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Philosophy, politics and conservatism in the thought of Elie Kedourie

One of Elie Kedourie’s obituarists described him as ‘the most profound historian of his generation’. Many would agree that he was, in addition, one of the most profound conservative thinkers of the twentieth century. At the end of his life, he was working on a volume on conservative political thought which would have spelt out in full the philosophy which underlay his political writings. Since he did not live to complete that work, however, the overall perspective which unites his wideranging body of political thought has remained a matter for speculation. A sympathetic commentator, Andrew Mango, summarized it by suggesting that ‘Kedourie looked at [politics] in the way that a professor of oncology might look at cancer. The evil is manifest, most remedies tried so far have proved inappropriate, and no cure is in sight. However, the disease can sometimes be skilfully managed, at least for a time.’ Although Mango’s emphasis on Kedourie’s dispassionate judgement is appropriate, the assessment of another sympathetic critic, David Pryce-Jones, is no less so. In a review of Kedourie’s Festschrift, Pryce-Jones wrote that he ‘is at all times a humanist. His gaze is fixed in pity and horror upon corpses of the innocent dead, who paid with their lives for the folly and pretentiousness of their proclaimed lords and masters, whether once British or now Arab.’ Unfashionably in the present age, Pryce-Jones added, Kedourie ‘has never found an end which justifies cruelty and bloodshed as a means to achieving it’. The present aim is to explore the ways in which Kedourie’s combination of detachment and humanism found intellectual expression in an ambitious form of conservative philosophy. Although Kedourie’s special interest was in the history of the Middle East, his approach to that subject involved a comprehensive overview of Western modernity at large. Perhaps the most illuminating way of approaching both his view of modernity and of the Middle East is to begin by recalling an extraordinary event at Oxford University early in his academic career. Although the details are by now well known, it is instructive to rehearse them briefly. In 1953, he had a viva for the doctorate at St Antony’s College in the course of which he became so deeply dissatisfied with the intellectual competence of his examiners – H.A.R. Gibb, Laudian Professor of Arabic in the University, and James Joll – that at the end of it he resolved to withdraw his doctorate from examination by Oxford. In a memoir he wrote many years later entitled ‘On Not Getting a Ph.D.’, Kedourie described how he wrote to the Secretary of Faculties requesting that he Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 41, No. 5, 689 – 716, September 2005