GEORGE LICHTHEIM 1912-1973

...DENNIS H. WRONG LI...

...that the managerial and technical intelligentsia represented the most rapidly expanding and politically significant stratum in advanced industrial societies...

...But even before his major books appeared in the '60s (there were nine in all plus two essay collections) he was so prolific a writer that he unobtrusively implanted ideas in the minds of others who publicized them more flamboyantly...

...that socialism neither could nor should be identified any longer merely with the aims and interests of the industrial working class...

...George wrote under both names through the 1950s, but G. L. Arnold disappeared after 1959 just before the publication of Marxism: A Critical and Historical Study, which won George a reputation as an important scholar and thinker never again to be described as a "journalist" in biographical notes...

...Already an admirer, I made a point of getting to know George when he spent his first year in the United States as an editor of Commentary in 1957-58...

...I first became aware of George Lichtheim's powerful and distinctive gifts in 1953 and 1954 when he wrote under the name of "G...

...As an editor, I discovered, as others had before me, that to ask George to write something was virtually to receive the completed manuscript in the return mail...

...The style and flavor of his writing were entirely congruent with those of the man himself...

...L. Arnold," although I had read him under his real name in Commentary on Middle Eastern and British politics as early as 1947...

...The number of ideas George advanced be tween the late '40s and the middle '50s—some of them in his first book, The Pattern of World Conflict published under the name of G. L. Arnold—that later became common intellectual parlance is truly remarkable: that the Cold War was essentially a sideshow to the struggles of the underdeveloped countries to achieve modernization...

...He recalled to me a remark of Clement Greenberg's that had startled me when I first read it: "It is possible that by `world-historical' standards the European Jew represents a higher type of human being than any yet achieved in history...

...But there was a world-weary and melancholy, almost impersonal, quality to his apparent intellectual arrogance: the disasters of 20th-century European history had bred skepticism and hard-bitten yet sad realism into his bones...

...He was a superb talker—witty, effortlessly erudite, often seeming outrageously dismissive in his rejection of fashionable intellectual pretentions and inflated reputations...

...To those of us, however, who—aware of his double identity—had been reading him for over a decade in half a dozen British and American intellectual and political journals, he already was a uniquely authoritative voice on subjects ranging from such ephemera as the latest British Cabinet shift to the nature of Stalinism and its appeal to the elites of underdeveloped countries, or the intellectual history of Europe since the 18th century...

...George's skepticism toward all ideologies, his scrupulous concern with the historical pedigree of the ideas he articulated, and the casualness and ease with which he handled complex social and philosophical theories—the absence of that straining for "brilliance" so common among American intellectuals—often resulted in his failing to receive the credit his originality deserved...

...Perhaps I romanticized him, but he always seemed to me to be a kind of eternal refugee, both the actual exile that he had been from Hitler's Germany who eventually chose to live in England, and a symbolic exile from the shattered hopes of pre-1914 socialism and from the greatness of modern European culture which remains so uncertain of renewal after the historical disasters of this century...

...I grieve the loss of a friend, but even if I had not known him personally I would regard the loss of the books and essays he had yet to write as an enormous and irreplaceable one...

...that Britain and the United States were beginning to suffer the "crisis of values" resulting from the disintegration of bourgeois civilization that had wracked continental Europe since at least 1914—to name only a few...