Prudence and Power: the Writings of Owen Harries

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Join us Tuesday November 29 as the eminent journalist Paul Kelly launches of our new book Prudence and Power: the Writings of Owen Harries.

A CIS senior fellow who sadly passed away in 2020 at age 90, Owen Harries was not just a beautiful writer and stylist. He was also a profoundly sound thinker, steeped in both the liberal and conservative traditions of thought, who made an intellectual mark across the Anglosphere from the 1960s to the 2010s.

Owen was a great admirer of America, but he warned against the dangerous rise of a hubristic triumphalism in post-Cold War America. Owen strongly believed in western civilisation, but he was the first to identity the collapse of the West as a strategic and political entity. Owen was the living embodiment of globalisation – he lived and worked across three continents — but he recognised the perils of the so-called global village; and the degree of envy, malice, meanness and vindictiveness that the intimacy of a real village can not only accommodate but foster.

If Owen’s opinions were unwelcome – whether it be at Australian university campuses during the Vietnam War protests or Washington think tanks at the height of America’s unipolar moment – his intellect and gravitas enforced respect.

Copies of our new book will be available to purchase on the night.

Paul Kelly is a Walkley Award winning journalist, author and commentator who writes on Australian politics, public policy and international affairs. He is Editor-at-Large for The Australian and is a regular television commentator on Sky News, the ABC, and channels Nine, Ten and Seven. He is the author of several books including The March of Patriots: The Struggle for Modern Australia (Melbourne University Press 2010) and The Truth of the Palace Letters: Deceit, Ambush and Dismissal in 1975 (Melbourne University Press 2020).

Michael Easson OM is an Australian businessman, a former secretary of the Labor Council of NSW, a prolific author of political history and a politics student of Owen Harries at the University of NSW in 1975.

Sue Windybank is the former Commissioning Editor at CIS and managed the contribution of external authors to the Centre’s main research programs, with a particular focus on China. Prior to this, Sue was Editor of CIS’s quarterly journal, POLICY.

Tom Switzer is executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies and a presenter at the ABC’s Radio National.