Take One of Everything: An Intellectual Biography of Donald Horne

Abstract

Donald Horne (1921–2005) was one of the most prominent Australian public intellectuals of the 1960s. His bestselling first book, The Lucky Country (1964), delivered a full-throated critique of Australian politics and society in the Menzies years. This thesis describes Horne’s life, work and intellectual development in the three decades following the Second World War. It seeks to explain his potholed journey from idiosyncratic conservative and Cold War anti-communist to outspoken republican and late-life icon of the Australian left-liberal intelligentsia. I argue that Horne’s long march from ‘right’ to ‘left’ in these decades was not a radical rejection of an earlier conservatism, but rather the evolution of a liberalism that he had always espoused. Throughout, Horne’s most consistent theme, the issue that held his work together, was a commitment to modernising Australia. This account of his intellectual odyssey is—like Horne himself—concerned with dramatising the many transformative changes that took place in Australian politics, society, civic culture and foreign relations in these years.