Footfalls In The memory: Early Enthusiasms

My publisher has suggested that I preface these essays with 'an intellectual autobiography'. I have interpreted this to mean an account of how I came to adopt the positions outlined. Thus what follows is emphatically not a full personal autobiography.

My father was a general practitioner in north-west London. Both he and my mother were of Lithuanian Jewish extraction, although naturalised before I was born. As a child I was precocious without being a prodigy. For instance, I worried that the hottest places were not always those nearest to the equator and that the coldest places were not at the poles. Then I switched from an obsessive observance of Jewish rituals to proclaiming my disbelief in religion. What I have retained from this period is a selective liking for ceremony and observance. I attended the last Christmas Eve Latin mass at the Brompton Oratory when a Mozart work was sung.

My early political instincts were more childlike. I started to say I was a Liberal because my mother was one. One family legend has it that I said to a 16-year-old girl: 'The Liberals gave you your old age pension.' But I did as a post-war teenager declare that I wanted to be an economist. That was because I supposed it to be the part of politics from which one could make a living.

Nevertheless, I did believe even in these tender years that mass unemployment was not merely an evil, but a huge illogicality: unsatisfied want existed side by side with unused labour. I was impressed by a book, which I picked up by accident, by the popular science writer Gordon Rattray Taylor who maintained that the cause of pre-war unemployment - both in reality and according to Keynes - was oversaving. I did not leap with joy to learn this. My iconoclasm stems in part from a frustrated desire to identify with authority and I could not easily believe that all the propaganda about National Savings was rubbish.

Another extracurricular influence was the now forgotten GDH Cole's Intelligent Man's Guide to the Post-war World. He maintained that regular business cycles existed entirely in the eyes of the beholder and that there was simply an irregular wave-like movement. Cole also made scathing remarks about a priori economists who made more and more refined models of perfectly working free markets and who should be left to spin out their fancies in peace.

Moving on from Liberalism, I brought myself up on a watered-down non-communist semi-Marxism which was then in vogue. One influence was Lancelot Hogben's Mathematics for the Million. I am afraid that I absorbed the sugar on the pill - such as the author's opposition to knowledge for its own sake - more than I did the mathematical core. But I did take more seriously than many real Marxists the insistence of the Communist Manifesto that capitalism was objectively progressive for its time; and eagerly embraced the Cobdenite vision of world peace through free trade.

My politics became 'left-wing Labour' or 'Bevanite'. This was because I wanted 'a socialist foreign policy'. This included a wishful belief picked up from my reading that western hardline policies had pushed the Soviet Union into repressive policies. Embarrassingly, one of my domestic duties was to take to a distribution centre parcels for a relative who had been deported from Lithuania to Siberia for no crime other than that of being a bourgeois element.

More creditably, I disliked the support given to repressive and corrupt regimes in Asia and Africa for the sake of anti-communism or oil. I had a whole litany, probably taken from some left wing MP, of 'sultans, pashas and effendis' that the west had no business supporting while prating about freedom and democracy. Here I have not changed and was very uneasy about fighting the Gulf War of 1990 to restore the al-Sabah dynasty to Kuwait. As Cobden said: 'In all my travels...these reflections constantly occurred to me; how much unnecessary solicitude and alarm England devotes to the affairs of foreign countries; with how little knowledge we enter upon the task of regulating the concerns of other people; and how much better we might employ our energies in improving matters at home.'

With such attitudes I could not bring myself, either then or later, to admire Clement Attlee. I did once take part in a dinner with Attlee when he came to address the Cambridge Labour Club near the end of his period as Leader of the Labour Opposition. He was asked about Indo-China, which the French were on the point of losing. His reply was: 'Don't know enough to say.' He was also asked (not by me) about the economy. 'Why should I bother?' he replied, "I have got Gaitskell and Wilson.'

At the age of 15 or 16 I ceased to see politics as the way to promote human happiness. This was not obvious to other people, as the reaction was taking place inside my own head. For a while I wanted to become a psychologist, as psychologists were the people most likely to understand the causes of human happiness and to initiate the reforms to improve people's prospects. Of course I have long since absorbed the common wisdom that the way to achieve happiness is not to pursue it directly; but there are many resulting paradoxes.

Among my parents' circle there were several medical consultants, who were hardly aware of psychology except as a poor relation of clinical psychiatry. My brother Leon and I can still chant their offputting refrain: 'Psychology without medicine means nothing.'