The United Kingdom, commentators are fond of remarking, is not properly speaking the name of a country but of a political settlement. Neither is Great Britain — an imperial moniker that denotes a territory whose borders have been drawn on the Welsh and the Jamaican coast — the name of a nation in any clear sense. It is instead a description of the projection of imperial power out of a core whose boundaries remain misty, miasmic, and amorphous. There is, therefore, something very anachronistic about Britain: it is a nation which seems to exist with one foot in modernity and another in a mutant feudal-imperial past.

No thinker has been more perceptive of the pathologies of Britain than the Scottish historian Tom Nairn (1932–2023), who died on January 21. The author of over ten books, Nairn dedicated his life to pointing out the fissures in this unhappy marriage of modernity and tradition at the heart of the British state. Looking back to the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution, he argued that Britain failed to develop a properly modern democratic culture because its early political tumult brought into power a nascent capitalist class protected by the fig leaf of a monarchy. Not in need of popular support to gain power, Britain’s hybrid ruling class — a strange fusion of the bourgeoise, gentry, and aristocracy — curtailed the emergence modern political institutions.

While other European nations developed bureaucracies and left-wing political parties shaped by modern ideas, Britain, an early industrializer, became a political laggard. A politics of compromise characterized the most progressive wings of Britain’s political class: eager to reform society but incapable of fundamentally altering the structure of the state. This was the view that Nairn held of the United Kingdom. The continued presence of support for Scottish independence, the general breakdown of public institutions, and the failure of Starmer’s Labour Party to mount a serious challenge to Conservative hegemony prove that Nairn’s diagnosis of the causes of Britain’s decay is of more value than ever.