Intimate with this is Manne’s other virtue: the connection his reason has with morality, and the open way in which he elucidates, in essay after essay, from one year to the next, notions of common decency. Such values – the Kantian, humanistic values – do not usually need arguing. But Manne’s work has involved the necessary activation of them in the battles to which he has been drawn like a duck to water in the shooting season. Politically, he has always been a meteorologist, a spotter of bad ideological trends, the better to name them and to combat them as matters of history and political judgment.

This combination of reason transparently applied and the values underpinning common decency gives another stamp to Manne’s essays: they display a militant degree of common sense. And of course, this trinity is profoundly friendly to ‘our’ sense of ourselves. In fact, Manne’s implicit construction of his audience is, even when he is reminding readers of moral axioms or the facts of history, a collusive one. Reading him seems to create in the mind a healthy space, one conducive to decent conversation, to the civilised discourse we like to affirm as democrats. Even as he offers correctives, his is the correction our better selves like to have. No wonder The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald named him our favourite public intellectual.

I realise I am idealising the civic space that Manne’s style characteristically fosters. He can be very stern. In this book, we have his famous crucifixions of the communist journalist Wilfred Burchett and the myth-loving historian Manning Clark. For historian Keith Windschuttle, Manne organised a whole book of people to destroy the case against Aboriginal slaughter in Tasmania. He confesses that, as an Australian-born son of German Jews who fled the Holocaust, his views can be ‘overdetermined’, which is to say that when he is most biographically driven to write on racism and refugees he is as loaded with need as with judgment. There is something rigid about Manne. But this does not detract from the third reason we value him.

Few essayists in Australia have defined key contemporary issues so thoroughly, especially in the areas of war, refugees and Aborigines, the topics that dominate this important book. Here we have his landmark Quarterly Essay In Denial (2001), which documented the policy of the removal of Aboriginal children in the era of assimilation. I think that the essay deals crudely with the concept of assimilation, and applies a model of racism that oversimplifies many years of complicated relationships on the Australian frontier. It is nonetheless definitive  and sits in the company of a sizzling forensic challenge to the judgment by Justice Maurice O’Loughlin in the Cubillo and Gunner case that there was no evidence for a policy of forcible removal. In Denial stakes out the ground in a way that makes it hard to imagine how a decent person could argue with it. Manne’s long essays are a long lament for humane accountability in relationship.

The same can be said of his other Quarterly Essay, Sending Them Home (2004), which is about border protection policy since September 11. This essay, with its excruciating case studies and balanced policy analysis of a difficult national issue, also seems to stand complete, unanswerable. Reading it produces the grave pause that invites political action. Overall, then, what Manne does is shed practical light on burning issues by tabling authoritative documents for the historical record. Another paradox: he is a polemicist with a gift for producing classics.

‘Ours is a polemical culture,’ Raimond Gaita wrote recently. ‘We must think hard ...’ Too true. We value Manne as an aid to what at school used to be called Clear Thinking. Except that polemic is not the best friend of the essay. To be polemical is, as we know, not to be ambivalent, nuanced or in flux with regard to ideas, values or the emergent aspects of one’s life. It is to be rather impatient for clarity, to be preoccupied with right and wrong at the expense of the deeper intelligence we might call sensibility. To be polemical is usually to write as if one knows exactly where one is culturally, historically and psychologically. Show me the polemicist who explores uncertainty.

I don’t wish to be misunderstood here (as Manne says several times himself). His essays are not crucially underpinned by certitudes with regard to cultural change, values and history – although it has to be said that, with regard to the ‘counterculture’ that generated most of the culture wars, Manne oddly distances himself from the revolution of the 1960s. He creates the impression that he was there at the time but did not inhale. Still, the bold organising principle of this collection makes Manne anything but safe since we are invited to witness his passage from his brief early moment on the left (when he opposed the Vietnam War) to the right and then to the left of politics.

In a shapely biographical sketch, enough to make one envious of its political coherence, he owns up to various errors. He tells us, for instance, that the term ‘political correctness’, with which he once lashed the left with such relish, is now too cheap a label for him to use. He has come to think that his opposition to economic rationalism, which helped lead him away from his New Right colleagues on Quadrant, and which generated one of his most important books, might have been better left to economists. He confesses to coming late to our shameful Aboriginal history, even though he also now admits (at last) that the communists were the good friends of the Aboriginal cause back in the 1930s. Manne seems to say, almost, that he poured himself into Aboriginal issues as soon as the Cold War ended, substituting, so to speak, Australian racism for Stalinism as his bad object. All these concessions to the truth – as if the public sphere needs to be a confessional, a construction with a Stalinist echo – Manne tables in this book, for his betterment and ours as his critical and nonetheless approving readers.

Yet the retrospection is not entirely straightforward. While all the above is declared, Manne is not one to admit error as easily as his biographical pitch would suggest. In fact, he says that, on the key issues of refugees and war, it is not so much that he has moved from right to left as that ‘the culture has changed’. This is an unfortunate construction. It seems to imply that Manne thinks he has been right all along. For an essayist to give this impression (even if he feels it sometimes in private) is for him to be locked into the vice of polemicism.

A key mentor for Manne was George Orwell, who tried to write with the full sensibility of the novelist and failed. But Orwell as an essayist succeeded marvellously because his pellucid prose was at one with his moral integrity and civic courage, a perfect vehicle for striking a blow for ‘democratic socialism’. And so with Manne, who essays on Orwell here, but unfortunately in a way that rather domesticates Orwell. He praises Orwell for being right about fascism and communism, and for defending both liberty and equality. He dismisses Orwell’s socialism because he judges ‘socialism’ as being entirely outdated. This is conventional wisdom and in keeping with what the right wanted to stress about Orwell during the Cold War. What Manne leaves out is Orwell’s radical internationalism, and the ways in which his thought pivoted on an opposition to imperialism in all its forms. Orwell thought that social justice at home could and should not happen unless there was social justice for those impoverished by colonialism. This thought is hardly out of date, indeed very much in keeping with our present dilemma. Nor was Orwell without his flaws, some of which Manne has inherited, and which you can see at work whether he is arguing from the left or the right.

Before going any further, Manne on the right should be praised for what he was not. His work did not have the paranoid twistings of Frank Knopfelmacher. Nor did it have the spiritual vanity of James McAuley, or the dark certainties of Vincent Buckley in the days of Catholic Action. Manne’s mental atmosphere was less extreme; he had more daylight in him even when most zealously putting the boot into the left. His zealotry excelled itself, of course, just after the Cold War ended. I could not read him without feeling he was slandering everyone on the left as a Stalinist. A triumphalist tone came with a tendency to use ‘left intellectual’ pejoratively, as Orwell did. I happened to agree with Manne about the communists who duck-shoved on Stalin. But I thought and still think that overall he was wrong about ‘the left’ because he never properly considered the industrial wing of the labour movement (another shortcoming of Orwell’s).

Here, I should say I am writing with my own sense of overdetermination, as my father was a militant unionist who rejected membership of the Communist Party. He did so for reasons Manne would have approved of, but during the Cold War he would not have uttered them to a Robert Manne because he did not want to feed the ideological hungers of a Right that had nothing to say about the machinations of the US. The leftism of activist humanists like my father – a welder and blacksmith whose politics had been shaped on the factory floor, whose political sensibility was a matter of communal loyalty and class struggle through two generations – was not going to bow to polemic that diminished the sacrifices of so many workers, least of all at a time when plotters such as B.A. Santamaria were so obsessed with communism that they were prepared in the process to discredit a whole union movement. In this book, Manne has a eulogy to Santamaria in which he notes without qualm that the arrival of the Democratic Labor Party kept the ALP out of office for two decades. It would have been good, in the context of Manne’s stocktaking about his own movement from right to left, if he had reflected on this as a matter of longer-term political judgment. If Labor had governed a few times between 1950 and 1972, Australia would probably be a less conservative and reactionary place than it is now.

Manne’s other blind spot – taking this book as a whole – is the US. It was most apparent in the debate over Pol Pot, when Manne, having rightly attacked the leftists who were slow to recognise the killings, went on to declare ‘wholly irrational’ the idea that ruin from the massive US bombing may have helped the Khmer Rouge take control. That was then. Today, to speak of a blind spot about the US might seem odd in the light of Manne’s recent opposition to the war in Iraq. He is trenchantly critical of the neo-conservatives; of the lies about the war – here and in the US. He is agonised by the torture Australia effectively condones in the wake of the US dismissal of the Geneva Conventions. As a patriotic Australian, he deplores the Howard government’s subservience of foreign policy to the White House. And so on. All this is clear from his recent writings in response to September 11, the ‘war on terror’ and the pre-emptive attack by the ‘Coalition of the Willing’. What more, one might ask, could we want? My point simply is that the left has long had many profound things to say about the US. They can be said intelligently without even being ‘anti-American’ in the cheap sense. But Manne has not begun to speak of them, and I can’t help feeling that some residue of his once having been a Cold War warrior will not allow him to run the risk of sounding ‘anti-American’. Our intellectuals will never be free until they don’t give a damn about that.

It should be obvious by now that I do not think of Manne as of the left. Perhaps, after his remark about the culture changing around him, nor does he, even though the title of his book seems to murmur a wish to be of the ‘left’ that once so ostracised him. Certainly, in his pieces on the culture wars – on pornography, feminism, parenthood, euthanasia – he is not speaking from the left but rather as a conservatively worried husband and father from the Melbourne suburbs (another reason to be liked by Age readers). In itself, not being of the left does not categorically matter, but it does make it easier to understand why Manne has yet to write directly about the unions (which he says he supports), the media, the Greens, the environment, let alone the poor of the world. It is not that he is without a world perspective – far from it: his defence of Middle-Eastern refugees is partly based on the political horrors they have been through, which the policies endorsed by relaxed and comfortable Australian leaders callously ignore. While Manne is attuned to the agonised mess of contemporary politics in this world, there are areas naturally connected to his interests at which he has yet to arrive; when or if he does, he will find a very useful body of leftist thought waiting for him. I hope he goes there.

Meanwhile, he remains a liberal democrat with a brave, clear heart, a man who, at present, is writing without an agenda. He is invaluable. And if I have given the impression that all of this book is concerned with the big issues of conscience, I must correct it by saying that Manne’s journalism on the leading public figures of our day is astute and witty. He nailed Hanson with Howard in the wings, and rightly predicted that Hanson on her own would not last. He got a bullseye with Latham before his downfall. Is there a better tag for Keating than ‘half Manning Clark, half Milton Friedman’? Sometimes, of course, he does not nail so much as encounter, and goes away thinking, as he did with Noel Pearson, face to face with the social ruin of Aboriginal communities on Cape York. On Aborigines, Manne may well be travelling away from leftist thought on welfare, and it would indeed be ironic if on this issue he ended up again in the company of the right. The Pearson piece made me hope for more by Manne where he shares his processes of thinking.

Manne is, as a deep Australianist, writing with a love of this country that I sometimes feel I am losing. He tells us he has always had this love because, early on as a migrant, he realised the unique value of British institutions that have been leavened by egalitarianism in this wide brown land. Despite the present climate of war, mendacity and xenophobia, Manne is keeping faith with the idea of Australia as a decent democracy. He is liberal in the best sense, which creates hope.