David Conway

David Conway is an old friend of Civitas Executive Director David Green. He is a Senior Research Fellow at Civitas which he joined in 2004 to work on health care and multiculturalism. In 2007 he was seconded to the Centre for Social Cohesion a think tank set up by Civitas "following widespread and longstanding concern about the diminishing sense of community in Britain".

Background

He was formerly a Senior Research Fellow in Theology and Religious Studies at Roehampton University of Surrey, prior to which he was Professor of Philosophy at Middlesex University. Jonathan Sacks was a contemporary of Conway's at Middlesex and Conway who would later have Sacks as his Rabbi.

Conway has also been associated with the Institute of Economic Affairs. In 1992 the IEA published Equal Opportunities: A Feminist Fallacy which Conway co-authored. IEA founder Arthur Seldon thanked Conway in the Acknowledgments for The Dilemma of Democracy.

In 2006 he gave evidence to the House of Commons Education and Skills Committee on citizenship in which he made “a plea for is the reinstatement of traditional British narrative history”. He subsequently wrote to the committee saying that they had mispresented his view as a “top down” approach.

On Islam

Conway is an adherent of the Eurabia thesis, telling an interviewer in 2007:

I believe it would be a sad thing were the form of life and society which has been in this country for centuries to cease to be, and I can see a real threat in which we just become part of a greater "Eurabia."

Conway's blogging on Islam for Civitas is notable for the use it makes of right-wing American sources such as Robert Spencer, FrontPage Magazine and Pamela Geller's Atlas Shrugs blog.

On Iran

Conway suggested in April 2006 that a US invasion of Iran would be morally justified:

In the same way as the invasion of Iraqi frightened Libya into rejoining the community of responsible governments, so arguably would an American invasion of Iran have a salutary effect on neighbouring Syria as well as on other dubious Muslim regimes in the Middle Eastern and elsewhere.

And when, as I truly hope, all these rogue and semi-rogue regimes are forced by allied action to wake up and smell the coffee of overwhelmingly superior US military fire-power, then the pipe-line of financial support that flows from them to our home-grown militant Muslim minnows will be turned off and they will simply exfiate on our home soil when radical Islamism is destroyed in the Middle East.

Publications

• A Farewell to Marx: An Outline and Appraisal of his Theories (Penguin Books, 1987)
• Classical Liberalism: The Unvanquished Ideal (Palgrave Macmillan, 1995)
• Free-Market Feminism (Institute of Economic Affairs, 1998)
• The Rediscovery of Wisdom: From Here to Antiquity in Quest of ‘Sophia’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000)
• In Defence of the Realm: The Place of Nations in Classical Liberalism (Ashgate Publishing Group, 2004)
• Disunited Kingdom: How the Government's Community Cohesion Agenda Undermines British Identity and Nationhood, Civitas, 11 May 2009.

Affiliations

Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, Academic Advisory council, circa 2007