ABSTRACT
Let me begin with a personal experience of one morning in May when I was on my way to deliver a 9 o’clock lecture. Oxford Road, a main arterial route in the city and along which the university is situated, is quiet at around 8.15. It was on Oxford Road that Friedrich Engels lived, over a hundred and fifty years ago, observing the slavery and suffering of industrial Manchester that formed the core of his The Condition of the Working Class in England. At this time in the morning the traffic has not yet built up, clogging the side streets. The shops have not yet opened. And most of the student population housed between UMIST, Manchester Metropolitan, the Royal Northern College of Music and the University of Manchester are still in bed. As part of the major ‘renewal and rebuilding of Manchester City for the new millennium’15 Oxford Road is caught, at the moment, between the ferocious urban decay that Manchester experienced when manufacturing industry came to an end and the new urban developments as money pours in to constitute it as not only a ‘European regional centre’16 but as ‘a leading international city of the future’.17 I was passing through a cruddy bit just before approaching the new olympic-size pool being built in preparation for hosting the Commonwealth Games in 2002. It was an ugly wet morning, when I came across a body stretched out in the doorway of a functional branch of the UK’s leading international bank. Nothing unusual in that – someone sleeping rough. One day walking from one end of Oxford Road to the other I counted seventeen people asking for money, all below thirty years old, some not even in their teens. Among them were four sellers of Big Issue. Some sit sprawled across the pavement, some walk from one person to another, some stagger with drink, some lie silent with a notice nearby saying ‘Homeless’, some are attached to a dog, some beg for money politely, some aggressively, some with a smile and a look which suggests payment in kind is available. But what held my attention with this person – who was so completely dug down into a filthy sleeping-bag that there was no telling whether it is was a man or a woman, alive or dead – what held my attention here were two objects at the side of the figure. One was a half-finished bottle of Chianti and the other was an old copy of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
