Dangerous Hero. Tom Bower
Читать онлайн.| Название | Dangerous Hero |
|---|---|
| Автор произведения | Tom Bower |
| Жанр | Политика, политология |
| Серия | |
| Издательство | Политика, политология |
| Год выпуска | 0 |
| isbn | 9780008299590 |
William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © Tom Bower 2019
Cover image © Getty Images
Tom Bower asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008299576
Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008299590
Version: 2019-03-18
To Veronica
Contents
5 Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad
The genesis of this book started exactly fifty years ago.
At the end of January 1969, a group of Marxist and Trotskyist students at the London School of Economics led a stormy protest against the school’s director, an authoritarian from Southern Rhodesia. He had ordered the staff to close a series of gates inside the building in Aldwych to prevent a students’ meeting in the school’s Old Theatre. In the mêlée, at about 5 p.m., a caretaker guarding the gates died from a heart attack and the students instantly started a month-long occupation, igniting similar sit-ins across Britain’s universities.
Throughout that first night of occupation, hundreds of LSE students crowded into the Old Theatre to debate the prospects of a Marxist revolution in Britain. Led by American graduates from Berkeley, California, where the student revolt against the Vietnam War had started five years before, and with speeches from French and German students, battle-scarred from 1968 street fights in Paris and Berlin, LSE’s Marxists and Trotskyists (there were many) told us we were the vanguard of a worldwide revolution – which would begin with the students, and the workers would follow. We believed it.
Aged twenty-three and from a conservative background, I had completed my law degree at the LSE (the country’s best law faculty at the time), and while studying for the Bar exams was employed on legal research projects at the college. Long before that dramatic night I had concluded that English law protected property rights at the expense of the rights of individuals and real democracy. Surrounded by articulate Marxists studying sociology and government, and going to lectures by Ralph Miliband and other Marxist teachers, I became attracted to their analysis of society. In that era, for anyone interested in politics that was not surprising.
In