Introduction: An Intellectual Journey

Summary

My first published essay was entitled ‘Everlasting capitalism’. It appeared in 1968 in a student magazine at Cambridge and discussed Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man, and his argument that all radical alternatives to capitalism had disappeared in the West. Published in 1964 One Dimensional Man was one of the first books I encountered when I started at Cambridge the following year. A friend gave it to me to read and it led to intense discussions. It opened a window for me into the world of European critical theory and confirmed my growing interest in political ideas, making me wonder whether Marcuse was right that history and ideology in the West had come to an end, and that there was no longer any possibility for radical dissent or radical change.

This book contains a selection of my articles and papers on political ideas and ideologies over the last forty years, They have been chosen to illustrate some of the main themes of my writing in intellectual history and the history of political ideas. In the companion volume to this one, After Brexit, I have put together a selection of essays from my writings on political economy and British politics. Although there is inevitably some overlap in themes between the two books, they are intended to be self-standing, and hopefully the essays selected give each book an internal coherence. This Introduction is followed by notes on the themes of each essay.

The title essay of this collection is ‘The western ideology’ (Chapter 1). It was delivered as the Leonard Schapiro Lecture at the PSA Conference in Swansea in April 2008. By the western ideology I mean the doctrines which came to define western modernity. This was not just a struggle of ideas but also a struggle of states to determine who had the right to define what the West was, what modernity was and who best represented it. This struggle took place over several centuries between states and within states. In important respects it is still going on, but at various points in the last two centuries intellectual advocates of liberal modernity have declared that the battle is over and liberal modernity has won.