Geoffrey Nielsen Ostergaard (25 July 1926 – 22 March 1990) was a British political scientist best known for his work on the connections between Gandhism and anarchism, on the British co-operative movement, and on syndicalism and workers' control. His books included The Gentle Anarchists: A Study of the Sarvodaya Movement for Non-Violent Revolution in India (1971), coauthored with Melville Currell, and Nonviolent Revolution in India (1985), both dealing with the Sarvodaya movement. He spent the majority of his academic career at the University of Birmingham.
Early life
Geoffrey Nielsen Ostergaard was born on 25 July 1926 near Huntingdon, the son of a Danish immigrant. He attended Huntingdon Grammar School and Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he studied philosophy, politics and economics, graduating in 1950. Ostergaard became an anarchist while serving in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War after reading Herbert Read's Poetry and Anarchism.
Work and career
Overview
Ostergaard taught and conducted research at the University of Birmingham from 1953 until his death. He was also a Rockefeller Foundation fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and a visiting professor at Osmania University, Hyderabad. Colin Ward wrote that "in his quiet, ironical way [Ostergaard] always relished the absurdities of the job he held" at Birmingham. Ward described Ostergaard as "a rock-like defender of academic freedom", and noted his "moral staunchness" in his support for the student revolts of the 1960s and for David Selbourne in his conflict with Ruskin College.
Ostergaard regularly contributed to anarchist and pacifist periodicals, sometimes publishing under the name Gaston Gerard (an anagram of G. N. Ostergaard), and was a trustee of Peace News and the Friends of Freedom Press. He was one of a number of writers who contributed to the development of anarcho-pacifist thought and action during and shortly after the Second World War; others included Read, Alex Comfort, Nicolas Walter, David Thoreau Wieck, Dorothy Day, and Paul Goodman. Drawing on Gandhism, he argued that nonviolence offered a way to reconcile political principles with tactics and to envision of a society without organized coercion.
Early career
Ostergaard pursued doctoral studies under G. D. H. Cole at the Nuffield College, Oxford, completing a thesis entitled Public Ownership in Great Britain: A Study in the Development of Socialist Ideas in 1953.
In the 1950s Ostergaard published a series of articles on the co-operative movement. In Latter-day Anarchism: The Politics of the American Beat Generation (1964) he identified beats, beatniks and hipsters as "latter-day anarchists" sharing an eschatological or apocalyptic, rather than utopian, outlook, and the practice of Zen, which he described as "an intensely personal, subjective religion".
Work on the Sarvodaya movement
Ostergaard was a lifelong Gandhian. His work on Gandhism sought to reframe the thought of Mohandas Gandhi, Vinoba Bhave and Jayaprakash Narayan in terms of anarchism.