Introduction

Abstract

This book traces the attitudes of the political left towards social change in the 1950s and specifically to the changes involved in what was known (particularly after J. K. Galbraith’s 1958 study) as the ‘affluent society’ — ranging from popular prosperity and consumerism to television and youth culture. As in the 1980s, the left encountered New Times’ that it found not only unfavourable electorally, but which it feared were in a deeper sense deleterious to socialism. Affluence threw socialism’s customary ways of thinking, its language and aspirations into doubt.¹