This worked well in The Causes of War, an unjustly neglected investigation into the links between economic cycles and periods of war. It is a shade less convincing, but still stimulating and well worthwhile, in The Great Seesaw. Here Blainey ventures into less well charted territory by attempting to show that changing attitudes towards technology and nature have a profound effect on economic growth. He is unduly constrained by his metaphor of the seesaw because it suggests that attitudes towards technology veer from absolute mistrust to absolute acceptance, whereas his own writing shows that reactions at any time are mixed and complex. But he has written a fascinating, provocative book, full of lively ideas and showing the Blainey characteristic of wide and at times off-beat reading.

Put simply, Blainey argues that change in the western world is largely conditioned by popular belief (or lack of it) in the capacity of humanity to manage its environment. According to Blainey, optimists believe that humanity is intelligent. The use of this intelligence through the work ethic has created an admirable industrial civilisation whose technology is capable of solving most of the world’s problems. Pessimists are those who prefer nature undisturbed, and fear that human intervention, particularly in the form of advanced industrial capitalism, often corrupts and pollutes.

In a survey from around 1750 to the present day Blainey discerns a swing from the late 18th century cult of the Noble Savage to a mid-19th century complacency about the superiority of newly industrial Europe.

This is followed by a growth in pessimism in the late 19th century, a revived hope in science and technology which survives the two world wars, and a swing back towards pessimism in the late 1960s, culminating in the anti-Vietnam movement and the counter-culture of the Age of Aquarius. In the late 1980s Blainey’s seesaw sits at an uneasy equipoise, ready to tilt either way at the first unexpected pressure.

While pursuing this line of thought Blainey throws our numerous bright ideas on other aspects of western civilisation. Knowing Blainey of old, one would expect to find speculations on the role of climate in history, or on the devices used by Napoleonic explorers to measure physical fitness. There are also speculations about attitudes towards cleanliness, nudity, boy scouts, over-population, and the importance of the solar topee. Blainey’s tutorials must be great fun.

But there is a price. Leaping from one fresh insight to the next, Blainey often fails to work out the implications of his arguments or to consider possible objections. It is odd that the period around 1780 – a time of pessimism, according to his definition when Europeans praised the simplicity of Tahiti as preferable to their own over-sophisticated culture – is also usually accepted as the start of that great technological change which we call the Industrial Revolution. Blainey sees the 1840s and 1850s as a high noon of optimism, but at that time the Irish and many other Europeans were dying of famine and Tennyson was writing ‘The world’s last tempest darkens overhead’. On the other hand he also suggests that late 19th-century Germany was a hive of pessimists who read Schopenhauer, Hartmann, and Nietzsche. But these were the very years in which Prussia was unifying Germany and creating a formidably competent industrial machine which challenged Britain, as well as an arrogant military caste. We badly need an in-depth historical analysis of that astonishingly fickle factor, business confidence; but Blainey has not proved that entrepreneurs draw in their horns when philosophers write gloom.

Some of his 20th century illustrations also invite argument. Optimists, says Blainey, believe that competition is a virtue, and anti-technological pessimists prefer co-operation; but what about all those socialist propagandists from the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere who extol the virtues of technology and industrialisation as the fruits of the communist revolution? The counter­culture of the late 1960s which rejected technology is for Blainey a striking modem example of pessimism; I remember its adherents as naively optimistic. They really seemed to believe that human consciousness could be changed radically and quickly. Once again, Blainey’s seesaw metaphor with its cargo of optimists and pessimists fails to do justice to the significance of the ques­tions he is asking. It also tends to conceal the possibility that two Blaineys are apparent in this book.

One Blainey is the friend of the mining lobby, the admired of the New Right, who has been badly bruised in recent years by those who disagree with him. This Blainey occasionally breaks through the urbane and good-humoured prose to take a swipe at the opposition. New job­creating opportunities, he says, are delayed because conservationists impose the economic costs of fighting pollution. Western guilt is spread by ‘the New Left as an emotional form of tear gas ... often fired at the public for purposes of quieting them.’ The European Economic Community may become a moral and cultural community through which spreads guilt for the atrocities of the recent past, and hence a lack of confidence for the future. Perhaps my nostrils are over-sensitive, but there is a fair whiff of conspiracy theory about such statements. At the very least, they need to be backed by more evidence.

Happily there is a second and more impressive Blainey who comes to the fore in the final pages The Great Seesaw. This is the Blainey who argues that human experience is narrowing because of urbanisation and ‘the premium on novelty in so many facets of western life’. With the decline of Christianity and knowledge of classical civilisations most people have a feeble knowledge of the past.

This gives them few standards for judging the present or guessing the immediate future. At the same time education has narrowed. Humanities and social science graduates grow up ignorant of science and technology and condemn them. Scientists, technologists, and commerce graduates know nothing outside their own specialisations. Both parties are without understanding of the events shaping the contemporary world because they perspective. ‘To say that the past has no relevance in interpreting the present is to make a profoundly historical statement and to claim an enormous knowledge of the past, Blainey writes. ‘If we disown history we are at its mercy.’ It was time that an Australian historian lifted his or her sights from the local and the particular and made such a statement in defence of our craft.

So it does not matter that there is much in The Great Seesaw to provoke debate and disagreement. The book raises important issues, and is therefore to be valued. It also demonstrates that its author, contrary to rumour, has not dwindled into a weekend columnist with somewhat obsessive notions about migration policy. Blainey is back in form.