Guy Ortolano - 'Thatcher's Progress: From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism through an English New Town'

During the quarter of a century after the Second World War, the British state designated thirty-two new towns across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Why, even before selling council houses or denationalizing public industries, did Margaret Thatcher’s government begin to privatise these new towns? By examining the most ambitious of these projects, Milton Keynes, this talk revises our understanding of British social democracy, arguing that the new towns comprised the spatial dimension of the welfare state. Following the Prime Minister’s progress on a tour through Milton Keynes on 25 September 1979, Ortolano alights at successive stops to examine the broader histories of urban planning, modernist architecture, and international consulting. Thatcher’s journey reveals a dynamic social democracy during its decade of crisis, while also indicating how public sector actors begrudgingly accommodated the alternative priorities of market liberalism.

Guy Ortolano is a cultural and intellectual historian of modern Britain, with interests in urban history and the history of science. He edits the Twentieth Century British History and, with Susan Pedersen of Columbia and Peter Mandler of Cambridge, runs the New York – Cambridge Training Collaboration for PhD students in modern British history (NYCTC). He teaches surveys of British and European history since the eighteenth century, and seminars on urban history, the practice of history, and the history of science. He also offers a survey of multi-ethnic Britain since pre-Roman times for NYU’s Core Curriculum. Ortolano writes about subjects that recently enjoyed wide acclaim, only to have fallen dramatically out of favor: a novelist no longer in print, a literary critic out of fashion, an architecture widely loathed. By recovering the context in which these reputations once thrived, his work challenges some of the most pervasive interpretations of the post-1945 era, from economic “decline” to the 1970s “crisis.”

His first book, The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature, and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain (Cambridge, 2009), explains how a cliché about intellectual life – that it is divided between “two cultures,” the humanities and sciences – ignited a ferocious debate during the 1960s, as this familiar lament became invested with competing readings of England’s past, the West’s present, and Africa’s future. His second book, Thatcher's Progress: From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism through an English New Town (Cambridge, 2019), on which this talk is based, follows the Prime Minister on a driving tour through the planned city of Milton Keynes - a journey that reveals a dynamic welfare state during the decade of its purported crisis.

A free event with the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.