Our universities aren't just managerialist: they're authoritarian

Britain's universities aren't just getting rid of the arts and humanities: they're getting rid of collegiate governance too.

Here's Krzysztof Nawratek, senior lecturer in humanities and architecture at the University of Sheffield, writing in Times Higher Education:

I started my university career in Poland in 1988, a year before communism collapsed. I joined an underground anti-communist student association, went on strike and saw my hierarchical, conservative university slowly crumble.

However, even within the oppressive communist regime, Polish universities held on to one core belief: the university belonged to its academic community. Rectors and deans were elected. Senates and faculty councils had real authority. Leadership was temporary and accountable to those it served. The university did not belong to its managers; in fact, it’s hard to say if there was any real management at all.

When I moved to the UK in 2008, I expected universities not just to be more autonomous but more democratic. Instead, I found institutions that were independent from the state but whose autonomy lay with their executive teams and governing bodies, not with the university as a whole.

British universities are clearly part of the late capitalist system,¹ and critics typically point to their neoliberal agenda and managerialism. But I think that description no longer fits. British universities are becoming not so much managerialist as authoritarian. 

This might sound harsh but I am not talking about dictatorship. The atmosphere of fear and expected obedience reminds me of my time as a student in Poland but the reason I use the word authoritarian is more banal: leadership is immune to any actionable feedback from below. Consultation still exists but nothing anyone says can change the decision or remove those who made it.

This trend away from democratic decision-making towards managerialism and ultimately authoritarianism can be seen across British society, not just in universities, but in local councils, professional bodies and even sport.

At the heart of it lies the belief that democracy, discussion and consultation are inefficient, but that belief is mistaken.

As it's Karl Popper's birthday, let me quote again his greatest British populariser, Bryan Magee:

Before Popper it was believed by almost everyone that democracy was bound to be inefficient and slow, even if to be preferred in spite of that because of the advantages of freedom and the other moral benefits; and the most efficient government in theory would be some form of enlightened dictatorship. 

Popper showed that this is not so; and he provides us with an altogether new and deeper understanding of how it comes about that most of the materially successful societies in the world are liberal democracies. 

It is not – as, again, had been believed by most people before – because their prosperity has enabled them to afford that costly luxury called democracy; it is because democracy has played a crucial role in raising them out of a situation in which most of their members were poor, which had been the case in almost all of them when democracy began.

That comes from Magee's intellectual biography Confessions of a Philosopher.

Notes

1. I am suspicious of the expression 'late capitalism': it suggests a claim to knowledge of the future, or at least a confidence in how it will turn out, to which the writer is not entitled. I fear that what will come after late capitalism is even later capitalism.

Professor Joad sees his play at the Theatre Royal, Northampton

I braved the heat today, went into town and called at the market. I came a way with a book called Repertory at The Royal: Sixty-Five Years of Theatre in Northampton 1922–92. As you would hope, there's plenty about this blog's heroine Freda Jackson, but this post is about C.E.M. Joad.

Joad was once a substantial public figure, chiefly as a member of the panel of the wildly popular radio programme The Brain's Trust. There he allowed himself to be called "Professor Joad" when he was no such thing, which riled his fellow philosophers. They also, whether from jealousy of his fame or impartial study, regarded his writing as either eccentric or plagiarised.

According to hero of the blog Bryan Magee:

He was an engaging but essentially fraudulent character. His popular books on philosophy thick-skinnedly recycled Russell’s work without acknowledgement; asked once to write a recommendation of a book by Joad, Russell replied: 'Modesty forbids.'"

While Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, in a meeting where Joad had delivered a paper criticising the form of analytical philosophy popular at Cambridge, that "naturally a slum landlord would object to slum clearance". In other words new thinking was clearing away the sort of stuff that Joad still came out with. 

The Magee quote is from an article by Richard Symonds that tries to rescue Joad's reputation as a philosopher, while the Wittgenstein quote is from Wikipedia entry on him.

Reading that Wikipedia article on Joad, you get the impression that he embraced just about every nutty theory going in the first half of the 20th century. He was a thumping sexist, though some of his braver views on social issues are now widely accepted. You may think the law of averages means he was bound to be prescient sometimes.

Anyway here's the story about Joad from my book on the Theatre Royal, Northampton. There it is credited to a manuscript in the county record office written by a theatre manager called Stephen Sylvester – presumably this Stephen Sylvester – and Alex Reeve was also on the management side of the theatre.

Northampton stuck to its commitment to new plays. In March 1946 Crackling of Thorns by C.E.M. Joad the philosopher and radio Brains Trust personality attracted widespread interest for its first professional production.

The substantive scenes, for which locations included a youth hostel and a national school, advanced the author's ideas on the reduction of the nation's population. These were interspersed with duologues between Mr .Playwrite and The Critic (Mr James Aggravate – alias for James Agate) discussing the craft of play writing.

Joad attended the first night, but although he had lent Alex Reeve, making one of his rare stage appearances as Mr. Playwrite, one of his suits he was less than enthusiastic about the identification of the character with himself:

Being the same size as Joad he [Reeve] was able to make himself up to resemble him, beard and all, and when he imitated Joe's squeaky voice the impersonation was very funny. Jude was a famous public figure ... and the audience quickly recognised the character and fell about. 

When Joad came to see the show his lack of amusement was positively Queen Victorian. In the bar afterwards he told Reeve, "I'm sure I don't speak in that squeaky voice." He said this in such a squeaky voice that we thought he was being funny, and laughed. But he wasn't, and in his subsequent radio broadcasts it was noticeable that his voice had gone down quite a few semitones.

You can hear Joad in the video clip above. If you watch the whole thing on YouTube you may form the opinion that he was a bit of a poseur. And an article on Herestical will give you the reason for the sudden end to his radio career,

Still, such was him fame that he got a mention in Shirley Bassey's first recording, which was banned by the BBC for being too sexy. Do watch it if you've not seen it before: she's wonderful. 

BBC4 is repeating Bryan Magee's series The Great Philosophers

Good news. BBC4 is repeating Bryan Magee's 1987 television series The Great Philosophers. The first three programmes – on Plato, Aristotle and medieval philosophy – are being broadcast late on Monday evening, prefaced at 22:30 by a new introduction to the series by Professor Angie Hobbs.

This is just the sort of television that they don't make any more - there's now a strong aversion to "talking heads". But if the heads are interesting enough, there is nothing more riveting. And what are podcasts but talking heads? 

They've even proved that two is the ideal number for the format. A podcast with one person is ultimately just a guy reading something out, and if there are three people (certainly if there are three men) they get excited and interrupt each other too much.

I remember watching Magee's earlier, similar series Men of Ideas – and they were men: the only woman guest in the 15 programmes was Iris Murdoch – while I waited to go up to York to being my philosophy degree. It was the best possible preparation.

What I didn't know then was that Magee had been evacuated to Market Harborough during the war and had lived literally round the corner from our house. I only worked out after my mother died that the "poor old Kath" she used to talk to was the daughter of the family Magee stayed with.

"Liberalism" doesn't need an essence to be a meaningful concept

When I was reviewing Liberalism by Jonathan Parry for the latest issue of Liberator, I thought of saying that he argues that Liberalism doesn't have a single essence but is rather a collection of family resemblances.

Here John Searle and Bryan Magee discuss Wittgenstein's later theory of meaning and his concept of a family resemblance in particular. I think they make it wonderfully clear.

You can download that issue of Liberator (no. 431) for free from the magazine's website.

BOOK REVIEW Liberalism by Jonathan Parry

This review appears in the latest Liberator (issue 431), which can be downloaded free of charge from the magazine's website.

Liberalism

Jonathan Parry

Agenda Publishing (2025), £19.99

In this short book, written as part of a series that promises “incisive and provocative introductions to topics, ideas and events for students wanting to know more about how we got where we are today”, Jonathan Parry provides a history of the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats and makes you think again about the relation between political philosophy and political practice.

The first three chapters deal with the years 1830 to 1914 – the Liberal Party’s era as a party of government – and do so thematically rather than chronologically. In the first of these, Parry discusses the widening of the franchise, the taming of the House of Lords and the intermittent Liberal enthusiasm for proportional representation.

Asquith’s battles with the Lords will be familiar to all, but the Liberal attitude to the widening of the franchise was more ambivalent than you might imagine. The Liberal Party, Parry argues, was forged in the struggle for parliamentary reform, but that was not the same thing as democratic reform. 

So the Reform Act of 1832 swept away many of the abuses of the old system – notably 143 rotten boroughs, which effectively allowed seats in the Commons to be bought – but it was not born out of zeal for any abstract principle of democracy. Rather, it was intended to make sure the Commons did its job of representing the country’s various interests and allowing the peaceful expression of grievances.

Many 19th-century Liberals had their doubts about democracy. John Stuart Mill, for instance, hedged his support for the democratic principle in his Representative Government with all sorts of conditions that would ensure educated opinion was well represented in any elected chamber. Among these conditions was the introduction of proportional representation to ensure that minority points of view were heard.

But other tendencies within the Liberal Party did not share these patrician fears, so no legislation to change the voting system appeared. Nor did it under Asquith, when the rise of the Labour Party and the consequent inevitably of three-cornered contests led Liberals to explore the virtues of the Alternative Vote.

Parry’s second chapter on Liberal history before 1914 deals with the development of the Liberal attitude towards the state. Gladstonian retrenchment had great appeal earlier in the 19th century when the party was busy attacking the corrupt old city corporations. When these were replaced by elected local councils, school boards and health boards, then the good that government, national and local, might do became of increasing interest to the party. The growth of the Empire also brought with it irresistible pressure for more spending.

The third of these chapters looks at Liberal moves towards a pluralist society, notably in religion, where the party became the champions of Nonconformists in their disputes with the power of the Established church and a supporter of Catholic emancipation, both in Britain and Ireland. Parry notes that support for Home Rule changed the social basis of the Liberal Party, with most of its members from the landowning classes becoming Liberal Unionists.

Parry’s final two chapters cover the Liberal Party’s long years in the wilderness as it tried to survive as a centre party in a two-party system – and that in an era when politics was principally about economics and the struggle between capital and Labour. There were interesting Liberal economic ideas – the party was putting forward Keynesian policies on the need for public works while Asquith was still leader, and Elliott Dodds’s advocacy of an idiosyncratic blend of Distributism and private enterprise was influential after World War II – but no single one that voters identified with the party.

The Alliance years are passed over quickly, which is surely fair, as social democracy never did cohere as a force or a philosophy outside the Labour Party. The two most prominent former SDP members of the new Liberal Democrats, Charles Kennedy and Robert Maclennan, were already pretty much Liberals by the time the parties merged.

Nor did The Orange Book have much discernible long-term effect on the party. Its reputation was always a triumph of marketing over content, as it wasn’t the bracing call for an end to “nanny state” interventionism its adherents sometimes pretended. The chapter on social policy was thoroughly Blairite, born from middle-class impatience with the lower orders and the way they brought up their children. If only they were better raised, the authors reasoned, there would be less need for public spending on them in later life and taxes could be cut.

And maybe we have always worried too much about economic policy. Today’s Liberal Democrats have little to say on the subject, but that didn’t stop us electing 72 MPs last year.

Finally. Parry looks at the agenda that the Liberal Democrats have made their own: devolution, civil rights and Europe. Much of it has been party policy since the Grimond years – our early support for British membership of the European Economic Community, in particular, was seen as proof of our farsightedness and proof that, despite all the humiliations of life as a third party, history was on our side. This, I think, explains the reluctance, noted by Parry, of Liberal Democrats to criticise the EU in the years before the referendum.

I enjoyed this breezy and unusually accurate history of the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats, but what I will remember most from Liberalism is Parry’s discussion of the relationship between a party’s philosophy and its practice.

There is a temptation – I have been guilty of this myself – to turn to works by John Stuart Mill or L.T. Hobhouse or Jo Grimond in search of an expression of Liberal philosophy that will tell us what the party should be saying today. But this is to put the philosophical cart before the horse of practice.

Parry has no truck with this view:

This book claims that Liberal leaders such as Lord John Russell, William Gladstone, David Lloyd George, Jo Grimond and Paddy Ashdown are better guides to political Liberalism than theoretical writers such as J.S. Mill or T.H. Green. It argues that politics has its own rationale, and that politicians take up bodies of ideas for specific purposes, rather than allowing works of theory to set their policy agendas for them.

This is surely right, as is his reminder that:

Hundreds of Victorian Liberal pundits made interesting and rich contributions to national political debate. We know much more about these than was once the case, so there is no longer any excuse for elevating Mill or Green into a small elite of Liberal “thinkers” who have had a transcendental impact on the party’s definition.

And when we do read the works of this elite, we are likely to misunderstand what they were about:

Liberal intellectuals such as Green, or later L.T. Hobhouse, described the aim of Liberalism as the socialisation of individuals into civil society without the intervention of a heavy-handed state that would suppress the energy and self-control that was the essence of their individuality. These writings sound more utopian and radical than they were. They were elegant ways of describing social arrangements that were increasingly visible in many towns by the end of the century.

And if that is not enough iconoclasm for you, here is Parry on Mill:

On Liberty was not intended as a political party bible but as a contribution to general educated discourse. It was also intended to be provocative. Mill knew that most Victorians would not agree with his underlying assumptions. Most educated Victorians did not see orthodox religion as a restrictive cultural force. On the contrary many of them viewed the issue of liberty through a religious lens. Individual responsibility was responsibility and accountability before God.

Again this is surely right. Gladstone, for one, certainly took this view of liberty.

I shall add Parry’s Liberalism to my shelf of very good short books alongside Bryan Magee’s ones on Karl Popper and Richard Wagner and James Hawes’s “shortest histories” of England and Germany.

Jonathan Calder

Furnival's of Fleckney, Nina Stibbe and Bryan Magee

Nina Stibbe, another member of the Market Harborough school of literature, once wrote about Fleckney in the Guardian:

Fleckney became industrialised in the late 19th century when hosiery companies fled the city. Rowley & Co, whose Leicester works had been stormed by weavers in riots in 1885, built a factory on Saddington Road. Its red brick design included a high wall along the street for protection in the event of further unrest. This wall (itself now protected) reinforces Fleckney’s identity as working-class compared with its more cottagey neighbours. 

Leicester’s second best pop, Furnival’s of Fleckney, was still bottled in the village when we arrived; Thorn Lighting had a factory there and the new industrial estate was home to Pukka Pies, where my brother worked part-time during his O-levels - and was once locked in the freezer for being pretentious (he was reading a book).

Fleckney is still an industrial village - the photo above shows one of the older factories there. Because industry came late, it was never on the railway and the canal passes by a couple of fields away.

Furnival's of Fleckney made me [rick up my ears, because the firm used to have a warehouse in Highfield Street, Market Harborough, directly opposite our house. (Don't look for it: It's not there any more.) I think I remember kids climbing over the fence to steal empty bottles so they could claim the deposit back on them. Think of it as enhanced recycling.

But that building wasn't always a warehouse: it had once been a factory. And for a description of it during the war I turn again to this blog's hero Bryan Magee.

This passage comes from his book Growing up in a War - Magee was evacuated to Market Harborough during the war and lived literally round the corner from where I used to live:

The factory in which Kath worked was a few yards beyond the end of our garden, its chimney visible to someone sitting in our back room. Previously it had manufactured swimming costumes, but now it was packing parachutes. 

Its chimney emitted not just smoke but noise: about every five seconds it gave a loud, vibrant belch that was a nerve-racking nuisance for everyone living near it. At one level of my mind I got used to it, and ceased to notice it, yet at another I was conscious of it all the time. 

The people in the neighbourhood complained to the local authority, but were told that nothing could be done: the chimney had once had a silencer, but this no longer worked, and a replacement was unobtainable in wartime. The factory had to carry on because it was involved in essential war work. So the people around it would have to put up with it. ('Don't you know there's a war on?')

Yesterday I posted a video of Magee reporting on the satire boom in 1963.

A 1963 television report on the satire boom by Bryan Magee

Now here's a find: a 1963 report on the satire boom by this blog's hero Bryan Magee.

We see John Bird, Jeremy Geidt, Peter Cook, Bernard Braden, Willie Rushton, Jonathan Miller and Michael Frayn.

I can't recall Braden being discussed as part of the satire boom before, and the most obscure name now is Jeremy Geidt, who is seen in the sketch with John Bird. He went to have an influential career in American theatre and his background was more establishment than that of anyone else in the programme.

Peter Cook is notable bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, while Frank Muir describes Magee as looking like "a bit like a young family doctor in a cough mixture commercial". I'm not sure that Magee's thesis that satire is at once centuries old and a bubble that is about to burst quite hangs together.

Muir is there because this is an off-air recording from a 1992 episode of TV Heaven where he chose the items included.

Thanks to Mario Ricciardi on Bluesky.

Bryan Magee on Karl Popper's account of human knowledge

Karl Popper's account of human knowledge, which Bryan Magee sets out at the beginning of this clip, seems to me so obviously right that I still find it hard to believe that no philosopher had put it forward before him.

Years ago I wrote the entry on Popper in Duncan Brack's Dictionary of Liberal Biography. 

What I didn't know then was that Bryan Magee, the great populariser of Popper's thought in Britain, had been evacuated to Market Harborough as a boy during the war and had lived literally round the corner from where I lived as a teenager.

Happy birthday Ludwig Wittgenstein: An introduction to his ideas

The two most influential philosophers who worked in Britain in the last century were Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Russell, thanks to his pronouncements on everything from sexual morality to geopolitics, was a public figure. Wittgenstein, by contrast, was a slightly mysterious figure even to his fellow philosophers.

Wittgenstein was born on 26 April 1889 and died in 1951. When I took my first degree in Philosophy (1978-81) he was still a dominating figure in the discipline - many papers began with one of his aphorisms. So I was rather proud that my report on our Philosophy of Mind option said I was "not dazzled by Wittgenstein".

Here John Searle and this blog's hero Bryan Magee discuss Wittgenstein's ideas. This is an episode from Magee's 1987 series The Great Philosophers, and proof that there are nothing wrong with talking heads if they have something interesting to say.

Ever seen in the same room? Bernard Williams and Nigel Farage

As well as being Shirley Williams' first husband, Bernard Williams was arguably the foremost British moral philosopher of the late 20th century.

I met him round about 1980, while I was doing my philosophy degree at York. We had a philosophy society and would ask eminent philosophers for dinner and a bit of discussion afterwards. Bernard Williams was one of the guests I recall, and another was a young American called Daniel Dennett.

You can hear Bernard Williams above discussing linguistic philosophy with Bryan Magee. Click on the arrow to play a short clip I have selected, or go to YouTube to watch the whole programme.

Williams is a wonderfully intelligent and lucid speaker, but what worries me, watching him today, is the extent to which he looks and sounds like a hugely erudite version of Nigel Farage.

A signed copy of Bryan Magee's Men of Ideas with a Market Harborough connection

I've blogged before about my discovery that the broadcaster Bryan Magee, who died in 2019, was evacuated to Market Harborough as a boy and lived literally around the corner from where I did as a teenager.

His television series Men of Ideas, in which he interviewed leading contemporary philosophers about the discipline's greatest figures, was broadcast while I was having my interviews for a university place to read philosophy, so it was wonderful preparation.

In his Growing Up in a War, Magee describes his time in Harborough. For most of it he lived in Logan Street (yes, it's named after this blog's hero J.W. Logan MP) with the Toombs family - like Norman Bowler, he was one of those children who were happier in their new home than back in London.

And his special friends was the Toombs's daughter Kath. Which probably explains this signed copy of the book of the Men of Ideas series that I got from a Market Harborough charity shop some years ago.

It wasn't my discovery. Someone I used to work with at Golden Wonder was volunteering in the shop and put it (and a couple of other signed Magee books) aside for me. And I'm very pleased I own it.

Later. Since I wrote this I've remembered my mother talking about a woman called Kath, whom she knew at least to say hello to. I think it's the same Kath.

The Mid Bedfordshire by-election of 1960

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Thanks to a reader for pointing out that the current Mid Bedfordshire by-election is not the first in the constituency. One was held there in 1960.

The Conservative Alan Lennox-Boyd, who had sat for Mid Bedfordshire since 1931, held the seat at the 1959 general election. But there was no place for him in the new cabinet and he accepted a hereditary peerage.

His Labour opponent at the general election had been this blog's hero Bryan Magee, while the Liberal candidate had been Wilfred Matthews. 

The result in 1959 (with percentages of the vote in brackets) was:

Conservative  21,301 (46.79)

Labour            16,127 (35.42)

Liberal              8,099 (17.79)

The by-election was held on 16 November 1960. The new Conservative candidate was Stephen Hastings, while Magee and Matthews again stood for their parties. There was a fourth candidate, C.F.H. Gilliard, who stood for the New Conservative Party, which had a British nationalist platform.

And the result in the by-election was not so different from that at the general election the year before. This time the votes were:

Conservative          17,503 (45.38)

Labour                    11,281 (29.25)

Liberal                      9,550 (24.76)

New Conservative      235   (0.61)

That's just the sort of result people are afraid of this time, but the past is a foreign country. 

In 1960 the Conservatives were still in the ascendancy and Harold Macmillan was SuperMac. If there had been no Liberal candidate, it's likely that the majority of the party's voters who still turned out would have opted for the Conservative.

And I imagine that Alan Lennox-Boyd had a higher reputation in Mid Bedfordshire than the one Nadine Dorries enjoys today.

Stephen Hastings was to represent Mid Bedfordshire until 1983, but his right-wing views kept him on the backbenches throughout his career.

Bryan Magee was elected MP for Leyton at the February 1974 election. He became one of the last Labour MPs to jump ship to the SDP, and lost there under as an SDP Alliance candidate in 1983.

Wilfred Matthew, who had first stood for parliament in Luton in 1950, fought Mid Bedfordshire for the last time at the 1964 general election.

The New Conservative Party renamed itself the True Conservative Party, but did not survive to see the end of 1962. It's founder John Dayton was a Labour candidate at the 1966 general election.

Archive on 4: Bryan Magee - Man of Ideas

I've just been listening to a radio programme about the broadcaster and philosopher Bryan Magee.

He's been blogged about here several times, and I collected most of what I had to say in a post I wrote after he died in 2019. Most notably, he introduced me to the work of Karl Popper and was evacuated to Market Harborough as a boy during the war.

Magee's television series Men of Ideas, in which he interviewed contemporary philosophers about the ideas of the subject's great figures, was broadcast in 1978. (I suspect Angie Hobbs, who made the programme, is younger then I am and watched his later series The Great Philosophers.)

If I remember correctly, I had already applied to study philosophy at university when Men of Ideas began, but was still going for interviews. Whatever the exact chronology, the programmes served as a wonderful introduction to the subject.

Though I went to a comprehensive and received free school meals, I can't say that their patrician tone put me off. In fact it attracted me, because I didn't want university to be just like school.

I can appreciate that others will have thought philosophy wasn't for them after seeing the programmes. And the title Men of Ideas makes me cringe today.

But then 1978 was a different world in philosophy as it was in everything else. In particular, Ludwig Wittgenstein still exerted a powerful influence on many academics. If their papers didn't explicate a remark of his, they certainly began with an epigraph taken from his work.

And Roland Hall, the man who interviewed me for a place at York and gave me a generous offer, had been supervised by J.L. Austin and, during his Army service, served as the clerk to the  the President of the Court during the war crimes trial of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, who was regarded as Hitler’s greatest general.

From which we conclude that 1978 was a long time ago.

Noam Chomsky on how we learn language

These days Noam Chomsky cuts a rather sad figure as one whose deep opposition to US imperialism has blinded him to the realities of Russian imperialism.

But it wasn't always like that.

Here he is interviewed for Bryan Magee's BBC2 philosophy series Men of Ideas in 1978. The quality of the conversation makes me weep for the glory days of public service broadcasting, even if the opening titles lead you to expect a Monty Python sketch.

Magee's opening precis of Chomsky's ideas is a masterpiece in itself. I have linked just to that portion of the programme, but the whole of it will reward your watching. Magee does bring up Chomsky's politics towards the end of the interview.

I don't know if Chomsky's ideas are in fashion now in linguistics or philosophy, but he was an exciting and innovative figure in his day. I still remember reading his demolition of B.F.Skinner's Behaviourist account of how children learn language 40 years ago.

These Men of Ideas programmes mean a lot to me because I watched them in the summer before I went to York to read Philosophy and they gave me a wonderful introduction to the subject.

What I didn't know then was that, as a boy during the war, Magee was evacuated from Hoxton to Market Harborough and had lived literally round the corner from where I was watching his programmes.

It's not that we get more right wing as we get older

Spending time with at my mother's house is giving me time for all the books I bought and never read. Among my findings so far is that Isabella Tree's Wilding is inspirational and Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk is overwritten.

Today I tried Wagner and Philosophy by Bryan Magee - that temporary son of Market Harborough - and hit gold before I'd finished the preface.

In it Magee describes Wagner as a classic example of someone who, when young is a passionately committed and active revolutionary, but becomes disillusioned with politics and turns away from it altogether in middle age.

He continues:

Former comrades who retain their left-wing commitment usually see such a person as 'moving to the right', and of course some do, they become conservatives. But in most cases this is an uncomprehending way of seeing what is happening. 

For most such people are not switching from one political allegiance to another, they are becoming disillusioned with politics as such. They are ceasing to believe that the most important of human problems have political solutions. They are acquiring a different sort of outlook on life, one that does not see politico-social issues as primary.

And concludes with the insight:

The unforgiving bitterness of the disappointed left-winger is a quite different phenomenon psychologically from the curmudgeonliness of the reactionary, even if in elderly people the two often show some of the same symptoms. One is bitterness at the loss of a past, the other bitterness at the loss of a future.

The Conservative Party is following the doomed path of all revolutionaries

I am now a “LibDem nutter”. Apparently for backing a Treaty that Boris Johnson recommended to the British people only nine months ago. I need another beer... https://t.co/qKSd9X3Le8

— Tim Montgomerie 🇬🇧 (@montie) September 15, 2020

Four years ago, after a meeting of Corbyn supporters had booed the name of Sadiq Khan, I wrote a post saying Corbyn's revolution was following the logic of all revolutions.

In it I quoted the philosopher and broadcaster Bryan Magee:

There is a situational logic to revolutions. Disparate groups unite to overthrow an existing regime, but once they have succeeded in doing so the cause that brought them together has gone, and they then fight one another to fill the power vacuum that they themselves have created. These internecine struggles, usually savage, among erstwhile allies perpetuate the revolutionary breakdown of society far beyond the overthrow of the old regime, and delay the establishment of a new order. 

As you can see from the tweet above, the same thing is now happening to the Conservatives.

Tim Montgomerie, as editor of Conservative Home and chief of staff of Iain Duncan Smith, was at the forefront of the revolution that saw the Conservative Party stop being Conservative and instead become an alliance between the forces of global capital and terminally aggrieved voters.

But that will not save him. It's off to the tumbrils in the morning.

A 1939 cigarette card of the Three Swans, Market Harborough

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In 1939 the Three Swans was kept by the writer and eccentric John Fothergill.

Bryan Magee, who was evacuated to Market Harborough during war, wrote of him:

What impressed me about him more than I can express was that he had written one of the books we had at home, An Innkeeper's Diary. He must have been the first author I met. Needless to say, I had not read the book, but I was familiar with it as an object, and knew that it was about the job I was seeing him doing, namely running a hotel. 

He must have been the best-known hotelier in Britain at that time, because his book had been a best-seller in the thirties and was currently in Penguin Books at a time when Penguins were the only mass-circulation paperbacks. 

I saw him as an outlandish figure. He wore his hair to his shoulders, and buckle shoes, and went out of doors in a cape, none of which I had seen a man do before. Yet he was not effeminate. He had a wife and two sons, and was very much the boss, both of his family and of the hotel. 

He spoke to everyone in a direct way that I found disconcerting. He was simply saying what he thought and felt, but I had never heard anyone do that. If he thought you had an ugly face he told you so. Sometimes you could scarcely believe your ears. ...  

But some of the most interesting things about him were things I did not know, and would not have understood. He had been a close friend of Robert Ross, who in turn was the closest and most loyal friend of Oscar Wilde. After Wilde's imprisonment, Fothergill visited him in France and stayed with him there. 

A mere eight of nine years after I knew Fothergill, the opportunity of asking him about all this would have been valuable beyond price, but it was wasted on me when I was ten.

Henry Hardy, David Owen and Simon Callow on Bryan Magee

Bryan Magee – philosopher, writer, broadcaster, politician – died on 26 July at the age of eighty-nine. 

After his death, the three main broadsheets swiftly printed the oven-ready obituaries they had on file. But the BBC, where Magee’s reputation was cemented in the later decades of the twentieth century, failed even to mention his death, let alone look back at his life and work. What were Front Row and Last Word thinking of? Not the tiniest clip from the rich Magee broadcasting archive were we offered. 

Magee was (and still is) a household name among the chattering classes, rightly, and this was an astonishing failure of cultural memory on Auntie’s part. He was a consummate interviewer, and one of the most articulate and engaging expositors, especially of philosophy, who ever lived. The silence on the air waves at the end of his life was shameful.

Henry Hardy begins a piece for The Oldie with this complaint about the BBC's ignoring of Bryan Magee's death.

He goes on to give his own memories of him and is followed by David Owen (Magee was a Labour and then an SDP MP) and the actor Simon Callow.

I have my own reasons for being grateful to Magee.

His television series Men of Ideas, featuring interviews with many of the great philosophers of the day, was screened at the start of 1978 when I was being interviewed by universities because I hoped to study philosophy there.

And his superb short book on Karl Popper was a strong influence on my own thinking,

I respect him too as a man who knew the back streets of Market Harborough.

Bryan Magee interviewed in 1999: Part 2

This is the second part of Bryan Magee's RTE interview from 1999. Persevere past the alien attack that comes halfway through.

My conclusion after listening to this is that I should read Magee's book on Schopenhauer. I have read his short book on Wagner and it is very good.

You can listen to part 1 here.

Bryan Magee interviewed in 1999: Part 1

This is the first of two interviews Bryan Magee gave to Andy O'Mahony from RTE in 1999.

His ability to make philosophical ideas clear to the lay listener is well in evidence.

Ignore the video's discouraging appearance: it will play.