Elie Kedouries Approaches to History andPolitical Theory

Kedourie was a remarkable man far more remarkable than the world, or he himselfacknowledged in his lifetime. Oliver Letwin

Controversy raged over Elie Kedouries radical interpretation of the history of theOttoman Empire and the Middle East. He was one of the most influential historiansof the twentieth century. During a long career in the Department of Politics at theLondon School of Economics, Kedourie inspired generations of students. Adedicated scholar and meticulous teacher, he founded Middle Eastern Studies, ajournal which, forty years after its launch, remains one of the leading publications inthe field and a monument to his work.

This collection brings together a range of distinguished scholars to evaluateKedouries contribution not only to Middle Eastern history but also to politicalthought, and to assess the impact of his scholarship.

The volume contains a bibliography of his writings.

This book was previously published as a special issue of Middle Eastern Studies.

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Elie Kedouries Approaches toHistory and Political Theory

The Thoughts and Actions of Living Men

Edited by Sylvia Kedourie

First published 2006 by Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2006 Taylor & Francis

Typeset by KnowledgeWorks Global Limited, Southampton, Hampshire, UKPrinted and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in anyform or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloging in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataA catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 10 0-415-39675-1ISBN 13 978-0-415-39675-2

Contents

ForewordSylvia Kedourie vii

Aspects of Elie Kedouries WorkSylvia Kedourie 1

The Cyprus Problem and its SolutionElie Kedourie 15

Elie Kedouries Contribution to the Study of NationalismPaschalis M. Kitromilides 27

Elie Kedourie and the History of the Middle EastM. E. Yapp 31

Philosophy, Politics and Conservatism in the Thought of Elie KedourieNoel OSullivan 55

Elie Kedourie and Henri de Lubac: Anglo-French Musings on the Progenyof Joachim of FioreMichael Sutton 83

History: Puzzle and People or Prescription and Prophecy?Peter Roberts 101

Collected Works 135

Index 175

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Foreword

This book which rst appeared as a special issue of Middle Eastern Studies isdedicated to the memory of Elie Kedourie, a man of many and varied academicinterests. A number of scholars have written essays, each discussing a dierent aspectof Elies scholarly contribution. They have all graciously consented to devoteprecious time in their overworked schedule to give me the benet of theirunderstanding of his work. To them all I owe a debt of gratitude.Thanks are also due toCaroline Steenman-Clarke for her initial sifting ofmaterial for

the bibliography which appears at the end of this volume. She sorted out the mass ofcuttings scattered in a variety of boxes and envelopes, which she listed and led. Thisinitial work enabled our daughter Helen Grubin to rearrange these lists thematically asthe collected works now appear in the bibliography. To her too thanks are due.The bibliography is now as complete and as up to date as possible. Items in all but

two sections are arranged in chronological order. The two sections, Articles by ElieKedourie and Review articles by Elie Kedourie, are arranged alphabetically bypublication with items arranged chronologically below each title. Some entries mayseem incomplete; I could not always nd details of the date and source ofpublication. Articles in The Times Literary Supplement which were originallypublished anonymously are listed without authorial attribution, although it is nowpossible to trace this. Three items which did not appear in the special issue of MiddleEastern Studies have now been added to the bibliography.Some Hebrew transliteration of the names of unfamiliar reviewers may not have

been correctly re-transliterated into Roman characters; this is inevitable given thenature of a Semitic language. All corrections or additions will be gratefully received.The section on Citations is rather haphazard, no special research having beenundertaken; the items listed there are only those items which happened to come toour attention.I am also grateful to the friends and colleagues who have lled me in with various

details, and who are too numerous to be mentioned by name. I thank them all mostkindly. I would also like to thank the friends who have alerted me to some factual, aswell as typographical, errors in the special issue. These mistakes I hope have all beencorrected.This work would not have been possible without the forty happy years of coopera-

tion with Frank Cass, the original publisher ofMiddle Eastern Studies; I would like toexpress my appreciation to him. Finally I would like to mention JonathanManley whohas so eciently and quietly dealt with all my requests for the past 15 years.

Sylvia KedourieNov. 2005

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Aspects of Elie Kedouries Work

SYLVIA KEDOURIE

Elie Kedourie, CBE, BSc. Econ. (Lond.), Dr.h.c. (TAU), FBA, was Professor ofPolitics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). A dedicatedteacher and meticulous scholar, he devoted himself wholly to his work. During hisforty years of academic life, he used an assistant only once, when due to ill health, hehad someone to copy for him some references from the Public Records Oce (PRO)archives. Even while teaching in the USA where most teachers seemed to delegate themarking of essays to their research or junior assistants, he would, to the surprise ofsome colleagues, insist on correcting all the undergraduate essays personally. Thisway, he would say to me, I know what I have taught and what they have learnt. Iremember that in one term he had some fty essays to correct.The precision and concision with which he wrote he attributed to his favourite

French teacher, M. Capon who would admonish his pupils regarding the writing ofessays : Ce nest pas de la pate de guimauve he would say an essay is not marsh-mallow, that is oversweet but vapid wae. In his writing, always devoid of jargonand owery phraseology, Elie could be deceptively easy to read. The mastery he hadover his subject, his breadth of learning, his deep familiarity with Arabic, French andEnglish language and literature, thanks to his early schooling at the Alliance IsraeliteUniverselle school in Baghdad, coupled with an acute memory and a sharp sense ofobservation, gave him a scope and a dimension dierent from that of his colleaguesat the School who mostly came from a purely Western and English-speakingbackground.In this volume a number of scholars discuss various aspects of his work. In my

essay, I shall describe his method of work, and give some background on his study ofnationalism, historiography, Middle East history, conservatism, Jewish themes, andof courseMiddle Eastern Studies, as well as his relationship with Michael Oakeshott.I am also enclosing an unpublished International Seminar Report on The CyprusProblem and its Solution which he wrote when he acted as rapporteur at a meetingin Rome in 1973 at the Center for Mediterranean Studies, American UniversitiesField Sta.A bizarre notion is still circulating that Michael Oakeshott was Elies mentor or

even that Elie went to the School in order to study under Oakeshott and that hebecame his student or his disciple. Elie only came to meet Oakeshott shortly beforehe applied for a post at the LSE recently vacated by Rufus Davis who was returningto his native Australia. By that time Oakeshott had been appointed head of theGovernment department where the vacancy had occurred. So at no time were thetwo of them anything other than colleagues. Although Elie was a much youngercolleague, deep respect not to say aection developed between them. Elie tells of his

rst contact with Michael Oakeshott in his short memorial address which he gave atthe LSE. This is what he said:

Though I did not know Oakeshott personally, in 1951 and 1952, while I was stilla graduate student, I sent him two pieces which he accepted and published inThe Cambridge Journal. The articles deal with subjects with which he could nothave been very familiar, but on the strength of what I sensed from the way heedited the Journal I felt that what I had to say might strike a responsive chord.This is what I found when I came to know him as a colleague.1

While Elie was an undergraduate at the LSE, his teachers included K.B. Smellie,William Robson, William and Dorothy Pickles, I. Reiss, Morris Jones and HaroldLaski, but never Michael Oakeshott who joined the School after Elie had graduatedand was awarded a senior scholarship at St Antonys College, Oxford. From MartinWight whom he came to meet when still an undergraduate, but not as one of hisstudents, he learned what it means to be a historian.2

Another misconception which needs to be corrected is the rumour that Elie cameto Britain as a refugee in 1948. Neither statement is correct. It has also beensuggested more than once that Elie was nostalgic for the Ottoman Empire. Had thisnot been a risible notion, I would have detailed his own answer to such a statement.His point would have been that in spite of the corruption and tyranny which existedthen, the states created to replace the Ottoman Empire imposed more control ontheir subjects with all the consequences that that entails.As a young lecturer in the department of Government at the School, Elie lectured

on the history of political thought, a subject which was a standard requirement forthe degree. His approach was of course dierent from that of other colleagues suchas Michael Oakeshott and Kenneth Minogue who also taught this course. He alwaystreated political theory in its historical context. To quote Michael Sutton, acontributor to this volume and a former graduate student: What struck me mostabout these lectures, he wrote in a letter to me, was the attention he gave to theintertwining of political and religious ideas. This was one of the ways in which hisemphasis was dierent. I have all his notes of these lectures, written out in long hand,but I have not yet been able to look through them in order to decide whether I cancompetently publish them in an acceptable form.This brings me to the question of some of his publications. In the Introduction to

the 4th, expanded edition of Nationalism,3 he writes that when Michael Oakeshott,the head of the government department, asked him to give a course of lectures onnationalism, it was as a problem in the history of ideas that he approached thesubject. In his article Paschalis Kitromilides places the book in a broader context.The subject was not one that Elie had occasion to think much about previously andhe did not then see nationalism as an urgent issue in current aairs. It was in 1953,the year of his appointment, that he began preparing the course of lectures which hegave in 195560. The pattern became a familiar one. He would give a course oflectures and then use them as the basis for a book: such are the later books: Politicsin the Middle East4 and Hegel and Marx5, the latter of which I unfortunately had tobring out from notes and is therefore incomplete. Elie was adamant againstpublishing lectures as they stood. He was emphatic that the spoken word would not

2 Elie Kedouries Approaches to History and Political Theory

make well rounded reading which explored all the issues. He was in fact still orderingnewly published books on Hegel, most of which have remained unopened, in orderto complete his reading before sitting down to turn the lectures into a book. I amgreatly indebted to the late Shirley Letwin who read the hand written lectures duringher long and nal illness and who encouraged me to publish them though unnished.This, as I said, became a familiar method of his, courses of lectures, public

lectures, conference or seminar papers would often later serve as the foundation forbooks or published articles. I have already explained elsewhere how he worked. Butat the risk of plagiarizing myself, I decided that without the same explanation thisessay would be incomplete.6 So here it is again.Elie wrote all his work by hand and did not make more than one draft. He only sat

down to write when he had the whole argument from beginning to end clearly set outin his mind. When he was taking quotations and references from books, he did notdo it on a card index, but on quarto paper cut in half which he kept in brownenvelopes. His own notes, which consisted of page numbers and faintly markednotations, were usually made on the back of recycled paper which he would have cutup into smaller pieces and on which he would have scribbled page numbers. Thesenumbers he would cross out as he went along. To start with, he would send the oneand only handwritten manuscript to the publisher; eventually, when he used theservices of a secretary, he sent a typed manuscript, again without keeping a copy.He would work on several projects at the same time as he was teaching. He would

however only start writing, as I have already mentioned, when he had complete in hishead, the whole work from its introductory questions to the resolution of these thathe had reached.

Historiography

Historiography has become a regular discipline and it would be instructive, before Igive an indication of the extent of Elies scholarship, to discuss how historiographyrelates to his work.I would like to start by quoting from H.E. Bell who, writing about F.W. Maitland

said that his canon law studies amounted to a frontal attack on orthodox opinion.Bell starts his book on Maitland with a discussion of the word historiography:7

Historiography the study of the ways in which men have applied themselvesto the problem of writing history has become fashionable, perhaps toofashionable a subject. For the professional, in history or in any other craft,there must always be an interest in seeing how the greatest practitioners havegone about their business: but whether that interest is sucient to justify themass of work that has recently appeared on historiography is not so certain.In particular, an extended study of an individual historian would seem to bejustiable only in one of two circumstances: he must either have been, in somesort, a public gure in his own age, whose historical writing inuencedpolitical action of his time, or alternatively he must have introduced anddeveloped ideas and techniques of permanent signicance in the writing ofhistory.8

Elie Kedouries Work 3

I shall not dwell on the point of the public gure. Although Elie was consulted bypublic gures, he was much too private and reserved a man to use or even mentionsuch contacts. Whether he made any impact on public aairs, I leave to others todetermine. Those interested can usefully read the essay by Peter Roberts whodiscusses this point among others. It is in Bells latter category, that of the signicantcontribution to the study of history that Elies work deserves an extended study. Hisapproach and method of writing Middle Eastern history was not only punctilious inits details, but revolutionary in its interpretation, approach and impact.On reading Elie, one discovers that he wrote the most interesting historiography of

his own work. I would like to concentrate on two of his essays: his Introduction tothe 1987 edition of England and the Middle East9 and Genesis of a History.10 Inorder to dene the meaning of diplomatic history, a category within which hereckoned his In the AngloArab Labyrinth11 might be classed, he stresses thatdiplomatic history had fallen into disrepute due to the growth of the Annales(dhistoire economique et sociale) school of history with its emphasis on social andeconomic factors for the writing of history, and the view that this was the only wayto make history interesting.

Many reasons may be cited to explain the high regard for social history . . . It iswidely believed that such history deals with activities and events which in somesense are more real, more fundamental, than the political transactions betweenstates which are the usual concern of diplomatic historians. This belief in theprimacy of social history is no doubt one outcome of Marxist ideas and of theirwide dissemination. For if it is assumed that the particular mode of productionprevalent in a society determines the character of all other activities, then socialhistory, or a variant thereof, must assume a commanding position. As is wellknown the Annales school has done a great deal to endow social history with itsnewly found prestige, and as it happens, one reason why two of the principalfounders of the school, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, became attracted tosocial and economic history was their belief that the real history of a societymust begin with and be based upon the history of its economic activity. The restwas dismissed and damned as mere histoire evenementielle, as so much frothygossip about Cleopatras nose, the Ems telegrams and sealed wagons speedingtowards the Finland Station.12

With reference to the Annales school, Elie quotes the very categorical editorial byImmanuel Wallerstein, the Tasks of Historical social science, which he published in1977 in the rst number of Review, the Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center forthe Study of Economics, Historical Systems and Civilizations at the State Universityof New York at Binghampton.13 Annales, he wrote, stood for the economic andsocial history against the political and diplomatic facade, for the quantied trendsagainst the chronological narrative, for the social sciences against historicaluniqueness, for the global man against fractional man, for Braudels longue dureeagainst the evenementielle [sic].Elie asks whether it is so easy to distinguish between root and facade in the ow of

historical events, and remarks that a social historian, like a diplomatic historian,could be a mediocrity. The choice of the subject is not in itself a guarantee of the

4 Elie Kedouries Approaches to History and Political Theory

genius or lack of it in a historian. Both social and diplomatic historians could bemediocrities. That diplomatic history has fallen into disrepute is undoubted; it hadcome to be widely taken to be in reality no more than a precis, more or lessmethodical, of diplomatic correspondence. If the idea of diplomatic history, hecontinues, involves no more than this, then the disrepute would be well merited.But, he goes on, all good history, good diplomatic history, starts with a heap of

materials which it aspires to put into some kind of order, but with a sense ofpuzzlement. . . . The history which an historian undertakes is an enquiry. An enquiryis a question, and the historian is an enquirer, an asker of questions.14 In otherwords, the subject is in some ways immaterial; it is the approach and the questionsposed which determine its interest.There is the story of the eminent Talmudic scholar who would be expounding his

weekly text which would always lead to the vital question he wanted his students toask. The correct question was the essence of his hour long discourse. One day assoon as he arrived in class, one of the young disciples stood up and put a question tohim. This most eminent man closed his books and announced that there was no needfor a lesson that day as the boy had arrived at the right question. Likewise with Eliessense of puzzlement. It always led to a question, and it was the question asked whichdetermined the course of the research and its nal completion. The essence was all inthe question.It was a question therefore that dictated his choice of subject for England and the

Middle East: The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire 19141921. The question arosebecause of the discrepancy between the political world conjured by Ronald Storrs inhis memoirs, Orientations, and Elies personal experience and observations of theMiddle East in the 1940s and 1950s.Elie undertook the research before the Foreign Oce archives were transferred to

the PRO, and the published accounts of Middle East history, as he found them, wereunsatisfactory. He became aware, however, of the existence of a large literature ofmemoirs, eye-witness accounts and military histories, as well as an accumulation ofArabic chronicles and memoirs with a great deal of documentation, of the existenceof which practically no historian had hitherto shown himself aware. These and otherprivate papers formed the bulk of his source material.15 He is undoubtedly a pioneerin making the study of Arab political memoirs into a major source for the writing ofhistory. The archives, when they were opened in 1966, only conrmed what he hadalready concluded.Elie of course made detailed use of the then newly available material. As he

explained in the Introduction to the 1987 edition of the book, had this materialbeen available to him when he was writing England and the Middle East in the early1950s, it would not have altered the structure or the nal conclusions of the book.The newly available material enabled him to elaborate questions which he had toleave obscure. He nonetheless published over the years a large number of articleswhich supplemented his early account and helped to clarify these obscurities.To go back to the label diplomatic history as may be applied to the Labyrinth

which deals with the HusaynMcMahon correspondence, Elie wrote that the book isalso an enquiry into the genesis of a bunch of letters and of the successivemetamorphoses such that what the correspondence was understood to signify in1939 was far removed from what its authors had in mind in 19141915.16 Tracing this

Elie Kedouries Work 5

change in meaning involved careful reading, noting subtle and imperceptible shifts inmeaning.Alain Silvera met Elie at the Quai dOrsay where they were both reading in the

early 1970s. On learning that Elie was concerned with the HusaynMcMahonmaterial he questioned the need for that, since he remarked that Elie had alreadywritten it all in England and the Middle East, Elies answer was: Cest pour avoir lecoeur net, in order to have a clear conscience. It was typical of Elie not to leave anyavenues unexplored.

Conservatism

Elies lifelong interest in the idea of Conservatism remains unfortunately unfullled.His article Diversity in Freedom: Conservatism from Burkean Origins to theChallenge of Equality, published in The Times Literary Supplement (TLS)17

encapsulates his work and mature reections on a subject which concerned himfor decades. Because of his method of working which I have explained, I do not haveany notes on which I could work in order to bring his thoughts together in bookform. He read widely and would marshal his arguments mentally before sitting downto write a book. He told me that all he needed was another six months at home andhis book on Conservatism would be ready for the printer.It is clear from his earlier article Conservatism and the Conservative Party rst

published in 1970, then included in The Crossman Confessions, that he had alreadydone some very solid work as a basis for understanding the Conservative Party since1832. It is necessary to have a detailed knowledge of the relevant transactions withinthe party, and between it and its rivals, he wrote.18 His article Lord Salisbury andPolitics of 1972 also in Confessions argued that, since there does not exist asystematic and coherent body of Conservative doctrine, understanding Conserva-tism has to start with examining the utterances and the record of a succession ofConservatives, who are articulate and aware of what being a Conservative impliesand . . . in some fashion exemplary for their time and place.19 Noel OSullivanexplores the conservative philosophy which inspires Elies response to the impact ofwestern modernity on both western and non-western societies.Articles he published over the next twenty years indicate that he was still engaged

on what he described as the laborious and dicult task of collecting such material.20

Thanks also to his contact with politicians, he had more that an outsidersknowledge of the transactions of the Party and records of its leaders. Such contactgave him insight, retrospectively, into the concerns and methods of workingpoliticians in earlier periods.The TLS article again dened this direct but demanding methodology.

Conservatism is no more than what Conservatives have said and done since theybegan to make an identity for themselves, and to be aware of it. Here I am eitherquoting or drawing on a summary that Peter Roberts, whose article goes into detailon this point, has made of Elies piece in the TLS:

Elie Kedourie was a political philosopher who placed theory rmly in itshistorical context. His lectures on Greek thought presented it in the political andhistorical setting of the Polis and its surroundings. His detailed interest in

6 Elie Kedouries Approaches to History and Political Theory

British political history for the last two centuries and even before is thereforenot surprising: it went hand in hand with his interest in the gradual developmentof a Conservative political theory.

At the beginning of his TLS article, Elie writes that Conservatives had tomeasure themselves against the intellectual claims and electoral attraction of theLiberal and then the Labour Party. The Conservatives had to address issuesraised by the other two parties which attracted the electorate, issues such astheodicy, Marxism, natural rights, delegitimization of property, contract, welfare,empowerment, planning, positional good and the enforcement of equality, amongothers.It was therefore in the course of a long period of dialectical reaction with its two

main rivals, the Liberal and the Labour Party, that the Conservative politicalidentity gradually rmed up. Elie considered the Conservatives to be the heirs of theWhigs and not as it is wrongly assumed of the Tory Party. Mr Pitts friends, hewrote dened their . . . politics in dialectical relation to the powerful ideologicalcurrent which the French revolutionaries got going. Further and fuller, self-determination followed . . . the variety of political contingencies to which, as long asthey have life in them, Conservatives have to respond. Some very signicantConservative ideas derived from Whig politics before Pitt. The divine right ofkings, the legitimist claims of the Stuarts, the inuence of the Church of England,absolutist attempts to curb parliamentary liberties, sensitivity to all these factorshave become part of Conservatism.The summation of his Idea of Conservatism may be found in the text he presented

to the Woodrow Wilson Center when he applied for a Fellowship in 1990:

The student of Conservatism faces a diculty which does not face the studentof, say, Liberalism or Socialism. These latter are political ideologies in the fullsense of the word; that is, they constitute articulated systems of thought inwhich conclusions about desirable political ends and the manner of attainingthem are based on what purport to be rst principles, from which are derivedseemingly logical conclusions. A case in point is J.S. Mills On Liberty andRepresentative Government, and the corpus of Karl Marxs writings where thepractical recipes of The Communist Manifesto are buttressed by the complexarguments deployed in Capital.

Conservatism is in a dierent case. There is, of course, no lack of writers whohave tried to expound what a Conservative politics must include and exclude,and on what grounds. But the arguments remain diuse and by no meansconstitute anything like a systematic and water-tight doctrine. An historian ofthe idea of Conservatism has to tease out from a large body of miscellaneousworks what writers have understood by Conservatism in various periods, andthe reasons for change in this understanding reasons which may have to dowith varying social and political conditions to which Conservative thinkers haveto respond; or alternatively, reasons which arise from within a given body ofthought and the intellectual problems or obscurities which it may come todisclose.

Elie Kedouries Work 7

To give one or two examples of the miscellaneous, unsystematic character ofwritings which are commonly accepted as being, in some sense Conservative;Edmund Burkes voluminous writings and speeches over many decades werecomposed in response to a variety of very dierent situations confrontingsomeone deeply involved in parliamentary and factional politics. The problemto the historian of Conservative thought is to nd whether, and if so to whatextent, there is continuity in Burkes thought on political matters and acoherent, event if only implicit, stance over government and society, politicalprudence and public morality.

Another example of a body of writings which can be usefully examined in thisway is that of which the author is the third Marquis of Salisbury. They aremiscellaneous in the same sense as Burkes writings, consisting of articlescontributed to The Quarterly Review and other periodicals, and the subjects ofwhich were usually dictated by current aairs and preoccupations. What can bedone in order to tease out a coherent, almost systematic approach to politicsfrom these writings is shown by an essay of mine on Salisbury and Politics,included in a book published in 1984, The Crossman Confessions and otherEssays in Politics, History and Religion.

This book also contains other chapters (chapters 2, 3 and 5) which exemplify myapproach to this enquiry. The subject indeed has been of continuing interest tome for quite a long time.

Conservatism has another aspect which its historian would also have toconsider. This is not so much its character as a body of thought, but rather as acomplex of attitudes, expectations and traditional behaviour which may bediscerned in approaches to political problems and styles of political action.What is under consideration here is not the articulate and the reective, butrather that which can be gathered from the way in which, say, a ministerconfronts or deals with problems and predicaments during the course of hispolitical career. This is to say that the task of a historian of Conservatism is verycomplex, and fraught with diculties and pitfalls.

The Conservatism which I wish to examine is that to be found in the English-speaking world, and particularly in Great Britain. The scene on the continent ofEurope is a very dierent one, alike, in its historical context and its assumptionsand idioms. I wish also to dierentiate Conservatism from what is calledToryism. Toryism makes sense in the context of a society which has hardly beentouched by modernity, and in which questions about monarchical legitimacyand religious uniformity are at the forefront of politics.

Conservatism moves in a quite dierent intellectual and political world. Thereare a great many books about various aspects of Conservative thought, andtransition, but I do not know of a work which approaches the issue in the waydescribed above. The interest of any enquiry of this kind is two-fold: rst as anexercise in doing the history of ideas, and second in mapping out the contours of

8 Elie Kedouries Approaches to History and Political Theory

a political outlook which has proves remarkably robust and durable in themodern world.

Elie concludes that Conservatism, which he distinguishes from right wing politics an erroneous modern identication, is to be distinguished by scepticism about whatpoliticians accomplish. It cannot be concerned with enforcing right opinions or amoral code, and it does not work towards a theodicy. . . .It is also suspicious of theimpulse to use politics for accomplishing the good.Further indications of how he was viewing the subject may be garnered from a

paragraph he wrote in his autobiographical note for the Wilson Center:

During my visit to the Wilson Center, I wish to look into the history of the ideaof conservatism. As with any other subject on which I have written, the impulseto examine the idea of Conservatism has arisen out of a puzzlement. Unlike saySocialism or Liberalism, Conservatism cannot easily be said to arise out of atheory or a philosophy either of politics or of human nature. There have been,to be sure, many attempts to theorize a conservative mode or style of politics,but these attempts came, as it were, after the event after a conservative politicshad been practised for quite a time. It is the relation between the earlierConservative practice and the later theorizing which I hope principally toinvestigate.

This emphasis on his interest in Conservatism may give the impression that he was amember of the Conservative Party. On the contrary, he never joined a political partyand was highly critical of some policies of the Conservative Government.One may well ask why I dwell at such length on a topic which remains incomplete:

because it was to be his magnum opus, but it was not to be. How well I remember myamusement in 1953 when, upon his return from the interview for the job at the LSE,he recounted to me what took place at the interview. If I remember correctly, thatrst post which he applied for was Government and British Administration. He wasthen completing England and the Middle East for a D.Phil. at Oxford. At theinterview he was asked why he was applying for that post when he was writingMiddle Eastern history. His answer? Political philosophy is my subject, Middle Easthistory is my hobby. And I have been forever grateful that he did not have to earnour living in Middle Eastern history.How he himself viewed his two specialities is best expressed in the same

autobiographical note which every new fellow at the Wilson Center (he spent Oct.1991June 1992 there) had to prepare:

My writing, all through my academic career, has revolved around two poles: thehistory of the Middle East in modern times, and the history of Europeanpolitical thought. To judge by the titles of the largest number of my books,modern Middle East history might be thought to be my chief interest. This,however, is not the case, for to judge by the amount of time devoted to theteaching of the history of poitical thought during my thirty-seven years at theLondon School of Economics, both at the undergraduate and at the graduatelevel, one could easily conclude that this indeed was my main scholarly interest.

Elie Kedouries Work 9

The truth is that it is very dicult to say which of these two subjectspredominated.

Just to digress: A lot has been said and is being said about Elies Oxford experience.The episode, going back to 1953, did in no way aect his personal or professionallife, and it was soon ignored by him. It is interesting, however, that no mention ismade of the Statutes of the university which require for a work to be passed to besuitable for publication. In Elies case, not only was his original thesis publishedwithout so much as a coma or full stop being altered, but the edition was quicklysold out. Our one and only copy, borrowed by a relative, was lost on theunderground, and no second hand copy came onto the market. The copy in the localpublic library had also disappeared. To nd a copy for the second edition we had togo the round of friends to beg for a copy. The copy I have now is inscribed by ElieWith love, but I no longer remember who was the original recipient.

Studies on Jewish Themes

Since Maurice Cowling published his Religion and Public Doctrine in ModernEngland21 and devoted a chapter to Elies work in which he picked up elements of areligious thread running through his work, people have been concentrating, in myview much too strongly, on Elies religious view of history and its importance forhis political thought. When Elie read this chapter by Cowling he remarked to me in arather puzzled way that Cowling had seen elements in his writing of which he wasnot aware. This, I believe, set him thinking more consciously about the meaning ofJewish history and the way Judaism has seen divine purpose in its long and oftentragic history.It was around that time that Mrs Neurath of Thames and Hudson, apparently at

Isaiah Berlins suggestion, pressed him to edit a book on the Jewish World as part oftheir World Religion Series. (The World of Islam by Bernard Lewis is another suchbook). Elie spent a couple of months researching the eld before he nally agreed tothe proposal. The book is not only beautiful but is a scholarly survey of Jewishhistory. Although it presents a chronological story it aims at interpretation ratherthan narrative. At the launch in Antwerp of the Dutch edition of The Jewish Worldin 1980, he gave the following address which I am publishing for the rst time:

The idea of a work dealing with Jewish history which was put to me by theLondon publishers struck me, to start with, I must confess, as full ofdiculties and drawbacks. I thought that there would surely be an abundance,not to say a superuity of books on the subject. A little research however wassucient to persuade me that I had been mistaken. A very large number ofbooks on various aspects and periods of Jewish history did undoubtedly exist,but I could not discover a work in English which was of reasonable length andcomprehensive, accessible to the ordinary educated reader, and at the same timeauthoritative in the sense of taking account of the existing state of scholarship.

Given then that there seemed to be ample scope for a work which would surveythe whole course of Jewish history, and which would be intelligible and coherent

10 Elie Kedouries Approaches to History and Political Theory

as well as possessing scholarly authority the question which arose was how toproceed.

When I began to plan the book one thing was clear to me. This was to be a bookabout Jewish history. By this I meant that it was to be a book not so muchabout what happened to the Jews and heaven knows a lot of things, many ofthem disagreeable, and some absolutely horrible, have happened to them asabout what the Jews made at dierent times of the variety of circumstances theyhappened to encounter. In other words the articulation of the book had tofollow the inner articulations of Jewish history itself.

Another strategic decision about the shape of the book related to another aspectof these articulations. If the book was to be true to the experience of Jews andJudaism across the centuries, what had to be shown was not only how the Jewscoped with the various emergencies which faced them, but also how theyunderstood themselves as Jews what form their self-identity took and whatsuccessive changes this self identity underwent through the long centuries inwhich this group managed in exile and dispersion, to preserve theircohesiveness. In other words, the book was to be a history not only of eventsbut also of ideas. The aim was that as far as possible the history of events andthe history of ideas should mesh in with one another as in fact events and ideasmesh in with one another in life itself.

These were the organizing ideas of the book, and I think that the nished article,with its eighteen chapters, does form a coherent whole. The book also may serveto mark the state of scholarship today on Jewish history in its various branches.It shows what a representative cross-section to put it no higher of scholarsconcerned with Jewish history consider the state of the subject to be. The bookmay thus serve to indicate how these studies stood in the last third of thetwentieth century.

The book covers a very wide span. It attempts to follow the fortunes of a smallgroup of people who, small as they are, have had an enormous impact onhistory, and whose character and fate continues to preoccupy the rest of theworld even those parts of the world which have had little to do with Jews orJudaism. Here I have particularly in mind Japan where interest in Jews andJudaism is, so surprisingly, very strong.

But the reasons for the general fascination with Jewish history are notparticularly mysterious. Jews provide in their history a conspectus or summaryof what has been a central human pre-occupation. This is the setting-up, thesafeguard, and the failure of political order. Pre-exilic Jewry with its duality orauthority shared between Ruler and Prophet is a distinctive departure from thekind of polity which was the rule all over the ancient world. The politicalexperience of the pre-exilic period has had enormous reverberations not onlyamong Jews in successive centuries, but also among all those for whom the Biblewas Holy Scripture. Again the encounter between the small Jewish polity and

Elie Kedouries Work 11