Second Part

0:09:07 Memories of Peter Laslett; Locke's library; Jack Plumb; Laslett's enthusiasm and encouragement of students; his deep understanding of Locke; enjoyment of working with him; charming with his students

13:03:09 Brought to King's by Noel Annan although Edmund Leach was Provost when I arrived; first six months of his term was complete chaos but he became an extraordinarily good Provost and made King's an intellectually exciting place to be; the sequence from Leach to Bernard Williams was distinctive and Williams was  so publicly clever; with Leach it was more impulsive and he made the College a social whole whereas Williams was more detached; there are Fellows who I have become involved with because of their role in the institution such as Martin Hyland; the College now is a somewhat depleted version of what it was in the glory days; there are people who overlap with my interests such as Istvan Hont; I was a feudal dependent of the College for quite some time as it was my primary association with the University; the relationship with the College is thus both more menial and more intimate; as the role changes over time the menial drops away but the personal ties do not; it has meant that King's has consumed a lot more of my emotion and quite a lot more of my time; my wife thinks this an occasion for regret but I can't pretend that I feel that; later became a lecturer in the Department of Social and Political Sciences and subsequently a Reader, then Professor

28:09:18 Cambridge as a university is important as a place to teach as you can be certain of extremely good students; for intellectual life there is a constant rejuvenation process; in some respects it is extremely cosmopolitan as people come from all over the world; it is an easy place in which to form and maintain intellectual friendships with people from far away; if you are a Fellow of a College over decades then you a guaranteed to have friends from other disciplines which is a very good thing in the modern world; this is much more difficult in small, provincial, universities; although I had a very nice time at Harvard as a Harkness Fellow in the 1960's and have taught at Yale etc., I would be more dismayed at the thought of going and staying there now; the America that I first went to was at its most Europe-friendly, social democracy-friendly, in its entire history and it has moved back a very long way since; I find it very much less attractive now and politically offensive

35:14:11 Anthony Giddens and the Department of Social and Political Sciences; my association with Sandy Robertson happened because I was keen to look at part of the post-colonial world in relation to political theory; the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana, a former student of King's, came to the College and invited any Fellow to come and teach at his University; no scientist wished to go but I did; a few months before I went I learnt that there was a post-doctoral student in Cambridge, Sandy Robertson, who was going to work in Ghana for a couple of years on a project on Ghanaian local government; Jack Goody suggested we might cooperate which we agreed to do; Sandy went to work about 250 miles from Accra and I taught in the University; in the vacations I went to see him; when he went back to Cambridge he handed me his 'habitat' so I spent several months working there at the end; when I came back to Cambridge we discussed writing a book together and decided we could; he was a very good person to cooperate with; I had about five months from the time I got a University job until I had to start teaching in which time I managed to write my half of the book; it did give a picture of what had happened in one bit of Africa both before and after the colonial period ended; at that time is was an original piece of work and was quite a success

51:10:24 Thoughts on democracy; originally inspired by Moses Finley's lectures on Athenian democracy; have come back to the subject a number of times; experience in Ghana showed that what was so toxic about the character of a post-colonial state might be detoxified by democracy, which is the current political formula for a least attempting that task; there are some special difficulties in implementing democracies successfully in Africa; thought about this much in 1970's and 1980's; pulled back to it in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union; you have to think of most countries today through the category of democracy or against it; thought I would try to show why that was so and the last book that I wrote was an attempt to do that; think the book shows that the way in which professional students of politics look at democracy is incoherent; always convinced that it would be a mistake for Ghana to opt deliberately for a political structure which wasn't democratic but was aware that the conflictual potentialities in a society like Ghana were very high; see in the last years that this is actually a central hazard space in contemporary human life and we are all acutely vulnerable to the increasingly obvious judgement that there is no other alternative space of a safer kind to be secure;  feel I have got onto a very important trail