Nairn-Anderson thesis
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The Nairn-Anderson thesis is a theory of British economic and political decline developed in the 1960s and 1970s by political theorist Tom Nairn and historian Perry Anderson.[1][2]
The thesis suggests that Britain's early development into a capitalist society was so successful that it failed to overturn archaic social structures and institutions like the power of the aristocracy. By contrast, continental European states like Germany introduced efficient administrations and educational systems as part of a "second" bourgeois revolution. The result for Britain, wrote Anderson, is that "the triumphs of the past become the bane of the present."[3]
The thesis was first developed in a series of essays in New Left Review[4] and is cited today in discussions of Britain's post-Imperial decline and "dysfunctional" institutions.[5][6]