Benjamin Farrington
Benjamin Farrington was an Irish scholar and professor of Classics, teaching in Ireland, South Africa, and Great Britain. Although his academic career spanned several disciplines, he is most well known for his contributions to the history of Greek science. Moreover, within the development of the discipline, his books were some of the first written in the English language that focused specifically on Greek science. In addition to his professional academic career he was also active in socialist politics, using his intellectual capabilities to speak and write on it. While beginning his academic career in South Africa in 1920 he became heavily involved in the Irish Republican Association of South Africa. In the process he wrote several articles for local South African newspapers about the need for Ireland to separate from England. In addition, he was instrumental in forming the Irish Peace Conference in Paris in 1922. Such political commitments inevitably influenced his teaching style, giving him the reputation in South Africa of being an intellectual Marxist. However, from the perspective of some critics, his Marxist commitments overshadowed his scholarly work, heavily tainting them. One of his better known pamphlets on socialism, written in 1940, is The Challenge of Socialism.
Early life
Farrington was born in Cork City, Ireland into an Anglo-Irish family. His father was the city engineer and was a Congregationalist, a Protestant church in the Calvinist tradition.Political activism
Farrington arrived in South Africa in March 1920 to serve as a lecturer at the University of Cape Town. By September, Farrington was writing articles for Die Burger in which he tried to persuade the paper's Afrikaan readership to support Sinn Féin and the Irish in the Irish War of Independence. Keeping in mind the readership was also overwhelming Protestant, Farrington sought to frame the conflict as a cultural and political one, not one based on a religious divide as some might. Farrington's partisan articles for Die Burger annoyed his employers at the University of Cape Town, who issued him a formal warning, which Farrington abided by. Nonetheless, at the same time Farrington formed the Irish Republican Association of South Africa, which launched its own newspaper The Republic in November 1920. Farrington served as the editor of the paper which ran from November 1920 to June 1922 over the course of 41 editions. The front of the first edition of the paper featured a portrait of Terence McSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork who had just recently died on a hunger strike.In November 1921, Farrington was elected by the IRASA to be the organisation's delegate to the Irish Race Conference in Paris to be held in January 1922. Many, including Eamon De Valera, credited the South African Irish and Farrington with the idea of holding another Irish Race Convention, as Farrington had been pushing the idea of an "Irish World Organisation" since early 1921, an association of members of the Irish Diaspora which would have a greater influence in the building of the new Irish Republic. However, what was posed to be a great feather in Farrington's cap ended in disaster as the convention was racked with in-fighting between those for and against the newly signed Anglo-Irish Treaty. Another issue was that during the convention, delegates from Ireland pushed for the idea that the "Irish World Organisation" should be controlled by a committee in Ireland that would dictate policy to the Irish abroad. Farrington himself hated this idea and, in order to prevent it, opposed his own Irish World Organisation idea.
Following the convention, a dejected Farrington returned to South Africa where in The Republic he broke the IRASA's own policy of neutrality on the issue of the Anglo-Irish treaty to attack De Valera and his cult of personality. Farrington also conceded that violence would be inevitable, foreshadowing the breakout of the Irish Civil War. The bitter divisions caused by the Civil war seemed to cause the IRASA to break apart, and the Republic did not publish any more editions after June 1922. Simultaneously, events back in South Africa were also weighing down on Farrington; the Rand Rebellion broke out in March and pushed Farrington away from entertaining Afrikaan nationalism. Farrington was disappointed to see the Rand Rebellion, which had started as a workers' strike, became subsumed by segregationists.
Instead of actively campaigning, Farrington withdrew and became to study the work of Irish Syndicalist James Connolly, of whom he became an admirer. In 1921 South African Communist Party was formed, but despite Farrington's newfound interest in Connolly he declined to join. Instead, he would gravitate towards Trotskyist groups already setting up as well in South Africa.
In 1936 Farrington joined the Communist Party of Great Britain following their immigration to the UK. Following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 Farrington left the Communist party, dismayed by the Soviet counter-invasion.