RELATED TERMS: Worldlessness #2: Worldlessness and Design; Worldlessness #3: Saving the world / at the end of / the world / is not enough
1 Introduction: Declinism and Apocalypticism as Genres [1]
The narrative genres with which we are working currently circle around the notions of ‘world’ and ‘worldlessness’. The emphasis within this nexus is on what it is that design, designing and design practices can ‘do’ in the context of world and worldlessness. In one sense, we are engaging critically with the assumptions or claims that ‘designing is world-making or world-building’; and that ‘designing is good’ . The visual-verbal discursive genres explored are dominated by the exploitation of ekphrasis and reverse or inverse ekphrasis. They include such phrases-images as: the world is good; the world is not enough; the world is not all; the world has been lost; the world needs saving; the end of the world; and the end of this world.
Given this framing, the genre of ‘declinism’ could easily be argued to fall into a narrative of ‘loss of world’. A ‘world’ has been lost through processes that together form a trajectory of ‘decline’, positing two states of the world: the world-as-was (more) and the world-as-is (less). Perhaps this is only one half of a two-part narrative, the first half asserting ‘decline’ from more to less, the second half asserting salvation or at least ‘revival’ from less to more but perhaps not a complete ‘restoration’ of the fullness of all that was. It is a variety of narrative of a fall, falling and of a state of fallenness. In this sense, it cannot escape moral or ethical connotations beyond the description and depiction of a passage towards ‘lessness’.
Such a narrative may, as suggested by Andy Beckett (2009), assume a ‘tone’ of apocalyticism, a tone which we are making efforts to avoid as we seek to address the challenge for designers, artists, activists and academics to imagine worldlessness without an apocalypse; in non-eschatological terms, (without an ‘end of the world’); in non-salvational terms (without ‘saving the world’, without redemption or liberation); without a sense of loss (because you cannot lose what you have never had and cannot have); and in non-utopian terms. Let us, then, look at an example of one body of declinist literature related to the United Kingdom as a geo-political-economic entity and the people encompassed by this domain, a shifting demographic body-populace over the past 140 or so years (1880s-2020s).
It is on the surface a simple story about a nation(-state), an accepted or received national (cultural) story. In other words, it is a simple narrative environment, with a relatively well-defined people, place and historiography, the three initial dimensions of the design of narrative environments. The story is as follows: The United Kingdom has suffered continuous relative economic decline since the 1870s, when Britain reached the apogee of its industrial predominance, leading eventually to the disintegration of the social and cultural fabric of the nation, a phenomenon that is clearly perceivable by the 2020s (now).
A major caveat to this simple long-term story is that the historiographical accounts of the UK’s decline have always been preceded by prior politically-motivated narratives with specific short-term political ends in mind and with different arguments presented at specific historical conjunctures during the late 19th, 20th and early 21st centuries. It is not, in short, a simple linear descent.
The morals that have been derived from this declinist story are varied. For example, some claim that this purported decline is the result of happenstance and reflects trends that affected other similarly developed countries equally; in other words, it shows Britain adjusting to its altered status in a more internationally competitive, post-imperial world. Others argue that this decline is the result of a national pathology, a sometime ‘British disease’. Some contend that the narrative of decline is not a true reflection of, or is often out of step with, the material socio-economic ‘reality’. Others argue that the overall narrative of decline is made up of discontinuous episodes of circumstantial politically-motivated narratives, some elements of which have made their way into historiographic narratives which should, for professional reasons, have some measure of ‘objective’ distance from such (ephemeral) discourses. Yet others consider that declinism, while a persistent psycho-pathology going back to the late 19th century, can be overcome ‘by design’ in a double sense of material practice and policy design; that is, by design practices effecting economic, technological and cultural change through the guidance of an intentional political-economic strategy to ‘revive’ the nation.
From the perspective of the design of narrative environments, declinism in the context of the United Kingdom is, at once: a pervasive ‘atmosphere’ or ‘mood’ – a ‘climate’ in Hewison’s (1987) term; a narrative genre with its associated literature; and a mode of (environmental) perception of Britishness and otherness, on the one hand, and of the material (natural-cultural-built) environment, on the other hand, in short, an ethico-ecological point of view. As a complex field of social, narrative and environmental actantiality, declinism gives rise to a matrix of responsive subjective sensibilities which are put into practice in various ways as modes of caring or not-caring, of being concerned or exhibiting lack of concern. While some ‘Brits’ are pessimistic or ‘abject’, others are resistant and optimistic. Many others are ‘oblivious’ or insensitive to the prevailing atmospheric, narrative and socio-material environmental conditions, remaining within the received cultural repertoires of an imaginary past; doing not as they were told but doing as if they had been told.
Overall, the role of design practices in ‘declinism’ plays out as a ‘perverse’ or paradoxical libidinal-political economy in which ‘we’ must, first, envisage ourselves as an imaginary figuration, let us say an imperial ‘racial’ body enacting a complex visual-discursive ideological performance. This is the opening, enlightening scene as the initial design configuration. Second, when that figuration falls short of its own ‘idealisation’, giving rise to dis-satisfaction followed by a sense of abjection, a situation unfolds in which design practices themselves, purposely exacerbating the abjection, respond artfully to re-articulate an imaginary alter ego, although one that continues to falter (fail-in-order-to-alter): the consumer as producer of themselves, employment falling into a secondary or disavowed role in relation to the (always limited, constrained) purchasing power which it facilitates. As pointed out by Susie Orbach (2009) many years ago, the human body, the body as self, the material body, the animate body, is central to this play of the libidinal-political imaginary-economy.
This alter ego, finding it hard to shake off the shadow of themselves as they are imagined to have been, a failing performative presentation in the presence of a haunting absence, requires prolonged repetitive supplementation, an addictive cycle not of despair but of faulty repair in a dependence on a world that becomes ever more distantly haunting because amplified and distorted in unending sequences of mnemo-technical illusion: ‘we’ recall, or rather it is re-called to us or re-called for us, that where ‘we’ are [is] where ‘we’ were not. ‘We’ are no longer ourselves, ‘we’ are not the same as ‘we’ were, while being presented with and hearing a constant call to become the selves that we have never been again. It is the again that causes us to hesitate and oscillate. ‘We’ flicker amidst the density of mediacy, materiality, experience and mediated-material experience.
2 The Declinist Genre
In a review of three books from Princeton University Press on the socio-economic history of the UK and the consequent impacts of that history on the state of contemporary British society in the 2020s, Diane Coyle comments on the historical genre of declinism [2]. From the perspective of the design of narrative environments, the relevance of declinism is its potential adjacency to apocalyticism. In turn, this evokes the thematic of worldlessness which we are taking as a ‘positive’ or at least ‘not-negative’ notion in the sense that it permits the acceptance of all that is supposed, from a liberal-neoliberal humanist point of view, to be marginal or non-existent but which is, in point of (media-material-experiential) fact, very much alive and persistent: the unworldly, otherworldly non-humans, non-human and more-than-human othernesses, the realms of living on or sur-vival.
Declinism, however, has a different relationship to the volitional aspects of ‘ending this world’, as changing the trajectory of a teleology of decline, and ‘saving the world’, which is too grand a millennarian horizon for the limited ambition of national revivalism. Nevertheless, changing course may be posited as beginning again which may be interpreted in messianic and millenarian terms.
Compared to ‘ending’, declining is more of a reluctant or pained ‘acceptance’ of the path of events, outcomes and states of the world – a slippage. In a sense, then, we are discussing the notion of ‘trajectory’, itself close to ‘narrativity’, a path that ‘we’, as the ‘sufferers’, are unable to alter: “an apparently unstoppable reality” (Jack, 2009), as if history is something that happens to us and is not ours to make. Alternatively, this difference between declinism and apocalypticism may be discussed in terms of ’tone’, such as, for example, when Ian Jack cites Andy Beckett (2009) as saying that, during the 1970s, declinism “shifted in tone; from the anxious to the apocalyptic,” evoking, unintentionally no doubt, Derrida’s (1984) text ‘Of an apocalyptic tone recently adopted in philosophy’.
British declinist literature itself has a long trajectory, even if it is not continuous but proceeds in phases. According to Edgerton (1996), in a review of The Lost Victory: British Dreams, British Realities, 1945-50 by Correlli Barnett, “declinism has been an element in political discussion since the late 19th century, but it moved centre-stage in the late Fifties and early Sixties, when C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures and Arthur Koestler’s collection of essays, Suicide of a Nation?, inaugurated a spate of books.” Indeed, Edgerton expresses the view that, “The historiography of modern Britain is dominated by one issue – ‘decline’.”
In addition to the two periods noted by Barnett, that is, the 1880–1914 period, marked by the rise of American and German competition and a moral panic about the decline of the ‘imperial race’, and the period of the 1950s-1960s, marked by decolonisation and the Suez Crisis, three other periods are significant for the genre of UK declinist literature: the interwar period of 1918-1939, highlighting the nation’s lack of independence; the 1970s, marked by industrial disputes, strikes, and economic stagnation combined with inflation; and the 1980s to the 2020s, marked by post-industrialisation and an increasing reliance on (non-productive, ‘parasitic’, ‘speculative’) rentier capitalism.
Within the more recent declinist texts, Coyle notes that Paul Johnson et al (2026), by synthesising the research embodied in the IFS Deaton Review, identify the financial crisis of 2008 as a key moment, although primarily one which makes it harder to ignore how much British society has disintegrated if measured in terms of widening inequalities in income, wealth, education and health, leaving younger generations worse off, or at least no better off, than their elders. The data-based argument is that UK has experienced less recovery from that 2008 crisis than comparable nations.
For Tony Hopkins (2026), rather than the year 2008, 1979 is the rupture point. Hopkins pins the blame for British decline squarely on Margaret Thatcher and the ideology around which she re-shaped Britain’s economy and society. This concurs with Edgerton (2018) and the Resolution Foundation (2022) who argue that Britain’s current economic malaise began under Thatcher, when rent-seeking via the housing market, privatisation and financial ‘innovation’ became the basis of Britain’s economic growth.
For Brian Harrison (2026) alternatively, the narrative of decline is much longer, having already begun by the late 19th century, a narrative that is unrelenting. This is the most extreme version of declinism, arguing that Britain has been a second or third-rate nation since the 1870s. In adopting this position, Edgerton (2018, cited by Ascherson, 2018) considers this form of declinism to be in many ways, “the unwitting last refuge of great power delusions … a form of jingoism, a delusion about inherent superiority, dressed up as critique”. Edgerton (2018), in The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, warns against the political seductions of national ‘declinism’ on the left because it works symbiotically with the nationalist ‘revivalism’ of the right. The claim that everything has been getting worse for decades is a gift to those such as Thatcherites and Brexiteers, who promise a dramatic turnaround in the fortunes of the nation.
Declinism Becomes Popular-Populist
Rather than an ever-present, simple, tale of continuous decline, the prominence of the narrative of Britain’s decline ebbs and flows. As Tomlinson (2009: 247) notes, “declinism has been periodically revived and re-invented,” due to tactical political reasons combined with the loss of Britain’s hegemonic position before 1900. Tomlinson (2009: 248) concludes from his survey of episodes of declinism in UK history from the late 19th century that,
“the 1970s was a pivotal moment, when contemporary economic and political circumstances enabled a government of the right to deploy declinist arguments to unprecedentedly powerful effect, entrenching them in popular understanding in a way never achieved in previous episodes.”
Nevertheless, although concern about the condition of modern Britain is widely shared, Coyle notes that of the three books she is reviewing one was written by a retired Cambridge professor, one by a retired Oxford professor and one by the head of an Oxford college. This dominance of Oxbridge voices in the tragic chorus troubles her: are the elderly elite out of touch with a nation-state that, “is also more prosperous, more cheerfully kaleidoscopic and thriving in its culture, still with a highly developed sense of humour, inventive, entrepreneurial” than declinist narratives might suggest?
Declinism and Pathology: Declinism and ‘Failure’
Tomlinson draws out an important aspect of the declinist narrative, present in both the periods 1880-1914 and the 1970s. Rather than being a process of adjustment to changing circumstances, declinism highlights the idea that the British economy’s responses to the strength and significance of the inescapable pressures under which British industry operated has been, “so weak as to indicate pathological failings of the whole society.” Counter to this view, according to Edgerton (2022), “The long-term British relative decline, which has undoubtedly happened, and continues, has been mostly due to the success of other countries, not British failure.”
For Tomlinson, the two most important declinist politicians of the 20th century were Joseph Chamberlain and Margaret Thatcher who both created powerful narratives by, in Chamberlain’s case, using a range of challenges to Britain’s industrial supremacy in the pre-1914 period to underpin his bid for a new conservative political economy and, in Thatcher’s case, by turning the traumatic events of the mid-1970s into evidence for a story of secular post-war decline.
Declinism as Opportunism
Tomlinson cites the figures produced by Broadberry and Crafts (2003) which show that, if measured from cyclical peaks, the turning point in British manufacturing productivity was 1973. Before 1973, performance was only marginally inferior to that of West Germany and was respectable by any long-run standards. However, in 1973-1979, manufacturing productivity collapsed.
This acknowledgement allows Tomlinson to generate a different narrative in which the events of the 1970s are not seen as the culmination of long-run problems. This presents a challenge the perception gripping the country, as Robert Hewison (1987: 10) had already noted, that it is in decline [3]. Instead, those events can be seen as largely the consequence of short-run forces. This undermines the notion of a profound malaise or decline that is both moral and economic, highlighting instead highly contingent and particular factors causing a short-run crisis within a longer-run picture of economic performance that may be ‘mildly disappointing’ but hardly catastrophic.
Robert Ralston (2022) concurs with Tomlinson that it was in the 1970s and the early years of 1980s that declinist discourse was most prevalent and most politically significant. However, Thatcher and the members of her coalition did not spin declinism out of nothing. Negative events, such as the oil crisis of 1973–1974, which led to oil shortages and a fourfold price increase, strikes by local authority manual workers, dockworkers, railway workers and miners and the three-day week (Buckley, 2007: 164) provided events to which Thatcher could point to elaborate a narrative of British decline, helping declinism resonate widely.
For Ralston, it is domestic political factors and events that are at the heart of declinism. Ralston’s argument is that declinism arises from opposition factions in national politics using it as a discursive tool to critique the government and to advance a different set of policies for renewal. This requires the presence of a particular kind of political actor, a broker in the opposition, who can bring together otherwise unconnected actors and form new political coalitions. Nevertheless, negative events or conditions are necessary for declinism to take hold as a convincing narrative. Thus, declinism is better suited to outsiders or newcomers who can avoid the trap of having their records intensely examined and also, without reservation or qualification, put forward a message of (past) decline and (future) renewal.
Declinist discourse is a set of episodic, short term, strategic, oppositional political narratives. They may, however, find their way into historiographic discourse in such a way that condenses them. In that case, the period 1880s-1920s may seem like a single whole trajectory of decline. This would mean that distinct periods of declinist discourse, for example, in 1880-1914, 1918-1939, the 1950s-1960s, the 1970s, 1979-2008 and 2008-2020s are rolled into one another.
Depending on its scale and granularity, an overarching historiographical narrative may convey a particular kind of truth about the overall period that a focus on any one of the episodic narratives may seem to contradict. The relationship between part and whole here is not ‘fractal’. Plus, there is no final, universal ‘view’ which determines the ‘right’ (or lack of) periodisation and the ‘correct’ (or lack of) perspective. There cannot be ‘indifference’ here. It is all about (novel) differentiating in order to undo what seems to be unjust (prior) differentiation. The question remains, though: justice for who, through what medium and recognised in what ‘forum’ or ‘court of arbitration’?
Notes
[1] This post does not address the issue of AI generated declinist material, such as the videos discussed by Marianna Spring (2026).
[2] Books under review by Coyle
Harrison, B. (2026) Yesterday: The United Kingdom from Thatcher to Covid. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Hopkins, A. G. (2026) The Land where nothing works: How Britain lost the plot. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Johnson, P. et al (2026) Challenging inequalities: How we got stuck and where we go next: The IFS Deaton Review. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
[3] Hewison’s focus is on the heritage industry in the UK. He contends that, although the heritage industry is an attempt to dispel this climate of decline by exploiting the economic potential of our culture, nevertheless, far from ameliorating the climate of decline, it is actually worsening it. While he is a historian and has a high regard for history, his view is that ‘heritage culture’ is not history. Rather, it leads not only to a distortion of the past but also a stifling of the culture of the present.
References
Ascherson, N (2018) As the toffs began to retreat, London Review of Books, 40 (22) https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n22/neal-ascherson/as-the-toffs-began-to-retreat
Barnett, C. (1995) The Lost Victory: British Dreams, British Realities, 1945-50. London: Macmillan
Beckett, A. (2009) When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies. London: Faber
Broadberry, S. and Crafts, N. (2003) UK productivity performance from 1950 to 1979: a restatement of the Broadberry–Crafts view, Economic History Review, 56(4), pp. 718–735. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0289.200300267.x.
Buckley, C. (2007) Designing modern Britain. London, UK: Reaktion Books.
Coyle, D. (2026) Have we gone too far with British declinism? [Britain in gloom], Financial Times, 29 April.
Davies, W. (2022) The Seductions of Declinism, London Review of Books, 44 (15) https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n15/william-davies/the-seductions-of-declinism
Derrida, J. (1984) Of an apocalyptic tone recently adopted in philosophy, Oxford Literary Review, 6(2), pp. 3–37. doi: 10.3366/olr.1984.001.
Edgerton, D. (1996) Declinism, London Review of Books, 18 (5). https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n05/david-edgerton/declinism
Edgerton, D. (2018) The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A 20th-Century History. London: Allen Lane
Edgerton, D. (2022) Yes, we’re in a bad way. But to wallow in myths of British “declinism” won’t help us thrive, Guardian, 12 June. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/12/yes-were-in-a-bad-way-but-to-wallow-in-myths-of-british-declinism-wont-help-us-thrive (Accessed: 15 May 2026).
Hewison, R. (1987) The Heritage industry: Britain in a climate of decline. London, UK: Methuen.
Jack, I. (2009) Downhill from here. London Review of Books, 31 (16) https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n16/ian-jack/downhill-from-here
Orbach, S. (2009) Bodies. London, UK: Profile Books
Resolution Foundation (2022) Stagnation nation: Navigating a route to a fairer and more prosperous Britain. London: Resolution Foundation
Spring, M. (2026) Anti-immigration AI videos traced to overseas fakers, BBC finds, BBC News, (15 May). Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgpyn30dp3o (Accessed: 15 May 2026).
Tomlinson, J. I. M. (2009) Thrice denied: “Declinism” as a recurrent theme in British history in the long twentieth century, Twentieth Century British History, 20(2), pp. 227–251. doi: 10.1093/tcbh/hwp019.
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