After coming to power in 1984, Manchester's 'New Urban Left' were for a while at the forefront of those radical councils seeking to use the local state both as the primary site of resistance to the Thatcher government, but also to develop a genuinely 'prefigurative' local socialism. However, in Manchester this experiment proved short-lived. The subsequent entrepreneurial project has proved both durable and more distinctive. This article provides a detailed narrative account of the transition from 'municipal socialism' to the politics of 'Manchester First'. Whilst summarizing the notable differences between the two projects, the paper argues that an interpretative emphasis on the apparent political U-turn after 1987 obscures important continuities. With hindsight, the municipal Left can be credited with redefining the role of local authorities in relation to the economy, creating a space for proactive local and regional economic strategies. At the same time, the embrace of urban entrepreneurialism in the late 1980s did signal a marked shift in the perception of what was actually possible in terms of the parameters and constraints on local strategy Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000.

The article reviews the changing strategies of Manchester's Labour‐controlled city council from 1987 and the emergence of “urban entrepreneurialism” as the hegemonic framework for local strategy. It is argued that the supply‐side emphasis on “bricks and mortar” regeneration, flagship developments, and place‐marketing depended on the emergence of both tacit and formal partnerships and the consolidation of an elite consensus. Such partnerships were substantially directed at securing discretionary grant funding in direct competition with other cities. The article goes on to analyse the reasons for the city's relative success in this competition, and the processes through which elite consensus was secured and consolidated.

Degrowth is identified as a prospective turning point in human development as significant as the domestication of fire or the process of agrarianisation. The Transition movement is identified as the most important attempt to develop a prefigurative, local politics of degrowth. Explicating the links between capitalist modernisation, metabolic throughput and psychological individuation, Transition embraces 'limits' but downplays the implications of scarcity for open, liberal societies, and for inter-personal and inter-group violence. William Ophuls' trilogy on the politics of scarcity confronts precisely these issues, but it depends on an unconvincing sociology of individuation as a central process in modernity. A framework is advanced through which to explore the tensions, trade-offs and possibilities for a socially liberal, culturally cosmopolitan and science-based civilisation under conditions of degrowth and metabolic contraction.

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For the last three decades, sociology has been in a permanent state of theoretical and programmatic disarray. Symptoms of the crisis include ambivalence about the possible scientific status of sociological knowledge, theoretical and methodological fragmentation and ambivalence about the appropriate degree of political and ethical ‘involvement’ in the sociological stance, and deep-seated anxieties about the relationship between sociology and neighbouring disciplines across the human sciences. Through a comprehensive exegesis of his major contributions, it is argued that Norbert Elias provides the foundations for a ‘central theory’, integrating diverse theoretical traditions within sociology, while providing a clear framework for establishing a synthesis across the full range of (social and biological) human sciences. In short, Elias provides us with the rudiments of a comprehensive human science, with sociology well placed to play an orchestrating role in the investigation of phenomena at the highest level of integration.