Marc Stears looks at how both Left and Right lost their faith in ordinary people and how they learn to find it again.

This is an age of polarisation. It’s Us vs Them. The battle lines are clear, and compromise is surrender. This is not a new problem. Marc Stears argues that from the 1920s to the 1950s, in a world transformed by revolution and war, extreme ideologies of Left and Right fuelled utopian hopes and dystopian fears.

In response to this, Stears explains, a group of British writers, artists, photographers, and filmmakers showed a way out. These men and women (including J B Priestley, George Orwell, Barbara Jones, Dylan Thomas, Laurie Lee, and Bill Brandt) had no formal connection to one another. But they each worked to forge a politics that resisted the empty idealisms and totalising abstractions of their time. Instead, they were convinced that people going about their daily lives possess all the insight, virtue, and determination required to build a good society. It was this humble vision that animated the great Festival of Britain in 1951 and put everyday citizens at the heart of a new vision of national regeneration.

These apostles of the ordinary helped Britain through an age of crisis. Their ideas might do so again, in the UK and beyond.

Stears is in discussion with Guardian writer John Harris.

Marc Stears’ Out of the Ordinary: How Everyday Life Inspired a Nation and How It Can Again is published by Harvard University Press. Buy a copy from Waterstones, our bookselling partners.

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Festival of Ideas: Marc Stears and John Harris, How Can Everyday Life Build Democracy?