“A new publication,” began Prospect’s opening editorial in October 1995, “requires an explanation, even a justification.” For David Goodhart, who had walked away from a good job at the Financial Times to set the magazine up, those words must have been heartfelt. Like the founding chair, Derek Coombs, he was risking a lot in the notoriously unprofitable field of highbrow publishing, in order to embark on something new—but what?
In page one of issue one, the founding editor went on to explain how curious -British minds were missing out on the sort of extended high-class polemics and canonical overviews that Americans had long lapped up from top US writers and thinkers in publications such as the Atlantic and the New Yorker. In the quarter-century since, Prospect has been true to the mission of filling that gap.
I’ll leave it to readers of this anniversary compendium of our best essays to judge for themselves whether or not the magazine has also succeeded in Goodhart’s other founding ambition to be “a home for those writers who can see further into the future than the rest of us.” Twenty-five years is a very long time in the prognostication business: few would have guessed the extent to which Prospect would go digital, with millions of readers online each year, plus a weekly podcast. It was just over a year into the magazine’s life that a rudimentary website was announced by a small notice in our pages which read “Prospect joins the nerds.” Prediction is an inherently hit and miss affair.
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That is a point powerfully made by our opening selection of pieces on “Britain.” We start with Neal Ascherson’s state of the nation address “When was Britain?” published in May 1996. His sharp ear for the “estuary” accent coming out of public schools and his feel for the vague power of English nationalism still resonate, but other lines betray how mid-1990s Britain was another country. Structurally, we were still in a unitary state: he writes about a Scottish parliament only in a conditional future tense. Politically, we were yet to see the rise (never mind the fall) of New Labour, at a time when it was still that bit easier to imagine vigour and imagination—“fresh air, intellectual exercise and new parliamentary majorities,” as Ascherson puts it—could solve the big problems without provoking big divisions.
Above all else, however, as we look back from 2020, it is Ascherson’s confident conclusion that “in the end, the union of Europe can replace the unions… around which the UK was built,” which exposes just how far our island story has, for better or worse, moved on. The following two essays, by Dutchman Joris Luyendijk—with the self-explanatory title “How I learnt to loathe England”—and the insider-outsider, Russian-born, English-raised Peter Pomerantsev, both eloquently attest to how national identity has hardened since the Brexit referendum. Still, Prospect has always sought to take the long view, and as a brilliant student of history as well as a journalist, Ascherson would have been less caught off guard than many from the years of “things can only get better” complacency. Even in 1996, he saw at least the potential for “a deadly confluence ahead. The river of Eurosceptic xenophobia is beginning to converge with the river of intolerant English nationalism.”
I hope I’m not striking the tone of a preachy pro-European at this point, because one other distinctive quality of Prospect has been to avoid lapsing into shrill tribalism. We have always, as Goodhart wrote in his opening editorial, been willing to “offer space to contrary temperaments,” picking pieces not on the basis of where they are coming from politically, but rather whether the author could write, and whether they had something to say.
It is as a result of this pluralism, I am sure, that the core identity of the magazine has survived pretty well intact, even as Goodhart himself evolved from a contrarian progressive into a contrarian post-liberal, then handed the reins to Bronwen Maddox, who hailed from the Times and mostly shared its “muscular” pro-western worldview, and then again as she in turn handed over to me, with my own background on the Guardian left. A strikingly high proportion of our subscribers have been with us throughout this whole journey, and so too have quite a few of the writers. Isabel Hilton, Ray Monk, Wendell Steavenson, Philip Ball and Francis Fukuyama are just some of the writers included here who wrote for Prospect back in the Goodhart years, and have also written for me.
And it’s not just the same thinkers and writers who keep popping up in our pages, it’s very often also the same themes. Take social mobility (or the lack of it) and “meritocracy,” contested ideals which both appear in different ways in this collection in pieces from Ivan Krastev, in the context of post-Communist eastern Europe, and Alison Wolf’s writing on the “rise of the super-family.”
Identity, likewise, has kept bubbling back in different forms, with some Prospect pieces sounding early alarms about the rising discomfort with immigration, years before the issue came to dominate British politics. More recently, however, we’ve also found plenty of room for pieces from writers who see things from the other side of, as it were, the diversity divide—including our own Sameer Rahim, whose essay on the “The good Muslim delusion” details how western powers have been trying, and failing, to dictate what Islam should be for centuries.
The last 25 years have dramatically sharpened awareness about which voices are deemed to have the authority to write the kind of canonical piece to which Prospect aspires, especially in terms of gender. We’ve made some (if imperfect) progress on that front of late. But this collection from the vaults represents the world of ideas and letters as it has historically been reflected in the pages of Prospect over the course of its life, and we’ve made no attempt to tamper with that.
What has been in the DNA of the magazine from the off is argument: the testing not of who happens to be saying something, but of what is being said. And the thread that runs through an archetypal Prospect piece is very much an argumentative one, even when we are tackling subjects normally covered in a more informative or discursive tone—witness, in this collection, Angela Saini on medicine, or Will Self on love. The magazine relishes starting arguments in fact, as can be seen here in the 1998 family row over the legacy of the 1960s engineered between the Hitchens brothers. And, as loyal subscribers will know, the Duel—in which two intellectual combatants swap letters for and against a proposition—remains one of our most recognisable and popular features.
The insistence on picking holes and subjecting every passing fashion to scrutiny is not to everyone’s taste, but—especially in foreign policy and economics—the past 25 years have proven the worth of writers who challenge conventional wisdom. The west’s post-war hopes of a new liberal order have been exposed as naive, and its talk of nation building has been the cover for an approach that has left the Middle East in flames. (Maddox is firmly committed to the Atlantic alliance—she wrote a book called In Defence of America—and yet her essay on the Afghan war in this collection powerfully illustrates just how much has gone wrong.)
And then, of course, there was the 2008 crash, an event so seismic that we’ve not included any of Prospect’s earlier economic coverage in this book. Instead we have picked out Robert Skidelsky’s magisterial meditation, within months of Lehman Brothers toppling, on exactly what kind of failure it was. Then there is Adam Tooze’s eloquent explanation—a decade on from the first bite of the crunch—about exactly how things had gone wrong in the banks, and the scarcely-understood mechanism by which they were eventually pulled back from the brink. Remarkably, such was the grip of the pre-crash conventional wisdom, much of this was new to most of us. Tooze went on to elaborate his thesis in an award-winning history of the crisis.
One familiar phrase in that first editorial—a phrase coined, indeed, by Prospect contributor Francis Fukuyama—was “the end of history.” It is a phrase that instantly illuminates just how different the 1990s were from our own time: in the intervening quarter of a century history has had its revenge. Some of the consequences of that might have been ugly, but they make it plainer that there is indeed an “explanation, even a justification” for a magazine of remorseless argument. Because in our world there should be few illusions about anyone having the final word. Which suits Prospect just fine.
