With the publication of Kynaston's history of postwar Britain, another strong addition has joined the lengthy tomes lining the popular history bookshelves. Despite its subject, this book is anything but austere: 692 pages await the reader, with more than 100 pages dedicated to each year of his study. It offers an opulent feast of fabulous detail, woven together by a racy narrative. Kynaston's skillful use of sources invites the reader to luxuriate in the sounds and sights of the working as well as the upper classes and to spy on the provincial populace as well as the metropolitan elite. Bevan's boasts of Labour's achievements are tempered by the wry, skeptical, or downright cynical evaluations of Mass-Observation diarists. Literary notables like Larkin and letter-writing Welsh miners all have their say on the dullness of daily life in a cold climate made more monotonous by rationing.

Kynaston's ambitious endeavor avoids being an unstructured history by anecdote for three reasons: first, he is an excellent writer; second, the book's structure is admirably clear, combining thematic and chronological frameworks; and, third, social surveys and government speeches are woven together to support a strong argument. Kynaston's thesis is that the British are a stoic, social democratic bunch and that the postwar welfare state was the sort of liberal gradualism that appealed to them. This is a powerful ripost to Corelli-Barnett's well-publicized criticisms.

Austerity Britain is, then, a jolly good read as one of Kynaston's diarists might say, and deserves its success; but it does raise questions about what modern history is for—at least for this reader. Despite his defense of the welfare state, Kynaston's main emphasis is on how little social change did take or indeed could have taken place. Parliamentary politics and, occasionally, the drawing room chatter of the “metropolitan elite,” are his agents of change. The wider public make little history: aside from actually voting governments in, they spend much of their time queueing and whinging.

This isn’t to suggest that Kynaston ignores class. Britain, as presented by Kynaston (or rather England and Wales; Scotland receives lamentably few mentions despite having distinct legal and educational systems), is inevitably and importantly a class-based society. Class could not simply be legislated away; it was a “fundamental social and cultural [continuity]” (55). Why, or how, is never explained. “There was,” Kynaston tells us, “as ever, the uncanny ability of ‘The Thing' [the British establishment] … to reinvent itself ” (174). This is about as close as we get to an analysis of the relationship between social structure and social change. Instead, Kynaston's subjects are slotted into ahistorical categories complete with their own “proper” modes of behavior. This particularly characterizes his treatment of the working class. Kynaston finds it revealing that the postwar working class adopted “an essentially `divi-minded,' instrumental use of [cooperative and trade union association] … as opposed to a more socialist or ideological motivation” (179). Kynaston doesn’t find politicians’ ability to combine ideals with pragmatism worthy of note, but he implies that the working class are either solidaristic revolutionaries or economistic, self-interested conservatives. Yet as Carolyn Steedman demonstrated in Landscape for a Good Woman (London, 1986), the stereotype of the radical working class was itself a product of a particular postwar moment. Moreover, those who did not conform to this representation were nonetheless agents of change.

That Kynaston misses the ways in which people refuse or remake the social categories to which they are allotted at particular historical moments is connected to his selection of sources. Kynaston's use of long-neglected postwar social surveys is commendable, but because these studies rarely quote their (usually working-class) respondents at length, the book's much-publicized use of “ordinary” people's words and thoughts relies on a small sample of middle-class Mass-Observation diarists. It is a shame that Kynaston dismisses the many relevant oral histories that have been published since the 1970s as “feel-good tosh”—“so much of it doesn’t have a precise date, and if you have a date, it is quite likely to be wrong.” By contrast, the postwar social scientists offer an authentic “contemporary voice” and “raw, unmediated” “historical evidence” (Kynaston, “The Uses of Sociology for Real-Time History,” Forum: Qualitative Social Research 6 [1 January 2005], section 2.4). Such a judgment reads as naive, even quaint, against the thoughtful research that characterizes the fields of oral history and narrative studies and recent cultural histories of the archive. It has grave implications, however, and not just in its marginalization of working-class voices. Kynaston never asks what Mass-Observation thought it was about, why the postwar period witnessed such a proliferation of social surveys concerned with redefining class, or how these shaped postwar history. Yet one reason for all this social investigation was surely that many of the working-class experienced unprecedented prosperity in the late 1940s, which attracted great academic and political interest—and, incidentally, challenges the austerity thesis.

To explore such questions would be difficult in a book like this one. Part of the pleasure of reading Kynaston derives from our engagement with the authoritative, anonymous narrator who delivers comforting certainties that leave no room for doubt or even diversity. This is far removed from the relativity celebrated by postmodernity and echoes similar popular histories like Sandbrook's Never Had It So Good (London, 2005). It is heartwarming, as a social historian, to see class back on the historical agenda and to read a book shaped by the conviction that history is more than an intellectual game. But it is revealing that women, black Britons, and the working class feature in this narrative as voices on the sidelines, rather than as agents for change. As we seek new ways of writing history, this should give us all pause for thought.