Understanding Scotland as a stateless nation: thirty years On

Thirty years ago, David McCrone’s landmark book Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation hunted down some of the then most prevalent myths about Scottish society, politics and culture. In fine grain empirical detail McCrone demonstrated that the social and economic structures of Scotland were, after all, not so different from the general pattern for Britain. Scotland was not more working class, more democratic in spirit or more egalitarian in its social mobility. Neither was it being held down by an external power as an oppressed nation or as an underdeveloped colony. Yet populist myths about Scottish distinctiveness had become so embedded in the collective self-images of the nation that they would not be shaken off simply by the production of factual evidence to the contrary.