Second Part

0:09:07 Came to Cambridge in October 1970; John Barnes had been elected to the Chair of Sociology in 1968 and the idea was that Social and Political Sciences as a tripos would largely consist of bits drawn from elsewhere - political thought from history, some of the more comparative sociological things from anthropology, bits of social psychology from management and engineering; there were things that were not available in the University so three lectureships were established in 1969 to provide those - one was to teach methods, which was the lectureship in sociology that I took, one was developmental psychology which Martin Richards took, and one was comparative sociology which Malcolm Ruel took; there were two or three posts in sociology in the economics faculty where the subject had been introduced in the 1960s - Tony Giddens and Ray Jobling were lecturers there; John Barnes became and remains a very close friend; I think him to be a very good anthropologist; there were two difficulties, one was that he was more of an anthropologist than a sociologist; he was not very interested in modernity but sociology is largely about that; remember there was a paper on the sociology of economic life where people talked largely about industry, labour and management; John gave a lecture on peasants which perhaps symbolised the nearest he could come; secondly, he did not really want to take much responsibility and didn't like administration, so it fell to others; not entirely unfortunate for me; in the early years of SPS we had external chairmen who could be very powerful, like Moses Finley, and a lot of the leg work was then done by the junior staff who were the academic secretaries as the chairman only appeared every other Tuesday afternoon; John Barnes was, however, a true liberal, a very decent man; the ideology of SPS was much more left-wing; nevertheless, being a liberal, he suited SPS very well as it would have been very difficult if we had had someone who imposed a particular vision of the social sciences; my wider view of SPS is that it was a notionally radical entity created in the most deeply conservative of circumstances; it was a set of compromises where everybody from genetics to theology wanted to have a say, as a result of which no one intellectual voice was primary; I think that in many ways that was a good thing; my experience of the social sciences is that when they start institutionally trying to define themselves, excluding other things, then a rigid theoreticism and methodological obsession takes hold; I think the environment of Cambridge and John's character kept SPS plural; quite inadvertently it sustained its conservative inspiration

8:31:00 I am a tremendous admirer of Jack Goody; I love the range and intellectual openness, his almost matter-of-fact originality, that he will take cooking or flowers to be self-evidently as serious a subject as kinship; he is so prolific; he was better than most other heads of the anthropology department had been at exciting young people; his own anthropology was possibly not of the deepest but his encouragement of others, and the creation in Adams Road and in Free School Lane of a welcoming atmosphere, seemed to me terrific; I am sure that Ernest Gellner was much more deeply reflective, Leach in his own tortured way, much more brilliant, Marilyn Strathern is very intense, but Jack has a set of qualities which none of them had; just his presence seems to me have been crucial to the subject of anthropology in the 1970s and 80s, but that is just looking from the outside; looking at anthropology with John Beattie's remark in mind, the subject has a genius for reinventing itself, unlike sociology which has drifted into some sort of sterile backwater, at least for the moment; it was particularly vivid in Cambridge because Jack was so good at energizing the subject; John Barnes had the same liberality but not the same energy

12:57:05 There was nobody else around who could have done what Tony Giddens did; tremendous confidence, managerial energy, will and determination to get something done; I was very nervous about doing what he did when he did it as I didn't think we had the resources; he took the view that he had to introduce a part 1 and try to extend the number of students because that was the only way to get more money; meanwhile the load on the staff was terribly heavy; we disagreed about that; also thought that in contrast to Barnes and Goody, Tony wasn't a very liberal character; it still seems to me that Cambridge flourishes because it tolerates intellectual heterogeneity; it hires clever people and lets them do what they want to do; for Tony the corollary of giving a faculty an institutional identity was  disciplinary distinctiveness; what that meant was that a particular vision of sociology was given pre-eminence over politics and social psychology, and there was no connection with anthropology because he wasn't interested in it; I didn't think that it was right for this place, but at the same time I can see its practical point; it made the University sit up, made the schools acknowledge its existence, but I think quite a high price was paid for it; what Tony did bringing it together in this way caused the later explosion that led into separating departments as there were too many of us who were not happy to be corralled in this way

16:29:22 I realize that I have had a problem with sociology all the time; when I came into sociology I was attracted by ethnographies of British society; a book by Brian Jackson and Denis Marsden 'Education and the Working Class', was published in 1962, and that book spoke to me for obvious reasons; Young and Willmott's work on family etc., and by others, a lot of whom had been trained as anthropologists, seemed to me terrific and that sociology was going to say what life was like in Britain; sociology had two other sets of ambitions, one was to be a generalizing science, and Tony had something of that; the other was to agonise about a distinctive method; one of the reasons I have always admired historians and anthropologists is that they seem much less preoccupied by method; I had been employed to teach it and completely lost my faith in it; I think that the subject got distracted by these two dispositions - obsession with method and the desire to be a synthetic science - and lost its ethnographic impulse; where are the ethnographies of modern Britain? - they exist in novels, and some work by anthropologists or social historians like Raphael Samuel; I am as guilty as anybody because I did not go out and do it; Cambridge is a very abstracted university and inclines people much more to theory; in a subject where there is a temptation to very high levels of excessively generalising abstraction, and this  has been a bad environment for sociology; this is just one view and many people would say I never really was a sociologist anyway, and perhaps I wasn't; this great hope of the sixties, nowhere is it on the intellectual front line; psychology has moved into the study of neurology, philosophy has broadened out and has become interesting again, anthropology keeps finding new life in itself, the study of history keeps renewing itself, English has broadened into cultural studies - these subjects are alive, where has sociology gone? - nowhere really; at Harvard, where I was offered a job in sociology for a second time, the department was more or less collapsing; it was for a similar reason as Harvard had tried to maintain a more ancient conception of the subject, with a group of clever, heterogeneous individuals, but the professionals were moving in and wanted more methodologists and theorists, and the subject was being killed

23:24:11 I used to enjoy book reviewing, partly because I enjoy reading; Daniel Bell once lamented that his natural length for pieces was 17,000 words which nobody wanted; my natural length is about 2,500 words which was one of the reasons that I likes reviewing; it offers the same pleasure and discipline that supervising does - the thing I have loved most about my job is supervising; it forces one to get a subject, unpack it, to make it clear without becoming crude, and have an argument about something, all in the space of fifty minutes and I have always most enjoyed talking to undergraduates; lecturing I enjoy less, though I  liked getting the material together but I was very nervous; I found it very difficult often to persuade myself that I had enough to say that was interesting and worth taking fifty minutes of an audience's time; it is different from a supervision as one is constantly monitoring whether the interest is there; in a lecture, unless you are very good at playing to the audience, it is more difficult as I am not confident enough; remember Quentin Skinner saying to me that one has to persuade the audience that this is the most important thing that they are hearing at this particular moment, and there is nowhere else they should be, and they will believe you; I have never been able quite to do this; as far as my work is concerned, teaching has dictated a lot of it; I had an interest in population and in social theory; the interest in population came at the end of Oxford; I had been so impressed by publications of the Institute of Community Studies that I wrote to Michael Young; he wrote back that the whole question of population was interesting, the question of fertility similarly, and couldn't be left to demographers, so I got interested in that; my first book was about fertility; it had a certain success and got me invited to Harvard as a visiting professor; that set me off on one line of work; the second thing was the history of social theory; I wanted to understand how sociology had come into being, and Essex had provided the opportunity because the social theorists there thought nothing worthwhile had been written before 1937, and could I teach on the early period, which I did; I carried on doing so here; they came to converge later; at Harvard I was given a course on population in the Third World which I had not thought about; I concentrated on India and China partly because the Khanna study had recently been published by Harvard and had been criticised by Mamdani; I had a job partly in sociology and partly in public health; I realized that to try to understand the dynamics of fertility one had to understand the social circumstances; looking at India and China from the thirties to the sixties (I was at Harvard in the early 1970s), one had to understand the economic circumstances and in order to understand those one had to understand the political circumstances; I became interested in the politics of these countries; meanwhile, the history of social theory was quite separate from this and led me to the view that the development of a distinctive social theory from the eighteenth century invention of the idea of society, the presumption that what had for a couple of thousand years been taken to be question in politics and law were questions in something now called sociology, was perhaps too strong; these two things converged; got a sense of the practical importance of politics through starting with population, and a sense of the more general intellectual importance of politics from looking at the history of theory; these two things together inclined me more to politics; then the question was how to do it; I didn't do political theory because partly a lot of it was going on here and there was plenty of teaching in it; I was curious about Third World politics, made particularly so when I went to India after Harvard; I had friends who were working in the administration in Delhi; this was in 1976 during Mrs Gandhi's emergency and what was going on in the Planning Commission was a fierce argument about whether India should take the Chinese path or the Japanese path; I was already pretty convinced that the Chinese path was not a path for India, both for international political reasons but also because India was as it was; I was more intrigued by the Japanese path and then I realized that there was a country that had adopted the Japanese path, though wouldn't admit it for reasons of history, and that was Korea; I got very interested in South Korea and its politics; then I got interested in failure, why had other places not been like this; I didn't have a feel for Africa but did for South America; thus there was a whole trajectory of work which took me through into the 1990s; meanwhile I was still wondering about questions of theory; the important influence then was Bernard Williams and he and I became close friends; initially it was a friendship that didn't have much to do with our intellectual lives; we had plans to do things together - we thought of writing a book on the philosophy of the social sciences and Michael Young asked us in the 1980s if we would write a manifesto for the new Social Democratic Party; rather glad we didn't, but we had endless happy conversations about both; I suddenly realized that there was a possibility of being intensely reflective, often at a very abstract level, while at the same time having a very strong human sense of the limitations of theory; that is what Bernard embodied for me, the importance of how far you could take theory, and where theory stopped; he used to have a saying about moral arguments that one could have a thought too many, that you could be too rational about things, and the importance of contingency, emotion etc.; he would generalize at a very high level on the importance of particularity; that was an enormous influence on me; I didn't like the strongly generalizing impulse in social theory and so I wrote a book about contingency and did it through writing about counterfactuals, just trying to knock the dignity of general laws off their pedestal; I am not sure it was a very successful book but that was the impulse

37:31:13 The next part of the story, again driven by teaching in Cambridge, was that I turned away from third world politics, not because I had lost interest, but because I was becoming more interested in international politics; population required an understanding of economy, economy required and an understanding of domestic politics, and that required an understanding of international politics; this was accelerated by a pure contingency which was that I got a personal Chair and the question was what do I call myself; John Dunn insisted that I shouldn't call myself professor of politics, but I was no longer a sociologist; decided on ‘international politics’ but then realized that if I called myself Professor of International Politics I needed to know something about the subject; simultaneously with this the educational structure of SPS was changing and there was going to be more dedicated politics teaching in part 2; by this time I was having to organize the second year course and take a lead in teaching; decided that as I was Professor of International Politics it would have to be a course in that subject; I then went home and hurriedly read some textbooks; Cambridge is wonderfully indulgent; whether it will continue to be, I don't know, but I have been so lucky as every fancy that has taken me, Cambridge seems to have said yes to; at the beginning of these text books was reference to  Thucydides' description of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta; I was sheltering from the rain in a shop doorway when Emma Rothschild also took shelter; she asked what I was doing and encouraged me to read Thucydides; I read him and it was a complete transformation, I thought it was an extraordinary book, that at last I was reading something that wrote about politics as they should be written about; then I thought it could be the basis of an undergraduate course; most second year courses are survey courses; thinking of this new part 2 in politics, realized that they have a first year where they do too much too quickly, they don't any longer read whole books at A level, so perhaps one should take a radical view of how to educate them in the second year; I was then in the position to do so, and instead of doing a survey course in the Michaelmas term, they should all just read Thucydides; they were in a state of shock because firstly the whole reason they were doing the course was to understand what was happening in Iraq tomorrow, and secondly it was one whole, old, book; it turned out to be an enormous pedagogical success and the course became very popular; they loved the book, thought about it, wrote well about it; that made me realise what an important book it was; that is where I am at now; I taught it until I retired and I am now writing a book about Thucydides

45:18:22 Cambridge has been a good place for me; I used to look at people who had been here all the time and thought that perhaps their experience had been a little too confined; to go away and come back has much to be said for it; SPS in the middle years was not easy and there was a moment in the late eighties when I would have gone to Harvard; the reason why I did not was because of my wife who is South American; it was a very cold winter at Harvard and she did not want to experience more of them and there were family reasons too; I came back to Cambridge and was very glad I did because things got better; as we all know it is a wonderful place to pursue what one wants to pursue; there is always somebody to talk to; I constantly wonder at people's eagerness to hear a thought; thinking now I feel it was an astonishing piece of luck to be here, and astonishing that this institution exists

48:12:18 On working, I tell myself to set aside part of the day, but I work in fits and starts; one of the best things that I have written I wrote in one night, starting at seven and finishing at seven; other things have been great agonies; bits of 'Plausible Worlds', on counterfactuals, a subject that was in some ways beyond me, were very agonized and it shows in the prose; it differs very much with the difficulty of what I am writing but I do love producing the sentences; although I did do it erratically, when I am doing it is one of the greatest satisfactions; what I regret about academic life, not too paradoxically, is that one has to read so much that one can't do justice to the way things are written; one guts and fillets books, and I am good at that; I realize that I have the time actually to read books but I have mistreated them, so a lot of what I have read and written about I am not sure I have digested properly when I look back; until recently I have very much liked working on word processors but I feel that they are not very good for one's sentences, although they are for the structure, so have gone back to using an old fountain pen; writing for me is a physically very involving thing and very aural, the music of sentences matters to me and goes back to my early love of poetry; I love the English language

51:48:13 What I realize at the end of this interview is that I have, to a degree, done something I was very determined not to do beforehand, that is tell the story as though it is a rational progression; in retrospect that is the way it can seem but I wouldn't have claimed to know where I was going