Peter Coleman: A Great Australian

Peter Coleman died on March 31. He was Quadrant’s Editor for most of the period from 1967 to 1990. But that was only one of his many important contributions to Australian literary, cultural and political life over the past sixty years.

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Keith Windschuttle: A Great Man of Letters

In the 2015 Queen’s Birthday Honours list, Peter Coleman received an AO, making him an officer of the Order of Australia, a much deserved and long overdue accolade. The list said the award was for services “to the print media industry as a noted editor, journalist, biographer and author; to the parliaments of Australia and New South Wales; and to the community”.

Peter’s best-known contribution to Australian print media was his role as magazine editor, in particular as editor of Quadrant. Peter became co-editor with James McAuley in May 1967 and held the position of either co-editor or editor continuously from then—with some brief breaks—until January 1990. In June 1975, the co-editors took the gamble of converting the bi-monthly journal into a monthly magazine, declaring in an editorial that the move would not affect its reasons for existence:

Quadrant has always been both a literary magazine and a magazine of combat. It has published the best literary work it could find and it has also believed that political controversy is a good thing. It will continue to do both.

After James McAuley’s death in 1976, it was Peter who largely defined the publication as a monthly magazine of national standing.

One of his critical roles was to ensure the magazine became Australia’s most prolific publisher of poetry and short fiction. Before Quadrant, this role been filled by the Bulletin magazine, of which Peter was editor from 1964 to 1967. When its owner Frank Packer converted the Bulletin into a weekly news magazine, Peter resigned and transferred its literary contents to Quadrant, where they have stayed ever since. In short, since 1967, Peter’s efforts ensured there was always a widely-read, national, monthly publication deeply involved in nurturing and shaping high-quality Australian poetry and fiction.

The same is true of his role in preserving in Australia the high culture of Western civilisation. Peter’s approach made Quadrant a major source not only of literary essays but also art criticism, film criticism, theatre criticism, autobiography, and essays on history, philosophy, politics and religion. Within each genre, he helped preserve a distinctively traditional yet creative set of values. As Prime Minister Tony Abbott observed in October 2013 at a dinner to celebrate the magazine’s 500th edition:

Quadrant has consistently displayed a scepticism of new paradigms and panaceas, a willingness to put forward a rational counterpoint to the breathless enthusiasm of the next big thing, an empirical philosophy that judges ideas not by their source or popularity but by the strength of the evidence and argument, and above all else a deep regard for the lessons of the past and the institutions and traditions that build and protect our society.

In June 2008, when the University of Sydney awarded him the degree of Doctor of Letters (honoris causa), its citation acknowledged Peter’s contribution “to the intellectual life of Australia and to its world of letters for more than fifty years”. It said his writings “constitute a remarkable analysis of civic society in Australia … they address the philosophical and moral underpinnings of international civic life”. His speech in reply, “The Whirligig of Time”, was published in Quadrant, September 2008.

Peter was one of Australia’s finest essayists. There is a distinction between essays and feature articles in journalism that is probably impossible to define, but the University of Sydney citation above captures the difference in its notion of writing that bears “the philosophical and moral underpinnings of international civic life”. Most of Peter’s writings contain something of this. The best of his essays, forty-two of which were collected in The Last Intellectuals: Essays on Writers and Politics (Quadrant Books, 2010), are beautifully crafted works from a master of the art. They constitute an invaluable record of cultural and political life in Australia in the especially turbulent period of the Cold War and its aftermath.

Peter embellished his editorial career by publishing six collections of essays by other writers that have themselves become important in defining Australian civic life. Two of these books are now widely acknowledged as classics of their time: Australian Civilisation: A Symposium (Cheshire, 1962) and Double Take: Six Incorrect Essays (Mandarin, 1996).

As well as spending most of his working life as a full-time editor, Peter also distinguished himself as a politician. From 1968 to 1978 he was a member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, where he rose to become both a minister and Leader of the Opposition. When he lost the 1978 election to Labor’s Neville Wran, he left parliament and became administrator of Norfolk Island from 1979 to 1981. He was then elected to the federal House of Representatives as member for the Sydney seat of Wentworth, where he served from 1981 to 1986.

During his political career Peter also found time to write several major books of cultural and intellectual history and biography. His book on the international cultural politics of the Cold War, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (Free Press, 1989) is an intellectual tour de force that remains the definitive work on the topic. As he noted in The Last Intellectuals, the struggle from 1946 to 1989 between Western civilisation and communism was waged not only by political confrontation in Central Europe and Latin America and overt warfare in Asia. There was also a global cultural war fought by writers in magazines, newspapers and books. Peter was one of Australia’s central figures in this great contest. The Liberal Conspiracy recorded how journalists, essayists, poets, novelists and editors defended cultural freedom and contributed to the eventual collapse of communism. More than any other movement, this culture war embodied the moral dimension of the Cold War. “It was,” he says, “an historic success.”

Along the way, Peter also managed to write the biographies of three important contributors to Australian cultural life: poet and essayist James McAuley, satirist Barry Humphries and film-maker Bruce Beresford. He also co-authored a biography of economist and fellow editor of Quadrant, Heinz Arndt. He followed this with his autobiographical Memoirs of a Slow Learner (Angus & Robertson, 1994, and a revised and updated edition published by Connor Court in 2015). This is a chronicle of his journey from student bohemianism to anti-censorship liberalism and anti-communism in the Cold War. At eighty years of age, he took on the daunting task of co-authoring with his son-in-law, the former Commonwealth Treasurer Peter Costello, an account of the robust politics of the eleven years of the Howard government, The Costello Memoirs (Melbourne University Press, 2008). These books alone rank him as an important figure in Australian cultural and political literature.

As the University of Sydney’s citation for his honorary doctorate recorded, Peter’s contribution to the intellectual life of Australia and its world of letters over more than fifty years was remarkable. In short, he was one of Australia’s truly great men of letters.

Keith Windschuttle is the Editor of Quadrant. An earlier version of this article, marking the award of the Order of Australia to Peter Coleman, appeared in the July-August 2015 issue.

 

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Patrick Morgan: Four Distinguished Careers

In the mid-1960s the Sydney Quadrant group used to hold conferences at the old Regency plush Belvedere Hotel to the east of the city. I found the discussions and the people—who included Richard Krygier, James McAuley, Professors Dick Spann and Doug McCallum, Donald Horne and Peter Coleman himself—congenial. Quadrant at that stage was an incongruous mix of Sydney libertarians and Melbourne Jews and Catholics; both groups had anti-communism or more generally anti-totalitarianism in common. Positive emphasis on freedoms made it a radical liberal rather than a conservative journal.

Quadrant, and its sponsor, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, were on a roll then, with its worldview, based on writers like George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, getting it right in the post-war climate, whereas many other local magazines were still wallowing, in Patrick White’s words, in the “dreary, dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism”. Coleman had just published his refreshing symposium Australian Civilisation (1962), which ushered in a more sophisticated, internationalist perspective, and confidently announced Australia as not just a culture, but as a civilisation. This was the first of Peter’s many important achievements.

From the start I found Peter different from many who mixed in journalistic, academic and political circles. He was personally charming, assured and urbane, neatly dressed and well groomed, easy-going but with at the same time a focused demeanour. He was fundamentally serious as opposed to much of the frivolous or irresponsible counter-cultural behaviour in fashion at the time. He could imperceptibly change gears to adapt himself to any new milieu, a sign of a person interested in others. He was relaxed, detached and non-ideological, neither an urger, a pusher nor a limelight seeker. Peter covered many areas and felt at home in the world of ideas. He was a gentleman, not of a certain stiff older type which could operate only within its own status group, but with a contemporary style which could retain its bearings in any company. I realised after some time that these were qualities I admired in the Sydney scene, in contrast to the Melbourne one (from which Peter had originally come), where people hunted in packs and treated you as a potential combatant until you proved otherwise.

Quadrant at that stage was housed in a couple of rooms in a rundown warehouse in Clarence Street. Peter was more in day-to-day evidence than Jim McAuley. Though they were joint editors, Peter operated in the penumbra cast by the scintillating star of the founding editor, who got more of the kudos and public attention. At that stage most of my dealings with the magazine were through Peter. Working with him was easy and a two-way street, as he sought your own opinions rather than being a passive receptacle for material sent to him. In the rooms as secretary and office manager was Marie Gillis, assisted by an aristocratic East European lady whose daughter married into the English royal family. They were succeeded by the long-term, long-suffering and devoted Robin Marsden. The magazine was a shoestring operation; if you happened to be in the office at publication time you were shanghaied into licking the address stickers, stamps and envelopes like everyone else.

As the 1960s moved into the 1970s McAuley became ill and Peter moved into the driver’s seat. Whereas the early Quadrant had seemed to be on a winner, its tone changed from confident to embattled, as Vietnam, student riots, the new Left, the permissive society, and university radicals became the go-to centres of interest, and support, for the media. Peter carried on an intelligent campaign against this new spirit of the age, being well equipped for this role as a former Bulletin editor and a thinker with a wide-ranging perspective. He held the fort when freedoms were increasingly on the back foot, and a new form of barbarism, exemplified by student rioters and more seriously by the Black Panthers and the Red Brigades, was on the rise. From this experience he later wrote a major work, The Liberal Conspiracy, the history of the worldwide Congress for Cultural Freedom, and of the organisational and ideas struggle during the Cold War period. His title may refer to the Congress being seen as illegitimate by the bien pensant intelligentsia. I still often see his book referred to. Very few Australians have written a widely recognised book on a key international issue. Peter also  wrote a succinct biography of his co-editor James McAuley, which rescued McAuley’s reputation from earlier defamations masquerading as biography which made him out to be a weird, devilish, peripheral figure.

Peter had four interconnected careers, as journalist, editor, politician and author. Curiously I thought of him temperamentally as an academic, which he technically wasn’t, because he was an analyst as much as a player. In conversation he would often quiz me, in the manner of a university tutor, in order to force me to clarify my ideas. Whom was he most like? I think of William Buckley of the National Review, like Peter an acclaimed editor and author, a dapper US East Coast gentleman, engaged with ideas and current controversies, yet above it all. Buckley, like Coleman, was ahead of the pack. When US liberal intellectuals like Norman Podhoretz were formulating a new position but hesitating to leave the Left, Buckley said: “Come on in, the water’s fine.”

Peter seemed assured in public but on a few occasions when I met him at his Woollahra flat or for a meal in Melbourne he seemed dispirited. One time was during his period as Opposition Leader in the New South Wales parliament when Neville Wran was Premier. Although he never said it to me directly, it was obvious he could never use the stories floating around about major corruption, as legally defendable evidence was not at that time available, so he was easily beaten by Wran in an election, a fatal blow to his political career. With the release of the Lionel Murphy material and with the trials of subsequent Labor ministers, the truth was if anything worse than the rumours, so he was unfairly hamstrung. In the New South Wales elections just concluded, pundits said Michael Daley’s gaffes in the last week lost the election, but the deeper reason was that the New South Wales electorate, including Labor voters, does not have confidence, with Labor corruption matters still before the courts, in electing the ALP to power. Peter won a federal seat after losing in New South Wales, but by that stage his New South Wales Liberal contemporary and perhaps rival, John Howard, had consolidated his position.

As sole editor of Quadrant in the 1980s Peter successfully took the magazine into a new period when it was once again in the ascendancy by opening up economic issues such as free trade, small government and industrial relations reform. Worries about school education and university delinquencies were increasing. The magazine backed efforts to end the Cold War by weakening Russia’s stranglehold on East Europe, and by similarly supporting South-East Asian nations like Indonesia. Quadrant was in good shape after having painstakingly built up its credibility and influence over the years.

But, as we all know to our cost, what has taken time and effort over time can be jeopardised overnight. The succession plan to have Robert Manne made joint editor caused problems. Manne had edited a book mainly by Quadrant contributors called The New Conservatism in Australia, in which he praised his contributors for “fighting the reigning left-wing orthodoxy of the intellectual class”. The book’s title was inaccurate, as many Quadrant contributors were not conservatives, but former Left-liberals who had been mugged by reality, like McAuley, Coleman, Sam Lipski and the two most recent editors of the magazine, Paddy McGuinness and Keith Windschuttle. As sole editor Manne announced that his erstwhile colleagues were a reactionary “old guard”. He moved the magazine to a trendy, progressive “adversary culture” position which supported protectionism and bagged Australian civilisation. His new contributors introduced a foreign tone of moral vanity into the magazine. This development understandably caused Peter great disquiet.

Peter’s family were, like him, productive and successful. His wife Verna wrote biographies of women writers and activists, and their son William published on economics. A daughter, Tanya, married Peter Costello, who like Peter was a suave, eloquent, persuasive figure, who mastered the arts of public life. Though Peter Costello undoubtedly had great natural talents, who knows how much he was one of his father-in-law’s many legacies. Both, though successful, had public careers that were at the end curiously incomplete and under-recognised. Peter Costello was young enough after his mid-life setback to fashion a second successful career for himself. Late in life Peter Coleman had the consolation of reflecting on a variety of impressive careers through which he had contributed to the nation’s vitality.  

Patrick Morgan first published in Quadrant in 1967 under the editorship of James McAuley and Peter Coleman.

 

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James Franklin: A Rare Understanding

Peter Coleman himself was often asked to speak at funerals, and there was a good reason for that. He had a clarity of thought that could summarise what someone’s life had amounted to. At the same time he had a sympathetic emotional attunement that could appreciate what it was like to have someone else’s concerns.

He had a difficult family start, which left him with some permanent burden. It was compensated for in later years by Verna and his children. On the other hand, the kind of things he did in his career lacked tenure, and the reversals of fortune usual in politics and journalism affected him. He wrote successful books, but not ones to bring in big money. It was a precarious life with no chance to rest on laurels even when there were plenty of laurels.

I mention that because he made the most of his experience, to understand others. His unselfish appreciation of people and interest in their stories and ideas is what made him such a success as editor, biographer and oral historian. I recall him saying about another editor, who he thought was a good editor, that he didn’t entirely approve of his just accepting articles whole. Peter thought the editor’s job was to help the writer explain himself or herself as well as possible. Generosity and gratitude were typical of him.

He was chronically restless. He used that to advantage too, in moving across such a range of intellectual and literary areas. Hence the true description, “man of letters”. (Here’s his own comment on that phrase: obsessive scribblers, he says, “try to disguise their affliction under some other label—man of letters, philosopher, academic, humanist, freethinker, writer. None really fits the case …”) As that comment shows, he had a strong sense of the farcical aspects of intellectual and political life. He says:

When I was elected Leader of the Opposition late in 1977, there was no shortage of advice. Clyde Packer rang from California to urge me to buy a greyhound. Rupert Henderson, the legendary director of John Fairfax & Sons, warned me to expect nothing from Fairfax (“They are weak!”) and to take no notice of journalists.

Thus his Memoirs—I think along with The Liberal Conspiracy his most impressive book—is memorable for the recurring phrase, “now a Japanese restaurant”; used as in “I slept at a Kent Street dosshouse and soup kitchen (now a Japanese restaurant), filling many notebooks with ‘observations and reflections’, to be grist to the mill of my novels when the time came …”

Also distinctive of his work was his sound judgment—his ability to grasp the right end of the stick in so many different areas, and have something unique to say. That was true early, when he learned faster than most of his generation which way was up in the Cold War. It was true very late in life too, when he became involved in indigenous affairs, an area he agreed was mostly a wasteland of rubbishy ideas, when he supported the campaigns of Bess and Jacinta Price.

That was true about the big questions of life too. Most general-purpose intellectuals take an “above my pay grade” attitude to questions of religion and the meaning of life. He agonised over them, like his friend James McAuley. As he says, “Once you have contracted the habit of looking behind the screen of life, once you are touched by the compulsion to examine conflicting values and ideas of the world, there is no turning back.”

His final word on the question (I think) was in a 2009 speech. He says:

My Mum was a Christian. She believed in the church—for marriage, baptism, confirmation, Sunday school and so on. Dad was an atheist, hedonist and a bit of a bohemian. In my youth I thought Dad had the better of the argument. But in time I came to believe that my mother was right after all.

But he didn’t feel able to sign up to any sect or creed. Finally, he says, “It is not true that we never learn: Something is gathered in—something worth preserving and passing on.”

Yes indeed. In fifty years’ time, when the young people of today write their memoirs, tearily evoking old Sydney with its long-gone Japanese restaurants, their minds and culture will have been formed, whether they remember or not, by someone who really understood, made his own and passed on the best that was worth preserving.

James Franklin is Professor, School of Mathematics and Statistics, at the University of New South Wales. This is an address he gave at Peter Coleman’s funeral in Sydney on April 8.

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Peter Costello: Peter Coleman’s Journey

When I launched the first edition of Peter Coleman’s memoir Memoirs of a Slow Learner in 1994, I mostly dwelt on the journey of the author. He describes his early life as “growing up radical”. His father, who worked in advertising, was “an apostle of modernity”. It was not just any old kind of modernism either. Peter Coleman’s father Stanley once worked for a newspaper—the Age! After divorce, he settled in Sydney, where Peter joined him. The household was peppered with radical booklets and pamphlets. Peter went on to set a record in selling badges in the “Sheepskins for Russia” campaign.

At Sydney University—in the immediate post-war period—Peter Coleman was taken up with the prevailing leftist zeitgeist. He came under the influence of the ex- and anti-communist Professor John Anderson—which probably saved him from the excesses of student Marxism. By all accounts Anderson was a huge figure of influence on the university and the city at the time. At the launch of the first edition I described this memoir as a:

journey through bohemianism and radicalism in post-war Sydney, through universities in Sydney, London and Canberra, and in and out of the lives of Australians of literary and artistic achievement like Robert Hughes, Bruce Beresford and Barry Humphries. In the background great intellectual wars were raging. There was the war against Stalinism and the struggle for the mind of post-war Europe—a story told by Peter in his book The Liberal Conspiracy—internationally led by Arthur Koestler, Irving Kristol and Raymond Aron. There was the war against the Australian disciples of Stalinism waged stout-heartedly by European émigrés such as Richard Krygier, Frank Knopfelmacher, Heinz Arndt and others. There was the literary war over the Ern Malley hoax and the academic war over Sydney Sparkes Orr.

It is worth reading this book just to get a feel for who was doing what back in those days of the Cold War. It is a description of a world that younger Australians will find hard to believe, how a ruthless dictatorial ideology held sway over many people who regarded themselves as the “intelligentsia”. It would take forty years for the ideology to collapse in failure. As we walk through the world of arts and letters and bohemianism in Australia in the 1940s and 1950s we get an intriguing snapshot of emerging Australian writers and artists.

Today I want to focus more on the aftermath of that journey which the author leaves off at the start of the 1960s. He has an air of pessimism. The icons of his youth are beginning to topple. His academic hero, John Anderson, is playing to undergraduate populism; the church is losing to modernism and unable to explain its concerns in any coherent way. The principal defender of conservatism in Sydney is Warwick Fairfax in the Sydney Morning Herald. No wonder there was defeatism in the air if our best hope of defending traditional values was the Sydney Morning Herald!

This new edition of Memoirs of a Slow Learner includes an appendix written in 2006 titled “Leaves from the Diary of a Madman”, which takes up the story. Coleman finds a new purpose, embarking on a parliamentary career in both state and Commonwealth parliaments. He declares: “I am a Liberal Party liberal because I think the Liberal Party is the best expression of Australian liberalism …”

He is defeated at the state level and loses his seat. But that is followed by resurrection and eventual retirement at the Commonwealth level. It is not a bad record. Enoch Powell observed that “All political careers end in failure.” To get out before the voters finally lay you to rest is as good as one can hope for. Coleman comes to believe that politics is a virus that infects a person and renders them delirious. It cannot be cured, only managed. In times of remission, temporary sanity prevails and opens an opportunity to get out of the full-time parliamentary life on one’s own terms.

Although he leaves politics as a full-time paid career, the author is still infected by the political virus. Now at the age of eighty-six he writes much-read columns for Spectator Australia and Quadrant. He is a judge on the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. Recently he entered the lion’s den of the ABC’s Q&A program.

He regards himself as a secular liberal. Of course there are great schisms within this group. On one hand there are the progressives, interventionists and liberationists. On the other there are sceptics, individualists and traditionalists. Coleman is in the latter camp.

But let me return to Peter Coleman’s 1960s. The church wanted to make a stand against moral relativism which it knew, instinctively, was hostile to the notion of revelation and moral absolutes. Academics were courting popularity and the Sydney Morning Herald was the bastion of conservatism.

Things are much worse today. The church no longer wants to engage against moral relativism, instead it largely echoes it. It does not think its relevance comes from opposing popular fads; it thinks it comes from being in the vanguard of them.

At the recent synod of the Melbourne Anglican Church, the delegates adjourned to be photographed under the banner that hangs from their cathedral that says, “Let’s Fully Welcome Refugees”. It does not have a banner declaring “Support for the Christians being crucified in Syria” or “Solidarity with the Churches being exterminated in Baghdad”. It would consider that divisive or offensive to the multicultural multi-faith view it takes of the world. In contrast, it would see taking on the government over refugees as a unifying cause. It means standing together with all those who read the Age and listen to the ABC, just like them.

After being photographed under the refugee banner the synod reconvened to decide how it could reduce its shareholding in fossil fuel companies. There was no discernible difference in the media coverage given to the Anglican synod compared to that of the Greens’ state convention.

These days, far from being the defenders of traditional or conservative values, the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald lead the fight against them. The church knows it will be attacked by the papers if it takes a traditional position, and widely praised if gets “progressive”. To use modern parlance, this as a no-brainer. If you think positive media coverage is a mark of relevance and success you should get with the program.

Back in the 1960s academics were courting celebrity from undergraduate audiences. But the universities didn’t have press offices and marketing managers as they do today. We now have universities taking huge billboard display advertising to publicise their marketing slogans. Universities take out radio advertising and hire super-boxes at sport stadiums to promote themselves and promote enrolment. They go to enormous effort to recruit overseas students because they can charge them higher fees and generate more revenue for their huge enterprises. They (correctly) describe this as earning export income. Celebrity academics are a wonderful way of promoting a university and its profile. This is a media-obsessed world, this world of Twitter and Facebook. Hits and traffic can be used to measure success more quantitatively than things like rigour and independence.

I hope there is still a place for conscientious academics who think their most important role is to open up inquiring minds, just as there are still faithful clergy who think it is their purpose to minister to souls without being distracted by the obvious failures of organised religion. There are people who still like to think a university should be a place of learning rather than an export industry. This goes to values. Values are deeper than politics.

Secular liberalism may well be an organising principle for public life, but can it speak to and explain our deepest values about learning and art, or our deepest questions about life and death? Peter Coleman knows that the credo of secular liberalism is not as robust as he once thought it was. He is, he says, still in conversation about it.

Peter Coleman’s fellow Quadrant editor and great mentor, the poet James McAuley, thought that the whole edifice of secular liberalism was unsustainable. He put his faith in God. Back in the 1960s Peter Coleman told us he was only one step ahead of the Hound of Heaven. It would be interesting to know if he is still on the run. One last chapter is still to be written about this!

The Hon. Peter Costello, Peter Coleman’s son-in-law, was Commonwealth Treasurer from 1996 to 2007. This edited version of the speech he delivered to launch the revised edition of Memoirs of a Slow Learner in Melbourne in February 2015 appeared in Quadrant in March 2015.

 

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Mervyn F. Bendle: The True Liberal Intellectual

Peter Coleman was at the centre of the most important intellectual shift of the twentieth century. It was an ideological perfect storm—a convergence of forces that brought catastrophe to the liberal intellectual tradition of the West, and elevated neo-Marxist ideology and postmodern obscurantism to the positions of intellectual dominance that they have held ever since. It was the late 1960s, the height of the Cold War, with universities throughout the Western world multiplying like microbes and bursting at the seams as the best and the brightest of the Baby Boomer generation battled through their identity crises and prepared for glittering careers in an emerging post-industrial society. There was a tremendous hunger for one of the new “paradigms” within which the cultural and political chaos of the times could be made to cohere into acceptable personal narratives, providing a comfortable political orientation for this vast cohort.

For several years the result may have been in question, but in 1967-68 it was resolved. First, devastating revelations emerged about the Congress for Cultural Freedom which, along with associated organisations and various high-profile journals, had been established to defend cultural and intellectual freedom from the totalitarian threat. Suddenly it was revealed that it was receiving funding from the CIA—an ideological kiss of death. Second, a series of student rebellions and demonstrations around the world announced the arrival of a new radical form of politics, marked by contrived spontaneity, irresponsibility and irrationalism, and informed above all by a sense of generational change that was simultaneously Oedipal and Promethean in its lust to be sui generis, politically and intellectually new and beholden to nobody. 

The older liberalism was abruptly in disgrace and the New Left in the ascendant. Previously great names like Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Daniel Bell, Raymond Aron, Albert Camus, Robert Conquest, Isaiah Berlin, Edward Shils, James Burnham, Melvin Lasky, Leopold Labedz and Sidney Hook were consigned to intellectual limbo and virtually expunged from intellectual history.

New names appeared, as a cadre of imperious master thinkers was ushered onto stage by such ideological entrepreneurs as Perry Anderson and the other Francophile Trotskyites of the New Left Review. Suddenly, a magical pantheon manifested itself: Foucault, Althusser, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard and Baudrillard; with Gramsci, the Frankfurt School and Chomsky thrown in. (Incidentally, the predominance of French theorists in this pantheon reflects the extent to which they achieved prominence by promulgating a radically simplified and “hyperbolic repetition of German philosophy”, as Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut point out in French Philosophy of the Sixties. By shedding the complexity of the German originals and distorting their core ideas the new master thinkers made them accessible to junior academics and graduate students while also servicing the anti-American, anti-liberal and anti-humanist agendas that increasingly dominated academia and culture.) 

This was an ideological coup of the first order and we have lived with the outcome ever since. We are therefore fortunate that important aspects of the event are illuminated by Peter Coleman’s eminently readable book, The Last Intellectuals: Essays on Writers and Politics, which complements his earlier study, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe, and indeed describes the research and writing of the earlier book. Coleman ranges far and wide in the many essays and articles that make up the book—from a tense meeting in Sydney in 1961 that determined the future of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, to another notable event in 2007 when God apparently chose Coleman as an amanuensis to deliver a missive concerning the atheist views of P.P. McGuinness. In addition to its reflections on “the last intellectuals” and their struggles, it offers many other interesting articles on various cultural and political events and personalities of the past decades, from Xavier Herbert, John Passmore and Pierre Ryckmans, to Bazza McKenzie, Bruce Beresford and John Gorton.

As Coleman recalls, the work of the Congress was “an epic drama in dangerous times”, when cultural issues were literally matters of life and death, especially for those courageous writers, artists and intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain for whom the Congress and its associated journals offered some hope that their voices might be heard and their names might not be forgotten. It offered a forum and a “common voice [for] that mixed company of intellectuals from New York to New Delhi, from Madrid to Melbourne [who were] determined to save civilisation or go down fighting”. The discrediting and collapse of the Congress in 1967 following the revelations about CIA funding decimated the anti-communist forces in the ideological and cultural Cold War, at the worst possible time.

While “the last intellectuals” remained quite capable intellectually of continuing their work and of defending themselves, their work was nevertheless marginalised on university campuses awash with the literature of a vastly empowered and insufferably self-righteous New Left, supplemented by thousands of dirt-cheap Marxist-Leninist publications from Moscow and Peking. The arguments and views of the earlier liberal generation were brushed aside on the basis that they now shared some deeply distasteful collective guilt. Even their acknowledged masterpieces and intellectual breakthroughs could not escape the stigma that had so easily been imposed. Orwell, for example, only escaped absolute condemnation because Homage to Catalonia was read as a favourable account of the Spanish anarchists, who were currently fashionable.

Similarly, at a time when the “Young Marx” and the theory of alienation were central to the New Left critique of contemporary society, Sidney Hook’s brilliant study From Hegel to Marx (1936) could not be admitted to the debate and had to be replaced (or indeed replicated) by The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (1969) by David McLellan, who was a young and untainted Marxist writer. It also became ideologically de rigueur to avoid all authors, such as Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1958) and Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski (Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, 1967), who dared to refer to “totalitarianism”, because the latter term was deemed by the New Left to be a reactionary attempt by “Cold War warriors” to discredit communism by associating it with Nazism (as if it wasn’t capable of discrediting itself). Pre-eminent liberal Sovietologists like George F. Kennan and Adam B. Ulam were denounced and suddenly only arch-leftists like the Trotskyite Isaac Deutscher and the historical relativist E.H. Carr were accredited for the study of Russia and the Soviet Union. 

Liberal sociologists like Edward Shils and Talcott Parsons were similarly condemned as conservative apologists for capitalism because their theories allegedly promoted a false “consensus” view of society, when the New Left insisted that the dastardly truth was only exposed by “conflict” theories like Marxism (and this view still dominates sociology, especially in Australia, which partly explains its demise into breathtaking tedium and irrelevance). Daniel Bell’s seminal insights in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1974) were dismissed because his analysis wasn’t economic determinist and he’d stripped the industrial proletariat of its revolutionary role. James Burnham was absolutely beyond the pale, even though (or because) The Managerial Revolution (1941) identified the rise of the bureaucratic “New Class” that the Left would later largely constitute.

Knowing who was in and who was out in this intellectual game became increasingly important for undergraduates in the early 1970s as they struggled to submit work and express opinions that judiciously reflected the current ideological situation. In time, this ideological coup and associated cynicism reconstituted the arts and social sciences in the image of the New Left, with all its obsessions, rage, moralising, self-loathing and blindness.

Ultimately, the very term “liberal” itself became pejorative, a label to be fixed to any author who observed the tenets of the liberal intellectual tradition and the principles of objective scholarship, while refusing to become an advocate of the favoured causes of the New Left. This approach was exemplified by Chomsky’s extended defence of ideological tendentiousness in “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship” (1969), which concluded that liberal and scholarly ideals and those who hold them exhibited a natural affinity for repression and dictatorship, as was illustrated, according to Chomsky, in the Vietnam War, which he blamed on American aggression and the liberal intellectuals who allegedly defended it.

Much of this history is tragic, and Coleman offers various revealing anecdotes as he recounts his exploits in researching and writing The Liberal Conspiracy. Diana Trilling, for example, declared that the story he had to tell “is littered with broken friendships! What a cesspit!”; while Coleman describes how the 1961 meeting had as its “real agenda … the humiliation of one or other of two leaders of Sydney public life”, in an election for the presidency of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom fought between those who wanted to continue the Association’s campaign against communist totalitarianism, and those who wanted to engage with “the exciting new ideas of the 1960s”, which included the view that anti-communism was becoming old hat and that the two world-systems were “converging”. On that occasion the former group prevailed and the line was held.

A decade later, in 1970, after the demise of the Congress, Coleman attended another meeting, of the Board of the International Association for Cultural Freedom, the successor of the Congress. There he witnessed an “epiphanic moment” and realised the tables had been turned. In discussion, Leo Labedz, the Polish editor of Survey, begged desperately for people to stop deluding themselves: “there had been no ‘end of ideology’, he said, no ‘convergence’ in the Cold War, no liberalisation in the USSR, no new ‘worldwide community of intellectuals’”. Their mission still lay before them, but unfortunately too many liberal intellectuals had become accommodationist and had lost their “former clarity of purpose” and combative élan at precisely the moment when the New Left was undertaking its “long march through the institutions”, in a strategy “which threatened to destroy the universities, politicise cultural life and appease the Soviets”. The following day, in response to Labedz’s lament, the French poet Pierre Emmanuel spoke on behalf of the board. He welcomed the New Left, which he felt was “trying to fill a spiritual emptiness in life”, and he described how his own son-in-law had become “a Maoist apostle of tabula rasa, of a new beginning from zero”. These views provoked little discussion. It had come to this.

What is to be made of such nihilism and of the resigned acceptance of it by an accomplished poet and literary figure like Emmanuel and the members of the Association for whom he spoke? It betrays a crisis at the very roots of Western civilisation that was overwhelming even the best intentions of the “last intellectuals”. Elsewhere in his book Coleman writes of James McAuley that “he was more than a poet. He had a prophetic gift, a sense of the crisis of civilisation that sustained his readers and brothers-in-arms.” Lacking enough people like McAuley, or the completely focused Richard Krygier, or the prescient and intransigent Burnham, or the redoubtable B.A. Santamaria (all of whom Coleman discusses in his book), it is perhaps comprehensible that the resolve of the Association crumbled as the New Left began its “Long March”, and came ultimately to succumb to a despairing accommodationist outlook.

Not that this gesture of intellectual détente was ever reciprocated. As Coleman recounts, the entire generation had to be disparaged by the victors: Koestler was condemned by the Left as a rapist, Orwell as a spy, Silone as an informer, McAuley as a sex maniac, and so on. They were all dismissed as “shits” and consigned to an “ideological gulag for anti-communists whose thought-crime was that they had been right about communism all along”. In Frances Stonor Saunders’s tendentious history The Cultural Cold War (1999), the long and courageous struggle of the Congress was dismissed as a disgraceful deception, and as “all a fiction, a fabricated reality”, in which the ideals of democracy and free enterprise were really just one side of a “Manichean dualism”, matched on the other by the equally credible ideals of bureaucracy and socialism, with both sides just acting out in a silly, “convulsive pas de deux”, unable to admit their foolishness and find the common ground that allegedly had been there all along. Saunders’s contempt is often breathtaking. For example, Diana Trilling is portrayed as being “in a carnal mood” as she declared in the middle of a discussion about intellectuals who were either “hard” or “soft” on communism: “None of you men are hard enough for me!” “They were ridiculous people, really, who lived in a teacup,” the anecdote concludes.

Coleman justifiably gives Saunders short shrift, pointing out her many deficiencies of research, and her juvenile eagerness to assign discreditable characteristics to the leaders and membership of the Congress (“lupine”, “oily”, “fake”, “silly”, “pathetic”). Above all, he points out how she lacked the necessary imagination for the task, the capacity to empathise with the people she was writing about, and was unable to comprehend, much less enter into, their mental world as the global crisis crystallised in the immediate post-war years. As Coleman recalls: “communists and their fellow travellers expected soon to be able to welcome Stalin’s tanks in the streets of Paris and Rome”, while “the old refugees from fascist and communist concentration camps who rallied to the Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1950, were prepared to resist and, if necessary, go down fighting”. To someone like Saunders, born in 1966, such concerns might seem exaggerated, but that was hardly the view of many as they moved from one nightmare to another in post-war Europe.

Unfortunately, there have been many other books seeking to debunk the “last intellectuals” and Coleman has done well in refuting their various outrageous claims. For example, his chapter on Koestler reveals the extent to which Koestler was systematically traduced by David Cesarani in Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (1999). He also quotes an interesting passage by Frank Knopfelmacher that emphasises how the tragedy of Central European Jewry (“a congenital catastrophe without parallel in European history”) must inevitably have found expression in the work of a Jewish intellectual like Koestler. 

Similarly with Orwell, who faced “perhaps the most persistent campaign of all” to destroy his reputation (which is really saying something!). The centrepiece of this was the allegation that Orwell had provided to the government a list of writers who he thought might be collaborators if the Soviets invaded Britain in the immediate post-war period. The Left reacted with outrage: E.P. Thompson, Salman Rushdie, Edward Said, Raymond Williams, Isaac Deutscher and others all joined in their denunciations. Some of them should have known better, while the revelations about how Said artfully constructed his own biography make him a poor authority on integrity.

It is a similar story with Stefan Collini’s Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (2006), where Orwell is treated in a very superficial fashion that manages to gloss over Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, while judging Orwell “obsessive”, “exaggerated”, and of “bad faith”, as Coleman points out. Collini tends to the view that genuine intellectuals are located on the “moderate, non-ideological Left”, where any concern with the totalitarian threat is seen as a personality defect. Other intellectuals are treated in a fashion that reflects their location on the political continuum. For example, the views of Roger Scruton are dismissed as “doctrinaire” and those of R.G. Collingwood as “exaggerated”; while A.J.P. Taylor is allowed to downplay the destructive role he played in many important historical debates, promoting, for example, the still dominant nihilist view of the Great War. Also, as Coleman points out, Taylor used his considerable influence “to promote anti-Americanism and a benign view of the Soviet grand guignol”, in a career that made him one of the most influential intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century.

Ultimately, Coleman concludes, Absent Minds is merely “payback for George Orwell”. (Collini distinguished himself several years ago by celebrating “the aura of omni-competent grandeur” of the prose of the Trotskyite éminence grise Perry Anderson, typified, as Collini approvingly emphasised, by a liberal use of such words as taxative, lustration, censitary, caducity, galumphery and moetic, as well as neuralgic—which may have referred to the effect of such pretension on his spell-checker. 

The acuity of Coleman’s rebuttal to all these attacks is best demonstrated in his essay, which rightly appeared as one of The Best Australian Essays 1999, on Cassandra Pybus’s The Devil and James McAuley. As he laments, according to Pybus’s execrable book with its multitude of mistakes, “McAuley was a committed opponent of communism. Therefore he must have been sick in the head. This is because he repressed his sexuality, especially his homosexuality, or displaced it onto the Devil” … as you do, according to the pseudo-Freudian psychobabble of the Left. Coleman then lists “eight simple rules” for misrepresentation that one can exploit to produce this type of tendentious reading. Working his way through these rules, Coleman recounts many of the key facets of McAuley’s life and identifies the central forces that drove his friend, including McAuley’s poetic genius, religious quest and commitment, philosophical grounding, political activity, academic achievements, unexcelled awareness of the evils of totalitarianism, and his unparalleled ability to express all this in poetic and literary form. 

In a few pages of concise prose informed by a controlled anger, Coleman shows how Pybus’s condescending and dismissive approach produces only another instance of the “ultimate banality” that typifies the obsessive iconoclasm of the contemporary Left.

This is an outstanding book that illuminates many of the most interesting cultural and political events of the past half-century, when the “last intellectuals” stepped forward to hold the line before one of the most sinister threats in the history of the world. It remains a battle that is far from over. It was a battle that Peter Coleman never shirked.

This is an updated version of a review of Peter Coleman’s The Last Intellectuals: Essays on Writers & Politics (Quadrant Books, 2010) that appeared in the September 2010 issue.