Georges Haupt: History and the Socialist Tradition

Abstract

For those of us who knew him, Georges Haupt's most enduring legacy will be his extraordinary personal warmth, his energy and his excitement. He had a remarkable ability to spark, to fertilize and to create links across the globe. For him the history of the labor movement was never only an individual preoccupation, though it was his personal passion. He always saw his work as a collective endeavor and it was through his example that he made all of his students and associates feel that we were part of an international community concerned with the history of socialism. Through his many languages, through his range of contacts and through his drive he was not only responsible for imparting that sense of community, but he was the personality that held it together. His passion for history was positively infectious if it were possible to collect the number of dissertations, books and essays which he inspired, one would have to know as many countries and languages as he did. Borders and distances were almost non-existent for him. When he arrived in America he immediately began to expand his knowledge of the American labor movement, and to find new acquaintances and friends here. Though his English was not yet firm, his lectures attracted attention from the beginning. Above aIl, in his seminar there was an immediate sense of importance that his presence carried with it. Even in his idiosyncracies, like hanging up the phone and continuing the conversation with yotl in Hungarian, Polish, Russian or whatever he had been speaking, when you only spoke English, we recognized that amazing internationalism that was his nature. Above all, however, we remember his awesome knowledge of the sources, the documents, the details of the history of the labor movements that made him the exacting scholar he was. One imagines that if Georges Haupt had lived in the time he knew best, the period of the Secorld International he would have been a scholar and militant of international stature, an active moral force in the International, like perhaps Camille Huymans (aIso a historian) who befriended him and entrusted him with the editorship of the archive of the International Socialist Bureau, or perhaps somewhat later like David Rjazanov or Arthur Rosenberg, whose work he greatly admired, and whose passionate combination of scholarly integrity and socialist commitment he emulated and embodied. But