Abstract
Already in previous chapters it will have been apparent that the history of LSE Sociology was often far from harmonious and indeed relationships were sometimes poisonous. Perhaps this is not in some respects surprising. Much of the fictional literature about academic life presents one of two tropes: either of academics as being uninterested in their students and so having the opinion common of many of those working in any service industry or profession, often seen in studies of the sociology of work, that the job would be great but for the demands of those who are expecting the service – the epigraph at the head of Chap. 2 rather embodies this perspective; or, if they are not neglecting or exploiting their students, academics are falling out with one another – as seen in novels such as some by C. P. Snow or David Lodge. Why then should LSE Sociology be any different from the academic stereotypes?
‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies.’
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 2, line 75
‘Our torments also may in length of time
Become our elements.’
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 2, line 274
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The statement about the number of research students is taken from correspondence at the time, but it is likely that some were not solely research students in Sociology. Some, of course, will have been MSc(Econ ) rather than PhD candidates, but there were certainly not twenty annual or so postgraduate completions at that time. Even so, there was pressure on staff resources.
- 2.
Interview of Donald MacRae by David Martin , 23 October 1990; LSE Archives/LSE Oral History/1/22, p. 18.
- 3.
Henry Clifford Scriven (1903–1970) was employed by LSE as an Accountant and later Deputy Secretary and Bursar from 1936 to 1968.
- 4.
Shils did later receive an MA, in May 1961 from Cambridge. Rather ingloriously, it was obtained not by study but by paying a fee so that he would be considered appropriately qualified to be appointed to a Fellowship at King’s College.
- 5.
Letter from Shils to H. Claughton, Principal of the University of London, 21 June 1946.
- 6.
Memorandum from John Nef to Executive Committee on Social Thought , University of Chicago, 14 November 1946, ‘Recommendation of Appointments of David Grene and Edward Shils’ (University of Chicago Library Archives); I am grateful to Stephen Turner for drawing this memorandum to my attention.
- 7.
Telegram from Robert Maynard Hutchins, 2 April 1949.
- 8.
Letter from Ginsberg to Carr-Saunders, 19 March 1947.
- 9.
See Carr-Saunders to the Standing Committee, Minutes, 27 May 1947.
- 10.
This is William Stuckey Piercy , CBE, BSc(Econ) (1886–1966), Right Honourable first Baron Piercy of Burford, who had long been associated with LSE.
- 11.
This would have been Talcott Parsons’ invitation to Shils to participate in the Carnegie Project on Theory within Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, which led to the edited book, Toward a general theory of action (Parsons and Shils 1951). Parsons had known Shils since 1936 but had perhaps had to resort to such external invitations because he deemed his Harvard colleagues unsuitable or less keen, as was confirmed in 1951 when most proved unwilling or at best reluctant to commit to the agenda implied in the book; see, for further details, Isaac (2010, esp. pp. 300–4) and Shils (2006, p. 84). Shils was a Visiting Professor at Harvard until the end of the 1950–51 academic year, before he then returned to Chicago as Professor in the Committee on Social Thought .
- 12.
Telegram from Carr-Saunders to Shils, 13 September 1949.
- 13.
E.g., Scriven to Shils, 26 February 1951, where Scriven complained of having frequently written unanswered letters.
- 14.
Interview of Donald MacRae by David Martin , 23 October 1990; LSE Archives/LSE Oral History/1/22, p. 18; see also LSE Archives, LSE/CENTRAL FILING REGISTRY/320/25, The Chair in Sociology.
- 15.
By the time of this letter, only two names were being considered for the post, though the advertisement had produced other enquiries or applications; all but one were of an informality or diffidence that seems ill-suited to the position of a chair. However, there was certainly one other serious application, supported by three referees including Corrado Gini of Gini Index fame; it was from Haskel Sonnabend of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. A letter from the Academic Registrar of the University of London, dated 26 May 1948, says that only one application was received, but Sonnabend’s would have arrived later. One has to wonder whether Sonnabend’s application was given quite the consideration that it deserved, although, by the time Gini’s reference was received, Glass had already been offered the post. The fact would, by 1948, doubtless have been long buried by institutional amnesia, but more than twenty years earlier, in June 1926, Gini had given a lecture at the School on behalf of the University of London, with Beveridge agreeing to be in the chair (Letter from Beveridge to S. J. Worsley, Deputy Academic Registrar of the University of London, 29 March 1926; LSE Archives, BEVERIDGE/25/2B/4). By 1948, however, Gini’s name might have been rather tainted by his questionable association with Italian fascism.
- 16.
Letter from Carr-Saunders to Sir Hector Hetherington, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Glasgow (subsequently replaced), and members of Board of Assessors, 24 June 1948: LSE Archives, LSE/CENTRAL FILING REGISTRY/320/25, The Chair in Sociology.
- 17.
Personal communication as to this possibility from the late Michael Banton (9 September 2010), who was none the less quite clear in not necessarily vouching for its accuracy.
- 18.
Jerzy (George) Zubrzycki (1920–2009) was a Polish refugee who had fought in the Polish army and then in the Polish resistance. After escaping to Britain in June 1940, he fought in the Polish Parachute Division and the Polish Section of the Special Operations Executive. He was a student at LSE from 1945 to 1952, finally earning an MSc(Econ ) in Population Studies in 1953. In 1955 he emigrated to Australia and his academic career was spent at the Australian National University, where he founded its Department of Sociology in 1970. There are a number of errors of fact in his memoir (Zubrzycki undated).
- 19.
An affidavit sworn by the sociologist Herbert Goldhamer in 1954 to give Shils some level of security clearance rather suggests that, on matters political, he talked of little else; see Herbert Goldhamer, Affidavit, sworn 17 February 1954 (University of Chicago Library Archives); I am grateful to Stephen Turner for drawing this document to my attention.
- 20.
Interview of Donald MacRae by David Martin , 2 January 1991; LSE Archives, LSE Oral History/1/22, p. 4. A better and more considered view of Shils’ sociology is offered in an impressively scholarly work by Schneider (2016). He devotes (pp. 171–81) some consideration to Shils’ LSE period; he was clearly not privy to Shils’ personnel difficulties with the LSE administration and, to my mind, he does give an exaggerated impression of Shils’ impact on later British sociology, ascribing influence to him for matters that would probably have happened anyway. Nonetheless, his book must be considered one of the most thorough and scholarly assessments of Shils’ life and work.
- 21.
I can vouch for this, having attended one of his seminars when at the University of Chicago; I left rather puzzled about the formidable reputation that he had at Chicago. Some graduate students there and some staff (e.g., Morris Janowitz) were entranced by him.
- 22.
Letter from Jean Floud to Michael Banton , 6 November 2007 (Copy kindly supplied by Michael Banton ).
- 23.
Letter from Michael Banton to Jean Floud, 15 May 1996 (Copy kindly supplied by Michael Banton ).
- 24.
Details of his later life have been taken from various sources, including Binney (2005, pp. 270–5), his Special Operations Executive file in the National Archives, declassified in 2004 (see HS9/1370/1/22666/A), his military service file obtained from Army Personnel Centre, Historical Disclosures, and his LSE Student and Staff files, LSE Archives. I am grateful to Mr. Peter Allen, the Cranbrook School archivist, for his supplied information about Skepper’s school career.
- 25.
This visit by Atkins to Hamburg would seem to have been before a later one starting on 21 November 1946 to that city for the purpose of assisting the prosecution of the defendants in the Ravensbrück concentration camp trial; see Helm (2006, pp. 302–15).
- 26.
Address list of F Section agents, dated 19 December 1945 (Imperial War Museum, Squadron Officer V. M. Atkins Papers, File 8/1/10).
- 27.
I am aware that referring to these events as ‘troubles’, as done here and in several earlier accounts by others, is value-laden, but I sought to minimize this imputation by the use of apology-quotation marks and by the observation that the word, with and without quotation marks, was in wide use at the time and has been since (Dahrendorf 1995, pp. 443 et seq.).
- 28.
Nor was this the first occasion that the School experienced student unrest. Harris (1997, pp. 291–2) describes an episode in 1934 that resulted in the expulsion of two students.
- 29.
- 30.
Kidd was unsympathetically hard-line and uncompromising throughout; a press report had him lamenting at one point, ‘It was never like this when I was at Cambridge’ (Sunday Times, 19 March 1967).
- 31.
Its members on this occasion were Lord Bridges (Chair of the Court of Governors), David Donnison (of Social Science and Administration), Leslie Farrer-Brown (a lawyer who had been Assistant Registrar at LSE as long ago as 1928 and was a member of the Court of Governors) and George Shorrock Ashcombe Wheatcroft (of Law and also on the Court of Governors).
- 32.
Judging by a ‘private and confidential’ letter sent by William S. Collings, then Deputy Secretary and Bursar, to Raymond Firth, one of the members of this Board of Discipline, the School was expecting a possible violent response from some students in the event of a guilty finding. It said that ‘some members of the academic staff would be quite willing to assist in maintaining discipline in the School, and it has occurred to the Director that you may wish to take advantage of this spirit where it exists by taking with you one or two of your colleagues on any occasion upon which you might be called on to act’. Firth resigned as member of this Board on 21 March, citing ‘the late nights and general strain’; Letter from Firth to Caine, 21 March 1967 (LSE Archives, FIRTH/7/4/1).
- 33.
Two of those suspended later graduated, one with a Third BSc(Econ) in 1967 and the other with a II(i) in the same degree in 1968. The first one of these was Pamela Dallas Brighton (1946–2015), who had actually started in the BSc (Sociology) degree but then switched to BSc(Econ), specializing in Government and then supervised by Miliband ; she later became a radical theatre director in Canada and Northern Ireland (Coveney 2015). The second was Stephen David Jefferys , who had specialized in Economic History and had a long later career researching on employment issues, finishing his career at London Metropolitan University.
- 34.
Financial Times, 15 March 1967.
- 35.
Daily Express, 15 March 1967. A study of LSE student opinion at the time, conducted by the Sunday Times Insight team strongly refuted this and showed widespread support for the student position; Sunday Times, 19 March 1967 (Cuttings in LSE Archives, FIRTH/7/4/2).
- 36.
Personal note by Firth (LSE Archives, FIRTH/7/4/1).
- 37.
Correspondence between William Pickles and Lionel Robbins , 24 and 26 April 1967 (LSE Archives, ROBBINS/4/2/1).
- 38.
Alan Day as Vice-Chair of the Academic Board conducted a brief telephone survey of the sample of Board Members (with about thirty-five respondents) to ascertain staff views on how the School had handled the closure – the majority view being broadly supportive of the School’s actions but opposed to any punishment of those who did break the closure (Letter from Alan Day to Robbins , 30 October 1968, LSE Archives, ROBBINS/4/2/4).
- 39.
Letter from Maurice Cranston to Robbins , 1 November 1968 (LSE Archives, ROBBINS/4/2/4). From other evidence the alleged offender was Robin Blackburn .
- 40.
Letter from Robbins to Day, 5 November 1968 (LSE Archives, ROBBINS/4/2/4).
- 41.
The Times’ report (see below) said seventy-six; my count was seventy-seven.
- 42.
The School administration conducted an analysis of the signatories; 20 were not on the regular teaching staff and, of the 57 who were, they came from Anthropology (1 of 8), Economics (5 of 50), Law (11 of 28½), Politics (4 of 27), Psychology (3 of 9), Social Administration (11 of 26), Sociology (10 of 22½) and Statistics (12 of 23). Other departments were not represented. There were 5 Professors, 4 Readers, 7 Senior Lecturers, 29 Lecturers and 12 Assistant Lecturers. Nine non-teaching staff were researchers in the Higher Education Research Unit (‘Breakdown of the members of the School who signed the letter to Lord Robbins of 12 November 1968’, LSE Archives, ROBBINS/4//2/4).
- 43.
‘LSE staff reply to governors’, The Times, 15 November 1968, p. 2.
- 44.
Letter from Robbins to David Glass, 13 November 1968 (LSE Archives, ROBBINS/4//2/4).
- 45.
Letter from George Jones and John Hilbourne to Adams, 18 November 1968 (LSE Archives, ROBBINS/4/2/4).
- 46.
Letters from Ronald Dore to Robbins , 3 November 1968, 19 November 1968 and 4 December 1968 (LSE Archives, ROBBINS/4//2/4).
- 47.
It is perhaps a delicious coincidental irony that the evening’s performance was of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, an opera to which unfortunate nationalist connotations have in the past been attached.
- 48.
Those less familiar with former fashions in advertising may not be aware that a favourite practice of advertisers on television and in print in the 1950s and 1960s was a comparison between the supposedly superior performance of the product that they were pushing and the allegedly inferior one of Brand X. It was particularly popular in advertising soap powders used to wash white shirts or muddy sportswear.
- 49.
Strangely, the case of Harris is not mentioned in Dahrendorf’s account.
- 50.
Wine Press [Sussex University], 13 February 1969, p. 8.
- 51.
Letter from Robert McKenzie to Adams, 7 February 1969 (LSE Archives, ROBBINS/4/2/4).
- 52.
Letter from Emanuel de Kadt to Adams, 19 February 1969 (LSE Archives, ROBBINS/4/2/4).
- 53.
Harris was also charged before Bow Street Magistrates’ Court after the earlier intervention of the Director of Public Prosecutions with wilful damage in connection with the removal of the gates back in January, a charge from which he was acquitted.
- 54.
Letter from George Jones to Adams, 23 April 1969 (LSE Archives, ROBBINS4/2/4).
- 55.
Letter from McKenzie and M. J. Moor to Adams, 24 April 1969 (LSE Archives, ROBBINS/4//2/4).
- 56.
The seventeen were: Cohen, de Kadt , Ford, Gellner, Glass, Heidensohn, Hilbourne, Hill, Hopper, MacRae , Morris, Musil, Rock, Sklair , Stewart, Westergaard and Robert J. Wilson (a Teaching Assistant). One member of the Department whose name was conspicuously absent from all Departmental motions was David Martin , a sociologist of consistent integrity but whose private and sometimes public views at the time were highly critical of the implications of activism, whether by staff or by students, as his autobiography reveals (Martin 2013, pp. 146–57).
- 57.
See letter from Adams to Robbins , 10 April 1969 (LSE Archives, ROBBINS/4/2/1).
- 58.
Letter from Michalina Clifford-Vaughan to Robbins , 1 May 1969 (LSE Archives, ROBBINS/4/2/4). Clifford -Vaughan was just returning from sabbatical leave, which may account for the absence of her signature on earlier Sociology Department motions.
- 59.
Letter from Robbins to Sir William Armstrong , 10 December 1969 (LSE Archives, ROBBINS/4/2/1).
- 60.
Letter from Robbins to Maurice Green, 3 November 1970 (LSE Archives, ROBBINS/4/2/1).
- 61.
Letter from MacRae to Adams, 11 October 1968 (LSE Archives, ADAMS W/8/21).
References
Belson, W. A. (1981). The design and understanding of survey questions. Aldershot: Gower Publishing Co.
Binney, M. (2005). Secret war heroes. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Birnbaum, N. (1955). Monarchs and sociologists: a reply to Professor Shils and Mr. Young. The Sociological Review (New Series), 3(1), 5–24.
Birnbaum, N. (2018). From the Bronx to Oxford and not quite back. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing.
Blackstone, T., Gales, K., Hadley, R., & Lewis, W. (1970). Students in conflict: L.S.E. in 1967, L.S.E. Research Monographs 5. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson for London School of Economics and Political Science.
Bulmer, M. (1996). Edwards Shils as a sociologist. Minerva, 34(1), 7–21.
Coltman, I. (1962). Private men and public causes: philosophy and politics in the English Civil War. London: Faber and Faber.
Coveney, M. (2015). Obituary of Pamela Dallas Brighton. Guardian online, 25 February and 10 April 2015. Accessed 18 August 2015.
Crouch, C. (1970). The student revolt. London: The Bodley Head.
Crouch, C. (1977). Colin Crouch. In J. Abse (Ed.), My LSE (pp. 191–207). London: Robson Books.
Dahrendorf, R. (1995). LSE: a history of the London School of Economics and Political Science, 1895–1995. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Foot, M. R. D. (1966). SOE in France: an account of the work of the British Special Operations Executive in France, 1940–1944. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.
Ginsberg, M. (1921). The psychology of society. First ed.; London: Methuen & Co.
Halsey, A. H. (1996). No discouragement: an autobiography. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Halsey, A. H. (2011). Shils, Edward Albert (1910–1995). Oxford dictionary of national biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Online edition, January 2011.
Harris, J. (1997). William Beveridge: a biography. Second ed.; Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Helm, S. (2006). A life in secrets: the story of Vera Atkins and the lost agents of SOE. London: Abacus.
Hoch, P., & Schoenbach, V. (1969). LSE: the natives are restless: a report on student power in action. London and Sydney: Sheed and Ward.
Isaac, J. (2010). Theorist at work: Talcott Parsons and the Carnegie project on theory, 1949–1951. Journal of the History of Ideas, 71(2), 287–311.
Kidd, H. (1969). The trouble at L.S.E., 1966–1967. London: Oxford University Press.
LSE [London School of Economics and Political Science]. (1967). Report by the Director, 1966–67. In LSE Calendar, 1969–70. London: London School of Economics and Political Science.
LSE. (1970). Report by the Director, 1968–69. In LSE Calendar, 1970–71. London: London School of Economics and Political Science.
Macintyre, D. (2018). My part in the anti-war demo that changed protest for ever. The Observer, 11 March, 44–45.
McKenzie, R. T. (1977). Robert McKenzie. In J. Abse (Ed.), My LSE (pp. 81–103). London: Robson Books.
MacLeod, R. (2016). Consensus, civility, and community: the origins of Minerva and the vision of Edward Shils. Minerva, 54(3), 255–292.
Martin, D. A. (2013). The education of David Martin: the making of an unlikely sociologist. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
Oakley, A. (2014). Father and daughter: patriarchy, gender and social science. Bristol: Policy Press.
Parsons, T. & Shils, E. (Eds.). (1951). Toward a general theory of action: theoretical foundations for the social sciences. New York: Harper & Row.
Robbins, Lord. (1971). Autobiography of an economist. London: Macmillan.
Schneider, T. (2016). Der sakrale Kern moderner Ordnungen: zur Entwicklung des Werkes von Edward A. Shils. Berlin: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Berlin.
Shils, E. A. (2006). A fragment of a sociological autobiography: the history of my pursuit of a few ideas. Edited by S. Grosby. New Brunswick & London: Transaction Publishers.
Shils, E. A., & Janowitz, M. (1948). Cohesion and disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II. Public Opinion Quarterly, 12(2), 280–315.
Shils, E., & Young, M. (1953). The meaning of the Coronation. The Sociological Review (New Series), 1(2), 63–81.
Skepper, C. (1943). Life in a Shanghai gaol. The Listener, 21 October, 473–474.
Stafford, D. (2000). Secret agent: the true story of the Special Operations Executive. London: BBC Worldwide Limited.
Zubrzycki, J. (undated). Edward Shils – a personal memoir. (Unpublished).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Husbands, C.T. (2019). Four Horsemen of a Sociological Apocalypse: Episodes of Dysfunction. In: Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, 1904–2015. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89450-8_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89450-8_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-89449-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-89450-8
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)