Abstract

In recent years there has been an enormous amount of work done on Australian literature. Unfortunately this has not been matched by an interest in others areas of Australian intellectual life, including political thought. This raises the suspicion that perhaps there has been no political thought of any value written by Australians. This is manifestly untrue. Last year a conference was held to examine the work of V. Gordon Childe at which scholars of the calibre of Barry Hindess, Peter Bielharz and Terry Irving scrutinised Childe’s contribution to Labour political theory. Nor is Childe the only Australian to have dealt with fundamental questions of political theory.

There are other rich veins waiting to be mined. The purpose of this paper is to examine one of these veins, in which the central issue is the role of the state in the modern world, as it is developed in the writings of two Australian who drew on their experience in this country to develop a more universal approach to social and political questions: Charles Pearson and Elton Mayo.

File attachments