Robert Manne | |
|---|---|
 Manne in a 2001 interview on ABC TV | |
| Born | 31 October 1947 |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Alma mater | |
| Occupation(s) | Academic; political lecturer |
| Years active | 1970s–2012 |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 2, including Kate Manne |
Robert Michael Manne AO (born 31 October 1947) is an Emeritus Professor of politics and Vice-Chancellor's Fellow at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. He is a leading Australian public intellectual.
Robert Manne was born in Melbourne to parents who were Jewish refugees from Europe. His earliest political consciousness was shaped by this fact and that both sets of grandparents were victims of The Holocaust. He was educated at the University of Melbourne (1966–69) (BA) (Honours thesis 1969, "George Orwell: Socialist Pamphleteer") and the University of Oxford (BPhil). He joined La Trobe University in Melbourne in its early years. He served there as a professor in politics and culture until retirement in 2012. He is Vice-Chancellor's Fellow and Convenor of the Ideas & Society Program at La Trobe.
Since 1983, he has been married to journalist and social philosopher Anne Manne (née Robinson). [1] [2] [3] He has two daughters, including Kate Manne, a philosopher and an associate professor at Cornell University.
Manne's broad interests include 20th-century European politics (including the Holocaust), Communism, and Australian politics. He has undertaken research in areas such as censorship, antisemitism, asylum seekers and mandatory detention, Australia's involvement in the Iraq War, the Stolen Generations, and the "history wars" of the 1990s.[ citation needed ]
Manne has aligned at various times within the Australian political scene 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 Quadrant , resigning when his editorial policies diverged from the views of the magazine's management committee. He had originally been appointed based on his previous anti-communist publications and his reputation as a conservative. Some people[ who? ] associated with Quadrant during his editorship believed that he was trying to push the magazine to the left. Since leaving the magazine, Manne has criticised it and the editors who came before—Peter Coleman and Roger Sandall, and after him—P. P. McGuinness and Keith Windschuttle.[ citation needed ]
In 1996 he published 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 . His book was widely discussed and cited.[ citation needed ][ why? ]
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). He edited the 2003 anthology, Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, as a rebuttal [4] to Keith Windschuttle's claims disputing there was genocide against Indigenous Australians and guerrilla warfare against British settlement on the continent. Contributors included Henry A. Reynolds, who writes on frontier conflict; and Lyndall Ryan, whose book The Aboriginal Tasmanians is one of the main targets of Windschuttle's work.[ citation needed ]
Manne was Chairman of the editorial board of The Monthly , a national magazine of politics, society and the arts, from February 2006 until his resignation on 18 August 2011. He wanted to focus on his writing, "including a new blog to be published on The Monthly's website." [5] 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." [5] Manne's blog, entitled Left, Right, Left, had its first post on 12 September. [6]
Manne is[ when? ] also 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.[ citation needed ]
Over the years, Manne has claimed a range of political, economic, philosophical, and academic figures as influences from across the political spectrum. These have included Primo Levi, Václav Havel, George Orwell, Richard Pipes, Sven Lindqvist, Friedrich Hayek, Eric Hobsbawm, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Stiglitz.[ citation needed ]
| Date | Review article | Work(s) reviewed |
|---|---|---|
| 1995 | Manne, Robert (December 1995). "November 1975 : character and crisis". Books. Quadrant. 39 (12): 83–86. | Kelly, Paul (1995). November 1975 : the inside story of Australia's greatest political crisis. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. |
Helen Dale is an Australian writer and lawyer. She is best known for writing The Hand that Signed the Paper, a novel about a Ukrainian family who collaborated with the Nazis in The Holocaust, under the pseudonym Helen Demidenko.
Raimond Gaita is a German-born Australian philosopher and award-winning writer. He was, until 2011, foundation professor of philosophy at the Australian Catholic University and professor of moral philosophy at King's College London. He is currently professorial fellow in the Melbourne Law School and the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne and emeritus professor of moral philosophy at King's College London. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Keith Windschuttle is an Australian historian. He was appointed to the board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2006. He was editor of Quadrant from 2007 to 2015 when he became chair of the board and editor-in-chief. He was the publisher of Macleay Press, which operated from 1994 to 2010.
Schwartz Publishing is an Australian publishing house, digital media, and news media organisation based in Melbourne, established by Australian property developer Morry Schwartz in the 1980s. Since the late 1990s many of its publications have appeared under the Black Inc imprint. Schwartz Publishing has its complementary brand Schwartz Media, which all sit under the wider group of Schwartz companies, specialising in newspapers, books, essays, magazines, journals, podcasts, and online news media. Its most well-known publications are Quarterly Essay, The Saturday Paper, and The Monthly.
Henry Reynolds is an Australian historian whose primary work has focused on the frontier conflict between European settlers in Australia and Indigenous Australians. He was the first academic historian to advocate for Indigenous land rights, becoming known with his first major work, The Other Side of the Frontier (1981).
The history wars is a term used in Australia to describe the public debate about the interpretation of the history of the European colonisation of Australia and the development of contemporary Australian society, particularly with regard to their impact on Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The term "history wars" emerged in the late 1990s during the term of the Howard government, and despite efforts by some of Howard's successors, the debate is ongoing, notably reignited in 2016 and 2020.
Frank Knopfelmacher was a Czech Jew who migrated to Australia in 1955 and became a psychology lecturer and anticommunist political commentator at the University of Melbourne. He engaged in vigorous polemics with many members of the left-wing intelligentsia from the Vietnam War period onwards, and through his teaching had a formative impact on many Australian postwar thinkers and writers such as Raimond Gaita and Robert Manne.
Quadrant is a conservative Australian literary, cultural, and political journal, which publishes both online and printed editions. As of 2019, Quadrant mainly publishes commentary, essays and opinion pieces on cultural, political and historical issues, although it also reviews literature and publishes poetry and fiction in the print edition. Its editorial line is self-described "bias towards cultural freedom, anti-totalitarianism and classical liberalism".
Nicholas Charles Cater is a British-born Australian journalist and author who writes on culture and politics. He is a columnist for The Australian newspaper.
Anne Manne is an Australian journalist and social philosopher.
William Peter Coleman was an Australian writer and politician. A widely published journalist for over 60 years, he was editor of The Bulletin (1964–1967) and of Quadrant for 20 years, and published 16 books on political, biographical and cultural subjects. While still working as an editor and journalist he had a short but distinguished political career as a Member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly from 1968–1978 for the Liberal Party, serving both as a Minister in the State Cabinet and in the final year as Leader of the New South Wales Opposition. From 1981–1987 he was the member for Wentworth in the Australian House of Representatives.
Ramona Koval is an Australian broadcaster, writer and journalist.
Peter Beilharz is an Australian sociologist. He is professor of critical theory at Sichuan University, Chengdu, PRC. Previously he was professor of sociology and remains Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He is adjunct professor at Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia. Beilharz is founding editor of the international journal of social theory Thesis Eleven published by Sage.
Justin Clemens is an Australian academic known for his work on Alain Badiou, psychoanalysis, European philosophy, and contemporary Australian art and literature. He is also a published poet.
Judith Margaret Brett is an Emeritus Professor of politics at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. She retired from La Trobe in 2012, after a restructuring of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in which the School of which she was head was dismantled.
John Bradley Hirst, was an Australian historian and social commentator. He taught at La Trobe University from 1968 until his retirement in 2006, edited Historical Studies—Australia's leading historical journal—from 1977 to 1980, and also served on the boards of Film Australia and the National Museum of Australia. He has been described as a "historian, public intellectual, and active citizen". He wrote widely on Australian history and society, publishing two well-received books about colonial New South Wales. Hirst also frequently published opinion pieces in the media.
Howard Alan Willis, is an Australian essayist, novelist, critic and editor.
Bruce Alexander Grant was an Australian journalist, foreign correspondent, government advisor, diplomat, novelist and author of several books on Australian politics and foreign policy.
Lisa Gorton is an Australian poet, novelist, literary editor and essayist. She is the author of three award-winning poetry collections: Press Release, Hotel Hyperion, and Empirical. Her novel The Life of Houses, received the NSW Premier's People's Choice Award for Fiction, and the Prime Minister's Award for Fiction (shared). Gorton is also the editor of Black Inc's anthology Best Australian Poems 2013.
Peter John Read is an Australian historian specialising in the history of Indigenous Australians. Read worked as a teacher and civil servant before co-founding Link-Up. Link-Up was an organisation that reunited aboriginal families who had undergone forcible separation of children from their families through government intervention. Read coined the term "Stolen Generations" to refer to the children subject to these interventions in a 1981 study. After graduating with a doctorate, Read worked as an academic for the rest of his career primarily working on Australian Indigenous history. He has also published work on the relationship between non-indigenous Australians and the land. In 2019, Read was made a Member of the Order of Australia for his work on Indigenous history.
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