| Summary: | <p>This thesis explores how and why the advance of the left in Western Europe halted so suddenly between the late 1970s and early 1980s. Through a detailed archive-driven study of the evolution of the left in this period in Britain, France and Italy, it explores how the British, French, and Italian Communist, Socialist, and social democratic parties encountered a crisis of identity and of purpose in this transitional period. Its methodology is more transnational than comparative. Rather than comparing the left in the three national contexts on the basis of their ideological similarities, cross-border transfers, and pluralist democratic regimes, this thesis focuses on the broadly similar strategic context provided by the restructuring of the industrial working class. This process initially fed expectations of expanded capacities and political prospects in an epoch of rapid social, economic, and cultural changes. However the weakening of the structures, imaginaries, and forms of representation within the left in Britain, France, and Italy led to a strategic impasse and identity crisis. The active participation of the major parties of the left in undermining the preconditions sustaining their growth sapped their credibility as an alternative to a nascent neoliberalism. This thesis shows how the crises of the left were not solely the consequences of automation, new technologies, or organisational changes to industry, but were catalysed by the reformulation of party and class relations. The strategic choices made – and resisted – at the turn of the 1980s demonstrate that different outcomes were believed to be possible and necessary. In particular, the interaction of factional disputes, intellectual dissidence, black and immigrant worker strikes, and autonomous forms of social movement organisation, fractured the coalition of supporters that the left had built in the post-war era. Through its analysis of a wide range of novel archival material from France, Italy and Britain, the thesis demonstrates the importance of this hinge period for understanding the evolution of the left in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century.</p>
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