such people is to go back and read what they have written (and also what others have said about them!) – an enormous task in Nairn’s case since he wrote so much. He was, with Perry Anderson, an early editor of New Left Review (NLR) – bringing to it the understanding he gained in Italy of Gramsci – and he was one of the companions on my own political journey from 1960-1990. In late 1964, my tutor at the LSE was Ralph Miliband whose Parliamentary Socialism (1961) had set the left alight and Tom Nairn produced his major critique of the Labour party in the columns of NLR (all 58 pages) in precisely the months I was at the LSE. Along the way, he managed to lose his Marxism and became increasingly fascinated with nationalism. When, in 1967, the Scottish Nationalists won their famous victory in Hamilton, Nairn duly responded with a typically caustic article in New Left Review entitled “The Three Dreams of Scottish Nationalism” (1968). But a few years later he was singing to a different tune in a longer piece ("Scotland and Europ") in that same journal. In 1972, just before the successful negotiations for UK entry into Europe, NLR published his powerful critique of the UK Left’s position on Europe – running to 116 pages

The closest he and I came to meeting was in the pages of the famous “Red Paper on Scotland” of 1975 when his was the lead chapter (on “Old Nationalism and New Nationalism” as I recall) and mine, after a chapter on “Devolution and Democracy”, followed - on “What Sort of Over-government?”

Neil Davidson was a Scottish academic who retained his Marxism and died at the tragically early age of 60. In 1998 he produced In Perspective, Tom Nairn which remains probably the most sustained critique of the course Tom Nairn has taken -

The extent to which Nairn has abandoned not only Marxism, but socialism itself, has been missed by both his critics and his supporters. Such misunderstandings should not be allowed to continue. What Nairn advances is nothing less than a theoretical justification for the endless subdivision of the world into competing capitalist nation states.

A more considered and recent treatment of Nairn’s thinking can be found in the quite excellent The Case for Scottish independence – a history of nationalist political thought in modern Scotland by Ben Jackson 2019. This is a terrific and very balanced analysis which I would strongly recommend to anyone interested in the Scottish experience.

For a taste of Tom Nairn’s writing, I would suggest readers have a look at the little book which contains a typical attack he wrote on Gordon Brown just before the latter became PM Gordon Brown – Bard of Britishness (2006) – with commentary from a range of opinions. And, for a more critical sense of the writer, The Breakup of Tom Nairn? (2002) will give a sense of his role as provocateur.

It;s too early to get definitive assessments of Tom Nairn – but I liked what Gerry Hassan said about Nairn more than a decade ago and Jonathan Shafi’s tribute this week.