Amongst
my most treasured possessions are some notebooks
of my grandfather and father from the 1930s as they trekked and camped in
north-western Scotland (these came to me in 1990); and my mother’s tiny common place book (extracts accompany this post)
which came to me on her death in 2005…..
She was the wife of a Scottish Presbyterian
Minister from the late 1930s and the friendship and hospitality which I remember at our home (as
well as the stringencies of the times) are evident in the quotations chosen by my
mother….they express sentiments which profoundly affected my upbringing (the photo below is from her 100th birthday celebrations.
Although I
know that both of my parents were very proud of the distinctive path I chose
for myself, I’m not sure if they would altogether approve of the element of
egocentricity which a blog implies….
My
first ever diary (which I rediscovered recently) was about a bike trip from
London to Toulon but I started the habit only in my 40s when I was a reforming
politician in Europe’s largest Region. For 16 years I actually held down a
position at the heart of policy-making and, in the 1980s, kept a large A4 diary
into which I would paste relevant cuttings, papers and articles and scribble my
thoughts on project work.
I
still have 5-6 of these diaries - others I donated to the library of the urban
studies section of Glasgow University (when I was a Fellow there for a couple
of months in the early 90s) in the fond belief that some researcher of the
future might find these jottings about the strategic management of Europe’s
largest local authority of interest (!).
Nowadays
the energy people used to devote to their diaries tends to find its outlet in
blogging…..although books made from blogs do
tend to be frowned upon…
Not
that this discourages me as you will see from the list at the top right corner
of this blog…….
I
personally have made a good living from words – both spoken and written –
although the balance between the two changed significantly after 1992. In the
70s and 80s it was the spoken word
which earned my modest keep (as a social science teacher) - although
the papers, journal articles and even a small book I wrote from my experience
as a political manager also helped develop a wider reputation.
.
.
Fortunately I had a bit of preparation for the role – being a member in
the last half of the 80s of various European working groups working on urban
issues.
The
work in “transition countries” the 90s and noughties was a real eye-opener - giving
me a vantage point to identify the various patterns in systems of local
government and Civil services. Suddenly I was seeing similarities in the
powerful influence of informal processes in Austrian and Dutch systems – let
alone Italian and Romanian!
Even
so, switching roles and developing new skills wasn’t easy – and it took me
almost a decade before I was able to produce the coherence of In
Transit – notes on Good Governance (1999) and essays such as - transfer
of government functions; civil service systems; decentralization;
and Training that works! How
do we build training systems which actually improve the performance of state
bodies?. This material
forms the “Lessons from Experience” section of my website - Mapping the Common Ground
As
I was starting to phase out my project management work in 2010 or so, I started blogging - using my work experiences
and reading since the 60s as the main focus of posts which now number almost
1,200. Some of these I’ve used to produce E-books – on such topics as “crafting
more effective public management”; and cultural aspects of Bulgaria;
Romania; and even Germany;
But for some time I have
been trying to produce a little book from the many posts I’ve
done which bemoan global social, economic and political trends….It was actually
in 2000 I first wrote an essay expressing concern about global trends and
asking where someone of my age and resources should be putting their energies
to try to “make a difference”….
Seventeen
years later I’m still not sure what the answer to that question is – although
it’s clearly in the area of mutuality …….but rereading and editing the posts
(which cover a decade) has made me realize that it’s actually quite useful to
see the process of one’s thinking “longitudinally” - as it were. Tensions
between lines of thought can be seen – if not downright contradictions. Far
from being a nuisance, these help to clarify and develop…And one post tried to
put a lot of the economic books into a typology – allowing me to see gaps in
coverage….
On
the other hand, blogging requires a very different set of skills from that of
writing a book which flows and has coherence…..
At the moment the book bears the title “Dispatches to the post-capitalist Generation” (an early version is here) and has sections entitled “Our Confused World”; “How did we let it happen?”; “The Dog that didn’t bark (covering the decline of the political party); and “What is to be done?” (a question I’ve used for quite a few of my papers in my lifetime)
The other thing I’ve
realized as I reread the draft is that my blog is at least partly a tribute to
those writers who have kept me company at one time or another on my journey of
the past 60 plus years. My
earliest memory of what I might call “seminal” books are those of Bertrand Russell –
and then the titles of the 1950s – Tony Crosland’s revisionist “Future of
Socialism” (1956); and two New Left counterblasts - Conviction (1959) and “Out of Apathy” (1960).
University – particularly the political and economics streams I opted into from 1962 – was the profoundest influence on my mind. The key influence may have been Karl Popper’s The Open Society – but there were others such as historian EH Carr and scholar of religion Reinhold Niebuhr….
University – particularly the political and economics streams I opted into from 1962 – was the profoundest influence on my mind. The key influence may have been Karl Popper’s The Open Society – but there were others such as historian EH Carr and scholar of religion Reinhold Niebuhr….
A couple of
years ago I listed the 50 or so books which have made
an impact on me here – and here
In
what I call the “restless search for the new”, we would do well to pause every
now and then and cast our minds back to such books and try to identify the
“perennial wisdom” embodies therein….
Intellectual histories are quite rare - notwithstanding the great efforts of people like Russell
Jacoby, Peter Watson, Mark Greif, George Scialabba and even Clive James..... perhaps the direction in which I should be taking this draft??????
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