
Dr Rory Scothorne
Postdoctoral Fellow, September - December 2022 and October 2023 - March 2024
Home Institution: University of Edinburgh
I am a historian of ideology, culture and politics, focusing on left-wing radicalism, nationalism, devolution and civil society in Scotland in the final third of the twentieth century. I am also a public commentator on contemporary Scottish and UK politics, writing regularly for the London Review of Books, the New Statesman and the Guardian, as well as appearing on television and radio.
Project Title: The Radical Left, Civil Society and the Scottish Nation, 1967-1983
This project will develop my doctoral thesis (awarded December 2021) into a monograph. It examines the origins of the discourse of ‘Radical Scotland’ in commentary and scholarship, which presumes a significant link between political radicalism and Scottish nationhood. It focuses on the period 1967-1983, emphasising the “opening” of a “Scottish radical imagination” in the aftermath of Winnie Ewing’s Hamilton by-election victory for the SNP in 1967; and the “closure” of this imagination in 1983, as radical intellectuals responded to Conservative dominance of British politics by abandoning the horizon of social and cultural revolution in favour of constitutional reform. It focuses on the development of a distinctively Scottish radical left tradition through a wide range of political and cultural magazines, as well as historical societies, political parties and campaigns. Building on my doctoral research into the territorial, social and political components of this radical imagination, this Fellowship will add a new emphasis on the importance of think-tanks and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) to the development of left-wing politics in Scotland, illuminating the relationship between radicalism, devolution and an emergent Scottish “third sector” from the 1970s onwards.