HA Lecture | British Activist Intellectuals and the Cold War during the Radical 1950s

Thursday 23rd April 2026 | 6pm

British Activist Intellectuals and the Cold War during the Radical 1950s

A talk by Sophie Scott-Brown (University of St Andrews)

We think of the 1950s as a decade marked by apathy, conformity and conservativism. At one level they were – but precisely because of these factors (not in spite of them), the period also fostered more radical thinking than usually recognised. This lecture offers a fresh perspective on British activism during the early Cold War. It discusses activist-intellectuals clustered around the first New Left, the Freedom Press anarchist group, and the Direct Action Committee (which campaigned for nuclear disarmament). The members of these groups asked what ‘freedom’ meant at a time of both affluence and Cold War fears. As traditional social and political identities fractured and values changed, they came to develop new ideas about democracy. Yet, as the talk will show, what did democracy mean for activists and the society they envisaged? The talk will consider these questions. Sophie Scott-Brown will discuss these questions, based on her recent book The Radical Fifties: Activist Politics in Cold War Britain (Oxford University Press, 2025).

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