nd of the 90s , which Macintyre dislikes so much that he doesn't list them in the bibliography.
They are actually more accessible in bookshops than many of the books he does list.
Macintyre's geographical bias towards Melbourne and towards current fashions in theory and cultural history
An examination of Macintyre's bibliography shows several pronounced biases. A striking feature of the bibliography is a strong representation of what is now called "theory" and "cultural history", and a sharp bias against popular history, public history, etc.
There is also a bias in favour of what I might call tenured university academic history.
There is a very strong geographical bias towards Melbourne and Adelaide. The further history producers get from these Agoras of the South, the less significance is ascribed to them by Stuart Macintyre.
Th ere is a strong bibliographical bias against labour history, ethnic history (other than Aboriginal), and religious history. The Catholics are eliminated from the narrative, most populism and rebellion also. p> What you get is a combination of the aforesaid "cultural history "as the" left ", and academic official history, as both the "left", and the "right", of Macintyre's discourse.
All the populist and Marxist participants in the, apparently now past, debate on class (other than Macintyre himself) are airbrushed out of history, almost as systematically as Stalin's captive historians used to airbrush Trotsky out of Soviet history. What we are left with is a very dull, Anglophile, official history of Australia from which most of the Sturm and Drang, and other excitements and turmoils, have been eliminated. br/>
Stuart Macintyre's intellectual odyssey
This argument with Stuart Macintyre has, in fact, become a bit personal for me, based to some extent on my intellectual disappointment in him. For many years I did not know Macintyre from the proverbial bar of soap. I remembered him vaguely from a distance, at a couple of radical conferences or assemblies in the 1970s.
I remember reading self-confidently ultraleft interventions under his byline in internal Communist Party discussion bulletins and leftist journals that came my way back then. I had very little sympathy with the Left Tendency in the Communist Party, of which Macintyre was a part, and its Althusserian rhetorical leftist ultimatism. Their standpoint seemed to me quite remote from any realistic Marxism that could be applied to the problems of the Australian labour movement. p> Later on, I became rather more aware of Macintyre's historical work and I was excited by one of his two early books, A Proletarian Science (Cambridge University Press 1980), which was an intellectual history of the influence of Marxism on the working-class founders of the British Communist Party. In this book, Macintyre uniquely developed a study of the phenomenon of autodidact proletarian intellectuals and their encounter with Marxism, and the extraordinary way that this encounter dominated the life of the early British Communist Party.
It struck me at the time how applicable this was to the Australian Communist Party, the early Trotskyist movement in Australia, and indeed the Australian labour movement as a whole, because similar working class autodidacts were the overwhelmingly dominant ideological force in the Australian labour movement until very recently. p> His other early book, Little Moscows (Croom Helm 1980), a study of some isolated working class communities in Britain, where the Communist Party had been uniquely influential, I found also quite interesting, although Macintyre's tendency to view those places and events as a kind of Marxist antiquarian was already apparent in this book, and in retrospect foreshadowed his later shift to the right politically.
His earliest Australian book, written when he was getting his academic start in Australia, in Perth, his very fine The Life and Times of Paddy Troy (1984), is about the quintessential Australian Communist autodidact trade union official.
Some of Macintyre's later Australian books, such as A Colonial Liberalism: The Lost World of Three Victorian Visionaries (1991, and The Labour Experiment (1988), Macintyre's own book on the early development of the arbitration system, are extremely useful.
One thing that flows from my knowledge of his early work is that it does not seem reasonable to pass over the thrust and orientation of his recent and more reactionary books, The Reds , the Oxford Companion , and the Concise History , with the ideological let-out that he may not know any better. Several historians with whom I have discussed the book have agreed that some of my major...
