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标题：The Use and Abuse of the Past: The New Right and the Crisis of History
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作者：Harvey J. Kaye
期刊名称：Socialist Register
印刷版ISSN：0081-0606
出版年度：1987
卷号：23
期号：23
出版社：THE MERLIN PRESS Ltd.
摘要：Writing in the twentieth anniversary issue of the American neo-conservative journal, The Public Interest, sociologist Robert Nisbet presented 'The Conservative Renaissance in Perspective'. Though his historical analysis focused on the resurgence of the conservative political tradition in the United States during the 1960s and '70s, his conclusion spoke in more universal terms. The coming to power of the New Right Conservatives and Republicans in Britain and America has indeed entailed a political discourse in which Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, along with their political and Cabinet colleagues, 'speak by design from the past and often about the past'. And yet, however much references to the past were to be expected, it seems that even more so than usual, the Thatcher Government and the Reagan Administration have actually made an issue of the past and our relation to it. It has regularly seemed that their resurrections of past personages, events, and experiences, have been intended as much to capture and command history, and thereby fashion particular interpretations and representations of it, as to mobilise it in support of their respective (though often quite similar) programmes and policies. The question of success aside, the more than seven years of Thatcher's premiership and six years of Reagan's presidency have rightly been viewed as involving determined efforts at reshaping late twentieth-century capitalist hegemony in Britain and America along New Right lines. Thatcher's and Reagan's respective historical assertions and initiatives must be read as part of those struggles.
其他摘要：Writing in the twentieth anniversary issue of the American neo-conservative journal, The Public Interest, sociologist Robert Nisbet presented 'The Conservative Renaissance in Perspective'. Though his historical analysis focused on the resurgence of the conservative political tradition in the United States during the 1960s and '70s, his conclusion spoke in more universal terms. The coming to power of the New Right Conservatives and Republicans in Britain and America has indeed entailed a political discourse in which Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, along with their political and Cabinet colleagues, 'speak by design from the past and often about the past'. And yet, however much references to the past were to be expected, it seems that even more so than usual, the Thatcher Government and the Reagan Administration have actually made an issue of the past and our relation to it. It has regularly seemed that their resurrections of past personages, events, and experiences, have been intended as much to capture and command history, and thereby fashion particular interpretations and representations of it, as to mobilise it in support of their respective (though often quite similar) programmes and policies. The question of success aside, the more than seven years of Thatcher's premiership and six years of Reagan's presidency have rightly been viewed as involving determined efforts at reshaping late twentieth-century capitalist hegemony in Britain and America along New Right lines. Thatcher's and Reagan's respective historical assertions and initiatives must be read as part of those struggles.