Michael Thompson’s Intellectual Outlook

Extract

Michael Thompson (F.M.L. Thompson) was a classic liberal, braced by a strong strand of Quaker egalitarianism. By ‘liberal’, I don’t mean what is today called a ‘neo-liberal’ follower of Friedrich Hayek and the members of the Adam Smith Institute, who are dedicated to shrinking or abolishing the state. Michael Thompson strongly opposed such a viewpoint.¹ Nor by ‘liberal’ do I mean someone who could be described as a ‘bleeding-heart liberal’. Michael Thompson certainly deplored a range of the hardships and injustices of this world. But he was a deeply reticent person, never one to express his emotions publicly, or indeed to spell out his worldview.

Nonetheless, he was quietly and straightforwardly a classic John Stuart Mill sort of liberal. So Michael Thompson believed in values such as fair play (he was, after all, a cricket lover); free speech; equal rights; equal opportunities; equal respect between fellow citizens; and so forth.