Obituary: Elie Kedourie (1926–92)
| Author | Maurice Cranston |
| Published date | 01 September 1992 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1992.tb00711.x |
| Date | 01 September 1992 |
| Subject Matter | Obituary |
Obituary: Elie Kedourie
(1926-92)
MAURICE CRANSTON
London
School
of
Economics
and
Political
Science
Elie Kedourie was one of the world’s leading authorities
on
Middle Eastern
politics, and some months before his death he was awarded the CBE in
recognition of his achievements in that area. He was also a distinguished scholar
in
the field of political philosophy and intellectual history and, at the time of his
death in July 1992, he was engaged in a research project
on
Conservatism at the
Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.
Elie Kedourie was born in Baghdad in 1926 and after attending the
IycPe
in
that city, he went to the London School
of
Economics to study under Michael
Oakeshott. He shared Oakeshott’s conservative sympathies and his interest
in
Hegel, and after Oakeshott’s retirement
in
1968, he took over Oakeshott’s
famous seminar
on
the history of political thought, which was really a seminar
on
the philosophy of history, and continued
it
on
Oakeshottian lines.
Kedourie’s conservatism was
no
less remote from that of the Conservative
Party than was Oakeshott’s, and in recent years he reached a large audience with
pamphlets and articles denouncing the British government’s policy of diluting
academic standards and diminishing academic freedom. One of his last public
appearances was in Washington, where he gave a lecture
on
the dangers
of
the
intrusion
of
political dogmas into both American and British universities.
English was only Kedourie’s third language after French and Arabic, but he
commanded a mellifluous literary style, and could express opinions, which were
often rebarbative, in remarkable seductive prose. One
of
his most notable
contributions to political theory was a short book
on
Nationalism,
published in
1960.
In
this he criticized the endeavours of previous historians to isolate different
schools of nationalism, and argued that nationalism was one coherent ideology
dating only from the French Revolution and first formalized by Fichte and his
German contemporaries, an ideoiogy which itself generated the myth
of
nation
on
which the ideology rested. Like Lord Acton, Kedourie held that a decent,
moderate and, above all, slack imperial regime offered a better chance for the
liberty
of
the miscellaneous ethnic groups which inhabited Europe than did
ideologically inspired efforts to secure sovereignty for each
of
those intermingled
groups. Kedourie also defended the record of the Ottoman empire against its
liberal critics, maintaining that it did less harm than the regimes which succeeded
it in the Middle East, whether Arab nationalist, French or British. His exposure
of
the sheer hypocrisy and deceit
of
anti-imperialist propaganda emanating from
Chatham House and elsewhere was notably devastating.
Kedourie was a man of few words in polite convesation and he took little
pleasure
in
argument. His temperament was very reserved and fastidious.
He
brought to England, when he settled there, the belief that that kingdom was a
community of gentlemen and never ceased to be pained by each fresh discovery
that this was not the case, even at the London School
of
Economics, from which
place he retired in 1990, having held a chair in politics there since 1964.
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