Suet puddings and red pillarboxes: A review of Marc Stears’ Out of the Ordinary
| Author | Edward Hall |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14748851211040173 |
| Published date | 01 April 2023 |
| Date | 01 April 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Reviews |
Review EJPT
Suet puddings and red
pillarboxes: A review
of Marc Stears’ Out
of the Ordinary
Edward Hall
University of Sheffield, UK
Marc Stears, Out of the Ordinary: How Everyday Life Inspired a Nation and How it Can Again
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2021), 236 pp. £30 (Hardcover). ISBN:
97806743878
Abstract
Marc Stears’ Out of the Ordinary: How Everyday Life Inspired a Nation and How It Can Again
is an engaging and sincere work of political theory. In it, Stears explores how the work
of a number of British writers and artists in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s – Bill Brandt,
Barbara Jones, Laurie Lee, George Orwell, JB Priestley and Dylan Thomas – can help us
to overcome some of the lazy ideological conventions of our time which suggest it is
impossible to simultaneously value tradition and progress, patriotism and diversity,
individual rights and social duties, nationalism and internationalism, conservativism
and radicalism. In this review, I highlight the timely and engaging elements of Stears’
book while also raising doubts about his treatment of the ‘everyday’ and his Blue
Labour solutions to our political ills.
Keywords
Britain, Marc Stears, nationalism, the everyday, the ordinary
Prior to his current stint as the Director of the Policy Lab at the University of
Sydney, Marc Stears was Chief Executive of the New Economics Foundation, a
well-respected left-leaning British think-tank, and before that senior advisor and
Corresponding author:
Edward Hall, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, S10 2TU, UK.
Email: edward.hall@sheffield.ac.uk
European Journal of Political Theory
!The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14748851211040173
journals.sagepub.com/home/ept
2023, Vol. 22(2) 363–372
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