An Awkward Quarrel
The Defense of Humanism in 1970s Britain
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/eph.v23i1.26093Keywords:
Britain, Humanism, 1970sAbstract
In the 1970s, student radicals, left-wing academic theorists and second-wave feminists challenged the relevance and social neutrality of humanistic study. Yet for all its tentativeness and studied modesty, humanism proved more powerful and aggressive than its critics realized. In their willingness to critique both their own limitations and those of their adversaries, humanists sometimes contributed to the deterioration of institutions and values that they most sought to protect. The reputation of universities as impartial and even hallowed places of learning suffered as education became politicized. The Left undermined its own authenticity when sectarianism eroded its political solidarity and disconnected socialism from its aspirational future.
References
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———. 2001. Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties. London: Verso.
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Simpson, Philip. 1982. “‘Presentness Precise’: Notes on the ‘The History Man’.” Screen 32(1): 20–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/screen/23.1.20
Taylor, D. J. 2012. “Worst Enemy: Malcolm Bradbury’s Liberalism.” TLS. 23 November.
Thompson, E. P. 1978. “The Poverty of Theory or An Orrery of Errors.” In The Poverty of Theory and other Essays. New York and London: Monthly Review Press.
Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret and Martin Warner, ed. 1991. Addressing Frank Kermode: Essays in Criticism and Interpretation. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Widdowson, Peter. 1984. “The Anti-History Men: Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge.” Critical Quarterly 26(4): 5–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8705.1984.tb00738.x
Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 1979. Politics and Letters: Interviews with the New Left Review. London: Verso.
Young, Michael. 1958. The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033: An Essay on Education and Inequality. London: Thames & Hudson.
Anderson, Perry. 1980. Arguments within English Marxism. London: Verso.
Bell, Daniel. 1996. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism: Twentieth Anniversary Edition. New York: Basic Books.
Bradbury, Malcolm. 1968. Stepping Westward. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
———. 1971. The Social Context of Modern English Literature. New York: Schocken Books.
———. 1975. The History Man. London: Picador.
———. 1980. “How I Invented America.” Journal of American Studies 14(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800001602
———. 1986. Eating People is Wrong. Chicago, IL: Academy Chicago Publishers.
———. 1988. No, Not Bloomsbury. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 2006. Liar’s Landscape: Collected Writing from a Storyteller’s Life. London: Picador.
Cox, Brian. 1992. The Great Betrayal. London: Chapmans.
Dworkin, Dennis. 1997. Cultural Marxism in Post-War Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Eagleton, Terry. 1976. “Criticism and Politics: The Work of Raymond Williams.” New Left Review I, 95.
Easthope, Antony. 1988. British Post-Structuralism. London: Routledge.
Felski, Rita. 2000. “Nothing to Declare: Identity, Shame, and the Lower Middle Class.” PMLA, 115(1): 33–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/463229
Greer, Germaine. 1970. The Female Eunuch. London: MacGibbon & Kee.
Grimley, Matthew. 2012. “Thatcherism, Morality and Religion.” In Making Thatcher’s Britain, edited by Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders, 78–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Halsey, A. H. 1986. Change in British Society, 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 1992. Decline of the Donnish Dominion: The British Academic Professions in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
———. 1996. No Discouragement: An Autobiography. Houndmills: MacMillan. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25137-7
———. 2004. A History of Sociology in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/0199266603.001.0001
———. and M. A. Trow. 1971. The British Academics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674332102
Hamilton, Scott. 2011. The Crisis of Theory: E. P. Thompson, the New Left and Postwar British Politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9780719084355.001.0001
Harrison, Brian. 2010. Finding a Role: The United Kingdom, 1970–1990. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hobsbawm, Eric. 1981. The Forward March of Labour Halted? Edited by Martin Jacques and Francis Mulhern. London: Verso.
———. 2002. Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life. New York: New Press.
Hoggart, Richard. 1957. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments. New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 1994. A Local Habitation: 1918–1940 in A Measured Life: The Times and Places of an Orphaned Intellectual. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers.
Jay, Martin. 2005. Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kermode, Frank. 1968. Continuities. New York: Random House.
———. 1975. The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change. New York: Viking Press.
———. 1979. The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 1983. The Art of Telling: Essays on Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 1995. Not Entitled. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
———. 2000. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Magee, Bryan. 1973. Popper. London: Fontana Collins.
———. 1979. Men of Ideas. New York: Viking Press.
———. 1997. Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey Through Western Philosophy, From Plato to Popper. New York: Modern Library.
Mitchell, Juliet. 1974. Psychoanalysis and Feminism. London: Alan Lane.
Morace, Robert A. 1989. The Dialogic Novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Morgan, Kenneth. 1999. The People’s Peace: British History, 1945–1990, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ortolano, Guy. 2009. The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Palmer, Bryan D. 1994. E. P. Thompson: Objections and Oppositions. London: Verso.
———. 2013. “Paradox and the Thompson ‘School of Awkwardness’.” In E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism, edited by Roger Fieldhouse and Richard Taylor, 205–227. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Rowbotham, Sheila. 1973. Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
———. 1989. The Past is Before Us. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
———. 2001. Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties. London: Verso.
———, Lynne Segal, and Hilary Wainwright, ed. 2013. Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism. 3rd ed. Pontypool: Merlin.
Simpson, Philip. 1982. “‘Presentness Precise’: Notes on the ‘The History Man’.” Screen 32(1): 20–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/screen/23.1.20
Taylor, D. J. 2012. “Worst Enemy: Malcolm Bradbury’s Liberalism.” TLS. 23 November.
Thompson, E. P. 1978. “The Poverty of Theory or An Orrery of Errors.” In The Poverty of Theory and other Essays. New York and London: Monthly Review Press.
Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret and Martin Warner, ed. 1991. Addressing Frank Kermode: Essays in Criticism and Interpretation. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Widdowson, Peter. 1984. “The Anti-History Men: Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge.” Critical Quarterly 26(4): 5–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8705.1984.tb00738.x
Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 1979. Politics and Letters: Interviews with the New Left Review. London: Verso.
Young, Michael. 1958. The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033: An Essay on Education and Inequality. London: Thames & Hudson.
Published
2015-11-23
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
LeMahieu, D. (2015). An Awkward Quarrel: The Defense of Humanism in 1970s Britain. Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism, 23(1), 1-24. https://doi.org/10.1558/eph.v23i1.26093
