Aspects of Elie Kedourie's work

Abstract

Elie Kedourie, CBE, BSc. Econ. (Lond.), Dr.h.c. (TAU), FBA, was Professor of Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). A dedicated teacher and meticulous scholar, he devoted himself wholly to his work. During his forty years of academic life, he used an assistant only once, when due to ill health, he had someone to copy for him some references from the Public Records Office (PRO) archives. Even while teaching in the USA where most teachers seemed to delegate the marking of essays to their research or junior assistants, he would, to the surprise of some colleagues, insist on correcting all the undergraduate essays personally. 'This way', he would say to me, 'I know what I have taught and what they have learnt'. I remember that in one term he had some fifty 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 of essays:'Ce n'est pas la pate de guimauve' he would say an essay is not marshmallow, that is oversweet but vapid waffle. In his writing, always devoid of jargon and flowery phraseology, Elie could be deceptively easy to read. The mastery he had over his subject, his breadth of learning, his deep familiarity with Arabic, French and English language and literature, thanks to his early schooling at the Alliance Israelite Universelle school in Baghdad, coupled with an acute memory and a sharp sense of observation, gave him a scope and a dimension different from that of his colleagues at the School who mostly came from a purely Western and English-speaking background. 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 of nationalism, historiography, Middle East history, conservatism, Jewish themes, and of course Middle Eastern Studies, as well as his relationship with Michael Oakeshott. I am also enclosing an unpublished International Seminar Report on 'The Cyprus Problem and its Solution' which he wrote when he acted as rapporteur at a meeting in Rome in 1973 at the Center for Mediterranean Studies, American Universities Field Staff. A bizarre notion is still circulating that Michael Oakeshott was Elie's mentor or even that Elie went to the School in order to study under Oakeshott and that he became his student or his disciple. Elie only came to meet Oakeshott shortly before he applied for a post at the LSE recently vacated by Rufus Davis who was returning to his native Australia. By that time Oakeshott had been appointed head of the Government department where the vacancy had occurred. So at no time were the two of them anything other than colleagues. Although Elie was a much younger colleague, deep respect not to say affection developed between them. Elie tells of his