The Fatal Lure of Politics: The Life and Thought of Vere Gordon Childe

Description

Renowned Australian-born archaeologist and prehistorian Vere Gordon Childe (1892-1957) had a lifelong fascination with socialist politics. In his early life he was active in the Australian labour movement and wrote How Labour Governs (1923), the world's first study of parliamentary socialism. However, he decided to pursue a life of scholarship to 'escape the fatal lure' of politics and Australian labour's 'politicalism' - his term for its misguided emphasis on parliamentary representation. In Britain, with the publication of The Dawn of European Civilisation (1925), Childe began a career that would establish him as preeminent in his field and one of the most distinguished scholars of the mid-twentieth century. At the same time, he aimed to 'democratise archaeology' and involve people in its practice. What Happened in History (1942), his most popular book, sold 300,000 copies in its first 15 years. Politics continued to lure Childe, and for forty years he was spied upon by security services of Britain and Australia. He supported Russia's 'grand and hopeful experiment' and opposed the rise of fascism. His Australian background reinforced his hatred of colonialism and imperialism. Politics was also implicated in his death. There is a direct line between Childe's early radicalism and his final - and fatal - political act in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. The Fatal Lure of Politics is a new and radically different biography about the central place of socialist politics in Childe's life, and his contribution to the theory of history that this politics entailed.

Terry Irving, radical historian and educational radical, is Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Wollongong, Australia. His books include Radical Sydney (with Rowan Cahill), Childe and Australia (edited with Peter Gathercole and Gregory Melleuish), Class Structure in Australian History (with Raewyn Connell), and The Southern Tree of Liberty. He was editor of Labour History: A Journal of Labour and Social History and a founder of the Free University (Sydney). www.terryirving.net