“Does this stuff just bore you?”, asks an agitated Oxford don after an hour of forced discussion about the political economy of World War Two. “Is this why we now have George ‘unremarkable 2:1’ Osborne as Chancellor?”, he goes on, disheartened by the lack of interest his undergraduates have shown in Beveridge, Keynes and Hayek. Young people, it would appear to him, even Oxford history students, have no interest in political ideas.
Yet the arguments in our defence are compelling. We explain that we have lived our whole lives in a neo-liberal, post-Thatcherite ideological vacuum. Thehyperbolic clashes of the twentieth century’s intellectual heavyweights are a world away from the monotonous, and frequently broken, promises of the career politicians that have dominated the discourse of our lifetime.
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