As best I can recall, I first same into contact with Sir Lewis Namier in 1962.  For Fifth Form History at Haileybury then, we looked at eighteenth century England.  The subject gripped me and it has stayed with me since.  We were told that Namier had changed the way we might look at history to an extent similar to the way Leavis had changed how we look at literature.  (Leavis does nothing for me.) 

I got into The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, and even then, I felt mesmerised by the detailed digging below and the alpine commentary at the top.  Later I would read the follow-up England in the Age of the American Revolution, and after that his essays and smaller works on other subjects – European and contemporary.  (I now get a similar fix from Sir Ronald Syme and The Roman Revolution.)

It was evident that Namier had served in the Foreign Office and been a journalist and essayist in ways that reflected his East European and Jewish background.  The man’s sheer intellectual horsepower staggered me from the start – and it continues to do so.  I set out why in a book about historians in the terms below.  Namier is an essential part, for better or for worse, of such intellectual furniture as I have been given.

The other day, a book arrived that I had forgot ordering – Conservative Revolutionary, a biography of Namier by D W Hayton that somehow I had not heard of.  The copy that I got had been owned by a scholar who had carefully annotated some passages in pencil, and helpfully included copies of some of the better reviews. 

My reading life has been blighted by scholars who write far too much and smother you with footnotes, and force you to edit with a view to seeing the kernel and staying sane.  They are incontinent and serial pests.  On the face of it, this book is just another one of those.  Like its subject, the author ruthlessly examines any document he can lay his hands on.  The industry is immense.  But the result, like those of his subject, is a gold-mine.

The story of this man is one that you could read by Balzac or Dostoevsky, but Professor Hayton, of Ulster University, tells it with scrupulous good sense and fairness.  It is one of those books you can read – and go back to again and again.  I do not know if the author is still with us, but the world of letters stands indebted to him.  The study of history is essential to what may still be called a liberal education and this book, a study of the life and thinking of one man, is a most remarkable contribution to it.

As a boring fourth generation white Australian, I must find it impossible to imagine the stresses of an East European of Jewish descent landing on Oxbridge in Edwardian England with an intellectual engine that very few locals could even get near.  And he fell into Balliol, and ‘its tranquil consciousness of effortless superiority.’

He arrived in England with what might fairly be called a fair load of ontological insecurity.  What was he?  A Jewish man born at the fringe of an edgy trouble spot in Poland, whose family had repudiated Judaism and accepted baptism in the Church of Rome, and which was determined to toe the quiet bourgeois line and stay out of trouble. 

Namier moved to England and fell in love with it – especially the better and brighter people – the elite.  He changed his name and got naturalised and took up writing high-brow commentaries on the state of Europe after serving in the Foreign Office during the war.  He got knocked back by Oxford, but had the energy and found the time to do research into English history that would explode in the close world of Oxbridge – but his work and general essays are still read and enjoyed now.  One of the inscriptions on the book of Professor Hayton is from Dostoevsky. 

‘Listen, Kolya, among other things, you are going to be very unhappy in life,’ Alyosha said …. ‘But even so, life on the whole you will bless.’

Namier would have approved that citation – and its source.  And we should remember that Namier undertook a vast excavation decades before the arrival of the digital era so that he was, as Toynbee remarked, obliged to ‘assault infinity with his bare fists.’

But he was, or at least came across as, utterly tactless, and his intellectual elevation was no excuse.  The people we admire do not get there by asking for it.  (A grotesque example is Donald Trump.) 

But Oxbridge can close in on people, and it would be very wrong to suggest that its pillars are immune to jealousy.  Namier was not just smart, but popular.  He could write.  More importantly, he had a much broader vision and canvas than the standard career dons, and he attracted disciples. 

Then, too, he was not just Jewish, but a Zionist – and an activist to boot.  We are currently seeing in Australia the problems that can arise for the Jewish community when Zionism becomes a local political issue.  (Only God knows what Namier would have made of Bibi.) 

The result was unsavoury behaviour like that on show in the film Chariots of Fire.  (‘Well, there goes your Semite, Hugh.  A different God.  A different mountain top.’  Delivered with the slinky venom of Sir John Gielgud, and the exalted ‘amateur’.)  And from people I admire, like A J P Taylor and Sir Jack Plumb, there was a reaction that was, simply, just bitchy.  It reflects badly not just on Oxbridge, but on England – a land that had made Prime Minister the grandson of an Italian Jew.

So, an aura of tragedy hangs over Namier, and the cycle of reaction and rejection in the Academy just goes on.  Curiously enough, Namier was studying in the English ruling class a group of people who had precisely what he lacked – the ability to get on with others.  His widow said that ‘he was always an outsider.  Because he never learned to consort with people, he wanted to find out the principles by which people consort with each other.’

There is real pathos here.  That fine historian, Richard Pares, was a follower of Namier who understood the difficulty of their work.  In working on the office of prime minister, he made a remark that applies to the history of political parties.  The history is ‘more like that of the Cheshire Cat: sometimes there is a whole cat, sometimes no more than a grin, and it is not always the same end that appears first.’  (That recalls for me a remark by the lecturer in the first lecture in Philosophy I Honours at Melbourne in 1964: ‘Like blind men in a dark room looking for a black cat – that does not exist.’)

Well, I am a common garden common lawyer, and over thirty years, I had to sit and make findings of fact on evidence that was conflicting and inadequate.  It was perhaps not unlike the police court Namier referred to, but I sometimes wondered what may have been the difference between me and a mountebank selling snake oil. 

I am, however, a child of my Anglo-Saxon ancestry, and I remain happy to leave all the abstractions and grand but narrow and footnoted theorising to the Europeans – and the Americans. 

Namier said ‘I am no good at abstract thought’ – a profession of the faith of the common law judge.  Namier understood that history is a collection of biographies, that people make history and not vice versa, and that his job was simply to collect the evidence of what real people did so that the court of public opinion can make its assessment. 

It is not therefore surprising that many idolised Namier, as I do now.  As I have remarked before, Tina Turner was wrong.  We need all the heroes we can get, and Namier is one of mine.

Book Extract

(Listening to Historians)

Namier

When Ved Mehta wrote a book about English intellectuals, he went to see a star pupil of the late Sir Lewis Namier (1888-1960), and a keeper of the flame, John Brooke.  A woman showed Mehta to Brooke’s room and said: ‘Mr Brooke is a very eccentric man.  When it gets cold, he wears an electric waistcoat plugged into the light socket, and reads aloud to himself.’  Such conduct would come within most people’s understanding of the word ‘eccentric.’ 

Brooke said that Namier looked on history as bundles of biographies; his interest was in the small men rather than the big; he believed that psychology was as important to history as mathematics was to astronomy; he looked at how men and women responded to the pressure of circumstances; his east European Jewish background enabled him to see his adopted and idolized nation in perspective; unlike liberals, he had no faith in progress – it was not that he did not wish to reform institutions that were decrepit – he just hated seeing them go; he would hammer out the first draft of a work with two-finger typing, and not be able to revise it until his secretary had finished the first draft – a process that might be repeated ten or more times.  He would go back and forth between his research boxes and indexes and his typewriter.  ‘It would be a constant process of writing and rewriting, shaping and reshaping, agony and more agony – and the biography was not more than a seven-thousand word job.’ 

There were other sources of pain.  He never relished acceptance by the English intellectual establishment; his deeply withdrawn nature led him to psychoanalysis; he suffered a cramp in the arm that got worse with the ill treatment of the Jews in the thirties – he was so terrified by the thought of a German occupation that he got a bottle of poison from a doctor friend and carried it in his waistcoat so that he could kill himself if the Germans came. 

But his work, beginning with The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III in 1929, hit English history like an earthquake in much the same way as F R Leavis did with literary criticism – and people who shake up the Establishment like that can expect a backlash.

Namier was, I am told, not an easy person to be with.  Elton called him ‘a man rather good at making enemies.’  He was a dreadful snob and a worse name-dropper.  He was not respected as a teacher, and in good English universities that is a real minus. 

‘His physique itself was impressive to a degree: the guttural, rather toneless voice, intense and implacable; the broad shoulders, the beaked nose, the fathomless eyes; above all his absolute stillness, the stillness one felt of a flywheel revolving too fast for the human eye.’  John Kenyon referred to his ‘granitic seriousness, and the monomaniacal way in which he would impose his thoughts on others.’  Sir Jack Plumb referred to the vulgar name-calling: ‘Constipation Namier – the big shit we can’t get rid of.’ 

Rejection was not new to Namier – his father cut him off for his espousal of Zionism – but exclusion breeds resentment and more exclusion – and Namier fell for the English aristocracy.  According to John Kenyon, his commitment to Zionism ‘increased the coolness of an Arab-orientated upper class.’  A more rewarded historian – a man named Butterfield – had what might be called the Establishment view that ‘the point of teaching history to undergraduates is to turn them into public servants and statesmen…but I happen to think history is a school of wisdom and statesmanship.’  Butterfield thought that Namier’s factual inquiry was cutting the ground from under the feet of would-be philosopher-kings. 

Why not just try to open their minds?  Things have changed.  The advocacy of the ideas or ideals of a dying empire now looks to us like a prospectus for a School for Bullshit.  But Butterfield and others went after Namier like gnats straining at a camel, and Namier became a kind of celebrity.

What does it say of Oxford and Cambridge that Namier was never considered good enough for any of the many chairs that fell vacant during his time?  Well, whatever else they did, they did not prove him wrong, and over time, the waters came in over the site where the bomb had exploded.  You get the impression that Namier did not help ease the pangs of jealousy that his brilliance inevitably provoked by not underestimating his own ability, and by frankly assessing the want of it in those around him in the cloister, a place deeply allergic to bombs going off.

To those who have had to make findings of fact on inadequate and conflicting evidence, the Namier revolution seems to be the unsurprising suggestion that history should be based on evidence rather than romance, on the direct evidence of primary sources rather than on secondary sources that are hearsay. 

Here are some of the larger statements.  From his book England in the Age of the American Revolution, we have the following.

History is made up of juggernauts, revolting to human feelings in their blindness, supremely humorous in their stupidity.  One of the greatest caricaturists that ever lived, Francesco Goya y Lucientes, reached the highest level of historical humour in his picture of a military execution of Spanish rebels.  A bundle of feeling, suffering humanity is huddled together in the last stages of agony, despair or defiance, and facing them stands a row of the most perfectly trained Napoleonic soldiers, with their hats and rifles all cocked at the same angle.  One knows that the next moment the rebels will be at peace, inanimate matter, and the firing squad will dissolve into a number of very ordinary, dull human beings.  Similarly in Breughel’s ‘Fall of Icarus’, the true humour of the tragedy is not so much the pair of naked legs sticking out of the water, as the complete unconcern of all the potential onlookers…….History of infinite weight was to be made in the absurd beginnings of a reign which was to witness the elimination of those who had hitherto governed England…..and the break-up of an Empire such as the world had not seen since the disruption of the Roman Empire – history was to be started in ridiculous beginnings, while small men did things both infinitely smaller and infinitely greater than they knew.

That is writing of immense power.  Here is Namier again on humanity.

Restraint, coupled with the tolerance which it implies and with plain human kindness, is much more valuable in politics than ideas which are ahead of their time; but restraint was a quality in which the eighteenth-century Englishman was as deficient as most other nations are even now.

Here is another extract.

The basic elements of the Imperial Problem during the American Revolution must be sought not so much in conscious opinions and professed views bearing directly on it, as in the very structure and life of the Empire; and in doing that, the words of Danton should be remembered – on ne fait pas le proces aux revolutions.  Those who are out to apportion guilt in history have to keep to views and opinions, judge the collisions of planets by the rules of road traffic, make history into something like a column of motoring accidents, and discuss it in the atmosphere of a police court.

No wonder the idealists and the Glory Boys were crestfallen, but on Namier’s death, an undergraduate wrote to Lady Namier saying that ‘he was probably the only truly great man that I have known personally.’ 

It is not hard to see how Namier could have had precisely that effect.  He was like a great artist who has taken the trouble to learn how to draw.  After Namier had done the hard work of amassing and sifting the evidence, he could allow himself a go with the broad brush.

Here are observations from other writings.

Characteristic of English social groups is the degree of freedom which they leave to the individual and the basic equality of their members, the voluntary submission to the rules of ‘the game’ and the curious mixture of elasticity and rigidity in these rules; most of all, the moral standards which these groups enforce or to which they aspire.  Characteristic of the German social group is the utter, conscious subordination of the individual, the iron discipline which they enforce, the high degree of organisation and efficiency which they attain, and their resultant inhumanity.  The State is an aim in itself…. The English national pattern raises individuals above their average moral level, the German suppresses their human sides. 

And it was again on the masses that Hitler drew: what was worst in the Germans, their hatreds and resentments, their envy and cruelty, their brutality and adoration of force, he focused and radiated back on them.  A master in the realm of psyche, but debarred from that of the spirit, he was the Prophet of the Possessed; and interchange there was between him and them, unknown between any other political leader and his followers.  This is the outstanding fact about Hitler and the Third Reich. 

But revolutions are not made; they occur…. The year 1848 proved in Germany that union could not be achieved through discussion and by agreement; that it could be achieved only by force; that there were not sufficient revolutionary forces in Germany to impose from below; and that, therefore, if it was to be, it had to be imposed by the Prussian army. 

The proper attitude for right-minded Members was one of considered support to the Government in the due performance of its task…But if it was proper for the well-affected Member to co-operate with the Government, so long as his conscience permitted, attendance on the business of the nation was work worthy of its hire, and the unavoidable expenditure in securing a seat deserved sympathetic consideration.  …. Bribery, to be really effective, has to be widespread and open…

Trade was not despised in eighteenth-century England – it was acknowledged to be the great concern of the nation; and money was honoured, the mystic common denominator of all values, the universal repository of as yet undetermined possibilities…. A man’s status in English society has always depended primarily on his own consciousness; for the English are not a methodical or logical nation – they perceive and accept facts without anxiously inquiring into their reasons or meaning.  (England in the Age, etc., 2^nd Ed, 1961); ‘…. Fox would probably have found it easier to account for his fears than for the money…

On Charles Townshend: He did not change or mellow; nor did he learn by experience; there was something ageless about him; never young, he remained immature to the end…Conscious superiority over other men freely flaunted, a capacity for seeing things from every angle displayed with vanity, and the absence of any deeper feelings of attachment left Townshend, as Chase Price put it, ‘entirely unhinged.

The English aristocracy survived, almost alone in Europe.  They had been able to reach an accommodation with the Commons in shaping the English constitution, and they reached an accommodation with business and money in shaping British trade.  This triumph of the English aristocracy is unique in all Europe, and the failure of English historians to notice it, let alone celebrate it, is a sad reflection upon the provincialism and specialization of too much of English historical writing. 

Namier saw it plainly, but he was from out of town.  Maitland frequently stressed the need for a comparative outlook, and was deeply interested in German history.  French historians such as Marc Bloch and Georges Lefebvre laced their analyses of the history of France and Europe with comparisons with what was happening across the Channel, and their work was so much more illuminating as a result. 

But English historians do not often return that serve.  How often do you read in English history how the French law of derogation precluded the French lords from engaging in trade?  For example, under the heading La Noblesse et L’Argent, (The Nobility and Money),Georges Lefebvre remarked that ‘the French lords envied the English lords who became rich on mixing with the bourgeoisie and who, thanks to their Parliament, formed the ministry and government of the nation.’

The English lack of interest in Europe has borne fruit, and is currently celebrating a kind of mordant vindication, but the mind-set may also be at risk of being described as insular – definitively insular – with all the darkening and proud exclusion that that state of mind entails.

They are the kind of sparks you come across when reading Namier.  He was difficult personally, a stranger to his new people, and possibly disloyal to his old people, and he was denied the acceptance that he craved and that he had so plainly earned.  Arnold Toynbee had nothing in common with Namier, but said: ‘I worshipped him.  He was a big man with a big mind.’  Isaiah Berlin said he was ‘an historian who psychoanalysed the past.’ 

When I read Namier, it is like being overtaken by a Bentley or listening to Joan Sutherland – you just know that there is plenty left in the tank.  Just as I think that Maitland’s intellect was far stronger than that of Pollock, so I think that Namier was stronger than Isaiah Berlin – it is just that the other two were better at playing the game.

Sir Geoffrey Elton was another import with a name-change who changed the way people saw his part of the history of England.  Elton said this about the reaction to Namier: ‘…. the violence provoked by Namier owed much to the astonishment felt in conventional circles at the uncalled-for appearance of a historian with Tory predilections who clearly outranked the liberals intellectually.’ 

We all recognize that syndrome immediately – the refuge of the tepid, the mediocre, the smug, and the fellow-travellers.  Namier had a most formidable and penetrating intellect.  And how many historians now would have the courage to refer to ‘plain human kindness’?