Out of the Burning House: Political Socialization in the Age of Affluence
Author: Sandy Hobbs and Willie Thompson
Date Of Publication: May 2011
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-2858-1
Isbn: 1-4438-2858-0
This unique collaboration, between a Marxist historian and behaviourist psychologist, is a vivid picture of the cultural milieu they experienced at Aberdeen University, and of social forces often overlooked in histories of the time: Scientific Humanism, The New Left, and precursors of the Women’s Liberation Movement.

As students together in the MacMillan Era, they shared an attachment to socialist, secular and scientific values. Like Brecht, they saw those unwilling to commit to revolutionary socialism as like people in a burning house asking if it is raining outside before they agree to escape.

They followed different paths in their subsequent lives: one became an historian and long-time member of the Communist Party; the other, although a radical behaviourist, unusually focussed on contemporary folklore and child labour.

Sandy Hobbs, former Reader in Psychology, is now a research fellow at the University of the West of Scotland. He was a founder member of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research. His books include Child Employment in Britain (with Jim McKechnie).

Willie Thompson was formerly Professor of Modern History at Glasgow Caledonian University. He is the author of The Good Old Cause, a history of the Communist Party, of which he was a member until its dissolution in 1991. Other works include Ideologies in the Age of Extremes.

“This book is a very welcome addition to the as yet small number of insider studies and reflections on the political and personal genesis of the generation of political activists born between roughly 1935 and 1945. It is the group too young to serve in the Second World War and the first to benefit from universal state education, a free health service and full employment. The authors are well aware of their location at a particular historical moment and they explore with exceptional deftness the relationship between their own intellectual and emotional growth and the relative uncertainties of available political choices. A further strength is its regional character. Willie Thompson’s account of childhood and youth in the Shetlands is beautifully drawn. You couldn’t get further away from metropolitan all knowingness. Only a little further south both authors’ contribute to a portrait of Aberdeen in the fifties which is simultaneously chilly and affectionate.

The result is a fascinating pair of inter-related autobiographies informative in detail and, though coloured by the passage of time, both stories seem rooted in contemporary contexts drawn from both diaries and youthful essays and articles. It is very clearly written and highly recommended.”

- Dr John Charlton, Currently Director of the Lottery-funded project cataloguing archives of popular protest in North East England, and author of Don’t you hear the H-Bomb’s thunder?: Youth and politics on Tyneside in the late ‘fifties and early ‘sixties. (2009).

“What happened politically when a Marxist historian (Willie Thompson) meets a Behaviourist psychologist (Sandy Hobbs) at Aberdeen University in the later 1950s? This compelling study, part memoir part case study in political socialisation, answers this question in a manner shedding light on an age, its ideas and its morality. It is also a very welcome addition to Dominick Sandbrook London-centric account of the period, Never Had It So Good. It is not only Aberdeen and its University that present a new angle on the generation coming of age in the 1950s and early 1960s; so too do the authors’ reflections on the nascent social movements of the time – left-wing activism, including the choice of Marxism and the British Communist Party as well as its more commonly known post-1956 rejection of it; feminism before the official arrival of the ‘second wave’; and secular humanism before the return of the irrational in Christian and Islamic fundamentalism today.

These two autobiographical-styled reflections are woven together to shed light on the ‘broad picture’, as they term it. Looking back on how they arrived in 2011, the authors’ concede how much could not be foreseen – with only capitalism and its exploitative modus operandi remaining a constant. On a human level, it also shows the enduring friendship of two academics whose left-wing politics could diverge without leaving each other behind.”

- Dr Norman LaPorte, Head of Research Unit, History, University of Glamorgan

Price Uk Gbp: 34.99
Price Us Usd: 52.99

Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)