Were the Interwar Years Truly a Slump?, Part II (book review)
continuous path of decline is not as believable. This argument completely ignores constant increases in productivity throughout the period, or the fact that Samuel Smiles and other self-help authors were popular and quite influential during the mid-19th century and afterwards.
In closing, however, the other three works are just as reductive as Wiener, and that, I suppose, was the greatest problem I had with all four. While this methodological approach might be useful in certain instances, for a complete study of the Interwar period it is not.
Footnotes:
[1] John Stevenson and Chris Cook, The Slump: Society and Politics During the Depression, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977, pp. 21, 24-8.
[2] Ibid., p. 268.
[3] Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980, (New York: Cambridge Univerity Press, 1981), p. 14.
[4] Ibid., p. 154.
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