Principles and Participation

Abstract

The present chapter was originally composed in the summer of 1969, while I was still at the University of Keele. Precisely because it was very much an occasional paper I have not in this case made any drastic revisions, excisions or new additions. The only alterations made are of four kinds: first, I have restored some sometimes substantial cuts; second, I have added some notes, mainly to illuminate what the passage of the years may have made obscure; third, I have assimilated the style of the references to persons and sources, and the framework of subheadings and subdivisions, to that followed elsewhere in this book; and fourth, I have inserted one or two cross-references to earlier and later chapters. Some of what remains is in consequence out of date: governments have come and gone and come again, and Edward Short has passed on from the Department of Education to politically higher office; Brian MacArthur too has been promoted to become the first Editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement; the Revolutionary Socialist Students’ Federation (R.S.S.F.) has dissolved, and the National Union of Students (N.U.S.) has passed from the control of left-wing social democrats into the hands of the ‘Broad Left’ coalition of Muscovite Communists with their fellow-travellers; and so on.