My most productive years were around 1968-72. I doubt if I thought of anything original. Nowadays most ideas in political theory as well as economics inevitably come from the academic world. But I was interested in taking them seriously for the light they shed outside the academic game. My first venture in that period was a book called Left or right: the bogus dilemma (Brittan 1968). The theme in stark simplicity was this: Hitler and Stalin were seen as at opposite ends of a left-right spectrum, while in fact they had more in common with each other than either had with more middle-of-the-road politicians. I did not suggest that terms such as 'left' or 'right' could be dropped. My main objection was to their use as a one-dimensional calibrating scale.

My own book had a subtext. This was a protest against 'socialists in the literary and theatrical world, who rightly leap into protests when civil liberties or freedom of expression are threatened', but did not realize that the end of competitive private enterprise would bring every form of artistic expression under state control. The contemporary Labour government had imposed savage travel restrictions to save foreign currency. 'Yet one of the severest restrictions it is possible for governments to impose on personal liberty in times of peace was greeted with hardly a word of protest from Labour's intellectual camp followers.'

On the other hand, Left or right was strongly critical of Conservatives for combining relatively permissive attitudes in economic policy with an authoritarian approach to questions of personal conduct. While I was writing, the Tory Conference carried by an overwhelming majority an extreme resolution disapproving not merely of legalization but any re-examination of the law covering soft drugs. Quintin Hogg expressed the charitable Christian wish that 'addicts of hashish and marijuana would be pursued with the utmost severity the law allows. I hope that they find themselves in the Old Bailey, and however distinguished their position in the Top Ten, that they will be treated as criminals deserve to be treated.' It took me a long time to get used to the fact that my first book (that on the Treasury) sold far more than any of the others I wrote, even when I had moved from what I thought was a specialist subject to one of general interest.

I always imagined that the philosopher A.J. Ayer must have felt rather similarly when all his life he was far more famous for the first book he wrote in his mid-twenties, Language, truth and logic (Ayer 1936), than for any of his later works.

{10 My own U-Turn >>>}