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‘WHO THE HELL ARE ORDINARY PEOPLE?’ ORDINARINESS AS A CATEGORY OF HISTORICAL ANALYSIS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2018

Claire Langhamer
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Abstract

Ordinariness was a frequently deployed category in the political debates of 2016. According to one political leader, the vote for Brexit was ‘a victory for ordinary, decent people who've taken on the establishment and won’. In making this claim, Nigel Farage sought to link a dramatic political moment with a powerful, yet conveniently nebulous, construction of the ordinary person. In this paper, I want to historicise recent use of the category by returning to another moment when ordinariness held deep political significance: the years immediately following the Second World War. I will explore the range of values, styles and specific behaviours that gave meaning to the claim to be ordinary; consider the relationship between ordinariness, everyday experience and knowledge; and map the political work ordinariness was called upon to perform. I argue that the immediate post-war period was a critical moment in the formation of ordinariness as a social category, an affective category, a moral category, a consumerist category and, above all, a political category. Crucially, ordinariness itself became a form of expertise, a finding that complicates our understanding of the ‘meritocratic moment’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 28 , December 2018 , pp. 175 - 195
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2018 

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Footnotes

Mass-Observation material is used by permission of the Mass-Observation Trustees. I would like to thank the Institute of Historical Research Durham for the Fellowship during which some of the early research for this paper was conducted. I would also like to thank Stephen Brooke, Lucy Robinson and Penny Summerfield for their comments on earlier drafts, the audience at the 2016 Northeast Conference on British Studies for their questions about an earlier version of this paper and the Royal Historical Society audience for their own questions and comments.

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