University College London, Cower Street, WCI Em-ton 7050

PROVOST:  THE LORD ANNAN             4 November 1968

    Many thanks indeed for your letter of 1 November.and the
copy of your reply to Dent.  I am sorry you should have been troubled
by this.  I told him, of course, that as regards University College
we were bound to have a rule that, as the sale of cannabis was
illegal, any student who possessed or sold it was guilty of a serious
breach of discipline.

    I am very interested indeed to hear that the Wootton Committee
may be suggesting some modifications in the existing law!

     The phrase which, I think, made my ,eyebrows shoot up was when
at one point in your lecture you said that all that was required to
alter current practices in regard to numbers of social problems was
for us to discuss matters thoroughly and change our opinions.  This
wasvztymuch the line that John Stuart Mill took 110 years ago in his
Essay on Liberty and which was based on the social theory which he
Euri8eas book The System of Logic (1842). This theory holds
that all changes in society really occur because people change their
opinions, and they change their opinions most fruitfully when there
has been a free discussion of the issues which results in Truth
inevitably coming to the surface.  Of course there is sometxg in
this,but no one to-day much believes in this rather simple positivist
explanation of how society changes.  They don't accept it if only for
the reason that Marx said something pretty trenchant on this matter.
Marx argued that it was not men's opinions which affected social
relationships.  It was social relationships which conditioned a(-
or determined, Marx was never quite certain which) ments opinions.

    At the end of the nineteenth century a new generation of
sociologists, who were alive to some of the crudities in Marx, took
up the argument - in particular Max Weber and Emile Durkheim.
Fundamentally they agreed with Marx in believing that the patterns
of thought e.g. ideology or religion in a society&&the product of
social structure, social relationships (in primitive societies
kinship structure), but they dissented strongly from Marx's con-
tention that the whole thing boiled down to the class struggle.

    I am entirely with you in thinking that unless we begin
discussing the kind of topics you raised seriously and soon, we shall
be unprepared for the situation which is going to arise owing to the
population explosion.  But at the same time I am afraid that however
sensible the conclusions which may arise from such rational discussior
they will not be accepted as conclusions unless considerable changes
have also taken place in our social structure and relationships.

1,

    I am ashamed to write all this because it is so primitive
and clearly you know all this.  The man to talk to, of course, is
Edmund Leach.  It is clearly terribly difficult to give a popular


lecture with any punch in it and which the audience actually
believes at the end of it that they have heard something new,
without simplifying.  I think Edmund copped it over his Reith
Lectures because he threw off the mantle of an anthropologist so
vigorously that he appeared to the uninitaited simply to be
uttering a lot of opinionated statements.
it up more in jargon,               If he had only wrapped
               he would have met with much less criticism

- and would have had much less effect.

going  to Well I am awfully glad you wrote because I was anyway
     thank you for coming here.
Odile again.                It was lovely to see you and

Yours ever,

Dr F.H.C. Crick, F.R.S.,
Laboratory of Molecular Biology,
University Postgraduate Medical School,
Hills Road,
CAMBRIDGE.