Peter Beilharz

Over the past three decades, Peter Beilharz has carved out an important space in Australian social and socialist theory. Co-founder of the journal Thesis Eleven, Beilharz’s work ranges from studies of Australian labourism and European social democracy to more general works in socialist and social democratic theory. Alongside these he has written two important works addressing the themes of culture and modernity. One of them is a study of Bernard Smith (Imagining the Antipodes, 1997) and the other is on the Polish émigré sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2000). The essays collected in Beilharz’s latest volume cover much of his intellectual journey over a period of twenty-five years ‘from socialism, to modernity, via Americanism’, as he titles his introduction. Beilharz well understands that the art of the essay is conversation rather than argument, raising possibilities rather than seeking a single answer. All the essays – engaging, learned, and undogmatic – reflect the kind of pluralistic and open-ended politics that Beilharz is concerned to promote.

History was work for Stuart Macintyre (1947–2021), writing was his pleasure, and he excelled at both. Peter Beilharz and Sian Supski, scholars from outside Macintyre’s own discipline of history, underscore the breadth of his interests and networks by initiating this collection of twenty-seven essays. They wish to honour Macintyre’s work and interrogate ‘the Macintyre effect’. That effect stemmed from prodigious scholarly output, intervention in national debates, political connections, service to professional bodies and key cultural institutions, a long career of teaching and leadership at the University of Melbourne, and mentorship. 

Empire is everywhere. You can see it in the shanty towns of São Paulo and on the coffee tables of the well-heeled in Boston and Sydney. It made us, in its British form, in the antipodes via the expeditions of Cook and Banks, and all that followed. Now it dominates our newspapers and television screens in the form of war.