T~lli AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

RESEARCH SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

HISTORY OF IDEAS UNIT

Professor and Head of Unit

Professorial Fellow

Senior Fellow

Senior Research Fellow

Visiting Fellows

Honorary Fellow

Research Assistant

ANNUAL REPORT 1976

E. Kamenka, BA Syd., PhD ANU, FASSA, FAHA

R.R. Brown, BA New Mexico PhD Land., FASSA

S.L. Goldberg, BA Melb., BLitt Oxon, FAHA

H. Caton, MA Chic., Ph.D. Yale (to January)

K.R. Minoguc (Reader in Political Science, London School of Economics and Political Science)

M.A. Rose (Lecturer in German in the University of New South Wales)

Iring Fetscher (Professor of Political Science in the University of Frankfurt and Seminar Director, Frankfurt Institute for Social Research)

M.C. Phillips (Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of Edinburgh)

Emeritus Professor P.H. Partridge

MTs E.Y. Short, MA Edinburgh

By the end of 1975 the severe financial stringencies and uncertainties imposed upon Australian Universities had had very direct and serious impact upon the History of Ideas Unit as one of the smallest and most recent developments in the School, still in the period of initial growth, though other Departments and Units have of course also suffered. Appointments had been delayed, the possibility of holding visitors against unfilled established posts inhibited, if not removed, the reality of Unit and Departmental establishments thrown into question and flexible forward planning on a disciplinary basis thus made extremely difficult. During 1976, as part of the general policy of reviewing the work of departments and units in the University, a Review Committee was established to examine; in the light of these difficulties, the position and future development of Units in the Research School of Social Sciences. The Committee, in its report, showed considerable sympathy for and appreciation of the work of the Unit and recommended an academic establishment of five - three tenured posts and two non-tenured posts - one less than it had been asked for. It accepted

the Unit's request that one of the non-tenured posts be treated flexibly as providing a fund, as part of the Unit budget, for the specific purpose of encouraging visitors and short-term appointments as an integral feature of the Unit's work.

The Unit therefore enters 1977 with its position considerably improved vis-a-vis 1975, with a strong core of tenured staff, though for the foreseeable future numerically weaker than it would like to

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be on non-tenured staff. Mr S.L. Goldberg, formerly Robert Wallace Professor of English in the University of Melbourne, took up his appointment in the Unit in January 1976, Dr A.D. Megill of the Department of History of the University of Iowa and Dr M.A. Rose of the Department of German in the University of New South Wales are to take up appointment in January 1977 to two-year and one-year Research Fellowships respectively. Dr Megill has been preparing for publication his work on the eighteenth­century debate on the origin of language and Dr Rose will be studying the literary work of Marx and Engels, including the young Marx's poetry.

The scholarly work of the Unit's tenured staff now spans three central areas in the history of ideas of the post-renaissance period: the history of social thought and of legal ideas and revolutionary ideologies (Professor Kamenka); the development of concepts and problems in the social sciences (Dr Brown); the relationship between literature and thought as well as the special nature and logic of the 'ideas' embodied in works of literature and literary criticism (Mr Goldberg). The work of the Unit is transdisciplinary rather than interdisciplinary; it does not mechanically bring together people from different disciplines but seeks out people whose own concerns, outlook and abilities make it possible for them to make material from different disciplines into part of the one story, part of an examination of the development of thinking about man, culture and society in the modern era. Mr Goldberg, apart from continuing to edit The Critical Review, has been working on a critique of the idea of 'modernism' in the arts (a topic on which he gave several papers during the year), on the inter-relationship between ideas of nature, the individual and meaning in early seventeenth-century literature and on the work of F.R. Leavis and the concept of 'realisation'. During December Mr Goldberg_comm~n~ed a short ~eriod o~ study leave during which he is visiting the Un~vers1t1es of Cambr1dge, Ed1nburgh and Sussex.

Dr Brown continued as editor of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy and served as a member of the Executive Committee of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, besides acting as Head of the Unit from July to October. He has prepared for publication a long paper on the topic of mental health and physical illness, revised and expanded his critique of the New Criminology for the forthcoming volume Law and Society: The Crisis in Legal Ideals (ed. Brown, Kamenka and Tay) and continued with his study of the development of the idea of social law~, looking especially at the work of French and British writers on economic questions from 1750-1850. At the annual conference of the Australasian Association of Philosophy in Melbourne in August he chaired the special symposium on the philosophy of the social sciences.

Professor Kamenka has continued to work on contemporary thinking about law and society, on aspects of classical apd contemporary Marxism and on the development of social thought, apart from taking office, in May, as Secretary of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. During a short period of study leave in August, September and October he visited France, worked in the Max Planck Institute for Private Inter-

national Law and Foreign Private Law in Hamburg, gave lectures and seminars in the Universities of Edinburgh and East Anglia and the Bundesinstitut fur ostwissenschaftliche und internationale Studien in Cologne and visited colleges in the University of Oxford. He has also been actively involved, as Secretary of the Organising Committee, in planning the World Congress on Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy to be held in Australia in August 1977, in which Dr Brown and several other members of the Unit and the School are also taking an active part. Dr Caton, who had completed a monograph on the obsolescence of social science during 1975, left the Unit in January to take up appointment to a Chair in the Humanities in Griffith University, Brisbane. The Unit's two PhD students - Mr M. Krygier, BA LLB Sydney, and Mr Simon Cowen, BA ANU - have continued their work on modern social thought: Mr Krygier has been concerned with the concept of bureaucracy and the Trotskyist analysis of Stalinism after completing some preliminary work on Saint-Simon; he presented papers on these topics to the Unit seminar and the Australasian Political Studies Association's conference on 'The New Class' and acted during the year as Review Editor of the intellectual monthly Quadrant. Mr Cowen, who is working on the problem of Technik and Praxis, principally in the work of Jurgen Habermas, has been looking at the work of Theodor W. Adorno and ofHerbert Marcuse, on whom he presented papers to the Unit seminar.

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Visitors have continued to play an important role in the intellectual work of the Unit and in its programme of weekly seminars, attended by significant audiences from a variety of departments and disciplines in the University and outside it. Mr Minogue, during first term, gave a series of papers on Ideology and Dr Rose spoke on the Poetry of Karl Marx 1836-37 and The Role of Literary Satire in Marx's Works; Professor Fetscher dealt with various Marxist conceptions of the role of intellectuals in the emancipatory movements of the working class, with the work of Georg Lukacs and with that of Antonio Gramsci. Dr Phillips presented a paper on the Augustan analogy in cultural self­definition in eighteenth-century England besides leading a discussion about the relationship between the history of literature and the history of ideas. Other speakers during the year included Dr A.C. Crombie, Reader in the History and Philosophy of Science in the University of Oxford, with whom the Unit is planning a major seminar on the history and historiography of the medical and biological sciences in 1979, Dr L.J. Hume, (Political Science, SGS) who spoke on Bentham's democratic theory and Professor R.B. Rose (History, Tasmania) who read a paper based on his forthcoming study of Babeuf.

Two of the volumes being prepared for the Edward Arnold series Ideas and Ideologies, under the general editorship of the Head of the Unit, have been completed during the year - Law and Society: The Crisis in LegaZ IdeaZs (ed. Kamenka, Brown and Tay) and Human Rights (ed. Kamenka and Tay) - and are expected to appear in London in September 1977; two more, Bureaucracy and ImperiaZism, as well as the volume Law~Making in AustraZia to be published by Edward Arnold in Melbourn~are now in preparation.

Members of the Unit and visitors have continued to play a very active role in lecturing, examining and giving seminars in other Departments and Universities. Professor Kamenka acted as Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law in the University of Sydney, teaching undergraduate and post-graduate courses on Human Rights and concepts

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of social justice, besides g1v1ng some lectures in the Faculty of Economics in the University of Sydney and in the history and theory seminar in the School of General Studies. During January he visited Perth to lecture in the University and the University Summer School. Mr Goldberg lectured in the Department of English in the School of General Studies and in Griffith University, Brisbane; Professor Fetscher and Mr Minogue lectured in the University of Sydney Law School and in Universities in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. Dr Phillips, who had spent an earlier period as Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of English in the University of Melbourne, spent his time in the Unit com­pleting work on two sections of a critical biography of the poet William Blake being prepared for the Clarendon Press and made final revisions to a collection of essays submitted to Princeton University Press.

PUBLICATIONS

* BANKS, R.J.

'The Intellectual Encounter between Christianity and Marxism: A Contribution to the pre-history of a Dialogue', Journal of Contemporary History~ 1976, 2 and 3, Vol.II, 309-331.

'Paul's View of Freedom', Journal of Christian Education~ 1976, 55, 40-48.

BROWN, R.R.

'Psychosis and Irrationality' in Rationality and the Social Sciences~ Benn, S.I. and Mortimore, G.W. (eds.), 332-~. j~>

GOLDBERG, S.L.

'Shakespeare's Centrality', Critical Review~ 18, 1976, 1-22.

KAMENKA, E. (ed.)

Nationalism. The Nature and Evolution of an Idea~ corrected U.K. edition with new index, Edward Arnold, London, 1976: vi + 135.

KAMENKA, E.

The Age of Feuerbach: Contemporary Changes in the Perception of Man~ Law and Society. The Annual Lecture~ l9?5~ Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, Canberra, 1976: 24.

'Marxism and Ethics. A Reconsideration', in S. Avineri (ed.) Varieties of Marxism~ The Van Leer Foundation, Jerusalem, 1976.

KAMENKA, E. and f TAY, Al i ce E- S.

'Participation, "Authenticity" and the Contemporary Vision of Man, Law and Society', in R.S. Cohen, P.K. Feyerabend and M.M. Wartofsky (eds.), Essays in Memory of Imre Lakatos~ D. Reidel, Dordrecht­Holland, 1976, 335-358.

* former member

t not a member of this University

,----------------------------------------------------------------.,

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KAMENKA, E. and f TAY, Alice E-S.

'Socialism, Liberty and Law', in Owen Harries (ed.), Liberty and Politics. Studies in Social Theory, Pergamon Press for the Workers' Educational Association of New South Wales, Sydney, 1976, 81-101.

* SAWER, P .M.

'New Directions in Historical Materialism', in Australian Journal of Politics and History, 22, 2(August) 243-257.

* former member

t not a member of this University