Please note that the original talk has changed.
The new title 'The Changing Social Bases of Opposition to War'
Wednesday 25 November 2026, 5pm
Schwarzman Building, Seminar Room 20.402 (History Faculty)
Speaker: Robin Archer, Director of the Postgraduate Program in Political Sociology at the London School of Economics
All Welcome
One of the most influential theses in the social sciences attributes opposition to war to the growth of ‘post-materialist’ values. This thesis seems to do a good job of accounting for the rise of the anti-Vietnam war movement and related social movements in the latter part of the twentieth century. But how did Edwardian post-materialists behave following the outbreak of the Great War? And what is the significance of this for the post-materialism thesis and our understanding of opposition to war later in the twentieth century?
Robin Archer is the Director of the Postgraduate Program in Political Sociology at the London School of Economics, Visiting Fellow in History at the Australian National University, and Emeritus Fellow in Politics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
He has written extensively about labour movements and social democratic politics. Writings related to this seminar can be found in The Conscription Conflict and the Great War; “Liberty and Loyalty: The Great War and Labour’s Conscription Dilemma”, Australian Journal of Politics and History; and “The Appeal to Honour and the Decision for War”, Journal of Historical Sociology.
