Changing the World - or oneself?

You know you’re losing your mind when – after a week of intensive musings – you still can’t put into clear words an issue which has led to much feverish searching for (and pulling out of) books……

It seemed initially to be about the source of significant social change – the extent to which it comes from external social and technical factors compared with more internal subjective factors… Arthur Koestler’s The Yogi and the Commissar; (1945) was perhaps an early expression of that dualism….

The collapse of communism in 1989 showed how regime self-confidence could melt in the sunshine….

In the middle of last week I came across in Brasov a nicely-presented book in the self-help genre - About Presence; a journey into ourselves - which I was tempted to buy (and read!) simply because the language was more conversational and downbeat than its usual type. And the book seemed to connect to the point which a friend had just put to me about the over abstract nature of the discourse which people like me use. As well as to the question put a couple of years ago by a schoolfriend with whom I had tried to renew contact after more than 50 years – “why doesn’t your personal life figure in your blog??”

The answer is quite simple – the technocratic role I’ve played since 1991 had no place for the personal….at least in the style of our writing…We had to pretend to a neutrality…if not omniscience! (Although the feedback was that I seemed to be more committed to grassroots change than the typical “expert”….)

The About Presence book reminded me of another similar title in my library Presence – exploring profound change in people, organisations and society; P Senge et al (2005) - typical of "new age" managerialism. By then I had piled on my desk my old Robert Quinn favourites – “Deep Change” and “Change the World” – which remain for me the key books exploring the link between the individual and the apparently impervious forces of the world at large…..

But the library also contains books on subjects such as Systems Change, Chaos theory and Complexity which have never been able to engage my sustained attention – apart from Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Ingenuity Gap – how can we solve the problems of the future? (2001)

These focus on the increase of the interdependence of one system with another – making apparently for a world which no one can control and yet one in which local victories are achieved….

So other books were duly deposited on the desk – both real and virtual - and now form a rather fascinating list which starts with a book written in 1967 and ends with 4 powerful books with messages of hope I strongly recommend to my readers.

Embracing Complexity – strategic perspectives for an age of turbulence; Jean Boulton, Peter Allen and Cliff Bowman (2015)

How Change Happens Duncan Green (2016)

Can We Know Better?; Robert Chambers (2017)

Knowledge Management Matters – words of wisdom from leading practitioners; J and J Girard (2018)

This post is long enough. I will attach the list tomorrow……  

Is it people who change systems? Or systems which change people?

Individualists say the former; sociologists and fatalists the latter.

And both are right!

Change begins with a single step, an inspiring story, a champion. But, unless the actions “resonate” with wider society, such people will be dismissed as mavericks, “ahead of their time”.

Change of any sort – whether an organisational reform or a social movement - is an intervention in a social system. Like an organism, it will quickly be rejected or absorbed unless there is some such “resonance”.

A significant number of people have to be discontent – and persuaded that there is an alternative before there will be any movement.

And the wider system has to be ready for change.

Robert Quinn’s Change the World (2000) is still one of the few books to focus seriously on this question of how one individual can change history….

Formal and informal systems are a well-recognised fact of organizational life. In 1970, Donald Schon coined the phrase “dynamic conservatism” to describe the strength of the forces resisting change in organisations – an update almost of Robert Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy”. Whatever new formal systems say, powerful informal systems ensured systems remained largely unchanged.

I remember vividly the discussions which ran in the 60s and 70s in the professional journals about rationality and change – with names such as Donald Schoen, Chris Argyris, Ametai Etzioni, Warren Bennis, Charles Lindblom and Herbert Simon to the fore (Alvin Toffler was simply the populiser)

These, of course, were the academic scribblers in whose midst American society was threatening to escape control….a moment perhaps best described in Adam Curtis’ documentary The Century of the Self (2002).

But it was The Aquarian Conspiracy – personal and social transformation in the 1980s; by Marlyn Ferguson (1980) which at the time caught the spirit of the age and posed the essential challenge both in its title and subtitle. Alas, it was a challenge soon to be marginalised…..

Those of us who had bemoaned the inertia of our bureaucracies were suddenly caught unawares by the speed with which change was unleashed…. In the 1990s, managing change became as popular as sliced bread. And soon indeed had its own recipe -

·         communications, leadership and training to ensure that people understand what the reform is trying to achieve – and why it is needed and in their interests

·         Development and enforcement of new “tools of change”

·         “Networking” in order to “mobilise support” for the relevant changes

·         building and “empowering” relevant institutions to be responsible for the reform – and help drive it forward

We are these days advised always to “control the narrative” and to carry out “stakeholder analyses” – to track who will be affected by the changes and how the indifferent or potentially hostile can be brought on side or neutralised. Out and out manipulation...,,and the world is wise to it....at last!!

Theories of Change - mine and other people's

For the past few years, people in the “development” field have been encouraged to have a “theory of change”. The global technocracy had at last been forced to recognise that its attempts to make political institutions in “developing” countries more open to economic development had not been working - and that a different more local, inclusive and incremental approach was needed if there were to be any prospects for improving the government systems under which so many citizens are yoked….. 

Practitioners of this curious field often use the phrase “Doing Development Differently” – there is a nice short powerpoint presentation here of the main ideas to complement the OECD paper which is the first hyperlink

I.ve had my own theories of organisational change – whether in Scotland in the 1970s and 80s or in central Asia in the 2000s – always (I have just realised) with the assumption that "we" were facing the implacable force of what the great organisational analyst Donald Schoen in 1970 called “dynamic conservatism”

When I was lucky enough to find myself in a position of strategic leadership in a new and large organisation in the mid 1970s, we used what I called the “pincer approach” to set up reform structures at both a political and community level. The organisational culture was, of course, one of classic bureaucracy – but, from its very start, some of us made sure that it had to contend with the unruly forces of political idealism and community power. The regional body concerned was responsible for such local government functions as education, social work, transport, water and strategic planning for two and half million people; and employed 100,000 staff but not has been written about it.

You’ll find the full story of the strategy here – and a short version here. 

Thirty years later. I was doing a lot of training sessions in the Presidential Academies of Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan and developed there what I called the “opportunistic” or “windows of opportunity” theory of change against what I started to call “impervious regimes” ie so confident of the lack of challenge to their rule that they had become impervious to their citizens -

“Most of the time our systems seem impervious to change – but always (and suddenly) an opportunity arises. Those who care about the future of their society, prepare for these “windows of opportunity”. And the preparation is about analysis, mobilisation and trust.

·         It is about us caring enough about our organisation and society to speak out about the need for change.

·         It is about taking the trouble to think and read about ways to improve things – and helping create and run networks of such change.

·         And it is about establishing a personal reputation for probity and good judgement that people will follow your lead when that window of opportunity arises”.

I realised that it would be difficult to implement such an approach in Beijing when I arrived there in January 2010 to take up the role of Team Leader in a “Rule of Law” project and made a fast exit from a project that was supposed to last for 4 years – for reasons I tried to explain in a note called Lost in Beijing.

A year later, I tried to share some of my concerns about how the European Commission was dealing with capacity development in “transition countries” with participants at the annual NISPAcee Conference in Varna. But The Long Game – not the log-frame was met with indifference.

As it happens that was the year the World Bank published its quite excellent People, Politics and Change - building communications strategy for governance reform (World Bank 2011). And it was 2015 before this guide on “change management for rule of law practitioners” saw the light of day    

I said earlier that I had always assumed that reformers were facing “implacable force” in their intervention but need now to question this..…not just because 1989 showed how easily certitudes and legitimacy can crumble….. but also because management writing has in the past 2 decades paid a lot more attention to chaos and uncertainty – even before the 2006 global crisis (eg Meadows and Wheatley).

As someone who has always felt compelled to try to intervene in social processes (ie of an “activist” mode) I readily admit that my initial responses to those who argued that every force attracts a counterforce and, most memorably, that “the flap of a butterfly’s wings can ultimately contribute to tornados”…has been one of impatience. Quite a lot of the writing on “chaos theory” and even “systems theory” seemed to me to run the risk of encouraging fatalism.

One of my favourite writers - AO Hirschmann – actually devoted a book (”The Rhetoric of Reaction”; 1991) to examining three arguments conservative writers use for dismissing the hopes of social reformers:

- the perversity thesis holds that any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy.

- The futility thesis argues that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will simply fail to “make a dent.”

- the jeopardy thesis argues that the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment.

He was right to call out those writers; but we perhaps need a similar framework these days to help us make sense of the world of chaos in which we live. I had been aware of systems thinking in the 1970s (particularly in the writing of Geoffrey Vickers and Stafford Beer) and again in 2010 and, finally, in a 2011 post which focused on complexity theory. My brief foray into the subject didn’t greatly enlighten me but I have a feeling I should return to the challenge….

I have therefore a little pile of books on my desk – including The Web of Life (Fritjof Capra 1996); Leadership and the new Science – discovering order in a chaotic world (Margaret Wheatley 1999); Thinking in Systems (Donella Meadows 2009) – as well as a virtual book Systems thinking – creative holism for managers; Michael Jackson (2003). 

So let’s see if my older self is capable of new insights……. 

Managing Change…why have we lost interest?

Let me try to summarise the argument of the recent posts about public services reform……

Our view of the State (and what we could expect of it) changed dramatically in 1989 – and not just in Eastern Europe. Boring “public administration” gave way to New Public Management (NPM) – with its emphasis on the “consumer” (rather than citizen) and on “choice”…

A series of blogposts last autumn used 15 questions to explore its state almost 20 years on….

Anglo-saxon voices were loudest in what was essentially a technocratic debate, focussing on concepts such as “good Governance” and “public value”.  

Last week I wrote that it was nothing short of scandalous that, in comparison with the thousands of books written on the subject by academics in the past 25 years, there seem to be only two written for the general public by journalists….Even if I add in those written by consultants (such as Barber, Seddon and Straw) the total comes to under a dozen….

A question which is surprisingly rarely explored in the vast literature on reform is one relating to the sources of change. We all too readily assume that effective change comes from politicians and their advisers…..The sad reality is that this is generally the kiss of death.

Of course this seems to fly in the face of the narrative about democratic authority and political legitimacy…. 

But that just shows how two-dimensional is the concept of democracy which prevails in anglo-saxon countries.

Effective change doesn’t come from the “ya-boo; yo-yo” system of adversarial power blocs of the UK and USA – it comes from sustained dialogue and coalitions of change.

And, often, it starts with an experiment – rather than a grand programme…Take, for example, what is now being called the Dutch model for neighbourhood care – started by Buurtzorg a few years back which is now inspiring people everywhere. That is a worker cooperative model… which, quite rightly, figures in Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organisations

And when “mutualisation” was being explored by the UK Coalition government in 2010/11 (see reading list at end of this post) it was a bipartisan idea which had strong support from the social enterprise sector….

There was a time when people were interested in the process of organisational change…..it even spawned a literature on “managing change”, some of which still graces my library shelves (from the early 1990s). …The titles figure in this Annotated Bibliography for change agents which I did almost 20 years ago….

Most of the literature was paternalistic but a few writers understood that change could not be imposed (however subtly) and had to grow from a process of incremental adjustment….that was Peter Senge at his best….But the most inspiring book on the subject remains for me Robert Quinn’s Change the World (2000) – this article gives a sense of his argument. At a more technical level, Governance Reform under real world Conditions (2008) also offers an overview with a rarely catholic perspective.....

I don’t understand why we have lost interest in the process of change – and why leaders seem doomed to reinvent the broken wheel…..

Postscript; for the record, this post probably encapsulates some of the most important messages from this series about reform I have been writing in the past year

Playing Games with a serious issue?

Part of me understands the groans (sometimes more than metaphorical!) which meet the term “public management reform” whenever it comes up in conversation…..

I have sometimes wished we could find a better phrase to do justice to what is, after all, one of the most important issues confronting countries everywhere – namely how we structure and fund the rights and responsibilities we all have ...in order to help make and keep societies secure.

So this post looks at some of the efforts which have been made in the last 20 years to find a less brutal approach to public service management than that represented by New Public Management… 

Just why and how the British adopted NPM – which then became a global pandemic - is a story which is usually told in a fatalistic way – as if there were no human agency involved. One persuasive explanation is given here - as the fatal combination of Ministerial frustration with civil service “dynamic conservatism” (as Donald Schoen would put it) with Public Choice economics offering a seductive explanation for that inertia….  A politico-organisational problem was redefined as an economic one and, heh presto, NPM went global 

The core European systems were, however, different – with legal and constitutional safeguards, Proportional Representation systems and coalition governments – although the EC technocracy has been chipping away at much of this.

”Good governance” ?

This became a fashionable phrase in the 1990s amongst at least policy wonks in the World Bank – although it was aimed mainly at ex-communist and “developing” countries and never really caught on in everyday conversation. One of the ingredients of the rather formulaic “good governance” goulash was anti-corruption measures - which I felt were always basic aspects of sound public management and not a novel add-on….  

“Public Value”?

Mark Moore’s Creating Public Value – strategic management in Government (1995) demonstrated how the passion and example of individual leaders could inspire teams and lift the performance and profile of public services. The decentralisation of American government allowed them that freedom.

British New Labour, however, chose to go in the opposite direction and to build on to what was already a tight centralised system a new quasi-Soviet one of targets and punishment – although this 2002 note, Creating Public Value – an analytical framework for public service reform, showed that there were at least some people  within the Cabinet Office pushing for a more flexible approach.

Measuring Public Value – the competing values approach showed that there was still life in the idea in the UK – if only amongst academics  eg Public Value Management – a new narrative for networked governance by Gerry Stoker in 2006.

Sadly Public Value; theory and practice ed by John Benington and Mark Moore (2011) offered no clarion call to a better society, it was full of dreadful jargon…..Who in his right mind imagines that networked public governance is going to set the heather alight???

“The Common Good”?

One of the things which struck me on rereading some of these references is how academic (apart from Moore’s original book) they are….For example John Bryson’s work on public strategies constitute the best writing on the subject eg Leadership for the Common Good; Crosby and Bryson (2^nd edition 2005) but when I look at the indexes and bibliographies of the material on Public Value, their names and books don’t appear! This shows utter contempt for the practical side of things…..

Quite rightly, the title of their latest book Creating Public Value in Practice – advancing the common good in a ….noone in charge world; ed J Bryson et al (2015) shows that their contribution is much more valuable than that of the academics….. 

“Communitarianism”?

At one stage, I thought that communitarianism – so eloquently served by the indefatigable Amatai Etzioni – held an important key……But I soon realised that it smacked of what Orwell benignly called the sandal-wearers and others, less kind, would call the Calvin sect……

Before I finish let me bring up the neglected issue of….Service.

Like Mark Moore, Chris Pollitt’s The Essential Public Manager (2003) focused on the human aspect of public management by exploring the core attributes and values of those who used to be called “public servants”… It’s a pity that more politicians don’t see themselves as “public servants” – and indeed Pollitt might consider, for the next edition of the book, replacing the word “manager” with that of “servant”; and adding at least one chapter to deal with Ministers…. ….????? And “Public Service Reform” is certainly the better phrase since it removes that offensive word “management”….and takes me to Robert Greenleaf whose On Becoming a servant leader (1996) is a book I sometimes turn to for inspiration.

Greenleaf was a thoughtful senior manager with corporate giant AT and T who took early retirement in 1964 to set up a foundation to develop his ideas about leadership - which had a clear influence on writers such as Stephen Covey and Peter Senge. These two management gurus preached/preach in the 90s a softer approach to the subject – while avoiding the explicit critique evident in the later work of, for example, Canadian Henry Mintzberg, one of the rare management writers to break ranks  and call big business to account – in his 2014 pamphlet Rebalancing Society – radical renewal beyond left, right and center. As early as 1970 Greenleaf wrote an article which set out the main elements of his approach - The Servant as Leader (1970). His continuing influence on at least some management writing can be seen here

In conclusion

This has been quite a romp – which has taken me longer to craft than my normal post. But, from my point of view at least, has been very useful….

 “Good government”, “Public service reform”, “networked public governance”, “public value”, “communitarianism”, “the Common Good”……what is it to be????  Perhaps I should do a straw poll?

But it has left me with one conclusion….that there are two significant sets of voices we don’t hear in most of these texts – the officials who run the services and the citizens who experience them. Last week I discussed the notion of public service ventures in the shape of cooperatives; and this is an issue which really does need to be pushed more strongly…….

 Further Reading

From NPM to Public Value (2007) – a useful academic overview

Public Value and Leadership; 2007 – a mercifully short and clear paper on the subject

Public Value; conjecture and refutation (2010) – a good academic overview with an emphasis on ethical consideration

Appraising public value; past, present and futures (2011) is an excellent review of the literature in the first 15 years of the concept’s life

Stocktake of a concept (2015) – a clear exposition of the development of an idea

Designing the model of public value management; (2015) How the concept is seen in Romanian academia

Creating Public Value in Practice – advancing the common good in a ….noone in charge world; ed J Bryson et al (2015), 

Comparison of public value frameworks (2016) a good academic assessment

To be continued

The power of Ideas

The longest of the 6 quotations which run down the blog’s right-hand column is from Keynes – suggesting that ideas have more influence on societies than we imagine compared, that is, with crude calculations of interest.

I have long been fascinated by the ebb and flow of ideas – and how rarely people seem willing to explore how they have changed their thinking…..I suppose our thoughts are so much part of our identity that we get first embarrassed and then angry if others try to push us on our belief changes….”Apostasy” is the big word for such acts of renunciation and there were loads of them in the 1930s as the first flush of enthusiasm for the soviet system dispelled and then again in the 1950s after Hungary. But I deviate……..retournons aux moutons!!

As far back as 1995 I doodled a couple of pages of notes about what seemed to me to have been the key focus of at least anglo-saxon debate in each of the decades from the 1930s. An updated version now makes a fascinating table explained in this post. Fear of the masses had been a strong theme in the 1930s but, by the 1960s, many of us in Europe and America were celebrating rather than fearing them – whether through the fashion for “participation” let alone community action, direct action or social development. 1968, after all, had been an expression of people power. And the writings of Paolo Freire and Ivan Illich – let alone British activists Colin Ward and Tony Gibson; and sociologists such as Jon Davies and Norman Dennis – were, in the 70s, celebrating citizen voices against bureaucratic power. In America, the therapist Carl Rogers was at the height of his global influence.

But political and economic events in the 1970s punctured that mood of egalitarianism - and ushered in not mutuality but rather egocentricity, greed and commodification. Adam Curtis’ documentary The Century of the Self captures the process superbly…….

But if there is one book which embodied the spirit of individuality and impatience and shaped a generation globally, it is In Search of Excellence – lessons from America’s best-run companies which came out in 1982. It ridiculed the hierarchic structure of organisations and encouraged the inner cowboy in managers to ride free.....

I have been turning the clock back 30 odd years to try to understand how exactly we were all persuaded to give managers and markets so much power in the delivery of our public services….

Clearly the fall of the Berlin Wall both triggered and symbolised a massive shift in people’s perception of state legitimacy – but the critique of the role of the state had been building up since the early 1970s and found expression in Margaret Thatcher’s completely unscripted programme of privatisation and “contracting out” of the 1980s….

I have a copy in my hands of a book published in 1990 called “Managerialism and the Public Services” which maps out in detail the development of UK thinking of that decade – by the same author who coined (the same year) the phrase “New Public Management”.

And it was but 2 years later that David Osborne and Ted Gaebler dramatically put the new thinking on the global agenda when they published Reinventing Government (1992) – with such neat injunctions as -

·         steer, not row

·         encourage competition

·         be driven by missions, rather than rules;

·         fund outcomes rather than inputs;

·         meet the needs of the customer, not the bureaucracy;

·         invest in preventing problems rather than curing crises

·         decentralize authority;

Effectively, it was the public sector version of the 1982 “In Search of Excellence” mentioned above. No less a figure than Vice-President Al Gore then took charge of what became a major political effort to reinvent government (see this paper for a good overview). Coincidentally I was in New York a few months after the book’s publication and was able to bring a copy back with me. The book was – with the possible exception of Machiavelli’s The Prince – one of the few best-sellers on the topic of government.

And Osborne and Gaebler weren’t academics – but a journalist/consultant; and city manager respectively!! And its message about contracting was soon being broadcast globally – thanks to the influence of the World Bank    

By then I was living in central Europe and working on projects designed to help establish more open and democratic public services accountable to citizens in that part of the world. 

In 1998/99 I found myself “resting” (as actors say) between projects in Bucharest and used the time to draft a little book about the challenges of building government structures in ex-communist countries. This is how I tried to set out what I thought I was doing….. 

The book is about the search for effectiveness and equity in government in a new era of immense change and growing expectations. It is aimed at –
-       those both inside and outside the machinery of government - both local and national - who, however reluctantly, have realised that they need to get involved in the minutiae of administrative change
-       people in both West and central Europe.

A lot has been written in the past decade about development endeavours at various levels - but there are several problems about such literature -
-       it is written generally by academics who have not themselves had the responsibility of making things happen: who have rarely, for example, been involved in the early, messy stages of taking initiatives they believed in, or in working with people who feel threatened and confused.
-       its very volume and language makes it impossible for busy policy-makers and advisers to read : a guide is needed.
-       such texts are (obviously) not sensitive to the Central European context

The analysis and argument of this book very much build on my practical experience as a "change-agent" in Scotland during 1970-1990, trying to "reinvent" the machinery of local government and to construct policies and structures to deal with local industrial collapse.
The text reflects a dialogue with a particular Central European audience between 1994 and 1998: the focus - and content - being shaped by the questions and issues which seemed to be at the forefront of the minds of the people I was working with in countries such as the Czech and Slovak Republics, Romania and Hungary…. 

The result was a little book In Transit – notes on good governance (1999) which I want to discuss in the next post because it is one of the few texts which tries to give a sense of what it was like to be active in such administrative reform efforts in the 1980 and 1990s..................

to be continued...

The Writer's Craft

“What is a writer? asked jesting Pilot - and would not stay for an answer”….OK I cheated, the question was actually “what is truth?” But the rest of the quotation (from one of my favourite essayists – Francis Bacon 1561-1626) is correct.

I don’t know why this quotation is so deeply engrained in what passes for my mind….although Bacon (and Lamb – I kid you not!) are probably the characters responsible for my love of good language……Charles Lamb actually came along a couple of hundred years later (1775-1835) and I remember mainly for his essay “on eating roast pig”. Joseph Addison came in between (1672-1730) and William Hazlitt (1778-1830) was a contemporary of Lamb’s…

Perhaps this is why I’ve never been a great fan of novels – the classical essayists, to whom I was introduced in my teens at school, made their impact, I realise, for two reasons – they crafted short pieces which left a vivid impression.

That said, if I am asked to name my three favourite writers, it’s not necessarily George Orwell who comes to mind….but rather Arthur Koestler, Joseph Roth and Sebastian Haffner – ie a Hungarian and two Germans - and all of them essentially journalists!

Arthur Koestler was a taste I acquired in my youth – and the hyperlink gives my tribute to him.

He was a prolific and powerful writer whose arguments on such varied subjects as the death penalty; and laughter and jokes I remember to this day. His memoirs give a far better sense of what it was like to be alive in the early part and middle of the 20th century far better than any novel.

I wrote an extensive post about Joseph Roth last year; until recently Roth was known in the English-speaking world basically as the author of The Radetzky March but now enjoys a reputation for his journalism and short stories thanks to the quality of his translator, Michael Hofmann, 

He was a master of the feuilleton, a peculiar form of journalism that was especially popular in European newspapers in the early 20th century. In his confident, controversial way, he added,

“What people pick up the newspaper for is me. Not the parliamentary report. Not the lead article. Not the foreign news….I don’t write ‘witty columns.’ I paint the portrait of the age.”

I was long a fan of Sebastian Haffner whose material on contemporary Germany I remember reading in The Observer – although he was by the 60s back in Germany. But he had made his reputation in Britain in 1940 with Germany Jekyll and Hyde – a contemporary account of Nazi Germany. In 1978/79 he produced “The Meaning of Hitler” but it was his posthumously produced "Defying Hitler – a memoir” which I found quite stunning in the picture it painted of how ordinary decent citizens reacted passively to the beatings, sackings and disappearances being inflicted on their neighbours…..

In the post-war period too many people fell for the argument that it was all the fault of a few Nazis when, in reality, it was a significant section of an entire society which was complicit…..

Reading it just a couple of years ago, I was immediately struck with the American parallels…. 

An article in the current issue of the New York Review of Books looks at a new book by Konrad Jarausch who gave us Out of Ashes – a new history of Europe in the 20^th Century     

The problem is that Nazism was so horrifying and so barbaric that for many people in nations where authoritarianism is now achieving a foothold, it is hard to see parallels between Hitler’s regime and their own governments. Many accounts of the Nazi period depict a barely imaginable series of events, a nation gone mad. That makes it easy to take comfort in the thought that it can’t happen again.

But some depictions of Hitler’s rise are more intimate and personal. They focus less on well-known leaders, significant events, state propaganda, murders, and war, and more on the details of individual lives. They help explain how people can not only participate in dreadful things but also stand by quietly and live fairly ordinary days in the midst of them. They offer lessons for people who now live with genuine horrors, and also for those to whom horrors may never come but who live in nations where democratic practices and norms are under severe pressure.

Milton Mayer’s 1955 classic “They Thought They Were Free”, recently republished with an afterword by the Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans, was one of the first accounts of ordinary life under Nazism. Dotted with humor and written with an improbably light touch, it provides a jarring contrast with Sebastian Haffner’s devastating, unfinished 1939 memoir, “Defying Hitler”, which gives a moment-by-moment, you-are-there feeling to Hitler’s rise. (The manuscript was discovered by Haffner’s son after the author’s death and published in 2000 in Germany, where it became an immediate sensation.)

A much broader perspective comes from Konrad Jarausch’s Broken Lives – how ordinary Germans experienced the 20^th century, an effort to reconstruct the experience of Germans across the entire twentieth century.

What distinguishes the three books is their sense of intimacy. They do not focus on historic figures making transformative decisions. They explore how ordinary people attempted to navigate their lives under terrible conditions.

The message seems to be that – in the hands of a skilful writer or journalist – the words and conversations of ordinary people can be moulded into powerful literature….

Joan Didion was another writer who had this gift of conveying conversations - Everyman's Library has a wonderful 1000 page collection of her nonfiction – We Tell Ourselves Stories in order to Live

JD Taylor is too young to warrant inclusion with such names but his recent tale of a bike tour – Island Story - has political commentary which takes us back to the writings of Cobbett’s Rural Rides. George Borrow and George Orwell……..