Robin Farquharson

After being rejected from a prospective Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, Farquharson worked for a brief time as an academic at Cambridge University. After losing this job he worked in various other administrative positions, including as a manager for a call centre. He also contributed to the counter-cultural Bitman magazine, which published a special obituary edition as a tribute to him after his death in 1973.

Farquharson died as the result of a fire at a house in Platt Street, Somers Town, London, in April 1973, down the road from St Pancras Old Church. After being exposed to the fire, Farquharson suffered third-degree burns. He was taken to the Hospital for Tropical Diseases near to St Pancras churchyard, where he died from his burns. Two workers also living in the house were tried for his death and found guilty of "unlawful killing".

Farquharson was a mental health activist working both with Tommie Ritchie in the Scottish Union of Mental Patients (SUMP) during 1972 and then the Mental Patients Union in 1973, shortly before his death. He was the first member of SUMP from outside Hartwood Hospital.

He is also said to have helped tear down the walls at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970.

In 1965 Farqharson's South African passport was revoked as a result of his part in the lobbying, on behalf of SAN-ROC, for South Africa's exclusion from the Olympic Games held in Tokyo, Japan, in 1964. He was rumoured to have been a member of the political White Panther movement.

Farquharson diagnosed himself as suffering from bipolar disorder (manic depression), and episodes of mania made it difficult for him to obtain a permanent university position and also resulted in him losing commercial employment. In later years, he dropped out of mainstream society, and became a prominent counter-cultural figure in late-1960s London. Farquharson wrote an account of his unconventional life in his 1968 book, Drop Out!, in which he described a week of being homeless in London. In 1973 he died from burns associated with an arson, for which two persons were convicted of unlawful killing.

After fully dropping out Farquharson did some work supporting the mental health patient reform groups of the late 1960s, working with organisations such as the Mental Patients' Union. He wrote, campaigned and argued with other members of the group for mental patients to have a greater say in their own treatment. He also helped to secure squatted sites and rent houses for groups to hold meetings and simply for a place to live.

It is the flux of his mental state and the variety of situations he encounters that make the book an interesting and vibrant account of London in the late-1960s. He copies information on a notice board, and rates graffiti in a public toilet for spelling, grammar and general interest.

Theory of Voting was originally Farquharson's doctoral thesis but was deemed to be of such a high quality it was later published as a book in its own right. Although written in 1958, when his doctorate was awarded, it was eventually published in 1969, by Yale University Press. The main reason given for the delay in publication is that Farquharson insisted that the logical choice diagrams be printed in colour, which they eventually were, in black, white and red.

At some point, Farquharson came to diagnose himself as suffering from several mental illnesses including bipolar disorder (manic depression) and cyclothymia. His condition caused him to be absent frequently from his university studies, starting November 1955 to March 1957. He was further absent from his studies after the death of his father.

As Michael Dummett recalls, in 1955 Farquharson sat the Fellowship examination for All Souls College. On the evening before an election meeting was held to discuss Farquharson's admission as a Fellow, the Warden of the college received a telephone call, which started with the words: "Do you have a pen and paper?" Farquharson tried to dictate what Dummett describes (he was not present himself) as a "lengthy statement in quasi-technical language, expounding a discovery in which would have solve [sic] many problems in mathematics, mathematical logic, physics, economics and the theory of voting."

Robin Farquharson was educated at Michaelhouse, Natal, South Africa, 1944–46. He earned a B.A. in South Africa from Rhodes University College, Grahamstown (1947–50). Subsequently studying at Brasenose and Nuffield Colleges, University of Oxford (1950–53), he obtained a second-class B.A. honours PPE degree. For his B.A. 1953–54 (?), his studies at this time were overseen by David Butler of Nuffield College, Oxford University. His D.Phil. was awarded in June 1958 from Nuffield College for his thesis entitled "An Approach to a Pure Theory of Voting Procedures". He was given a Research Fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge in 1964. He also studied at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Reginald Robin Farquharson (3 October 1930 – 1 April 1973) was an academic whose interest in mathematics and politics led him to work on game theory. He wrote an influential analysis of voting systems in his doctoral thesis, later published as Theory of Voting.