Euston Manifesto - Euston Manifesto Group

Euston Manifesto Group

The authors and their collaborators call themselves the Euston Manifesto Group. There are about thirty members of the group, four of whom were most heavily involved in authoring the document: Norman Geras, Marxist scholar and professor emeritus at Manchester University; Damian Counsell; Alan Johnson, editor of Democratiya; and Shalom Lappin. Other members include Nick Cohen of The Observer, who co-authored with Geras the first report on the manifesto in the mainstream press; Marc Cooper of The Nation; Francis Wheen a journalist and authority on Marx; and historian Marko Attila Hoare. (see complete list)

The manifesto began as a conversation between friends, a gathering of (mainly British) academics, journalists, and activists. At their first meeting in London, they decided to write a "minimal manifesto", a short document summarising their core values. The original intention of its proposer was that the manifesto would provide a rallying point for a number of left-leaning blogs, to be collected by an aggregator, and the basis for a book collecting some of the best writing about related political questions. The group met more formally after the document's first drafting, at a branch of the O'Neill's Irish-themed pub chain on London's Euston Road — just across the road from the British Library — where the manifesto was named, and its content voted on. It was first published in the New Statesman on 7 April 2006.

There are similarities between the manifesto and the aims of the Henry Jackson Society which was launched at Cambridge University in March 2005. Some Henry Jackson Society members are among the signatories of the manifesto. Figures around the American journal Telos have launched an American chapter of the Euston group. Early signatories of the American statement included Ronald Radosh, Martin Peretz, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Michael Ledeen, and Walter Laqueur.