In October of 1968, that annus mirabilis of radical opportunity and reverse, I went to Oxford to study modern history. This was a subject that had been my favourite at school and I had few doubts that I wished to study it at university. Doubts, which began to surface, focused mainly on my wish to study the modern and contemporary. (Oxford history in those days only just made it to the Second World War.) I thought about switching to politics, philosophy and economics because of my interest in politics, not realising at the time that hidden within PPE was the possibility of studying a course or two in sociology.

I had begun to be radicalised by the events of 1968, particularly the French student revolt of May, the Prague Spring and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in August, and reading books like The dialectics of liberation and the seemingly radical work of RD Laing and the other anti-psychiatrists and I began to engage with Marx and Marxist writing. History at Oxford at the time was very traditional, with little in the way of conceptual or theoretical focus or discussion. Yet all around things were changing with the new social history, and the start of the ‘History Workshop’ movement at Ruskin inspired by Raphael Samuel. I attended the early conferences and found a more engaged history more open to theory and also to radical concerns.

I wanted to go on to postgraduate study but in what subject area? While thinking about this I had met through friends of friends John and Jean Comaroff, then postgraduate social anthropology students themselves in London, now eminent professors in Chicago. Both were enormously dynamic and enthusiastic and they spoke of the exciting insights and potential of the social sciences. I read The sociological imagination and was influenced even more by Peter Berger’s Invitation to sociology: A humanistic introduction. I began to think that I needed (and wanted) to study a subject that offered more analytic and conceptual tools for understanding the world than the history that I had studied up till then. Maybe after studying sociology I would return to history invigorated and with more theoretical sophistication. I applied for the two year BPhil course at Oxford (it seemed easy to stay where I was), which promised a conversion course into sociology plus the likelihood of employment in university level teaching.