ABSTRACT
What happened? It is not, of course, my intention in this essay to construct a full history of social, political and cultural change in Britain during the 1960s. Rather, the aim is to sketch in how Conservative and Labour parties each suffered significant crises of authority-the former in 1962-3, the latter after 1966. These crises were multidetermined and their ramifications were complex and far-reaching. But their effects, I will argue, were to break down established assumptions of what was ‘political’ and thus to open up, for a period, the whole field of civil society and everyday life to a widelydiffused contestation of authority and tradition.1
