Book Review: A Life of H.L.A. Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663905055692 |
| Published date | 01 September 2005 |
| Author | Neil Maccormick |
| Date | 01 September 2005 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
BOOK REVIEWS
NICOLA LACEY, A Life of H.L.A. Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, xxii + 422 pp., £25 (hbk).
Nicola Lacey’s biography of H. L. A. Hart is fully of the high standard its subject’s
quality and qualities demand – and that is high praise. When I originally heard a
couple of years ago that she had signed up to write this book, I did not realise,
probably on account of my own inattention, that she had been given the full run of
Herbert Hart’s private papers – correspondence, diaries, the lot. She has put these
materials to brilliant use in sympathetically reconstructing the complex, and in some
ways tortured, personality that lay behind the outward appearance of a life of brilliant
success at the heart of the English establishment.
Evidently, Hart was a haunted man despite all his achievements at the Bar in the
1930s (riding to hounds as well!), in wartime intelligence, in Oxford philosophy in
its linguistic–analytical ferment after 1945, then in the Chair of Jurisprudence surfing
the runaway success of The Concept of Law (1961), next in the Bentham Project and
the Monopolies Commission, and finally in the successful Principalship of Brasenose
College. There seemed a fitting serenity when there followed a long and respected
period as Professor Emeritus with rooms in University College overlooking the
Fellows’ Garden, and many colleagues from near and far with whom to discourse and
reflect. Yet tortured the soul behind the outward success clearly was – riddled with
self-doubt about intellectual performances and public utterances, about marriage,
family life and personal relationships, about sexuality and much else.
As one of his admirers and a friend in a modest way, I found much in Lacey’s book
to surprise me, yet on reflection nothing that chimes other than clear and true. I was
never on particularly intimate terms with Herbert Hart personally, and never became
a member of his circle of close friends, wide though that was. As a junior colleague
in Oxford from 1967 to 1972, in common with others at the time, I fell much under
the spell of his charm and brilliance in discussion and conversation, and I was a great
admirer of The Concept of Law. He in turn treated me with a much appreciated
friendliness, and encouraged me in my work and career. He was one of two external
assessors (the other was Glanville Williams) on the committee that recommended my
appointment to the Regius Chair in Edinburgh in 1972 shortly before my 31st
birthday.
I have much to be grateful to him for. I feel the gratitude, and a renewed pang of
regret for his passing, albeit many years ago, the more deeply for the improved
understanding of the turmoil of his inner life Lacey has given me. There is indeed
something extraordinary about the contrast between the outward and the inward
Hart. He was, in his own eyes, always an outsider, when to others he seemed an
insider of insiders. The ever-acute and searching critic of others’ work, operating
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, www.sagepublications.com
0964 6639, Vol. 14(3), 433–450
DOI: 10.1177/0964663905055692
06 055692 Reviews (bc-s) 12/7/05 3:25 pm Page 433
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