Robert Manne
Encyclopedia
Robert Manne is a professor of politics
at La Trobe University
, Melbourne
, Australia
.
Born in Melbourne, Manne's earliest political consciousness was formed by the fact that his parents were Jewish
refugees from Europe
and his grandparents were victims of the Holocaust. He was educated at the University of Melbourne
and the University of Oxford
during the 1960s and 1970s. He holds two degrees: BA (Melb) and BPhil
(Oxon). His university teaching focuses on twentieth-century European politics (including the Holocaust), Communism
, and Australian politics, and he has undertaken research in areas such as censorship
, anti-semitism
, asylum seekers and mandatory detention, Australia's involvement in the Iraq war, the Stolen Generations, and the "history wars
" of the 1990s.
He is married to journalist and social philosopher Anne Manne
.
, resigning when his editorial policies diverged from the views of the magazine's management committee. Since Manne had been appointed to the position of editor on the strength of his previous anti-Communist publications and his reputation as a conservative, there was widespread anger among some people associated with Quadrant during his editorship that he was trying to push the magazine to the left. Since leaving the magazine he has published various attacks on it and upon his predecessors, Peter Coleman
and Roger Sandall
, and successors, P. P. McGuinness
and Keith Windshuttle as editors. In 1996 he published a widely discussed and cited book, The Culture of Forgetting, which explored the controversy surrounding Helen Demidenko's 1994 Miles Franklin Award
winning novel about the Holocaust, The Hand that Signed the Paper.
Robert Manne edited the 2003 anthology, Whitewash. On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, as a rebuttal to Keith Windschuttle
's claims disputing there was widespread genocide against Indigenous Australians
and the existence of a widespread guerrilla warfare against British settlement. Contributors included well known researcher into the frontier conflict, Professor Henry A. Reynolds, and Professor Lyndall Ryan
, whose book The Aboriginal Tasmanians is one of the main targets of Windschuttle’s work. Among Manne's other books are The New Conservatism in Australia (1982), In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right (2001), and Do Not Disturb (2005). Other current professional involvements from Manne include being the Chair of the Australian Book Review
, a board member of The Brisbane Institute
, and a member of the board of the Stolen Generations Taskforce in Victoria.
Manne was the Chairman of the Editorial Board of The Monthly
, a national magazine of politics, society and the arts, from February 2006 until he resigned on August 18th, 2011 "in order to focus on his writing, including a new blog to be published on The Monthly's website." His blog, entitled Left, Right, Left, had it's first post on September 12th . Manne's departure as chairman resulted in the editorial board's dissolution, with Monthly editor Ben Naparstek
announcing, "We're not going to have one any more."
at Bundoora
in suburban Melbourne
. Subjects taught by him in 2009 included Australian Political Culture, Politics in the Twentieth Century, and The Holocaust as a Problem for the Social Sciences. Manne also supervises postgraduate students in the areas of Australian Political Culture and European politics in the twentieth century. His La Trobe profile lists his recent research grants as including the ARC Large Grant: Aboriginal Child Removal Policies in 1999-2000, and in 2003-2005, the ARC Linkage Grant: Refugee Repatriation Policies. His recent academic research work investigates "The Question of Repatriation of Refugees from Australia", and "The Australian Media and the Invasion of Iraq".
, Václav Havel
, George Orwell
, Richard Pipes
, Sven Lindqvist
, Friedrich Hayek
, Eric Hobsbawm
, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
and Joseph Stiglitz.
Political science
Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...
at La Trobe University
La Trobe University
La Trobe University is a multi-campus university in Victoria, Australia. It was established in 1964 by an Act of Parliament to become the third oldest university in the state of Victoria. The main campus of La Trobe is located in the Melbourne suburb of Bundoora; two other major campuses are...
, Melbourne
Melbourne
Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...
, Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
.
Born in Melbourne, Manne's earliest political consciousness was formed by the fact that his parents were Jewish
Judaism
Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...
refugees from Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
and his grandparents were victims of the Holocaust. He was educated at the University of Melbourne
University of Melbourne
The University of Melbourne is a public university located in Melbourne, Victoria. Founded in 1853, it is the second oldest university in Australia and the oldest in Victoria...
and the University of Oxford
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
during the 1960s and 1970s. He holds two degrees: BA (Melb) and BPhil
Bachelor of Philosophy
Bachelor of Philosophy is the title of an academic degree. The degree usually involves considerable research, either through a thesis or supervised research projects...
(Oxon). His university teaching focuses on twentieth-century European politics (including the Holocaust), Communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
, and Australian politics, and he has undertaken research in areas such as censorship
Censorship
thumb|[[Book burning]] following the [[1973 Chilean coup d'état|1973 coup]] that installed the [[Military government of Chile |Pinochet regime]] in Chile...
, anti-semitism
Anti-Semitism
Antisemitism is suspicion of, hatred toward, or discrimination against Jews for reasons connected to their Jewish heritage. According to a 2005 U.S...
, asylum seekers and mandatory detention, Australia's involvement in the Iraq war, the Stolen Generations, and the "history wars
History wars
The history wars in Australia are an ongoing public debate over the interpretation of the history of the British colonisation of Australia and development of contemporary Australian society...
" of the 1990s.
He is married to journalist and social philosopher Anne Manne
Anne Manne
Anne Manne is an Australian journalist and social philosopher.Her 2005 book Motherhood: How should we care for our children? was short-listed in 2006 for Australian journalism's Walkley Award.She is married to Australian academic Robert Manne....
.
Professional work
Manne's allegiances within the Australian political scene have moved from left to right, then back to left again; he titled a compendium of his political essays Left, Right, Left. Between 1989 and 1997 Manne edited the conservative magazine QuadrantQuadrant (magazine)
Quadrant is an Australian literary and cultural journal. The magazine takes a conservative position on political and social issues, describing itself as sceptical of 'unthinking Leftism, or political correctness, and its "smelly little orthodoxies"'. Quadrant reviews literature, as well as...
, resigning when his editorial policies diverged from the views of the magazine's management committee. Since Manne had been appointed to the position of editor on the strength of his previous anti-Communist publications and his reputation as a conservative, there was widespread anger among some people associated with Quadrant during his editorship that he was trying to push the magazine to the left. Since leaving the magazine he has published various attacks on it and upon his predecessors, Peter Coleman
Peter Coleman
William Peter Coleman is an Australian writer/journalist, former politician and Minister of the Crown in the cabinets of Tom Lewis and Sir Eric Willis. Following Willis' resignation as leader he was made Leader of the New South Wales Opposition...
and Roger Sandall
Roger Sandall
Roger Sandall is an essayist and commentator on cultural relativism and is best known as the author of The Culture Cult. He was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1933 but has spent most of his career in Australia...
, and successors, P. P. McGuinness
Padraic McGuinness
Padraic Pearse "Paddy" McGuinness AO was an Australian journalist, activist, and commentator. He was notable for the evolution over his lifetime of his political beliefs...
and Keith Windshuttle as editors. In 1996 he published a widely discussed and cited book, The Culture of Forgetting, which explored the controversy surrounding Helen Demidenko's 1994 Miles Franklin Award
Miles Franklin Award
The Miles Franklin Literary Award is an annual literary prize for the best Australian ‘published novel or play portraying Australian life in any of its phases’. The award was set up according to the will of Miles Franklin , who is best known for writing the Australian classic My Brilliant Career ...
winning novel about the Holocaust, The Hand that Signed the Paper.
Robert Manne edited the 2003 anthology, Whitewash. On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, as a rebuttal to Keith Windschuttle
Keith Windschuttle
Keith Windschuttle is an Australian writer, historian, and ABC board member, who has authored several books from the 1970s onwards. These include Unemployment, , which analysed the economic causes and social consequences of unemployment in Australia and advocated a socialist response; The Media: a...
's claims disputing there was widespread genocide against Indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. The Aboriginal Indigenous Australians migrated from the Indian continent around 75,000 to 100,000 years ago....
and the existence of a widespread guerrilla warfare against British settlement. Contributors included well known researcher into the frontier conflict, Professor Henry A. Reynolds, and Professor Lyndall Ryan
Lyndall Ryan
Lyndall Ryan is an Australian academic. She has held positions in Australian Studies and Women's Studies at Griffith University and Flinders University and is currently Foundation Professor of Australian Studies and Head of School of Humanities at the University of Newcastle...
, whose book The Aboriginal Tasmanians is one of the main targets of Windschuttle’s work. Among Manne's other books are The New Conservatism in Australia (1982), In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right (2001), and Do Not Disturb (2005). Other current professional involvements from Manne include being the Chair of the Australian Book Review
Australian Book Review
Australian Book Review is Australia's leading literary review. Created in 1961 the ABR is an independent non-profit organisation that publishes articles, reviews, commentaries, essays, and new writing...
, a board member of The Brisbane Institute
The Brisbane Institute
The Brisbane Institute is an independent think tank based in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, founded in 1999. It holds various talks, functions, debates and similar activities on average once every 2 to 3 weeks...
, and a member of the board of the Stolen Generations Taskforce in Victoria.
Manne was the Chairman of the Editorial Board of The Monthly
The Monthly
The Monthly is an Australian national magazine of politics, society and the arts, which is published eleven times per year on a monthly basis except the December/January issue. Founded in 2005, it is published by Melbourne property developer Morry Schwartz...
, a national magazine of politics, society and the arts, from February 2006 until he resigned on August 18th, 2011 "in order to focus on his writing, including a new blog to be published on The Monthly's website." His blog, entitled Left, Right, Left, had it's first post on September 12th . Manne's departure as chairman resulted in the editorial board's dissolution, with Monthly editor Ben Naparstek
Ben Naparstek
Ben Naparstek is the editor of Australian politics, society and culture magazine The Monthly.Naparstek was appointed to the editorship following the controversial sacking of his predecessor Sally Warhaft. He has also published a collection of interviews with major writers entiltled In...
announcing, "We're not going to have one any more."
Current teaching and research
Robert Manne currently teaches a number of subjects at La Trobe UniversityLa Trobe University
La Trobe University is a multi-campus university in Victoria, Australia. It was established in 1964 by an Act of Parliament to become the third oldest university in the state of Victoria. The main campus of La Trobe is located in the Melbourne suburb of Bundoora; two other major campuses are...
at Bundoora
Bundoora, Victoria
Bundoora is a suburb in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 16 km north from the Melbourne central business district. Its Local Government Area are the cities of Banyule, Darebin and Whittlesea. At the 2006 Census, Bundoora had a population of 24,018....
in suburban Melbourne
Melbourne
Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...
. Subjects taught by him in 2009 included Australian Political Culture, Politics in the Twentieth Century, and The Holocaust as a Problem for the Social Sciences. Manne also supervises postgraduate students in the areas of Australian Political Culture and European politics in the twentieth century. His La Trobe profile lists his recent research grants as including the ARC Large Grant: Aboriginal Child Removal Policies in 1999-2000, and in 2003-2005, the ARC Linkage Grant: Refugee Repatriation Policies. His recent academic research work investigates "The Question of Repatriation of Refugees from Australia", and "The Australian Media and the Invasion of Iraq".
Influences
Over the years, a range of political, economic, philosophical, and academic figures have been influential on Manne, from across the political spectrum. These have included Primo LeviPrimo Levi
Primo Michele Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist and writer. He was the author of two novels and several collections of short stories, essays, and poems, but is best known for If This Is a Man, his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland...
, Václav Havel
Václav Havel
Václav Havel is a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician. He was the tenth and last President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic . He has written over twenty plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally...
, George Orwell
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
, Richard Pipes
Richard Pipes
Richard Edgar Pipes is an American academic who specializes in Russian history, particularly with respect to the Soviet Union...
, Sven Lindqvist
Sven Lindqvist
Sven Lindqvist is a Swedish author, whose works include A History of Bombing.-Works in English:*China in Crisis *The Myth of Wu Tao-tzu...
, Friedrich Hayek
Friedrich Hayek
Friedrich August Hayek CH , born in Austria-Hungary as Friedrich August von Hayek, was an economist and philosopher best known for his defense of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism against socialist and collectivist thought...
, Eric Hobsbawm
Eric Hobsbawm
Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm , CH, FBA, is a British Marxist historian, public intellectual, and author...
, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was aRussian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of...
and Joseph Stiglitz.
Books
- The Petrov Affair: Politics and Espionage (1987) ISBN 0-08-034425-9
- Shutdown: The Failure of Economic Rationalism and How to Rescue Australia (1992)(ed) ISBN 1-863720-08-1
- The Shadow of 1917: Cold War Conflict in Australia (1994) ISBN 1-875847-03-0
- The Culture of Forgetting: Helen Demidenko and the Holocaust (1996) ISBN 1-875847-26-X
- The Australian Century: Political Struggle in the Building of a Nation (1999) (ed) ISBN 1-875847-21-9
- Whitewash. On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, (2003) (ed) ISBN 0-9750769-0-6
- Do Not Disturb: Is the Media Failing Australia? (2005) (ed) ISBN 0-9750769-4-9
- Left, Right, Left: Political Essays 1977-2005 (2005) ISBN 1-86395-142-3
- Making Trouble: Essays Against the New Australian Complacency, Black Inc., (2011)
Quarterly Essays
- QE01 In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right (2001) ISBN 9781863951074
- QE13 Sending Them Home: Refugees and the New Politics of Indifference (2003) ISBN 9781863951418 - With David Corlett
- QE43 Bad News: Murdoch's Australian and the Shaping of the Nation (2011) ISBN 9781863955447
External links
- Manne's profile at La Trobe University
- State Plays With Fire Opinion piece about interference with the Bushfire Royal Commission on the La Trobe University website.
- Zealotry not in the Public's Interest Opinion piece about the dedication to the climate change issue on the La Trobe University website.
- Articles by Manne at The Monthly