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Out of the Ordinary: How Everyday Life Inspired a Nation and How It Can Again
From a major British political thinker and activist, a passionate case that both the left and right have lost their faith in ordinary people and must learn to find it again.
This is an age of polarization. It’s us vs. them. The battle lines are clear, and compromise is surrender.
As Out of the Ordinary reminds us, we have been here before. From the 1920s to the 1950s, in a world transformed by revolution and war, extreme ideologies of left and right fueled utopian hopes and dystopian fears. In response, Marc Stears writes, a group of British writers, artists, photographers, and filmmakers showed a way out. These men and women, including J. B. Priestley, George Orwell, Barbara Jones, Dylan Thomas, Laurie Lee, and Bill Brandt, had no formal connection to one another. But they each worked to forge a politics that resisted the empty idealisms and totalizing abstractions of their time. Instead they were convinced that people going about their daily lives possess all the insight, virtue, and determination required to build a good society. In poems, novels, essays, films, paintings, and photographs, they gave witness to everyday people’s ability to overcome the supposedly insoluble contradictions between tradition and progress, patriotism and diversity, rights and duties, nationalism and internationalism, conservatism and radicalism. It was this humble vision that animated the great Festival of Britain in 1951 and put everyday citizens at the heart of a new vision of national regeneration.
A leading political theorist and a veteran of British politics, Stears writes with unusual passion and clarity about the achievements of these apostles of the ordinary. They helped Britain through an age of crisis. Their ideas might do so again, in the United Kingdom and beyond.
This is an age of polarization. It’s us vs. them. The battle lines are clear, and compromise is surrender.
As Out of the Ordinary reminds us, we have been here before. From the 1920s to the 1950s, in a world transformed by revolution and war, extreme ideologies of left and right fueled utopian hopes and dystopian fears. In response, Marc Stears writes, a group of British writers, artists, photographers, and filmmakers showed a way out. These men and women, including J. B. Priestley, George Orwell, Barbara Jones, Dylan Thomas, Laurie Lee, and Bill Brandt, had no formal connection to one another. But they each worked to forge a politics that resisted the empty idealisms and totalizing abstractions of their time. Instead they were convinced that people going about their daily lives possess all the insight, virtue, and determination required to build a good society. In poems, novels, essays, films, paintings, and photographs, they gave witness to everyday people’s ability to overcome the supposedly insoluble contradictions between tradition and progress, patriotism and diversity, rights and duties, nationalism and internationalism, conservatism and radicalism. It was this humble vision that animated the great Festival of Britain in 1951 and put everyday citizens at the heart of a new vision of national regeneration.
A leading political theorist and a veteran of British politics, Stears writes with unusual passion and clarity about the achievements of these apostles of the ordinary. They helped Britain through an age of crisis. Their ideas might do so again, in the United Kingdom and beyond.
248 pages, Hardcover
Published January 12, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 18, 2022
I find it difficult to evaluate the arguments Stears presents in "Out of the Ordinary" in a clinical, detached way, due to the immense emotional pull the book had on me.
I want to believe in a Britain which protects and venerates the patterns of everyday life. After all, I myself am a child of those same patterns and my heart hurts when I think of them now and my current detachment from them. I want to believe that the everyday people of Britons know what is best for themselves and can overcome the deep clefts that divide them. As such, I enjoyed "Out of the Ordinary". Those of differing beliefs may come away with a different perception of the book.
I do feel that the Stears is harsh on Corbyn and post-2015 Labour. That said, whilst I may feel that the party was closer to Ordinary People in 2015-19 than during the New Labour years, the fact of the matter is that millions disagreed, and showed their disagreement with their votes.
I still love my fellow Britons and, like Stears, have hope and faith in their choices. Whatever the divisions we face, we can at least take small comfort in knowing that the US is far, far, worse.
I want to believe in a Britain which protects and venerates the patterns of everyday life. After all, I myself am a child of those same patterns and my heart hurts when I think of them now and my current detachment from them. I want to believe that the everyday people of Britons know what is best for themselves and can overcome the deep clefts that divide them. As such, I enjoyed "Out of the Ordinary". Those of differing beliefs may come away with a different perception of the book.
I do feel that the Stears is harsh on Corbyn and post-2015 Labour. That said, whilst I may feel that the party was closer to Ordinary People in 2015-19 than during the New Labour years, the fact of the matter is that millions disagreed, and showed their disagreement with their votes.
I still love my fellow Britons and, like Stears, have hope and faith in their choices. Whatever the divisions we face, we can at least take small comfort in knowing that the US is far, far, worse.
May 31, 2021
Marc Stears makes the case for a politics which engages with the everyday lives of ordinary people without making any references to anything more recent than a trip to the 1951 Festival of Britain. He draws support for his standpoint from the works of writers D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell, Dylan Thomas and Laurie Lee and the photographer Bill Brandt and the artist Barbara Jones, who in the main had accomplished their most important work in the decades before and immediately after the second world war. Everyday life in its most recent form doesn’t really get a look-in in this meditation on politics and social existence.
The work is inspired by the Blue Labour current which argues that the Left has lost its place in the affections of ordinary people because it has ceased to identify with their fundamental values which orientate around family, community, class and nation. These are seen as reservoirs of social solidarity which bind us together and make plausible the hope for a fairer, more egalitarian society. Yet Stears knows and is good enough to remind us on at least two occasions when mentioning the more critical take on mundane everydayness projected by, for example Virginia Woolf and the political theorist Henri Lefevre, that other conclusions can be arrived at from close observation of the ways people live and interact with one another. Not so much a resource for hope as the feeling of being on a depressing treadmill from which we worry we will never be able to escape.
Of course, carefully considered, it should never be a case of either only optimism or only pessimism when we observe what goes on in homes and neighbourhoods. The fundamental issue to concern ourselves with is what is needed in terms of political initiative to put aside the ‘mind-forged manacles’ that make everyday life oppressive and which gives agency to the commodification of interpersonal relations, and which might open the way to genuinely solidaristic and democratic society. There are good folk working on that question, who Stears doesn’t seem to have much time for.
The work is inspired by the Blue Labour current which argues that the Left has lost its place in the affections of ordinary people because it has ceased to identify with their fundamental values which orientate around family, community, class and nation. These are seen as reservoirs of social solidarity which bind us together and make plausible the hope for a fairer, more egalitarian society. Yet Stears knows and is good enough to remind us on at least two occasions when mentioning the more critical take on mundane everydayness projected by, for example Virginia Woolf and the political theorist Henri Lefevre, that other conclusions can be arrived at from close observation of the ways people live and interact with one another. Not so much a resource for hope as the feeling of being on a depressing treadmill from which we worry we will never be able to escape.
Of course, carefully considered, it should never be a case of either only optimism or only pessimism when we observe what goes on in homes and neighbourhoods. The fundamental issue to concern ourselves with is what is needed in terms of political initiative to put aside the ‘mind-forged manacles’ that make everyday life oppressive and which gives agency to the commodification of interpersonal relations, and which might open the way to genuinely solidaristic and democratic society. There are good folk working on that question, who Stears doesn’t seem to have much time for.
December 2, 2021
An interesting and compelling read - Stears argues that the "grand and abstract" in Politics is alienating and doomed to fail. The real substance of a meaningful politics lies in the everyday lives of citizens, something exemplified by a generation of creatives in the immediate post-War period. This is not a political program, so the work of connecting the everyday to government and public policy is left to us. But a good reminder for those who seek to change the world to bring their fellow citizens along for the ride in the spirit of fellowship.
April 5, 2021
Really interesting read on how we might establish a better balance between the grand ideas of Whitehall and the Town Hall with the everyday life of citizens in making things better for all of us...
June 16, 2021
A book that could change your life and much more.
Gives a different outlook for what he future could hold and shows that hope and power lie within the ordinary.
Gives a different outlook for what he future could hold and shows that hope and power lie within the ordinary.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews