Within the framework of the politicization of the personal, this chapter explores the essayistic writing of a loose group of socially conscious actors who belong to the political Left, a capacious category that includes leaders of the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the New York Intellectuals, the New Left, the environmental movement, and groups with a range of progressive agendas. With a focus on the twentieth century, the wide variety of styles and themes of leftist prose writing is analyzed. The chapter dwells on the contributions of important figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Randolph Bourne, Jane Addams, Irving Howe, Mary McCarthy, James Baldwin, Eldridge Cleaver, Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, N. Scott Momaday, Maxine Hong Kingston, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, and Richard Rorty. As a form of "prose that thinks," the essay has been an excellent site of intellectual reckoning where writers may publicly take strong positions on various political and social issues, expressing these in a highly personal style.

This chapter analyses nationalist attempts to yoke together Scottish independence and the egalitarian politics of the left. From an initial embrace of the radical participatory politics of the 1960s to a later enthusiasm for the heritage of the British labour movement, this chapter shows that nationalists have presented independence as the route to a socialist Scotland. But as this chapter also demonstrates, the early twenty-first century saw some key nationalists turning away from this agenda and embracing instead a revisionist social democracy that accepted some significant capitalist constraints on the politics of independence.

This chapter turns to the nationalist critique of the British state from the 1960s. It demonstrates how indebted independence supporters have been to the writings of Tom Nairn and the wider New Left’s characterisation of Britain as an antediluvian relic that historically evaded an adequate process of modernisation. In particular, the chapter demonstrates the importance of ‘imperialism’ to nationalist thinking, insofar as nationalists saw the fundamental weakness of British national identity as its close connection with empire and the economic ‘decline’ of the British state as related to its loss of colonial possessions. However, the chapter also documents the fading away of the Marxist and economistic elements of this critique of Britain over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, to be replaced by a robust, but avowedly political, democratic republicanism, which identified the British state’s chief shortcoming as a failure to become a proper bourgeois democracy.