Stuart Holland - Background and Education

Background and Education

Born in 1940, and escaping the most accurate V1 aimed at its ‘bull’s eye’ Oxford Circus by only one street, Stuart Holland was educated at State primary schools, Christ’s Hospital and Balliol College, Oxford. At both the latter, one of his contemporaries was Alan Ryan, later a professor of politics at Princeton and then Warden of New College Oxford. With Ryan, and many others, he gained immensely from the sixth form or ‘Grecian’ teaching of the historian Michael Cherniavsky who introduced both of them to Hume and to Wittgenstein, as well as to political theory.

He was tutored at Balliol by two of the most prominent historians of the time, Christopher Hill and Richard Cobb. Hill opted to give him tutorials in political theory on a one-to-one basis and recommended him to teach political theory at several Oxford colleges on Holland's graduation. He was fortunate also in being encouraged by another Balliol tutor, Paul Streeten, to pursue his critique on philosophical grounds of the ‘trap’ of conventional economics in the mind set of the early Wittgenstein. Having attended and presented papers at seminars chaired by John Hicks, later a Nobel laureate, Hicks deemed that he could proceed straight to a doctorate which, after a stint in Whitehall and no.10 he did.