Gareth Stedman Jones

Gareth Stedman Jones interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 23rd April 2012

0:05:07 Born in a nursing home next to Hampton Court in 1942, and brought up during my first years in Teddington, Twickenham and Richmond; there were a lot of teachers in my mother's family; my mother's father came from the Channel Islands, and the Le Gros family has a genealogy that goes back to the sixteenth century; one of the family legends was that they originally came from Nantes, not so far from Jersey, and were lace makers connected with the Court and came over during the French Revolution; one, whose portrait we have, was a minor shipping magnate during the Napoleonic Wars; my grandfather had bits of property in Jersey and, much to my mother's dismay, gave it away; he was quite radical in his way and didn't believe in property; he had five daughters, and married into a middle to upper-middle class family in Middlesex; he taught - I think it became quite a struggle bringing up five daughters but they all had some sort of further or higher education; he was a great believer in education; one of my early memories, between five and twelve, he would take me up to London to look at historic sites; in those days, London was a bomb site in many areas, and we would go to see City churches, the Law Courts and so on; I have always been fascinated by historical records of one sort or another; born in the middle of the war, I received undue attention from my unmarried aunts which gave me confidence; I don't think I really saw my father until 1946 because he was in North Africa, Italy, and in the last years of the war in Austria; he came back with a very big dolls' house; I did have a sense of the immediate post-war; my father's father, a Stedman, was a smallholder in the Strata Florida area north of Aberystwyth; he left home at about twelve; his parents had died when he was young and he had been brought up by a family called Jones, hence the name Stedman Jones; he had two younger brothers, one of whom went to South Africa in the 1880's, the other went to the United States, and he himself went to the mines; my father was one of six children from two marriages and was born in 1913; of the six, the three boys did pretty well; their father ended up as a mine overseer; my father got a university education at Queen Mary College, and his elder brother was seconded to the Ministry of Food during the War; Keynes invited him to become a Fellow of King's after the War but he preferred to remain in the Civil Service, and ended up in the Cabinet Office; he was a very clever man, mathematical, a linguist, and Welsh patriot; my father was much more literary; he wanted to be a writer and, but for my mother, might have become one; he became a teacher, and became head of English when Holland Park was founded as one of the first comprehensives in London; he used to write for newspapers and morning stories for the radio; the main thing from my point of view was that he really loved literature, and his hero was Dr Johnson; after the War he collected eighteenth century books so I had the whole run of the London Magazine, which I remember reading quite avidly; we lived quite comfortably; he was very keen that I should learn to write properly so he gave me exercises to do; my enthusiasm meant that at about twelve or thirteen I read through most of Dickens; my engagement with the nineteenth century was really inspired by that; I went to the local Prep school called The Mall, at Twickenham they had an old library so I read Henty, and because I was interested in books they asked me to reclassify the library; then I went on to St Paul's

12:08:07 My mother had an iron will; she was the second of the five sisters and very much wanted to be her father's favourite; she was very practical; she slightly resented her two younger sisters who had got to the Slade and LSE whereas she had gone to Goldsmiths; she thought she would have been a good doctor but never had the chance to do a medical degree; so there was always a slight edge of disappointment; she was firmly middle-class; my father coming from just outside Merthyr was potentially out-going; he liked talking to people in pubs; as there had been a major migration of Welsh people from the valleys in the 1930s, in the '50s, when I was growing up, there was a London-Welsh diaspora which I was inducted into; they were much jollier types in some ways and all put a big value on education; my mother was, I think, much more materially minded; my father delighted in learning; he had been brought up in a very religious household though he was no longer so; the stories were of the three brothers sitting around the table discussing Plato in the mining village; his character was not strong enough to stand up against my mother; he probably could have been a good writer, but deferred to her; they sometimes argued over the superiority of the Home Counties to the Welsh Valleys, and he was much more radical than she was; I was an only child; my father had a pretty nasty temper, my mother would just go cold and lock herself in the bedroom while my father stormed around, and I would try and keep myself scarce; my life was not idyllic but was alright on the whole; I was initially brought up with my cousin as we shared a big house; she also became an academic - a philosopher at UCL; it was a bit like having a sister until the age of eleven, but on the whole I think my character traits are those of an only child

18:00:22 I collected coins for a bit as a hobby, and then I collected old books; I was quite keen on sport but not very good; I followed cricket quite a lot; I had friends at various schools and the local youth club, but I also had quite a strong intellectual side; when I was about seventeen at St Paul’s, Ritchie Blackburn, brother of Robin, arrived there; I got to know the family quite well and that was the way I got into the New Left; at St Paul’s I had two very inspirational teachers, one in French and the other in history; one was Frank Parker, and I remember him producing a list of about fifty books that one should read, not only French works; I did French A level and got more and more francophone as the time went on; the other was an exceptional history teacher called Philip Whitting he produced people like Max Beloff and Mark Elvin; I did pretty well and was compared to Elvin; some of the teachers could be quite eccentric and although Whitting was not radical in the ways that one would now recognise, his reputation was as a radical, mainly because he was ironic about organized religion, which at that time was part of the definition of the school; he knew all about Byzantium, he was very good on Louis XIV and I was inspired to read Aldous Huxley's stuff on that, and the Memoirs of Saint Simon; he dictated masses of notes which were very good; he had a little study under the staircase and would give supervisions like you would get here, so when I went to Oxford it was no big deal; he was good at making sure you didn't write clichés and made a clear arguments, so I learnt a lot from him; last year I was invited to give the Philip Whitting Memorial Lecture which they still have at the school, so he obviously made an impact there; St Paul’s contained many bright students and the scholarships mattered more than just A levels; they put me in a year early thinking I would eventually go to Balliol, but I went to Lincoln instead of hanging around for another year at school; my father had got to know someone who was a French exchange teacher who was now a journalist working for Agence France Presse; I got the scholarship in December, left school and went to Paris, and got a job as a copy boy at the Press; I went with three school friends who were also keen; one was David Aukin who became a well-known theatre producer at the RSC, the other, John Gilbert, later worked for the BBC; the third was Paul Grinke, who became an antiquarian book dealer we had originally thought we were going on a university course, but as I had a job, I did not bother, though I did read quite a lot; my hours of work were from six to midnight, so rather antisocial; it was only at the end of my stay that I had earned the resources to enable me not to work for the last couple of months; this was in 1960 and while there, I witnessed the attempt of the French Generals at a coup against General de Gaulle and in the last couple of months I also got to know some Germans whom I still see, and they were quite keen on doing little errands for the FLN, so I did have a sense of what was going on, and of course from Agence France Presse where you were literally taking the news off the machines for the relevant journalists

26:09:24 At St Paul’s there were bits that were compulsory that I really disliked; the school was divided into eight houses and there were compulsory boxing competitions between them; it was a nightmare trying to get out of that; another thing that I disliked was the CCF; I tried going into the Scouts as an alternative, or doing games instead, but eventually, I felt compelled to join. In 1956 Field Marshall Montgomery, an old boy, came to address the school; he made us sit down on the tarmac; it was a hot day and all the tarmac was melting and we didn't have CCF for the rest of the term as our uniforms all had to be sent to the cleaners; those were the main things I didn't like and I played truant several times trying to avoid them; I was in the school orchestra and played the oboe, which I was quite keen on; we set up a drama/culture society; I remember we managed to get Graham Greene to speak and we organized a trip to see a Pinter play; we called it the Gallery Club, and that was quite exciting; I wasn't terribly good at sport but quite enjoyed it; in school I did classics, so Latin and Greek at 'O' level, then Latin, history and French at 'A' level; I basically enjoyed the time there, and by the end of it, particularly once I had got to Oxford, they allowed me to give mini-lectures; at that stage, because the New Left had seeped into my consciousness, 1956 was the big change with both Suez and Hungary; I remember thinking initially that maybe Suez had something to be said for it but eventually it just seemed monstrous; that was the year I thought I should join CND and began defining myself against the conventional school; I also developed a hostility towards the suburbs and their provincialism; going to Paris made it worse; you had to go to school on Saturday morning to play sport; for the first year or two I wore cavalry twills and a cravat; then I remember we were taken on a trip because one of the parents worked at Gillette or Firestone Tyres; we were taken round the factory and then allowed to spend half an hour in a cafe; there was a juke box and that was the first time I heard Elvis and 'Blue Suede Shoes'; up until then one felt under social pressure to learn to do foxtrot and quickstep, and I think I had even started at some little dance academy; the great liberation was giving all of that up, and move from cavalry twills to jeans; in some ways it felt an exciting time which then extended to the seventies, and changed in good ways on the whole; in retrospect I think I was lucky to have that post-war prosperity without having a memory of the war itself

32:50:15 On religion - I was confirmed at school; I remember thinking that it could be true so I didn't have strong anti-religious feelings; on the other hand the school Chaplain who taught us divinity was not very bright, so we made jokes and regarded it as ridiculous but I don't think we were fundamentally alienated from religion though we were from organized religion as it was practised at school; over time I have been sort of agnostic; Bernard Williams once said to me that Anglican atheism was his belief; I quite like the rituals of the Church of England, but I don't believe in God and all that; my position was reinforced by reading Hegel, Anglicanism happens to be the religious culture of this island and I don't feel any strong urge to disrupt it; I think the Dawkins-Hitchens attack is a bit childish; my question is not "is there a god" but "what is God?" and Hegel has an interesting answer to that, that it's just everything; if England had stayed as it was in the 1950s - at school I did read Bertrand Russell's explanation of why he was not a Christian - I would have supported the Dawkins line; but now it seems to me to be attacking something that really isn't that central; I find myself in the slightly ridiculous position of observing that the people who seems to say sensible things are in the Church of England, senior judges, and people in the House of Lords; I don't with any comfort approve of any of these things particularly, but on the other hand it is one of the areas where a certain pluralism survives, and for that reason I feel that the alternatives might be worse

36:30:19 I had already had girlfriends before going to Paris; I used to meet girls from the Grammar school in the local youth club; one was a musician, and to follow her I joined the Middlesex Youth Orchestra; but I was determined I had to make my way in the world and desperate to leave the suburbs; when I went to Paris it was a pretty barren time sexually; I do remember going to see an early Brigitte Bardot film, 'God Created Eve', in Hounslow, and being attacked in an alley afterwards, so I was obviously interested in sex and had hopes for Paris; in fact, French girls then were hardly seen; it wasn't until later on, when I was at Nuffield, that I met two anthropologists, students of Levi Strauss; one was Dan Sperber and the other was Pierre Smith, and through them I got to know other people in Paris; in the sixties, for all the interest in Sartre etc., I thought that Britain was a more culturally enlightened place; the idea of my French friends in 1967-8 for a Saturday night was to play bridge and listen to Louis Armstrong; I did think that they had a lot to learn; however I did keep up the French connection, and when I was at Oxford my girlfriend was someone who had been to Paris, so we had this shared knowledge; she became an anthropologist and worked on gipsies - Judith Okley; the person I married, Gay Webber, was also an anthropologist; we used to go down to the pub where Evans-Pritchard went; her supervisor was Rodney Needham, and when I wrote 'Outcast London' I had read Mauss and gift exchange and all that sort of thing which to historians at the time was quite novel.

41:46:05 At Lincoln, the other history scholar was placed in the room next to me; he was a larger than life person called Angus Hone; he was about six foot five; he came from Malvern but he had a Scottish mother, so when he came to Oxford he insisted on wearing a kilt, so everyone knew who he was; he was a great enthusiast and wanted to meet everybody, so I met a lot of my generation whom he thought worth meeting through being next door to him; we continued into the third year when we lived out in Woodstock Road with Roderick Floud and Charles Drace-Francis, who became an ambassador in somewhere like Honduras; it was an enjoyable time and I was very happy to have ended up at Lincoln; now I gather it is near the top of the league, but then it was not especially distinguished; one of the tutors was V.H.H. Green who became the model for Smiley in the Le Carré novels, as he had also been at Lincoln; Green had a room that allegedly belonged to John Wesley at some time, about twice as large as this, but all along the wall were teddy-bears sitting in rows; although he was Chaplain of the College he always wore a suede suit; he was actually a much less interesting person than that suggests, and his history wasn't terribly inspiring; the other history tutor, called John Owen, was a much sharper person who had been one of the early followers of Namier; I got very interested in economics while I was in Oxford, first of all from this New Left connection there was a Leavisite New Left paper called 'New University' which was terribly worthy in a David Holbrook sort of way; one of my friends through Oxford was Alexander Cockburn and we tried to set up a snappier newspaper called 'The University Messenger'; eventually I got involved in 'Isis' and so did Angus and Mary Kaldor, and we were more or less running that for a term or two; we were interested at that time in theories of the Third World and economics of development; there were a number of sympathizers and seminars on the subject, and my interest continued when I went to Nuffield; at school I had read Christopher Hill very thoroughly and that was the sort of area that I knew best when I went to Oxford; he was rather disappointing as a lecturer; I read Trevor-Roper as well; I went to one or two of his seminars, but disliked the fact that he would send people away if they were not wearing gowns; the person I was most enthusiastic about at the time was Lawrence Stone; he was giving the lectures that became 'The Crisis in the Aristocracy', and I definitely made a point of going to all of those; I got to know him a little; another person whose lectures I did go to was Jack Gallagher; although I was at Lincoln, the circles I was closer to, were in Balliol, particularly round Richard Cobb and Gallagher who had gone there too; I also liked Hoskin's lectures; there was a nice paper called 'Sixteenth Century Economic Documents' and Hoskin's was quite inspiring in his way; the other person who was a bit of a guru because he didn't publish much was K.B. McFarlane, and his work on bastard feudalism was really exciting; I went to Keith Thomas's lectures on Rousseau, Aristotle and Hobbes; I ran the Stubbs Society for a year and invited him to give one of the talks; that was exciting as he was bringing together history and anthropology; on the Cuban Missile Crisis, I remember turning up to a protest meeting in St Giles; when I first came to Oxford they parachuted me into being secretary of the Oxford students' CND together with Nick Humphrey, Adam Roberts and Jonathan Howard, the son of Marghanita Laski, so I got to know quite a few people straight away through the CND connections; I remember we did a march round Oxford which was supposed to follow the edge of a crater that would be made if a bomb landed there; it was a period when nuclear war didn't seem inconceivable; I remember the committee being invited to SHAPE to hear the NATO case; I also got involved in the Labour Club alongside Simon Jenkins; I have never been an organizer but preferred to be a foot-soldier; later I had connections with Ruskin College; Jonathan Howard had a rather beautiful sister called Lydia and I was very keen on her; before me, Tim Mason had been keen on her, and before him, Raphael Samuel; Raphael got to know me because he was worried about Lydia; he had just been given some sort of position through Christopher Hill in Ruskin, though he may have lectured there part-time before then; he had been in retreat from politics in Ireland; I got to know him as an undergraduate and by the third year had been to his house in Spitalfields; when he did come to Ruskin he had the idea to put on history workshops which started as a much more modest affair, but were basically getting the students to do dissertations, then pairing them with sympathetic academics - that would have been 1965-66; I remember participating in those workshops; at the time I was intrigued by the earlier history of the New Left; another person that I got to know was Edward Thompson and Perry Anderson; Perry didn't like the old New Left, Raphael didn't trust Edward; I thought of myself at the time as a sort of mediator as I admired Anderson's 'Origins of the Present Crisis' but with my interest in history I greatly enjoyed the company of Edward; I must have got to know Eric Hobsbawm at the same time; I knew them all but tried to manoeuvre between them; Raphael I got to know more closely; I didn't agree with him much of the time as I had always been rather sceptical about history from below; my fantasy was that an historian is rather like a dramatist and could see the different players from different positions; it wasn't that practising history from below couldn't be interesting, it was just the moralistic ethos that went with it; but it made people do some oral history, give voice to people who were generally ignored; I remember editing one of the essays that Raphael had set up about railwaymen's slang, and it was very interesting; we both agreed that history was important, that we could change the world by changing history; it was a time when history seemed to have something to do with emancipation, though it is harder to conceive now quite why one thought that; it was a time when Edward and Raymond Williams had taken education out of the ivory towers to the people; one of my early experiences was when I went to stay with Edward Thompson; he was living in Halifax at the time and we drove up to Cleveland where he gave a talk on the Peterloo Massacre, or something like that; it was quite inspiring and really was a sort of secular creed; one of the members of the class had been Sidney Webb's electoral agent in 1924 so there was a strong sense of labour traditions having some real vitality at the time, which was why I didn't entirely go along with the New Left; the new New Left had a lot of contempt for the New Left clubs, and said we shouldn't go to pubs but to cocktail bars, so a very strong modernist style, while the old New Left were keener on getting to know the people

Second Part

0:05:07 I got a first; it was a very bad year and only eight got firsts; I did have a long set-to in the viva with Trevor-Roper; I was very keen on Annales at the time and he thought I was just making it up; John Cooper wanted to quiz me on whether I really knew what the Ricardian theory of rent was about; I went on to Nuffield - Roderick, Angus and I all decided that Nuffield was the place, and Roderick and I decided that Habakkuk was the person we wanted to be supervised by; Charles went off to the Diplomatic Corps and Angus wanted to become an economist; in some ways the ethos of Nuffield was very narrow; I realized in retrospect what a liberation it was coming to King’s and talking to scientists, who were interested in the large questions of the world, and that they could talk in a comprehensible way, also literary people, whereas in Nuffield it was just social sciences which could be a bit oppressive; but having said that there were some good people there and it was intellectually stimulating; I knew I wanted to carry on doing research but I also thought London would be much more exciting; that was partly why I chose London as my DPhil topic; originally I was going to do something on self-help - why was it that, in 1906, people voted for Liberals in a big way whereas if you went back to Chartism and before, Liberalism was under great suspicion; I was interested in how Liberalism had become a popular creed and originally it was going to be around Samuel Smiles; as I read into the stuff it became clear that the place where it was not working at all was London, so that was the intellectual background together with some French work by Louis Chevalier ‘ Classes Laborieuses et Classes Dangereuses’ ; then meeting French anthropologists helped me broaden the way I thought about it; at the time I was leaving it open whether I would carry on in academia; my fantasy was that we would set up a journal a bit like 'Libération', and we did try in 1967-8 but it folded after twelve issues; the idea was that it should be Libération-Paris Match-Picture Post, to bring radical photojournalism and leftish news together; at the same time I began to get more uncomfortable with the New Left line, particularly the more Trotskyist; people were talking about having a revolution in Europe and I didn't think we needed that; I think I was a sort of crypto-Fabian; one of the things I did having finished 'Outcast London' was accept a commission to write on Engels; I did that because the agent wanted a very readable biography and I felt that if I was going to broaden myself from London and Victorian history, this was the moment to do it; on the strength of the advance I managed to learn German and eventually got a Humboldt scholarship; I got a year in Frankfurt at a rather interesting time, just at the end of the SDS and the Baader-Meinhof - 1973 or something like that; that was fascinating although I also thought that they were crazy; I kept saying that what had been happening in Britain was interesting, but they thought it was the 'Italian Spring' - factory occupations, and terrorism, which I didn't like, though I knew some who were involved; the film that has just come out on Baader-Meinhof was really good and brought a lot back, and the sense that bad mistakes on the part of the authorities can lead to a profound change in the nature of politics (in that case the move to terrorism)b; at the same time I'd got a job; it was 1973-74 when the university cuts were coming and I was running out of the advance; I applied for a job in Essex in the sociology department; I got it but they said the post was frozen; after about three or four months I was beginning to get worried and a college job in King's came up and I applied for it; then the post at Essex was unfrozen, but by then I'd been charmed by King's, and the fact of having a job in history rather than sociology appealed to me too

9:04:11 As a supervisor, Habakkuk was fairly hands-off; it was still the time when one's supervisor tended to give you a glass of sherry once a term rather than what we now think of as a graduate supervision; he had his own hobby-horses, but he wrote a marvellous book on the migration of labour and capital between America and Britain, and his own lectures were good; he was not what I expected when I did get to know him a bit; he was an unassuming Welshman, but he only published a small fraction of what he had been doing; he was in All Souls and you noticed boxes and boxes of half-finished books, so he did know a lot; I remember he was very good with my book where the first section was all about how the labour market worked and he had really useful things to say; the other person I should mention at Nuffield was Max Hartwell and he was very keen to set up a little school around him; I was quite fond of him but there was obviously a lot of tension and when Peter Matthias got the job he even wrote an inaugural lecture that he would have given if he had got it; it did mean that because he was at Nuffield that there was a little group of economic and social historians whom he supported; Brian Harrison wrote a great book on temperance at the time; he was someone who at first seemed terribly square but as one got to know him, gradually unwound; I remember him asking me to do the obituary on Raphael in the DNB; I kept it fairly formal but he encouraged me to tell more, about how inspirational he could be; there was a side of Brian which was very open to heterodoxy although he didn't look like that at all; he was a good thing in Nuffield, and so was Jose Harris, the biographer of Beveridge and a historian of the Welfare State; they had come to Nuffield as research fellows together, so there was quite a strong, interesting, history group there

13:24:17 On 'Outcast London' - it seems strange now as it is such a different historical epoch, at that time what we now call neo-liberal ideas were thought of as part of bad old Victorian days, and one was interested in discovering at what point they were challenged; in 'Outcast London' my aim was partly to show why the question of poverty and under-employment was a dominant problem in Victorian or pre-1914 England; I was particularly interested in it because I had read work on Rio and other third world cities - the whole idea of the shanty town and the Third World was in my mind when thinking about casual labour; strangely no-one had done much systematic work on it although I did find some American economists in the thirties, Simon Kuznets for example, who had worked quite interestingly on it; it was also a period when it was thought that a quantitative estimation would make history into a much more exact science, so I did all this work on the censuses but actually most of it proved fairly irrelevant; you could divide the London population into five Registrar General classes but it actually didn't explain anything about how London worked; on the other hand there was work done by geographers, which I found very inspiring, on the location of industry so you could examine street maps and show why industries clustered in particular areas, how local labour markets work; a lot of that had been done in the '50s and '60s and I built on that; I was never quite a Marxist but I was interested in the sort of problems that I thought Marx raised; another of the influences at the time on the New Left was Althusser; I was interested in him because against the idea of people simply expressing class interest he had the idea of “the problematic”; this meant that the question could be set up in a much more Saussurean way as a set of relations between signs, which you could still at that point connect with a class; in the third part I was trying to explain the shift in different ways of thinking about the social problem in London; it started with demoralization which is a classic liberal idea of a poor law kind, that if people don't practice thrift they will sink; that they could survive if they managed their incomes better; in the '80s it becomes a much more social-Darwinist idea of what was called ‘degeneration’; the idea that the city-dweller was degenerate, London was drawing in good country types but you could never meet a third generation Londoner who was not an imbecile; I was interested in how these discourses changed; I did not use the word discourse and the time but that was what it looked forward to; I was still trying to connect it to social class analysis, but I did so in a loose enough way that it didn't really matter in the end; I was interested under what conditions the idea that poverty, a fairly insoluble problem, apart from charity, goes away; of course I had a very simplistic answer at the time which was simply that the First World War created full employment for a bit, it wasn't the same problem as before, and after the war the trade unions were organized so there wasn't the same casual labour problem; so that was part of the background; I was interested too in the way in which historians had focused on the industrial revolution in the North and I wanted to show that the South was just as exciting a thing to study in the nineteenth century - why London had this amazing reputation; when I was a student, the East End still had an aura of difference about it with Toynbee Hall and the London labour tradition; the other thing that was just good fortune was the marvellous documentation with the Mayhew and Booth material, so you couldn't fail to make it an interesting piece of work

20:13:15 When working I definitely go for a walk in the afternoon, particularly in recent years; I use periods of insomnia to work things out; sometimes I have a notebook beside my bed, and often regret it when I haven't, and jot down an idea, some of which turn out to be very good; I am very old-fashioned in the technology, I use handwriting to take extensive notes, I write the thing on the computer but make sure I get them printed as quickly as possible; my first planning will be hand-written so it is just when I get to actually write a chapter I will do it on the computer; I have loads of 8x5 index cards, and still have those I had for 'Outcast London'; I am learning but am still fairly backward on the Internet; I'm used to going to libraries and looking things up.

22:42:05 For the Cambridge job my competitor was Robert Skidelsky; at the time Eric Hobsbawm said he had a little influence in King's, and the thing that was slightly shocking when I arrived was how conservative the faculty was; King's was a beacon of enlightenment and I felt very comfortable here; I felt nervous to start with wondering whether I would be up to it, but once that feeling had past I just felt very lucky as it was my sort of atmosphere par excellence if I could choose one; one of the things that surprised and delighted me was to meet scientists, and on the Electors - an illuminating experience for me - with people like Sydney Brenner who could give a wonderfully graphic picture on what a particular dissertation was about, its background, what the problem was and whether it was worth studying; or Bernard Williams with his contempt for routine linguistic philosophy so that people whom Oxford thought were the best thing since sliced bread, he could just scythe through; there was the sense of assured intellectual confidence which in the end could look like arrogance, such as Wynne Godley who thought he could do the alternative forecasting to the Treasury, but I rather admired all that; talking now about whether the College should introduce various bureaucratic schedules for renewal, that was so different in those days and no one would have dreamt of anything like that; people did trust each other, I think; in Oxford I had been a research fellow so didn't really have any administrative duties, but coming here and finding that so many things were just done by word of mouth, on the telephone, or informally, you didn't have to have a great paper chase over everything; King's also gave me the opportunity to set up my own seminar on social history -.in those days social history was still regarded as outside polite society as far as the Faculty was concerned....so I set up the Social History Seminar with Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, which Raphael Samuel, Tim Mason and myself had originally pioneered in St Anthony's; that became a sort of alternative focus for eighteenth to twentieth century work which got a large crowd of people; so there was a sense of forward movement, taking on questions that nobody had asked before, expanding horizons into feminism, takes on Empire, Black history, all sorts of things which were beginning to happen; when I did get a Faculty job it was in intellectual history; in Oxford I had enjoyed it but just thought of it as part of history, whereas in Cambridge it was presumed to demand a rarefied set of skills. I just thought that any decent historian would have used those skills when asking questions; there was a whole group of us that did social history and that carried through until the mid-nineties; King's then thought it well-enough established not to need an independent seminar; so King's I have always found a very decent place; when I had the misfortune of trying to move house around 1989 and found myself on a bridging loan for about eight or nine months, which was not pleasant, Michael Cowdy, the Bursar, gave me an interest-free loan for two years, something that no academic institution would feel empowered to do these days; that sort of informality and trust is something that I've liked most about Cambridge; I think Cambridge is a strange place because its nearly all immigrants from one place or another with some rather resentful locals underneath it all; Quentin Skinner talks of it as Calvinism without God, and there is a certain amount of that; there isn't really a culture of port-swilling in Cambridge, the Puritanism has somehow survived; I respect that as it doesn't produce the old corruption that occasionally Oxford did; on the other hand it can be a bit icy at times; when my parents died they left a cottage in the Wye Valley, at a place called Llangrove between Ross and Monmouth, so we spend quite a lot of time there; I have always enjoyed the idea of living two temporalities; for a long time I lived in London while teaching in Cambridge; since the 90s I have lived almost exclusively here but have another place in the country; I greatly appreciate the different pace of existence and preoccupations in Herefordshire, and I value both places

31:59:24 John Dunn was probably one of the main people who got me here and has always been very supportive; his book on Locke is quite justifiably a classic; in its time his book on Revolutions was also innovative and I taught on that; again it was part of the intellectual expansiveness in Cambridge at the time that SPS and history were able to share such a course; he was also very supportive when I had the idea of setting up something on the history of political economy in the Research Centre; all along I think he has played a good role in the College.

33:32:06 I have known Emma Rothschild since the sixties; we were undergraduates together in Oxford though she came at some ridiculous age like fifteen; then she went to live in the States and got a job at MIT; when I was in a position to do so we set up some research fellowships in politics in the College and I encouraged her to apply and she got one of them; she had done work on war and peace in Sweden and we had this idea that although the technology had changed immeasurably since the ancients, thinking about war and peace hadn't changed that much; we first set up a seminar about war and peace and I remember people like Miles Burnyeat giving wonderful talks on violence in antiquity; in economics, Cambridge particularly with the passing of the Keynesian generation, was getting more and more mathematical and technocratic, so as a countermove we wanted to try to re-establish the central importance of history as part of economic knowledge. From her days at MIT Emma has wonderful connections, as you might imagine, with major funding organizations, particularly in the United States. We got a grant from the Macarthur Foundation and we set up the Centre; the idea was to create studentships to encourage economics’ students to learn some history and vice versa; that doesn't operate quite as well now since with the coming of the MPhils, people find other ways of doing that, but we still give money to support such things as post-graduates who want to learn a language in order to pursue their research as there is a danger that everything is becoming much too monoglot; if persons come up with an exciting idea in history and economic we try to find funding, and appoint them as research fellows; Emma has been influenced by another part of the Annales tradition which is mentalité, so situated between intellectual history and cultural history; Quentin, John and others were always sixteenth-seventeenth century. This meant that intellectual history was always a small conversation between elites. We were interested in extending this into thoughts about economy or commercial society, whatever one might call it at the time; also, particularly when one gets to the nineteenth and twentieth century, you are dealing with mass readership and mass opinion, so you need a broader definition of what sort of history this is; situated somewhere between intellectual, cultural and political history of economic thought in this context, and its relationship to the economy itself

38:44:22 I was also writing a book about conceptions of poverty in Britain and France, and a little bit on Germany; it was written as a riposte in a sense to the neo-liberal idea that Adam Smith was best expounded by Milton Friedman, I argued thate there was no direct genealogy that led back from the Chicago School to Adam Smith; between them came the French Revolution, and the first disciples of Smith were radical; Smith himself had various quite critical thoughts about the law of entail, inheritance etc.Smith’s strange position can't actually be aligned either to left or right very helpfully, which is the grandiose ambition which you find in history, and at the same time the vanity of riches ; obviously it was a critique of empire at the time; to show that Smith was quite critical, I wanted to show how it developed in both France and Britain, and in Britain that Paine was in some sense was a reader of Smith; but of course in 1792-3, Paine gets burnt in five hundred villages up and down the country; I wanted also to criticise the way in which Malthus has been conventionally presented as a critic of Condorcet and Paine, when actually he hardly touches them; I used Condorcet to show there was new thought which came along with the French Revolution, connected partly with the development of statistics in the eighteenth century, used in calculus and the way in which that gets connected with life tables and life expectancy; this was effectively the origin of national insurance, and to show that it was also part of the early vision of the French Revolution; it gets hit on the head, obviously the French State gets more financially encumbered and incompetent and goes bankrupt anyway; also, if you look in Britain at the mid 1790s it is still on the agenda, with Pitt and others having ideas on poor law reform; it becomes anathema in the reaction to revolution as is stated then by Malthus and so on; I wanted to show that these were the first systematic thoughts of a non-utopian kind of how to deal with poverty, and that it was pushed out by what we now come to think of as political economy in a more orthodox sense; I looked at people like Jean-Baptiste Say in France; however I was also interested in showing where the idea of industrial revolution came from, why, for instance did they come from France rather from Britain and through the school of Jean-Baptiste Say, then it gets picked up in the end by Bismarck and the new liberals in Britain. The other motivation behind the book was to show in contrast to a Left, which intellectually speaking, had got so identified with the Marx-Engels tradition that I wanted to show that there were other ways in which one could be radical and progressive, and this was one of the lineages which had been forgotten and needed to be retrieved, particularly against present neo-liberal orthodoxies.

44:03:23 What I found an immense privilege was supervising MPhils and PhDs; that almost doesn't feel like work as often I felt I was getting as much back as I was giving to them; I have mixed feelings about supervisions; if they are in groups of three or four that is fine, one to one can be a bit tiresome; I think we are very lucky in Cambridge with our seminar system because it means that so many people from all over the world come passing through; the only thing I would say where things could be a bit more liberal, I have now got a retirement part-time Chair in Queen Mary, and the good thing there is that you can devise an M.A. option; here, in history, you get appointed to teach pre-existing papers and its very difficult to change the syllabus as you have to give two or three years notice; in those areas it is a bit rigid and we need to move in a more flexible direction; I also wonder sometimes whether the lecture system is the best way of conveying knowledge; I don't mind lecturing though I prefer giving talks; on the other hand, when I first came to Cambridge I was told that it was not so much for students, but to make sure that you knew your topics, and it did force me to get up a whole cluster of subjects that otherwise I would have just waffled on about without really knowing; that is to be said in its favour

47:21:22 I now have a particular project that I held a little conference on last week, on 1848 as a turning point, particularly in political thought; more generally I am trying to write an intellectual but general biography of Marx which is taking the contextual idea seriously; I think the Marx we've inherited is an invention of the 1890-1920 period; I am trying to get back to a cohort of people who, for whatever reason, thought what they did in the 1840s, to show the fragility of a lot of the thought, the misunderstandings which have given it this canonical sense; I am not wildly trying to prove something else, but bring the whole thing back to a proper study of history and to show its contingent factors; it is not just intellectual history as I've got an idea about the familial relations that are fascinating; I have got very interested in his father; I think its a story of hubris, a set of ideas, which seemed to have a lot going for them in the 40s but then he gets into the critique of political economy which he thinks is going to be the absolute answer. As he gets into it, I think, he finds it doesn't work, but the problem is that his wife believes he is writing the great book, so has put up with this disorderly way of life and lack of income; this is also Engels' view, so in a way he is a prisoner of their expectations and he can't give it up as a mistake; its a bit like Casaubon; it has a certain tragic quality because he doesn't speak to anybody about it but gets psychosomatic symptoms such as boils; the other thing is that he reverts to a sort of utopian socialist view because he gets more and more seduced by the idea of the primitive communism; his main opponent in latter years was Henry Maine as he had started with patriarchy; I think there are more interesting things to say, though it is a bit tough at the moment as I am trying to set the story in a larger philosophical history of the eighteen and nineteenth century in particular the history of German idealism. But basically I am enjoying it, and there are two or three unfinished books in my filing cabinet also waiting to be attended to, when I get the chance.