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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
THE NEW EDITOR HAS ASKED ME ‘TO WRITE THE KEY ARTICLE ON THE foundation and achievements of Government and Opposition itself’, others to write on aspects of Ghiţa Ionescu's life and work, just as John Pinder has already written such an excellent comprehensive account. I said that that was too tall an order, to sit down and read again, or look over, thirty-one years of it and all those associated books and pamphlets. But Geraint Parry twisted my arm, much as Ionescu used to do, most flatteringly, telling me that ‘the Board felt unanimously that you would be the ideal [sic] person since you were one of the journal's founders’. Even so, all I said I could do would be an essay, mostly from memory, an essai to catch the motives, atmosphere and context of that time, half a life-time ago at the height of the cold war. And as an erstwhile biographer, I know the unreliability of memory.
1 John, Pinder., ‘Ghita Ionescu 1913–96 Freedom and Politics’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 31, No. 4, 1996, pp. 400–25.Google Scholar
2 Even before the explosion of titles in the last decade in Britain and the United States, when periodical publishers have found a way of living off university libraries at inflated prices, and when academics are desperate to publish anything for rival departmental assessment ratings, or renewal of contract, let alone promotion. The worst result of all this multiplication has been, of course, the fragmentation and compartmentalism of disciplines, against which Government and opposition has always fought by telling example.
3 Of the five of us who attended, Isabel de Madariaga was a historian, Julius Could a sociologist, and Leonard Schapiro’s legal and historical approach to Soviet studies was coupled with a scepticism about the pretensions of political science almost as great as that of Michael Oakeshott—and I was a fine pot to call a kettle black. Only Ionescu began to move widely and ever wider in the international political science fraternity. Richard Hofstadter, Professor of American History at Columbia, a good friend of Ghiga’s from New York days, was also a member of the Editorial Board, Even though he could not attend meetings, he made notable contributions and was a very useful source of American contacts, quite unlike the equally distinguished but conventionally inactive members of the Advisory Board.
4 Foord, Archibald S., His Majesty’s Opposition, 1714–1830, Oxford University Press, 1964 Google Scholar. He quoted the Edinburgh Review in 1855, saying that ‘the most salient characteristic of a free country and its principal distinction from despotisms’was’ the legal and acknowledged existence of an organised opposition’. That I called ‘proud nonsense’, asking why ‘organized’ and, even if so, why ‘an’?.
5 To be fair, he grew more and more successful in getting grants for conferences—none of the rest of us were. Conferences were to him an essential part of realizing the journal’s aims; certainly they increased the fame and reputation of the journal and often led to first‐rate articles. But some early experiences taught him that conference proceedings nearly always look banal and disjointed in print.
6 The best and fullest statement of which is found in his Centripetal Politics: Government and the New Centres of Power, London, Hart‐Davis MacGibbon, 1975.
7 Pinder, ibid., p.25.
8 No, the Managing Editor tells me from her files that I have transposed the order of events. So much for memory, as I warned.