Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | A | Arena Magazine

Donald Horne reflects on John Anderson & Australian civilisation.

Article Excerpt
Mark Weblin (ed.), A Perilous and Fighting Life: From Communist to Conservative--The Political Writings of Professor John Anderson Pluto Press, 2003

Where is the key to this selection of political pieces by John Anderson (now seen as legendary creator of Sydney's Andersonians')? It begins with an article on proletarian power he wrote For a Communist newspaper not long after he arrived at Sydney University from Glasgow in 1927 and ends with a claim he made in a university literary journal in 1952: that to arrest cultural decline one must uphold privilege.

The key is in Anderson's original faith in the productive and liberating power of the workers and then in that faith's collapse.

At the beginning of the book are reminders of his romantic belief as a communist that the working class, along with artists and scientists, made up 'the new society within the old'. Following the French socialist Georges Sorel, Anderson saw the workers as potential liberators; opposing the ethic of 'the consumers' that could burn away the creative spirit of "Science, Art and Industry', they upheld instead the ethic of 'the producers'--with a productive life that was enterprising, cooperative and self reliant.

But by 1939 when, as a 17-year-old student, I had become an 'Andersonian', the scene had changed to the realities of the Moscow trials, the exposures of the Soviet Union as...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!