Australian Dictionary of Biography

Professor Peter Self, c.1960

LSE Library, Imagelibrary/258

Peter John Otter Self (1919–1999), journalist and professor of public administration, was born on 7 June 1919 at Brighton, England, elder child of English-born parents Sir Albert Henry Self, civil servant and later permanent secretary of the British Ministry of Civil Aviation, and his wife Rosalind Audrey, née Otter, granddaughter of Nathaniel Woodard, a prominent Anglican minister and educator. Peter was raised in a liberal Anglican household and educated at Lancing College, founded by Woodard near Brighton. On leaving school, Self recalled ‘a faint hope that I might distinguish myself in the world’ (Self 1999, 68). That journey began in earnest when he read philosophy, politics, and economics at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating with first-class honours in 1941. A future British cabinet minister, Roy Jenkins, recalled Self’s ‘distinguished but drooping presence, rather like a kidney bean’ (Jones 2016).

With the outbreak of World War II Self felt torn between the responsibility he felt to defend his family and nation and his belief in the sanctity of human life, and he eventually committed to being a conscientious objector. He subsequently worked on a farm and as an assistant to a Labour parliamentarian before becoming a journalist for the Economist in 1944. Two years later he began tutoring in the extra-mural department of the University of London. In 1947 he was recruited by William Robson to the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) where he spent the remainder of his British academic career, progressing through the ranks to succeed Robson as professor of public administration in 1965. In 1950 at the Parish Church of All Saints at Witley, Surrey, he married Diana Mary Blizard Pitt, a journalist (divorced 1957).

Self’s politics aligned with the social democratic principles of Fabianism. His research interests ranged across the theory and practice of modern governance and were captured in numerous writings during his tenure at LSE, including five books, starting with Cities in Flood (1957), in which he argued that uncontrolled market-led growth of cities would produce major social problems, and called for this to be countered by the creation of new towns and local, regional, and metropolitan planning. In 1959 he married American-born Elaine Adams, née Rosenbloom. Their tempestuous marriage was to end in separation in 1972 and divorce in 1981.

At the LSE, Self introduced interdisciplinary postgraduate degrees in public administration in 1965 and in regional and urban planning the following year. His main extracurricular commitment was to the Town and Country Planning Association whose origins lay in Ebenezer Howard’s campaign for garden cities. In the 1950s Self was an assistant editor of its journal, Town and Country Planning, and later became chairman of the association’s executive (1961-69) and council (1979-83). His Planning the Urban Region (1982) summarised his conclusions on the importance of regional governance. In 1981 at the Aylesbury Registry Office he married English-born Sandra Gough, née Moiseiwitsch, a retired librarian and daughter of Daisy Fowler Kennedy, an Australian concert violinist.

Early retirement from LSE late in 1982 saw Self migrate to Australia to continue his academic career at the Australian National University (ANU), where he had earlier enjoyed two sabbaticals (1976, 1980-81). Canberra had the added attraction of being a planned modern city that reflected garden city precepts, with a lively political environment. His initial role was senior research fellow in the urban research unit (1983-84). He maintained a visiting fellowship status at the ANU, including stints with the Centre for Research in Federal Fiscal Relations (1987), and the National Centre for Development Studies (1995-98). He was granted Australian resident status in 1986 but continued to make regular extended visits to England during the northern summer.

Self gave frequent seminar presentations across Australia, produced three more well-received books, and wrote prolifically for the press. He maintained his focus on the bureaucratic expression of the modern democratic state, and the misalignment between its increasing market orientation and societal obligations. Rolling Back the Market (2000), published posthumously, merged his critiques of uncontrolled market capitalism and recommended reforms from the perspective of a social democrat who had faith in ‘the capacity of reasoned discussion to influence policies and opinions’ (Self 2000, ix).

In Australia Self took on a variety of external consultancies, his highest-profile commission being as chair of the National Inquiry into Local Government Finance (1984-85). The resultant report recommended the continuation of Commonwealth grants for local government, allocated on the basis of population. Its core recommendations were largely adopted but policy trade-offs, made to negate internal bureaucratic opposition to Commonwealth funding of local government by securing the support of the States, seemed to him to be at the expense of real reform and straight out of ‘a political science textbook’ (Self 1987, 9). He also advised the New South Wales government on metropolitan strategy (1983), the Western Australian government on regional development (1991), and the Commonwealth government on the Multi-Function Polis and Very Fast Train proposals (1988-90). Continuing his long-held commitment to the reformism of Labor governments, he took a close interest in the Keating government’s Australian Urban and Regional Development Review (1994-95), particularly on the issue of urban consolidation.

Throughout his distinguished half-century career in two countries, Self relished opportunities to contribute to public policy. He was made an honorary member of the British Royal Town Planning Institute (1978) and the Royal Australian Planning Institute (1997). His incisive critiques of political and economic orthodoxies garnered an international reputation and he argued against neo-liberalism as being ‘basically irrational’ and ‘ethically unappealing’ (Self 2000, 170). He instead upheld a progressive empirical liberalism that stood for the public interest and a beneficent capitalist welfare state, with urban planning a means of achieving both social justice and environmental improvement.

A tall man with a distinguished presence, Self had been the recipient of Oxford half-Blues for squash and tennis and, in maturity, his lumbering gait was honed through his favoured pastimes of long walks and golf. He was an aloof and absent husband and father who rejected domestic responsibilities and was fully absorbed with his work and social life and, on the whole, much warmer to friends and colleagues than to his family. Sandra predeceased him in 1996. His sons with Elaine, Jonathan (born 1959), a journalist and entrepreneur, and Will (born 1961), an eminent novelist, wrote excruciating accounts of their childhoods in a dysfunctional household, including the impact of their father’s many extramarital relationships. Self died in Canberra of liver cancer on 29 March 1999 with both sons present, and was cremated.