In Spite of History? New Leftism in Britain 1956 - 1979 Thomas Marriott Dowling Thesis Presented for the Degree of PhD Department of History University of Sheffield August 2015 ii iii Contents Title page p. i Contents p. iii Abstract p. vi Introduction p. 1 On the Trail of the New Left p. 5 Rethinking New Leftism p. 12 Methodology and Structure p. 18 Chapter One Left Over? The Lost World of British New Leftism p. 24 ‘A Mood rather than a Movement’ p. 30 A Permanent Aspiration p. 33 The Antinomies of British New Leftism p. 36 Between Aspiration and Actuality p. 39 The Aetiology of British New Leftism p. 41 Being Communist p. 44 Reasoning Rebellion p. 51 Universities and Left Review p. 55 Forging a Movement p. 58 CND p. 63 Conclusion p. 67 iv Chapter Two Sound and Fury? New Leftism and the British ‘Cultural Revolt’ of the 1950s p. 69 British New Leftism’s ‘Moment of Culture’? p. 76 Principles behind New Leftism’s Cultural Turn p. 78 A British Cultural Revolt? p. 87 A New Left Culture? p. 91 Signifying Nothing? p. 96 Conclusion p. 99 Chapter Three Laureate of New Leftism? Dennis Potter’s ‘Sense of Vocation’ p. 102 A New Left ‘Mood’ p. 108 The Glittering Coffin p. 113 A New Left Politician p. 116 The Uses of Television p. 119 History and Sovereignty p. 127 Common Culture and ‘Occupying Powers’ p. 129 Conclusion p. 133 Chapter Four Imagined Revolutionaries? The Politics and Postures of 1968 p. 135 A Break in the New Left? p. 139 v Keeping the Agenda Alive p. 147 New Leftism and ‘1968’ p. 155 ‘Smashing the System’ p. 159 Student Power p. 162 After May p. 165 Conclusion p. 169 Chapter Five Psychopolitics and Theory Wars: The Denouement of British New Leftism? p. 172 New Leftism in the 1970s p. 175 Malaise p. 180 Seven Days p. 183 New Leftism and Feminism p. 184 History and Theory p. 189 The Pathology of E. P. Thompson and the English Idiom p. 192 Conclusion p. 200 Conclusion: ‘Acknowledging Ourselves in the Beast’ p. 202 The Changing Nature of History p. 205 Resisting Ideology p. 208 A Sense of History p. 211 Bibliography & Sources p. 214 vi vi Abstract This thesis seeks to challenge a prevailing historiographical consensus that tends to view the experience of the British New Left from the late 1950s as one of general ‘failure’. Such characterisations, it is argued, rest on a fundamental misreading of the New Left’s founding pluralist agenda. Citing the movement’s origins amidst the ‘conjunctural’ crises of 1956, the thesis argues that ‘new leftism’ in Britain should be approached less as an attempt to construct an alternative political, ideological, or theoretical position (as opposed to Stalinism or social democracy), than as an effort to establish a series of orientating principles through which a new generation of socialists might come to apprehend a world in which the ideological or theoretical assumptions of the past no longer appeared to hold. In this sense, the thesis suggests, new leftists can be understood as having been amongst the first intellectuals in Britain to both recognise and negotiate the burgeoning ‘post-modernist’ paradigm in the post-war era. The thesis demonstrates how in its earliest phase the New Left displayed considerable reticence about its ‘movementist’ identity, preferring instead to promote itself as reflecting ‘a frame of mind’, and ‘a mood rather than a movement’. Above all, it is argued, the New Left was premised on the insistence that any meaningful renewal of the ‘socialist-humanist’ project would require a period of sustained ‘theoretical humility’, ‘a permanent openness’, and the creation of a cultural and intellectual ‘third space’ in which free-inquiry and open-ended discussion could proceed without inhibition. In this sense, the thesis argues that British new leftism was considerably more successful than has hitherto generally been acknowledged, helping to carve out, amongst other things, much of the intellectual and cultural terrain upon which some of the most significant social and cultural transformations of the latter half of the twentieth century took place. 1 In Spite of History: New Leftism in Britain 1956 – 1979 Introduction [The twentieth century] will never be understood unless we can both comprehend the motivations of those who took part in the wars of secular religion which devastated so much of it, and to stand back from their assumptions far enough to see them skeptically and in perspective. Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Preface’, in the US Paperback Edition of Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (New York, 2005), p. xiii. Nostalgia is a very second-order emotion. It’s not a real emotion. What nostalgia does is what the realist in a sense does with what is in front of him; the nostalgiac looks at the past and keeps it there, which is what is dangerous about nostalgia, which is why it’s a very English disease in a way… [L]ooking back is part and parcel of our political language. But I’m not dealing in nostalgia. I think that if you [don’t] have an alert awareness of the immediate past, then what you are doing is being complicit in the orthodoxy of the present, totally, and I am sometimes amused to be berated, to see myself berated as one who uses nostalgia, and this is not the case. Dennis Potter, ‘An Interview with Alan Yentob, BBC 2’ (1987), reprinted in Seeing the Blossom: Two Interviews, a Lecture and a Story (London, 1994), p. 67. History is a form within which we fight, and many have fought before us. Nor are we alone when we fight there. For the past is not just dead, inert, confining; it carries signs and evidences also of creative resources which can sustain the present and prefigure possibility. E. P. Thompson, ‘The Politics of Theory’ in Raphael Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory, (London, 1981), pp. 407 – 408. It is sometimes overlooked that historians of the very recent past invariably have a more problematic task than those who cast their gaze further afield: not only is it perhaps unwise to commence sweeping-up at any time before the ‘dust’ has finally settled, but, as George Orwell reminds us, ‘to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.’1 In contrast, the greater the distance that stands between us and our chosen object of study the more licence our imaginations are granted to fill the intervening space with alternative meanings and interpretations – not least, those 1 George Orwell, ‘In Front of Your Nose’ in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (London, 1968), p. 167. ‘Dust’ here is meant in a similar sense as that used by Carolyn Steedman to represent ‘the immutable, obdurate set of beliefs about the material world, past and present, inherited from the nineteenth century, with which modern history-writing attempts to grapple.’ (Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester 2001), p. ix.) 2 which may somehow serve to assist or assuage us within the maelstrom of our more pressing contemporary predicaments.2 It is perhaps for this reason, therefore, that as the great nineteenth-century essayist, William Hazlitt, once observed, distant objects also please: Time takes out the sting of pain; our sorrows after a certain period have been so often steeped in a medium of thought and passion, that they ‘unmould their essence;’ and all that remains of our original impressions is what we would wish them to have been… Seen in the distance, in the long perspective of waning years, the meanest incidents enlarged and enriched by countless recollections, become interesting; the most painful, broken and softened by time, soothe.3 If perspective is one of the watchwords of the historian, we can only hope that evidence still stands as another – though here, paradoxically, in the struggle to affect the appearance of the former, less may sometimes seem like more. As it is, every historian is to some extent condemned to live in fear of himself (or, worse still, another historian) discovering some previously overlooked document or artefact that just so happens to discount the entire conceptual or theoretical foundation on which his life’s work has hitherto been based. The production of history is necessarily predicated on selection, which also means exclusion; thus it follows that the less one is obliged to consider the less one risks overlooking. It was recognition of this paradox that once led Lytton Strachey to ironically observe of the Victorian era that its history could never be written precisely because we already ‘know too much about it’.4 Strachey was, of course, writing towards the end of World War I, less than two decades after Queen Victoria’s death, and, therefore, could not have anticipated the ensuing flood, which has since come to constitute ‘Victorian Studies’ in academic departments around the globe; nevertheless, the admonitory pith of his observation 2 Pierre Nora, for example, famously argues that the past, in all its multiple dimensions, is always determined and filtered through the rubric of the contemporary moment (Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’: Les Lieux de Memoire, in Representations, No. 26 (1989); or as Primo Levi observed shortly before his death: ‘The further events fade into the past, the more the construction of convenient truth grows and is perfected.’ (Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (London,, 1988) p. 27.) 3 William Hazlitt, ‘Why Distant Objects Please’, in William Hazlitt, Selected Writings (London,, 1970), pp. 149 – 150. 4 Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (London,, 1918), p. vii. 3 still pertains: in our struggle to perceive an authentic picture of the past, invariably, the more that is revealed the harder it becomes to see.