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Politicians who try to write seriously about politics will usually be told by academics that they are superficial; academics who try to write about practical politics will be told by politicians that they do not understand realities. But what of those rare persons who manage at once to be politicians and serious academics? They will either fall between the two stools or make substantial and original contributions to our understanding of political life. David Marquand, who died in April 2024, clearly belonged in the latter category.
When he won the safe Labour parliamentary seat in the Nottinghamshire mining town of Ashfield in 1966, he could have envisaged a long parliamentary career. However, in 1977, when Roy Jenkins left parliament to become president of the European Commission, David also left to join him as his chef du cabinet. In 1981 both Jenkins and Marquand were among the founders of the Social Democratic Party, a breakaway from Labour. They were motivated partly by their old party’s turn against membership of the then European Economic Community, but also by Labour’s shift to what they saw as impractical far-left positions. David remained on the national committee of the SDP until 1988. Meanwhile he was also appointed to a chair in contemporary history and politics at the University of Salford. He was therefore now at a fork in the road between politics and the academy, and it was the latter path that he followed for the rest of his life.
It is therefore mainly for his academic contributions that we now remember him, especially for a series of books that cast an increasingly critical eye on British political institutions. These provide the material for most of the articles of this special issue. However, he never departed fully from that fork between politics and academic work. He was a true example of the public intellectual. His writings reflect this. They are urgent rather and contemplative. You cannot look to them for a fully worked-out political philosophy, or for terms defined with finality. He made excellent use of some problematic ideas, such as progressivism, community, civic republicanism, but did not resolve all the tensions contained in them. His work was an on-going, deeply felt concern, with shifts and moves as the issues of the day changed. There was also however a continuing preoccupation with some basic themes: community and locality, an essentially liberal outlook, and the importance of politics and politicians adhering to a serious ethical code.
He retained both roles of political activism and analytical commentary. His biography of Ramsey Macdonald (1977) was a masterpiece of historiography, but always in David’s mind were the still relevant political questions raised by that controversial figure – like David himself, torn between a commitment to the labour movement and a fear that politics needed to be more expansive than that niche afforded. Britain since 1918 (2008) is not just a detailed study of political developments over 90 years, but as its sub-title – The Strange Career of British Democracy - reveals, also gave him an opportunity to ponder real-world problems of democracy. The Progressive Dilemma: from Lloyd George to Kinnock (in the original, 1991, edition; from Lloyd George to Blair in the second, 1999, edition), sets up a similar confrontation between historiography and ethnical concern.
The heart of his concern for public issues was with the moral quality of public action rather than with party manoeuvres and factions. This started with The Unprincipled Society (1988) and continued through the works already mentioned towards The New Reckoning: Capitalism, States and Citizens (1997), The Decline of the Public (2004) and finally Mammon’s Kingdom: An Essay on Britain, Now (2014). It is not fanciful to observe in the titles of these books a growing worry about the state of British public life and its loss of any moral compass.
While there is great consistency in his preoccupations, and especially concerning the failing ethical base of politics, there are also clear lines of development. Through to the late 1980s his main concern was usually to defend the integrity of what might be called the liberal left against what he saw as illiberal tendencies within the proletarian politics of Labourism. But the 1980s also showed him the threats posed by the neoliberalism of Margaret Thatcher’s period and the continuation of some of the same ideas in the New Labour governments of Tony Blair. In The Decline of the Public (2004) he contested the now reigning idea that the public realm was always inferior to what the private sector could do. These criticisms reached a crescendo in Mammon’s Kingdom.
Although David was born into and lived much of his life as part of the ‘liberal establishment’, he was a long-standing believer in the local and the small. He celebrated local community, and at one point showed an interest in communitarianism, though he became quickly aware of its potentialities for the illiberalism he believed he had found in the historic Labour Party. He was always balanced in his political instincts, and he no more believed that we could do without large-scale institutions than he was a centralizer.
Citizenship and civic republicanism became key concepts for him. Citizenship was not just a formal status bearing formal rights, but an exchange of rights and obligations. Citizens needed to be active, perhaps only at the level of their local community and other little platoons to which they belonged, but certainly active. His image of the good democratic society was one in which citizens were embedded in a series of levels of participation. His work with John Prescott on regional government in England fitted well into that perspective, and that same belief in a series of levels of citizenship activity led him for his final political destination to Plaid Cymru.
He sat athwart several dilemmas: the progressive dilemma between liberalism and socialism about which he wrote explicitly; that between the importance of local community and the need for large-scale action; between politics and intellectual life; and between classical British historiography and contemporary comparative political economy. To a large extent it was the way in which he maintained these dilemmas unresolved that makes his written work still so lively and provocative, and made himself such a delightful and engaging companion and friend.
