11 - H. L. A. Hart: a twentieth-century Oxford political philosopher

Summary

Hart's life

Herbert Hart was born in 1907, a son of prosperous tailors in the north of England. From the age of eleven he went to boarding school in the south, but after some years was schooled close to home at an excellent grammar school where he finished as head prefect, regarded by the headmaster as a head boy of unsurpassed loyalty and capacity. By competitive scholarship examination he proceeded to New College, one of the University of Oxford's oldest and best colleges, where he studied Greek, Latin, ancient history, and philosophy, with brilliant success.

Passing the bar exams in late 1930, Hart joined commercial chambers in Lincoln's Inn where he practiced with notable success, especially in tax matters. Although he had joined the Inns of Court Regiment early in his career at the bar, and participated enthusiastically in stag hunting and like pursuits, his political views, always liberal, moved decisively left during the mid-1930s even before he became associated in 1936 with Jenifer Williams, who had been a member of the Communist Party since 1934. But, as she later wrote of Hart (whom she married in late 1941), “he was strongly opposed to communism both as theory and practice.”