My thesis explores the different ways that actors within the British Labour Party and the wider Left, including politicians, journalists, intellectuals and activists, conceptualised and deployed ideas of 'community' - particularly in relation to ideas of decentralisation and localism - in the 1970s and 1980s. This encompasses grassroots 'community action' after 1968; the turn of Labour's revisionist right towards 'community socialism'; the varied politics of municipal socialism; journalistic accounts of the decline of solidaristic working-class communities, and the communitarian anarchism of Colin Ward.
