Many thanks to Professor Stuart White, Professor Matthew Adams, and Professor Melanie Nolan for their sensitive readings and insightful comments. All raise different but important points which I sh...

The first British New Left formed in response to a crisis in international and British socialism. Although never a formal movement, its associated members set themselves the tasks of, first, confronting the rapid change transforming social life at both global and national scales, and second, articulating a new political culture able to accommodate the good and resist the bad of it. As part of this process, a series of intense debates took place on the role of the socialist intellectual in (...) stimulating such a culture. In this article, I consider three of the NL’s main protagonists, EP Thompson, Stuart Hall, and Raphael Samuel, and the different positions they took on this issue. I argue here that while all made important contributions to the argument, Samuel’s practice as an intellectual, currently the least well known of the three, is worth closer attention for its relevance to contemporary educational debates. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty” lecture was the iconic statement of Cold War liberalism, an expression of all its insights and limitations. It divided critics then and now: was it a stimulating restatement of classical liberalism with revitalising potential for post-war democracy or a conservative retreat from politics that paralysed liberalism as both a social and political force? This article approaches the debate from a side angle. It looks at how the Freedom anarchist group addressed the problems raised by (...) the lecture. Of all ideologies, anarchism most elevated liberty as the highest good. At the same time, it considered itself a social movement for the advance of liberty. As such, the tension highlighted by “Two Concepts”, between the intrinsic value of liberty and the pursuit of liberty, had long preoccupied generations of anarchist thinkers but never more so than after the War, where inherited assumptions about revolution and social change became implausible. Although Berlin identified anarchism with the fullest realisation of positive liberty, the movement was more philosophically diverse than he recognised. The Freedom group’s responses to his dilemma of liberty demonstrates this. At the same time, their efforts to think beyond the impasse and experiment with new forms of political practice – as exemplified by Anarchy, Freedom’s sister publication – outstripped those of the liberals casting fresh light on the limits and possibilities of freedom in a Cold War world. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The First British New Left formed around two journals, The New Reasoner edited by E.P.Thompson and John Saville, and the Universities and Left Review edited by Stuart Hall, Gabriel Pearson, Raphael Samuel and Charles Taylor. Both sought a ‘new’ socialism which, based on a loose concept of socialist humanism, restored the role of the individual and revitalised a popular left movement. Early commentators critiqued its lack of robust theory and organisational structure. More recently, others have proposed that, particularly amongst (...) the ULR cohort, with this ‘new’ socialism emerged a ‘new’ activist politics. Building on this, I examine the ULR’s activism as a performative politics which stressed active participation over theory and dissolved any distinction between means and ends. Whilst Thompson and Hall have tended to be considered the main protagonists in shaping this, I argue that it was Samuel, an experienced organiser, who was most responsible for shaping their early agenda. His role has been neglected because he wrote no ‘position piece’ but, appropriately for an activist politics, expressed his ideas through his actions. ‘Reading’ his performances, then, illuminates more fully both the scope and the limits of this activist politics. (shrink)