The launch of this magazine ten years ago was based on an optimistic premise about the market for serious journalism in Britain. That optimism seems to have been borne out. It was also launched at a time of hope in international politics. Yitzhak Rabin was still prime minister of Israel (he lay dead six weeks later), and western, liberal baby boomers like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were in power, or heading there, hoping to take advantage of the end of the cold war to reform domestic and international politics. Most of these political hopes have been disappointed.
Ten years on, the new world order has given way to the war on terror, and in Britain—notwithstanding New Labour's many successes—we have a third-term Labour government struggling to fashion an appropriate response to the new salience of security and identity issues. Prospect has, unexpectedly, been at the forefront of the latter debate. But flicking back through the last 114 issues, it is striking how rapidly intellectual fashions have risen and fallen: stakeholding, globalisation, evolutionary psychology. Then, after 9/11, the focus shifted back to older themes: religion, identity, the preconditions for democracy and economic growth.
Many people admonished me in the early days, saying Prospect could not be a magazine of ideas without a clear set of ideas of its own. I never wanted Prospect to be a "cause" magazine in the manner of our two monthly predecessors (Encounter and Marxism Today), but I thought in time we would find our own particular niche, and so we have in the dilemmas and unintended consequences of progressive politics. We are a post-grand narrative magazine with, I hope you agree, lots of grand stories to boast from our first decade—many of these can be found in Thinking Allowed, a new "best of Prospect" book collection.
