Paul Addison is widely regarded, and rightly so, as a doyen of contemporary historians of Britain. His first book, The Road to 1945 (London, 1975), remains a classic—providing the construction of political consensus as both a “positive and purposeful” (14) structure for historians studying domestic politics during the Second World War and a goad for those “conviction” politicians who, since its publication in 1975, have condemned such a consensus as the principal cause of Britain’s relative decline. It has thereby triumphantly engaged, as all good contemporary history should, both historical and current political debate. Nor was it as naive as some younger historians later claimed. The potential radicalism of consensus, it was acknowledged, went unrealized because of the “very modest changes in society itself” (14). Consensus also did not signify total ideological agreement on all issues at all times. The true significance, for both left and right, of Bevan’s and Thorneycroft’s ideological stands in the 1950s was not that they occurred but that they were defeated. “Consensus in action” was patently predominant. In 1945, as Addison concluded: “The rhetorical debate between state socialism and laissez-faire capitalism was renewed with acrimony. In practice, the Conservative and Labour leaders had by-passed most of it in favour of ‘pragmatic’ reform. … When Labour swept to victory in 1945, the new consensus fell, like a branch of ripe plums, into the lap of Mr Attlee” (14).

Did success likewise fall too easily and early into Addison’s lap? Certainly his later work has not had the same impact or frisson. This book helps to explain why. Entering the crowded field of general surveys, it divides the “total social” history of postwar Britain into three essentially political periods: 1945–57 (the aftermath of war), 1957–74 (the quest for modernity), 1974–97 (transformations). Its central, quite reasonable, argument is that—for all the wartime destruction of the fundamental bases of conservatism throughout society—the “positive and purposeful” agents for change that truly transformed postwar Britain were a series of peacetime revolutions, based on affluence: the transformation of an industrial into a service economy with its consequences for class structure and the rise of neoliberalism, permissiveness, multiculturalism, and devolution. As ever, there is a balanced, comprehensive, and generous summary of other academics’ findings and, above all, statistical evidence, succinct political insights that whet the appetite for more (for example, on Mrs. Thatcher, “if the blade was sharp it was also narrow” [278]), a welcome emphasis on women’s experience, the realistic identification of the roots of many “Thatcherite” trends in the 1970s under Labour, and an eye for the telling example. Many will know of Churchill’s barbs against Labour’s answer to Harry Truman: “a sheep in sheep’s clothing,” “an empty taxi arrived at No 10 and Mr Attlee got out.” Less well known is the response to a young lady on a train who inquired whether he had often been told that “you look just like Mr Attlee.” “Frequently,” came the priceless reply (7).

The coverage is thus exhaustive, but the book is essentially descriptive rather than analytical. For example, the introduction (in the equivalent of which much of the incisive direction of his earlier work was located) is disappointingly bland. “The fundamentals of a capitalist economy and a parliamentary system were never seriously in doubt,” Addison writes, in defiance of much of the evidence he later produces, and “the British remained a comparatively tolerant and orderly people and Britain one of the best countries in which to live” (2–3). What of the fundamental challenge to all authority in the 1970s, to which Thatcherism was—initially at least—an improvised reaction, the viciousness behind the anarchy of the 1979 “winter of discontent,” the 1984–85 miners’ strike, and the 1990 “poll tax” riots, as well as continuing racial hatred (not least toward the English in Scotland)? “Britain against itself” was Sam Beer’s lament for the 1970s. Moreover, it overlooks two “peacetime revolutions” that would seem critical—while not unique to Britain: the changing balance of power between the developed and developing worlds (typified by the oil crises in the 1970s, which meant Britain could no longer “muddle through” at its own pace) and the IT revolution (which not only increased the capacity of those in power, not least in the media, but also exposed, through blogs, and so forth, the banality of much of the popular opinion on which democratic change had to be built and which had convinced an earlier generation—amid much derision—that the “gentleman in Whitehall really does know better” [Douglas Jay, The Socialist Case (1937; repr., London, 1947), 258]). In response to the first oil crisis, one miner asked the then-Conservative prime minister: “If you can pay the bloody Arabs, why can’t you pay us? We’re British!” This would be worrying enough in itself but is doubly so when Addison claims it was “good advice” (155). Absent too is any pathbreaking examination of both the loss of self-belief, or “civic paternalism” (grounded in years of historical reality) to a shrill polemicism (imported from the very different world of the United States, ironically despite—or arguably because of—Britain’s permanent entry into the European Union) and the “secret garden” of new (democratically unaccountable) power brokers such as bankers, public relations professionals, and media moguls.

In short, the book captures Addison on the irresistible “upward escalator” of liberalism, without even a discussion of the rift between negative and positive freedom that has bedeviled its proponents since Edwardian times (the former requiring minimal government action, while the latter—“freedom to” rather than “freedom from”—needed the kind of positive direction provided by the Attlee government). As a child of the 1950s, he is thus clearly exposed—as admitted in 1975—as an “optimist” who believes that capitalism could seamlessly “be made to work more efficiently, and provide greater welfare.” Judged by the highest standards (to which Addison is fully entitled), effective analysis requires greater disinterest and objectivity than this.