Norman Birnbaum is University Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University Law Center. He has taught at Oxford and Amherst College and had visiting posts at European universities. He was one of the founding editors of New Left Review and is on the Editorial Board of 
The Nation. His most recent book: After Progress: American Social Reform and European Socialism in The Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press, 2001. He is presently writing a memoir.

Yet hath my night of life some memory,
my wasting lamps some fading glimmer left.
Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors, V. 1.

“That’s history” is an American expression, in which “history” means not the past recalled or invented but dropped into the memory hole, or in any event not deemed worth bothering about. No nation, of course, is more imprisoned in its past than mine, not despite but because of its obdurate refusal—even with the great efforts of our historians—to face it. The failing isn’t exclusively American, and affects cultures and institutions great and small. Even the LSE in its bright and shining new form, might profit from a look back. An entirely personal one follows.

I came to the LSE in the fall of 1953, aged twenty-seven, as an Assistant Lecturer in Sociology, and left in 1959 for an appointment at Oxford University. When I arrived, I had visited the UK twice previously; the first time being earlier that year for ten days, and then again briefly for the interview preceding my appointment. I had spent the academic year 1952-53 in Germany (at the universities of Marburg and Heidelberg), gathering material for a Harvard doctorate in sociology on the Reformation in the German cities. Taking up the post in London, then, entailed entering two very different European cultures in rapid succession.

I suppose that I could claim that as a native New Yorker from the Bronx, when areas now entirely Black and Latino were inhabited by a large Jewish community with Italian and Irish districts at the borders, I was used to cultural diversity. The claim would be untrue. The New York I grew up in was marked by class and ethnic segregation. I attended the academically excellent high school of the City College of New York, where the students were mostly from the Jewish lower middle and working class.

I had an advantage, since my father was a high school teacher and there were plenty of books in our home. Our teachers, actually, were rather different. Those were Depression years, and many of them had doctorates. Ten years later they would have been in university teaching posts. An interesting contingent were the Irish, who brought to the classroom something of what I later identified as Jesuit rigour. There were old family Protestants and, of course, a considerable contingent of Jewish teachers of my father’s generation. One teacher had helped the Spanish Republic, another worked with Einstein: we were much impressed by each.

The atmosphere at school (Townsend Harris High School, named for the first American pro-consul in Japan) was a singular mixture of political fervour and the progressivism of the New Deal. Some students came from unionized families, and the struggles between Stalinist and Trotskyite interpretations of the world crisis found their way into our political arguments. The Nazi-Soviet pact divided our spirits, but we resented the legislative harassment and dismissal of a very few of our teachers who were Communists. Our teachers espoused a standard version of American higher culture, descended from New and Old England in a straight line. One who was dismissed as a Communist taught Wordsworth, but I do not recollect mention of the poet’s ardour for the French Revolution.

It was only when political activity in a New Deal student movement brought me out of this milieu that I met persons of my age from much more prosperous families. Children of bankers, lawyers, physicians, they lived on Central Park West or West End Avenue, a social world removed from ours. They took for granted that they would be going to elite private colleges. One of them, who attended a private school, introduced me to the cultural-political journal Partisan Review, whose attempted fusion of Marxism and modernism was bewilderingly different from the progressivism I had inherited at home and at school. The journal’s London correspondent was George Orwell. It was a period in which I read widely, encountered both Harold Laski and John Strachey, and learned about the Fabians and the founding of the LSE. I learned of its connection with the struggles of the thirties and forties, and before I was sixteen, it had mythic status for me.

Meanwhile, film and novels made London and Britain more tangible. Of course, we all remembered Britain’s truly finest hour—between the fall of France and the German attack on the Soviet Union. Like many in my generation, I can still visualize the cartoon by Low depicting a Tommy on the English cliffs, shaking a fist in defiance of a black cloud moving across the Channel: “Very well then, alone!”

I spent a semester at City College after leaving high school in January of 1942, and then went to Williams College in the fall. It was the incarnation of New England’s culture, this time espoused by a faculty composed entirely of Americans from early waves of immigration, many of whom were ardent New Dealers. I interrupted my college studies at seventeen, and worked for two years for a US government wartime propaganda agency in New York, where I met a lot of American journalists from Kansas and Texas and other places I knew only from film and novels. I returned to college at the end of the war, and then began doctoral studies at Harvard in 1947.

I spent five splendid years at Harvard, where a resident tutorship in one of the houses and wide acquaintanceship in the university brought me out of the narrowness of Harvard sociology, with its ambitions to construct a science of society. The rest of the university had its own deformations. Harvard understood itself, correctly, as the intellectual capital of the new American empire. The United States as the heir of the ages—and especially of tired Europe—was its belief about the nation, inextricably tied to the conviction that since Harvard served country so well, the rest of America was bound to be delighted by Harvard’s leadership. (There is a bon mot about Harvard: “You can always tell a Harvard man, but you cannot tell him much.”) A good deal of this was clothed as a theory of historical progression, in which the US incarnated modernity, the goal—however distant, and however little they knew or acknowledged it—of all cultures. It was this superbly uncritical view of the US which made it unnecessary for Harvard, in the early Cold War years, to deal seriously with either Marxism or with less triumphalist interpretations of our own history.

Great Britain had a role in this, as an honored if distant ancestor, whose descendants were shabby, if still genteel. Quite a few Harvard faculty members had studied in the UK, mainly at the older universities, many had wartime memories of Great Britain, some had worked with British officials during and after the war. There was some interest in the new welfare state and the work of the Labour governments. The end of British Empire was taken stolidly, as if a fact of nature, not history. Hobbes, Locke and Mill were certainly more familiar than Rousseau and Comte. Keynes had become an icon, the struggles over his legacy in the UK and Europe of interest to a very few. There was a residual attachment to Britain, a familial deference without sharp contours. A stream of British academic visitors passed through, their conversational talents often more evident than their intellectual achievements. Karl Popper spent a year at Harvard, but—important in Cambridge—charmed no one. Isaiah Berlin, by contrast, was a welcome visitor, who also had the supreme virtue of flattering his hosts’ belief that they were now at the apex of civilization.

Between Harvard and the LSE, I spent a year in a country whose elites treated Britain and things British with distant respect. World power had passed to the US and to the Soviet Union, in possession of a third of Germany. It was thought indiscreet to speak or write openly of Britain’s eclipse—and, in any event, the German elites were trying desperately to extricate themselves from the consequences of their own defeats. I do think that many educated Germans admired what they thought of as British dignity in an altered historical situation, and they were European and insightful enough to attribute it to the British sense of historical continuity. Perhaps, indeed, that was what the Harvardians admired in Britain: it was a university peopled by those ambitious above all to move out of their own milieu.

These were the experiences I had before coming to the LSE. None prepared me for the most obvious of initial obstacles: I had to learn a new language, or several, since the classes and peoples of Britain did not speak in one tongue. To make matters more difficult, much of the new language was unspoken. It consisted of conventions of address, meaningful pauses, small coughs, slight movements of the head, quiet inflections of voice, and occasionally, the sheer refusal of response. It took me a while, for instance, to grasp that in learned debate, the phrase “I do not quite understand” had to be translated as “I understand all too well, that is, I see through your preposterously weak argument.”

The techniques of sly indirection and punctuated silence of the Senior Common Room had counterparts at the greengrocers, but these too had to be learned.

No historical intuition, further, prepared me for the fact that Britain was exhausted. The twenty-one years between the cross Channel carnage of the First World War and the home terrors of the Second were definitely not a long respite: there was the Depression.

Six years of war thereafter had drained many of energy, and the vigour of the young was reined by an inherited scepticism: they learned, early, that starting over was an illusion.

The material deprivations of the immediate post-war years were not compensated by the élan of social reconstruction. I arrived in the UK two years after Attlee left office, met both the leaders and followers of Labour’s campaigns, and did not think that theirs was a condition of all passion spent. It was, rather, of tasks dutifully accomplished.

The contrast with the self-satisfied optimism of Harvard was very great. Therein, however, was a lesson I could not have learned on the other side of the Atlantic. My British colleagues in the social sciences (and their contemporaries in the arts) took the density and resistance of history as given. My twenty-one year old students were more aware of the complexities of their existence than their counterparts in the US.

The caricatured British don whose philosophy of history reduced itself to “History? History is one damned thing after another!” was onto something, although there were more elegant ways to describe slow processes of historical accumulation. It was not an accident that British historians gave Marxism a depth and specificity its schematic proponents usually lacked. Like their less radical colleagues, they did not expect to leap into a new world: the one they lived in, they thought, was here to stay for the indefinite future. The resigned scepticism with which they all scrutinized new ideas could and sometimes did degenerate into complacency. It was, however, the resistance to dogma of intellectually low churchmen—not the worst thing in a world of multiple illusions.