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Robert Manne (b. 31 October 1947) is a professor of politics at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia and one of Australia's foremost public intellectuals.

Born in Melbourne, Manne's earliest political consciousness was formed by the fact that his parents were Jewish refugees from Europe and his grandparents were victims of the Holocaust. He was educated at the University of Melbourne and Oxford University during the 1960s and 1970s. His university teaching focuses on twentieth-century European politics (including the Holocaust), Communism, and Australian politics, and he has made extensive contribution to public debate in Australia on topics such as censorship, anti-semitism, asylum seekers and mandatory detention, Australia's involvement in the Iraq war, the Stolen Generation, and the "history wars" of the 1990s.

He is married to journalist and social philosopher Anne Manne, whose 2005 book Motherhood: How should we care for our children? was short-listed in 2006 for Australian journalism's prestigious Walkley Award. They have two adult daughters.

Contents 1 Professional work 2 Current teaching and research 3 Influences 4 Major Books 5 External links

Manne's allegiances within the Australian political scene have moved from left to right, then back to left again. Between 1989 and 1997 Manne edited the liberal/conservative magazine Quadrant, resigning when his editorial policies diverged from the views of the magazine's management committee. In 1996 he published a widely discussed and cited book, The Culture of Forgetting, which explored the controversy surrounding Helen Demidenko's 1994 Miles Franklin Award winning novel about the Holocaust, The Hand that Signed the Paper.

Robert Manne edited the 2003 anthology, Whitewash. On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, as a rebuttal[1] to Keith Windschuttle's claims disputing there was widespread genocide against Indigenous Australians and the existence of a widespread guerrilla warfare against British settlement. Contributors included well known researcher into the frontier conflict, Professor Henry A. Reynolds, and Professor Lyndall Ryan, whose book The Aboriginal Tasmanians is one of the main targets of Windschuttle’s polemic. Among Manne's other books are The New Conservatism in Australia (1982), In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right (2001), and Do Not Disturb (2005). Manne regularly contributes essays and columns to the Melbourne Age and Sydney Morning Herald. Other current professional involvements from Manne include being the Chair of the Australian Book Review, a board member of The Brisbane Institute, and a member of the board of the Stolen Generations Taskforce in Victoria.

Manne currently teaches a number of subjects at La Trobe University at Bundoora in suburban Melbourne. Subjects taught by Manne in 2005 include Australian Political Culture, Politics in the Twentieth Century, and The Holocaust as a Problem for the Social Sciences. Manne also supervises postgraduate students in the areas of Australian Political Culture and European politics in the twentieth century. His Latrobe profile lists Manne's recent research grants as including the ARC Large Grant: Aboriginal Child Removal Policies in 1999-2000, and in 2003-2005, the ARC Linkage Grant: Refugee Repatriation Policies. His recent academic research work investigates "The Question of Repatriation of Refugees from Australia", and "The Australian Media and the Invasion of Iraq".

Over the years, a range of political, economic, philsophical, and academic figures have been influential on Manne, from across the political spectrum. These have included Primo Levi, Václav Havel, George Orwell, Sven Lindqvist, Friedrich Hayek, Eric Hobsbawm, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Stiglitz.

• Do Not Disturb: Is the Media Failing Australia? (2005) (ed) ISBN 0-9750769-4-9
• Left, Right, Left: Political Essays 1977-2005 (2005) ISBN 1-86395-142-3
• Whitewash. On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, (2003)(ed) ISBN 0-9750769-0-6
• The Australian Century: Political Struggle in the Building of a Nation (1999) (ed) ISBN 1-875847-21-9
• The Culture of Forgetting: Helen Demidenko and the Holocaust (1996) ISBN 1-875847-26-X
• The Shadow of 1917: Cold War Conflict in Australia (1994) ISBN 1-875847-03-0
• The Petrov Affair: Politics and Espionage (1987) ISBN 0-08-034425-9

• Manne's profile at Latrobe University
• Online opinion articles by Manne from The Age