Fifteen Eighty Four

Writing the life of a thinker is a long and difficult process. As an author, one often needs sources to which one can return and which never fail to refresh one’s original interests and revive the spirits, reanimating one’s pen. For me, writing about Neil MacCormick, one of those key sources was hearing MacCormick’s voice.

              MacCormick, though naturally shy, was a brilliant speaker. Perhaps it was foretold that he would be so, given his father, ‘King John’ – John MacCormick, one of the founders of the Scottish National Party (SNP) – was himself an inspiring orator, famously rousing not only the public during his Scottish Covenant and Convention in the 1940s and 1950s, but also the judges, especially Lord Cooper, the Lord President, in the cult 1953 case of MacCormick v Lord Advocate. MacCormick observed his father’s speeches during those years and just a little later joined his brother and cousins to form a formidable MacCormick clan in the Glasgow University debating society. There, MacCormick honed his skills as a speaker, participating in parliamentary-style debates – alongside his friends, Donald Dewar and John Smith – that sometimes went on for 14 hours. After Glasgow, now studying in Oxford, he continued to practice his public speaking, also becoming President of the Oxford Union.

              Indeed, it is during his Oxford years that we have the first known recording of MacCormick’s voice. This appears early on (at 3.45 min) in one of the Oxford Union’s most iconic evenings: 3 December 1964. This was the evening Malcolm X addressed the Union – speaking for the motion ‘Extremism in the house of liberty is no vice; Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue’ – only 2 months before his assassination. MacCormick is 23 years old in the recording, and his speech is short: he reports as the Librarian on books published that week, though, characteristically, even on this occasion, he manages to introduce a little quip, turning what might have been a boring report into a moment of delight. A few moments later (at 8.53 min), there is another such moment, when it is announced, to considerable applause, that MacCormick will follow Eric Abrahams as the next President of the Union.

              During the many years I have worked on MacCormick’s life in politics, philosophy, and law, I collected as many recordings of his voice as I could. Some of them are digitised and uploaded here, which also includes a timeline of events in his life. There are many treasures, such as the 1981 interview MacCormick gave when in Sydney on Scottish Nationalism. The early 1980s were a crucial moment for Scottish nationalism and the SNP, for after the loss of the 1979 referendum and the rise of Margaret Thatcher, there was an urgent need for new hopes and new inspirations. MacCormick was an important voice in this period, always full of new ideas, and approaching the challenge of speaking up for Scotland with his usual mix of optimism and gradualism.

              Other highlights include the lecture MacCormick gave at my own institution, Queen Mary University of London, in December 1996, on a favourite theme: ‘Democracy, Subsidiarity and Citizenship in the European Commonwealth’. For MacCormick, who championed ‘Scotland in Europe’, Europe was Scotland’s future and, more broadly, a political theatre that had the potential for showing us that politics could be different – that it need not be a zero-sum game of sovereignty, but instead a collaborative space – a post-sovereign commonwealth – governed by subsidiarity. His voice was one of the key ones missing when the language of sovereignty rose to prominence during the Brexit campaign.

              MacCormick died, following a short battle with cancer, in 2009. But recordings of his voice keep emerging. Just a few days ago, the Walter Scott Society, of which MacCormick was for a time President, released a digitisation of his 1996 speech to the society. MacCormick was an avid reader of Scottish literature – Scott, certainly, but also of the writing emerging in his time, such as the novels of Neil Gunn. Literature has always had a complex relationship with politics in Scotland, and Gunn, in particular, was heavily involved in Scottish nationalism, helping John MacCormick behind the scenes in some of his campaigns. Indeed, towards the end of his life, when he recorded his (unpublished and unfinished) memoirs, MacCormick remembered how as a young boy he would sometimes be allowed to stay up late, and listen to the conversations in the family home in Glasgow, where poets, philosophers, and politicians would all sit around the table, dreaming about Scotland’s future.

              In due course, MacCormick became one of the 20^th century’s most important legal philosophers and one of Scotland’s most important public intellectuals, writing drafts of the Constitution for a Future Independent Scotland, and then advising the SNP on its European policy, eventually becoming a Member of the European Parliament and helping draft the European Constitution. His many publications encompass early classics such as Legal Reasoning and Legal Theory (1978) and Legal Right and Social Democracy (1982), as well as the quartet he wrote towards the end of his life, including Questioning Sovereignty (1999) and his very last and moving book, Practical Reason in Law and Morality(2008).              

MacCormick’s life was thus a full one, and there was, indeed, much to write about. For me, the challenge was not to get caught up in his many honours and achievements, but to always return to the man–to the human being who interacted with others and grew in relation with them. This meant returning, frequently, to his childhood and its many adventures, including of course his father’s famous involvement in the daring capture of the Stone of Destiny, currently on exhibition at the Perth Museum, and announced by his father on Christmas Day 1950 to the astonished family (MacCormick at the time was 9 and recalled how cross his mother was with his father!). And it also meant listening to the voice of this extraordinary person – a warm, jovial and yet also serious voice, and such an important voice in the history of Scotland and these Isles.