In Memoriam/Maurice Cranston
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
IN MEMORIAM Maurice Cranston p rofessor Maurice Cranston, one of the stalwarts of The American Spectator's Editorial Board, collapsed and died of a heart attack in a good cause on November 5. He...
...His involvement in resettling Jewish refugees from Germany eventually turned him towards political philosophy...
...He, too, had been an editor...
...Maurice wrote scholarly works that will be read for decades...
...She died in June, and the day before our lunch we had commemorated her death at a memorial at St...
...If he knew I was going to be in London and there was a writer that might be helpful to The American Spectator, he would introduce us...
...With his natural independence of mind and a scholarly rigor he pursued the study of freedom at Oxford...
...His review of John Rawls's Political Liberalism on page 58 is characteristic...
...They had two sons...
...He brought people together...
...Upon Oakeshott's retirement Maurice 14 The American Spectator January 1994...
...Kenneth Minogue replaces him on The American Spectator's Editorial Board...
...In his early years he followed the bohemian life...
...Bill's wife Shirley Robin Letwin was also a stalwart in that circle...
...It was my good fortune to have been his guest for lunch at the Garrick Club in London the month before he died...
...We hailed a cab and he shoved off to the London Library, to carry on his work in la grande paix des bibliotheques...
...For a profoundly serious champion of freedom and prudent politics, it was a proper way to exit, but it has left his colleagues here at The American Spectator lost in sadness...
...Bereavement always seems to leave its mark on the eyes...
...That institution may have begun as a seedbed of British socialism, but when one of the founders of modern conservatism, the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, replaced the leftist Harold Laski as a professor of political science, it was apparent that conservatism was also a strong presence in the faculty...
...A head "full of seventeenth-century rationalism," as he put it, and an interest in continental philosophy kept him free of the hooey of academic fashion...
...His other guest was one of the conservative luminaries with whom he had visited and conspired for years, the economist William Letwin...
...Our lunch was lively...
...Bill and I left Maurice down the street from the Garrick...
...I personally remember Maurice for his kindliness, his wit, his learning, his good sense, his keen analytical mind, his high standards, and his sense of the risible...
...Martin in the Fields church with Lady Thatcher...
...He lectured in both English and French...
...Now Maurice's many friends and colleagues are suffering a touch of that loss...
...Yet amid the robust chatter and laughs one could still see the grief etched along the rims of Bill Letwin's eyes...
...Yet he was always available to write the kind of elegant and trenchant essays and reviews that have appeared here and in other periodicals...
...In 1958 he married Baroness Maximiliana vonwas appointed to his chair, in a department that now contained such conservatives as Kenneth Minogue...
...Once past his shyness, students found a devoted mentor and lifelong friend...
...Of particular importance is his work on Locke and Rousseau...
...but in his own words, "I have always sought what Jean Starobinski called la grande paix des bibliotheques...
...RET and zu Fraunberg...
...While at the LSE, Maurice became a great teacher...
...I assume he has now found a still greater paix...
...Though never doctrinaire, he sustained conservatism's growing influence at the London School of Economics...
...Maurice Cranston was a great gentleman, a superb teacher, and a graceful, tireless, and extremely wise writer...
...IN MEMORIAM Maurice Cranston p rofessor Maurice Cranston, one of the stalwarts of The American Spectator's Editorial Board, collapsed and died of a heart attack in a good cause on November 5. He was engaged in a television commentary on Lady Thatcher's memoirs for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation...
...He was born in 1920 to a theatrical family...
...When I told them that before every writing session on a book I now have well under way I like to jog or take a warm bath, they reminded me that Machiavelli would dress formally in a black cape before his writing sessions, even in exile...
Vol. 27 • January 1994 • No. 1
