Over the past forty years, Jim Tomlinson has played a leading role in recasting our understanding of economic policy in twentieth-century Britain. One strand of Tomlinson's work has focused on the ideas that have shaped policy making within the state, challenging conventional narratives of the “rise of Keynesianism” in the 1940s and its “fall” in the 1970s and highlighting the importance of “supply-side” policies to the Labour Party's political economy under Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson. At the same time, Tomlinson has also paid growing attention to the ways in which politicians, journalists, and other commentators frame economic problems in public debate, most notably in his influential work on “declinism.” Managing the Economy, Managing the People draws these themes together in a wide-ranging survey of “economic narratives” in British politics since the Second World War. Across ten richly detailed chapters, Tomlinson argues that “‘the economy’ is not a natural object, but a socially constructed one” (2), and shows that postwar British governments have actively propagated particular forms of economic knowledge in order to shape public behavior and secure political support for their policies.

In part one of the book, Tomlinson takes a chronological approach, tracing the evolution of economic objectives within Whitehall—and the ways in which the British state communicated these objectives—from the austerity politics of ration books and dollar shortages in the 1940s to the fiscal austerity of the past decade. In part two he shifts to a thematic frame, exploring the changing ways in which unemployment, productivity, inflation, and the balance of payments have been understood in and around the state. As does David Edgerton's new study, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation (2018), Tomlinson's book reminds us that postwar economic management rested on a distinctively national and industrial conception of the economy, which contrasted sharply with the Gladstonian free trade order that existed before the First World War and the globally integrated, service-dominated economy that has emerged since the 1970s. He pays particular attention to the propaganda that Labour governments issued to win support for export and productivity drives (in the late 1940s and mid-1960s) and incomes policies (in the 1960s and 1970s), but also examines the ways in which politicians of both main parties have sought to define the terms of debate for political advantage—for instance, by holding up the balance of payments (Harold Wilson), inflation (Margaret Thatcher), or the budget deficit (George Osborne) as the test of their success or failure. Of course, we know much more about how these narratives were created than how they were received by the public, but Tomlinson draws together a range of evidence from opinion polls and social science research to shed light on this question. The result is an impressive study of the politics of economic policy in postwar Britain that underlines the contingent nature of contemporary economic problems and lays the groundwork for future research.

One question Tomlinson touches on in the introduction but might have interrogated more fully elsewhere is why the modern democratic state needs to “manage the people.” For the postwar “golden age” from the 1940s to the 1970s, the explanation for activism is not difficult to find: British politicians were committed to a strong conception of national economic interests—especially economic growth and the defense of sterling—and believed that their prospects of reelection relied on delivering full employment and rising living standards. This belief led to the adoption of highly ambitious economic objectives that could be achieved only if citizens were prepared to subordinate their wage demands, consumption patterns, and investment patterns to the greater good. As Jon Lawrence has pointed out, the growth of popular individualism and decline of deference to elite leadership during the 1960s and 1970s meant that these appeals for restraint turned out to be too demanding (see Jon Lawrence, “Paternalism, class, and the British path to modernity,” in Simon Gunn and James Vernon, eds., The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain [2011]). The Thatcher government responded by managing public opinion in a rather different way, insisting that there was “no alternative” to the adjustments required by the market and encouraging workers to revise their wage expectations downwards.

It is less clear from Tomlinson's account how far Thatcher's successors have had to “manage the people.” Much of the economic policy discourse of the last thirty years has been narrowly electoral in character, as Labour and the Conservatives have competed at the margins of fiscal policy by warning of “tax bombshells” and “Tory cuts.” Tomlinson hints, however, that we might also see the Blair, Brown, and Cameron governments’ narratives as part of a politics of legitimation which reflects their recognition that the distributional effects of deregulated labor and housing markets are “politically unacceptable” (234). British governments have thus used rhetorical claims about the inevitability of economic change, as well as redistributive measures such as tax credits, to secure public consent for market liberal policies. On the other hand, there are reasons for doubting whether this legitimation strategy has been wholly successful. The persistence of industrial nostalgia in the United Kingdom and other western democracies—mobilized so effectively in 2016 by the Leave campaign in the United Kingdom and by Donald Trump in the United States—suggest that many voters continue to judge their economic experiences against the vision of a national, industrial, full-employment economy which their governments projected during the “golden age.” The enduring power of this productivist vision poses serious problems for the legitimacy of postindustrial liberal capitalism. As the United Kingdom leaves the European Union, politicians are likely to find it even harder to manage public expectations of what the state can deliver. Those policy makers who take on this unenviable task could learn much from reading Tomlinson's important volume.