How I Became a Free Radical

John Carroll’s memoir in the May issue of Quadrant has stimulated me to write about my experience travelling politically in the diametrically opposite direction from him. He and I were at Cambridge at almost the same time, my last year being his first. I was then on the committee of the Cambridge University Conservative Association and a Europhile, co-founding the Confederation of European Student Associations in 1966. Now that I am in the middle of my third age, I travel ever further to the political Left. I started by fancying myself as Disraeli light: I am ending as Gladstone heavy. John is a professor of sociology: I am a professor of accounting. John resonates with Burke: I resonate with Zizek.

John had two formative political experiences. The first in Papua New Guinea in 1963 made him a Hobbesian, believing in the need to regulate behaviour and setting him against the noble-savage conceit of Rousseau. The second was the student sit-ins and demonstrations of May 1968, which…