History: Puzzle and people or prescription and prophecy?

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Notes

Round Table (London: 1970) Vol.LX, No.239, p.358, hereafter: Round Table.

E. Kedourie, ‘Genesis of a History’, Appendix to E. Kedourie In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth; The McMahon – Husayn Correspondence and its Interpretations 1914 – 1939, 2nd edn (London & Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2000) p.329. Hereafter: the whole book is referred to as the Labyrinth and the Appendix as ‘Genesis of a History’.

E. Kedourie, England and the Middle East: The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire 1914 – 1921, 3rd edn (London: Mansell, 1987), hereafter: England and the ME. Chapters 3 & 4.

Labyrinth, p.4

E. Kedourie ‘Colonel Lawrence and his Biographers’ (hereafter: ‘Lawrence Biographers’) in Islam In the Modern World (London: Mansell, 1980).

The Labyrinth, pp.34 – 37.

E. Kedourie, ‘Why Brutus Stabbed Caesar’ The Wilson Quarterly, Autumn, 1992 p.114, hereafter: ‘Why Brutus Stabbed’.

‘Genesis of a History’ pp.325, 326.

Ibid., p.330.

L. Lukitz ‘A Ph.D. Experience’, in S. Kedourie (ed.), Elie Kedourie CBE, FBA 1926 – 1992 History, Philosophy, Politics (London: Frank Cass, 1998) p.44, hereafter: Elie Kedourie.

E. Kedourie ‘History, the Past and the Future’ in The Crossman Confessions and other Essays in Politics, History and Religion (London and New York: Mansel, 1984) p.189.

‘Genesis of a History’, p.343.

The Introduction to England and the ME; p.2 suggests that for Hamilton Gibb in 1953 the matter of the capture of Damascus was settled and a statement by Sir Percy Cox quoted in a biography firmly settled another matter.

E. Kedourie, The Chatham House Version (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2004), hereafter: Chatham House V. Round Table, Vol.LX, No.238, p.223.

‘Lawrence Biographers’, p.263.

E. Kedourie (ed.), Nationalism in Asia and Africa (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970), hereafter: Nationalism in A&A.

‘Genesis of a History’, p.329.

E. Kedourie, Nationalism, 4th edn, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) All references, including this, are to the 4th edition. It carries the preface to the first edition, 1960, which features Kedourie's acknowledgement of his debt to Sorel.

E. Kedourie, Hegel and Marx: Introductory Lectures, edited by S. Kedourie and H. Kedourie (Blackwell, Oxford 1993), hereafter Hegel & Marx. Comprehensive summaries of his work on political thought, relating it to his historical studies, are in A. Silvera, ‘Elie Kedourie, politique et moraliste’ and A. Beattie ‘Elie Kedourie's Philosophical History’, both in Elie Kedourie.

Hegel and Marx, pp.2,3,14.

Nationalism, in A&A, p.95.

Nationalism, pp.96,83.

Ibid., pp.35,36.

Ibid., pp.42,43.

English Historical Review, 1962, pp.199 – 200.

England and the ME, Introduction pp.8d, 8c. 8d contains Kedourie's evocation of Matthew Arnold's lines: ‘… alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night’. A full survey of Kedourie's work would involve his interest in poetry in several languages and its inter-relationship with his work on history and philosophy.

E.C. Hodgkin, ‘Lionel Smith on Education in Iraq’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol.19, No.2, pp.254 – 260, also includes Smith's memorandum.

Quotations from Zu'aytar Yawmiyyat are cited from E. Kedourie ‘The Break Between Muslims and Jews in Iraq’, in M.R. Cohen (ed.), Jews among Arabs: Contacts and Boundaries (Princeton: Darwin Press 1987) p.31.

Kissinger's unpublished essay is cited in W. Isaacson Kissinger: A Biography (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, limp 1993) p.67.

England and the ME p.104.

R. Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (London: John Murray, 1999).

Round Table, Vol.LX p.228.

Quoted in Chatham House V, pp.354 from A.J. Toynbee, A Study of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934 – 64; hereafter: Study), Vol.X, p.139.

‘Genesis of a History’ pp.328,333,336.

England and the ME p.8e, cf. note 13 above.

J.L Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (London: Constable, 2nd revised edition, 1951, pp.ix, x, 3, hereafter, Xanadu.

The Spectator, London, 6 July 1934.

P.Geyl, Debates with Historians (Groningen: J.R. Wolters, 1955) p.159.

Chatham House V, p.364.

L. Stone, ‘Historical Consquences and Happy Families’, Spectator, 29 Oct. 1954, reprinted in M.F.A. Montagu (ed.), Toynbee and History: Critical Essays and Reviews (Boston MA: Porter Sargent, 1956), p.113, hereafter Toynbee and History. The book assembles articles by scholars, not only British, of different academic disciplines.

F. Millar ‘Toynbee, Arnold Joseph’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p.11, hereafter Toynbee, ODNB.

E. Barker ‘Dr Toynbee's Study of History: A Review’ in Toynbee and History p.97. Reprinted from International Affairs, London, Vol.31, 1955.

Quoted in Chatham House V., p.372.

‘Genesis of a History’, pp.340 – 42 summarize Kedourie's enquiries into the sources of Toynbee's reports. More details are in the Labyrith, pp.202 – 7, 209 – 220.

A Bullock, ‘The Historian's Purpose’, History Today, Feb. 1951. Reprinted in D. Snowman, Past Masters: The Best of History Today (Stroud: Sutton, 2001).

Nationalism [after p.xviii] For fuller accounts of why Kedourie reckoned historians should not be policy makers, see his ‘Foreign Policy: a Practical Pursuit’ and ‘Politics: a Philosophical Pursuit?’ in Crossman Confessions.

Nationalism, p.xvii.

P.M. Kitromilides, ‘The Debt of a Student of Nationalism’, Elie Kedourie, p.92.

R. Irwin ‘Betrayal in the Oxford Text’, Times Literary Supplement, London (hereafter, TLS) 2 April, 2004, pp.3, 4.

E. Kedourie, ‘I would use the term despotism…’ in: Martin Kramer, Middle Eastern Lectures No.1 (Tel Aviv University and Syracuse University Press, NY, 1995) p.80.

Hegel and Marx, pp.30 – 35.

Nationalism in A&A, pp.3, 4, 7, 8.

Ibid., pp.4 – 7. In Lenin: A Biography (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp.245, 246, Robert Service has traced Lenin's theory of imperialism to earlier Marxist sources but pointed out that the polemic was produced to oppose more moderate Marxist theorists (Russians and others) and to press for an immediate revolution in Russia.. It is remarkable that a pamphlet produced to score a point in a precise and comparatively local dispute should be regarded on the same or higher level as detailed archival research over half a century on the causes of the First World War. The relevance of the dispute to actual developments was marginal, since the revolution in Russia preceded publication of the diatribe.

New York Review of Books.

Round Table, Vol.LX, p.358.

T. Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (Harlow: Longman, 1986).

‘Why Brutus Stabbed’ p.120.

P. Sluglett, ‘The Middle East’ in R.W. Winks (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: Bibliography, Vol.V (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) p.425. See also p.249. Hereafter: Oxford History.

It would not be relevant here to present quotations (on the scale of criticisms of Toynbee cited above) from a variety of scholars on the shortcomings in the historical methodology of Edward Said and his followers. It may just be noted that several contributors to Vol.V of the Oxford History were sceptical of his value as a historian, especially of India, e.g. R.E. Frykenberg suggested Said's ‘scorn’ was not enough to destroy older methods of scholarship (p.197) and D.A. Washbrook that Said ‘traps himself inside a web of solipsism’ (p.607). It is not a condition that favours detached historical enquiry. A.G. Hopkins expressed strong doubts about the mass conversion of newcomers from literary studies, by way of post-modernism and cultural studies, rising even above social history to displace ‘older and seemingly outdated specializations in political and economic history’ (p.648). H.G. Balfour-Paul in a narrative account of ‘Britain's Informal Empire in the Middle East’ in Vol.IV of the Oxford History at least cited and perhaps drew on the Labyrinth (pp.494 – 98, 514). Examples of Said's attacks on individuals and anyone associated with them are in P.J. Vatikiotis, Among Arabs and Jews (London:Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991) pp.86, 104. Vatikiotis also makes interesting observations on the effect of various social sciences on Middle Eastern studies in the USA. His general review of the development of Middle Eastern Studies in the USA does not suggest that archival based research was much advanced there when Kedourie began to research, write and publish. Though Peter Sluglett thought the Labyrinth was out of fashion, he classified it a ‘diplomatic history’. A random check on a new work within that category does not, however, suggest that the Labyrinth or even England and the ME are regarded, at the time of writing, as out of date. Zara Steiner's chapter on the Treaties of Sevres and Lausanne in The Lights that Failed; European International History 1919 – 1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) ends with lists of relevant books and articles (pp.127 – 130). About two thirds of the 50 books cited were published in the last twenty five years. England and the ME (1956) is the earliest in the list. (pp.127 – 130). It mentions only five books appearing before the Labyrinth (1976) which can be reckoned to deal with the diplomatic history of the period. A third of the articles listed are from Middle Eastern Studies; a further article is cited from a collection of essays presented to Kedourie.

R. Winks ‘Future Imperial Studies’, Vol.V of the Oxford History, p.656. For Kedourie on Fanon see Nationalism in A&A pp.131, 139, 141, 488 – 539. On p.2 and 3, he recalls Toynbee's and Sartre's invectives against the west, to induce guilt and resentment, in the former's The World and the West, (London, 1953) and latter's Preface to F. Fanon, Les damnées de la terre (Paris, 1961).

Toynbee used the phrase ‘running dogs’ to discredit a perceived fault in Kedourie's much more nuanced arguments in favour of an ordered and less precipitate transfer of power, which could have afforded some protection to minorities in former colonial territories. Toynbee simply asserted that they would thereby invite the epithet. Round Table, Vol.LX, p.226.

Marx and Hegel, p.7. For the use of Marxist ideology to further the USSR's foreign policy see Nationalsims in A&A, p.143.

R. Winks op.cit., note 59 above.

M. Gammer (ed.) ‘Elie Kedourie as a Teacher’, in Political Thought and Political History: Studies in Memory of Elie Kedourie, (London: Frank Cass, 2003), p.2. For articles by scholars who were not Kedourie's students see E. Ingram (ed.), National and International Politics in the Middle East: Essays in Honour of Elie Kedourie (London, 1986).

R. Clogg, ‘Politics and the Academy: Arnold Toynbee and the Koraes Chair’, in Middle Eastern Studies, Special Issue Vol.21, No.4 (Oct. 1985). Later published by Frank Cass, London, 1986.

Xanadu. p.4.

M. Cowling ‘Kedourie’, in Religion and Political Philosophy in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p.335.

T. Carlyle, Letters, 25 April 1856 (London, 1923), p.295.

See note 46 above.

A. Waugh, Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family (Headline, London, 2004), p.4.

Labyrinth, p.36.

Satow's Guide codified existing diplomatic methods. First published in 1917, it has been through many editions and is still in print and perhaps consulted.

Labyrinth, p.186.

Ibid., p.136.

Ibid., pp.126, 127.

Ibid., p.93. McMahon's despatch, based on Lawrence's romantic report on Mecca, earned the comment (disturbing in Whitehallese: ‘partial and highly coloured’. Further correspondence from Cairo, on the same lines, was scathingly analysed by Hirtzel and Chamberlain in the India Office. The Labyrinth, pp.127, 128.

Ibid., p.202. Satow had managed to release Thailand, China and Japan from foreign encroachments on their sovereign territories, within the bounds of the ‘old diplomacy’.

Ibid., p.49 cites Kedourie's sources (including V.H. Rothwell in Historical Journal, 1970), pp.274, 275.

Ibid., pp.32, 33, 37, 38, 40, 43.

Ibid., p.213.

England and the ME., pp.8b, 8c.

‘Toynbee’ ODNB, p.6 of entry.

Labyrinth pp.252 – 258.

E. Kedourie, ‘How To (And How Not To) Make Peace In The Middle East.’, reprinted in Islam in the Modern World, and Other Studies. (London: Mansell, 1980), hereafter: ‘How to Make Peace’.

I am grateful to Sylvia Kedourie for her patience in submitting to my enquiries about records relevant to this section. She not only searched papers she holds but made enquiries at the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, which holds some Thatcher papers. All mistakes and omissions in this essay are, however, my own.

Elie Kedourie, p.82. Martin Kramer quotes the paragraph in ‘Policy and the Academy: An Illicit Relationship?’, Middle East Quarterly, Vol.X, No.1 (Winter 2003), p.8 of article. His stimulating article covers some of the same ground as this essay. His main point, however, is that the events of 11 September 2001 may have affected a historian's conception of an appropriate relationship with politicians. I do not wish to speculate on how Kedourie would have reacted to those events, had he lived. Nothing in the enquiries I have made, however, suggests that he strayed from his original approaches to the issue of political advice. They rather confirm that closer proximity to politicians reinforced his long held views that the tasks of academic and policy-maker differed. Growing acquaintance with archives also strengthened his belief that sound history and even historiography were resources which policy-makers should have on tap. Kramer also suggested that Kedourie developed his contacts with politicians because of the unique importance of the Middle East. Kedourie was, however, associated with historians of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in discussions with Conservative politicians. The influence of Marxism on those areas and beyond was one of his life-long interests. It was not a recent development. If Kedourie had wished to prescribe policy on the Middle East, he would have cultivated his contacts with government and the media in the USA during 1990 and 1991. He in fact took no such initiatives. See note 118 below.

E. Kedourie, ‘Lord Salisbury and Politics’ Encounter, London, June 1972. Reprinted in Crossman Confessions, p.48. In ‘Mrs Thatcher and the Intellectuals’, Twentieth Century British History, Vol.5, p.219, Brian Harrison suggested that Kedourie's essay had a formative influence on the ‘Salisbury group’ of conservative intellectuals in ‘unobtrusively’ presenting ‘his refusal to engage in Peelite or Heathite seizing of Whig clothes’. Cf. also ‘Conservatives and neo-Conservatives’, Crossman Confessions, p.76.

E. Kedourie ‘Diversity in freedom: Conservatism from Burkian origins to the challenge of equality, Times Literary Supplement, 10 Jan. 1992, hereafter: ‘TLS 1992’. Oliver Letwin drew on the review and made interesting comments in ‘The Politics of Elie Kedourie’, p.86 – 91.

E. Kedourie, ‘Conservatism and the Conservative Party’, Solan, 1970. Reprinted in Crossman Confessions, p.37.

Ibid., p.43.

Ibid., pp.39 – 42 and ‘TLS 1992’.

The absurdity of applying such terms springs from the fact that they are based on the seating arrangements of the French Revolutionary chamber at the end of the eighteenth century. Yesterday's ‘progressives’ then became today's ‘reactionaries’, according to the intrigues of those who succeeded in grabbing power. Kedourie demonstrated shortcomings of the terms, as aids to history and political thought, in ‘The History of Ideas and Guilt by Association in Crossman Confessions, pp.143 – 147. See also Nationalism, pp.84 – 86.

Crossman Confessions, p.42.

Kedourie summarized his views on the ‘balance of power’ in ‘A New International Disorder’, Crossman Confessions, p.97 – 107, in which he identifies 1914 as the beginning of many of the destructive tendencies of the twentieth century. The theme is too vast to develop further here but 1914 recurs frequently in Kedourie's work as a cardinal date in the conduct of international relations.

England and the ME, p.5.

Ibid., p.8g, 8f. Paul Schroeder in The Transformation of European Politics 1763 – 1848 (paperback edition, Oxford, 1996), p.640, queried Swartzberg's approach. Nevertheless, in assessing the relative effectiveness as policy makers of Conservatives and Liberals, Schroeder seems to consider that Wellington and Aberdeen did a better job than Canning over the Greek question and the Russo – Turkish War Transformation, pp.641 – 665. (I identify Canning as a Liberal here because he is so regarded in the Liberal canon, as one of the great liberators.)

Nationalism, p.84.

Ibid., pp.125 – 128.

England and the ME, p.8f.

Nationalism, p.103 for all quotations so far in this paragraph.

Crossman Confessions, p.41.

‘TLS, 1992’.

Crossman Confessions, pp.38 – 39.

Ibid., p.34. At the height of Margaret Thatcher's popularity at the successful conclusion of the Falklands War, Kedourie dissociated himself from the claim that the war was justified on the grounds of self-determination. ‘Conservatives and neo-Conservatives’, Encounter, 1982. Reprinted in Crossman Confessions, p.82.

Crossman Confessions, p.41. Kedourie reckoned in 1982 that ‘Marxism is the latest…and most formidable, adversary against which conservatism has to measure itself’. Ibid., p.80.

M. Thatcher, The Path to Power (Harper Collins, London, 1995), pp.250 – 253.

E. Kedourie, Diamonds into Glass: The Government and the Universities, Centre for Political Studies, No.89, 1988. Kedourie's disappointment with the Conservative Government's policy on higher education was perhaps reflected in his later publication of Peristroika in the Universities (Institute of Economic Affairs, 1989). He apparently criticized Conservatives for stealing Labour's clothes on secondary education in ‘TLS, 1992’.

R Conquest, Ravaged Century (note 31 above), p.148.

G. Urban Diplomacy and Disillusion (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996) To ‘remove pitfalls for future historians’, Urban listed (p.20) the names of some historians, not mentioned in The Downing Street Years, from whom Margaret Thatcher invited ‘extramural assistance’. They include Lord Thomas, Sir Michael Howard, Hugh Seton-Watson, Gordon Craig, Fritz Stern, Norman Stone and Timothy Garten Ash. Their work and appointments indicate their academic calibre and its foundation on archival research rather than on the theories of social scientists or even social historians whose publications, at least until 1990, were poor guides to the contemporary history of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and other areas. Several of the historians Urban listed were among the guests at the lunches at Chequers, which Kedourie attended.

Urban had published a book on détente. He was a specialist in information policy rather than a professional academic, though he had a particularly deep knowledge of Eastern Europe. For détente during a period before 1975 see Conquest, pp.169, 170.

See R. Conquest, loc cit., note 108. Archie Brown has described two sessions, Margaret Thatcher held with historians, when she was forming her policy towards Gorbachev. See his The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp.76, 77. Cf. M. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London: Harper Collins, 1993), pp.450 – 453.

‘How to Make Peace’, p.248.

Personal information, S. Kedourie. Hugo Young considered that Margaret Thatcher regarded the ‘philosophers’ and ‘intellectuals’ she consulted as her ‘teachers’. See his One of Us (London: Pan Books, Macmillan, 1993), pp.406, 407. She herself described her seminars with historians as ‘educative’. It was necessary ‘to learn’ as much as possible. She believed in ‘tapping outside information…on which to shape policy’. Downing Street Years, pp.451, 452. For her, as for Kedourie, experts were on tap not on top. She expressed her preference for historians rather than Sovietologists drawn from ‘political analysis and systems analysis’, ibid., p.452. In another context, she recorded her view that ‘History is an account of what happened in the past’, ibid., p.595. Bernard Porter considered, however, such a view revealed her naivety. See his ‘Mrs Thatcher and the Historians’, in Twentieth Century British History, Vol.5, No.2, 1994, p.249. By that criterion many of the historians cited in this essay must be dismissed as naive.

Cf. note 46.

Labyrinth, p.230.

Ibid., p.241.

 Chatham House V, p.214.

J. Shattan, ‘Remembering Elie Kedourie in the United States’, in Elie Kedourie, pp.67 – 69.

For Kedourie's remarks on TV pundits' forecast that Schwartkopf's forces would suffer severe setbacks when confronted in 1991 with the ‘elite’ Republican Guard, see A. Mango, ‘Memories of a Friendship’, Elie Kedourie, p.74. Kedourie, however, did not exclude foreign correspondents' reminiscences from his reading or overlook value they might have as a historical source. The last book he ordered was Edward Behr's Anyone Here Been Raped And Speaks English? (Penguin Books, 1992) He had been told that Behr had written some significant things about Algeria. Kedourie also had an appreciation of the hilarious and bizarre in human activity. Behr's description of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop as ‘the best book ever written about the press’ suggests he might share Auberon Waugh's view, quoted above, about journalists as policy makers.

L. Greenberg, ‘A Bulwark against Mediocracy’, Elie Kedourie. She, however, recorded that suspicions that Kedourie was a Zionist and consequently distorted his scholarship persisted long after an anonymous reviewer in the TLS had publicly withdrawn the phrase that Kedourie was a ‘Zionist historian’. See Elie Kedourie, p.83, 84.

Shattan, p.69.

Cf note 120.

See note 56 above.

Labyrinth, p.343. Speculation on why Maitland may have aroused Kedourie's admiration is in Elie Kedourie, pp.79, 80.