The endless seminar

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  • Published 20100601
  • ISBN: 9781921656163
  • Extent: 264 pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm)

‘The only kind of revolution possible is a cultural one. Simply to change the people in control of parliament or of the means of production is no revolution. It’s a coup d’etat.‘ – Dr Jim Cairns. 
Discuss.

SO BEGAN A 1980 exam paper set by Donald Horne for a course on Australian political culture. Across barely a dozen questions Horne quotes Cairns, Murray Edelman, Antonio Gramsci, Robert Menzies, Sol Encel, Dennis Altman, Keith Hancock and Denis Kavanagh. In three hours political science undergraduates at the University of New South Wales were invited to consider the theory of hegemony, the distance between description and reality within political institutions, Australia as a home-owning democracy, the influence of middle-class affluence and Australia as a derivative culture.

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