Modernity's Discontents: Esmonde Higgins and James Rawling as Labour Intellectuals
In the first half of the twentieth century, two young men from different backgrounds broke with the ruling culture in Australia and became labour intellectuals.2 Why did this happen? Was there some disruptive element in their early engaement with ruling ideas – perhaps in their family life – that made their defection possible? And how did the break occur? Was it due perhaps to a moment of intellectual enlightenment, in which powerful new ideas captured the mind, or did it also involve a coming together of history and biography, a moment of concentrated exposure to modernity’s discontents at the same time as disorienting personal crises? Further, in their commitment to communism, how did they understand their political practice as intellectuals? And how should we understand it? Did it draw on their previous training and experiences? As intellectuals they were ‘modern’ men, but what kind of modernists were they? This journal article is available in Illawarra Unity Journal of the Illawarra Branch of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History: http://ro.uow.edu.au/unity/vol11/iss1/2 5 Modernity’s Discontents: Esmonde Higgins and James Rawling as Labour Intellectuals1
Revolution and Personal Crisis: William Z. Foster, Personal Narrative, and the Subjective in the History of American Communism
He is composed, con dent, unemphatic and impenetrably unruf ed. Never for a moment does Foster hasten his tempo ... He seems completely without ego ... He lives completely outside the circle of self, absorbed ceaselessly in the ceaseless stream of detail which confronts him ... Once in a while he gets angry over the stupidity of man; then you see his quiet is the quiet of a high tension machine moving so swiftly it barely hums. He is swallowed up in the strike’s immensity. What happens to Foster does not concern him. I do not believe that he spends  ve minutes in the whole year thinking of Foster or Foster’s affairs.
ROBERT HOOKE, MONUMENTS AND MEMORY
In June 1682, when Robert Hooke (1635–1703) delivered a lecture to the Royal Society on memory – his first and only excursion into human psychology – he had just witnessed a spectacularly public failure of memory when new texts were added to the Monument (1671–76), which he had designed with Christopher Wren. In a direct civic challenge to royal authority, these explained that the ‘Papists’ had set London's Great Fire of September 1666. This paper examines the tensions and accommodations between the City of London and Charles II that accompanied the Monument's erection; the column serves to dramatize the difficulties besetting would-be memorializers in Restoration England. It is suggested that Hooke's memory lecture must be read, not only in the light of specific political anxieties then attached to memory, but against the other ways in which he grappled with forms of signification, here treated as forms of historical witness.