Defender of Kulchur City

...The two most interesting scholarly papers in the book are those de>-voted to "The Special Relationship: An Anglo-American Myth," and to "The Anglo-French Union Project of June 1940...

...On the Jews and Israel, The Intellectual in Politics is uniquely rewarding...

...Indeed, the book conveys a slight sense of siege, of the last lean veteran with a shotgun defending Kulchur City after the badmen have taken the sheriff...

...Abroad, Beloff chides India's Education Commission for requesting aid from "richer industrialized nations which 'share India's faith in Democratic Socialism,' " since that excludes the United States, democratic but un-Socialist, and the USSR, Socialist but hardly democratic...

...Proper detachment required courage when accused of serving the system, as did concern for freedom, liberalism, democracy, art, edV ucation, and society when each of these was sneered at by the cheap device of calling them "bourgeois," "middle-class," or "white...

...For some it was a case of conscience, of political solidarity in a cause that overrode even deep and passionate disagreements...

...Beloff knows the dilemma and knows its permanence: History seldom offers simple solutions—or if it does, they are as unthinkable as "the final solution...

...In this sense, although still a middle-class elitist, Max Beloff faces the very issues that his enemies preempt...

...Bourgeois" individualists, "middle-class" scholars, "white" liberals —making up their minds with scruple and difficulty, drawing distinctions, aware of historical perspective, questioning the evidence and their own motives, clinging to their integrity in the midst of a bullying clamor, perpetually invoking T.S...

...They make the book more fun than it might have been, even if they will make some readers withhold a cheer...

...All along the way he strews unpopular epigrams: on "parental ambition, that great motor of progress...

...at other times his asperity sounds less than playful...

...His scholarship is not worn ostentatiously...

...Though they did not see it that way, these men were like Eugene McCarthy's students facing Mayor Richard Daley's machine politics...

...In the climate of the '60s, it was certainly easy to feel beleaguered, especially as a professor of government...

...It is here, rather than in the lecture on Ramsay Muir that gives the book its title, that Beloff really tackles his promised theme: the degree to which "bourgeois" scholarship can contribute to politics without either compromising its own honesty or neglecting the human content of the causes it meets...

...A Jew and a liberal, he might be called "a Jewish liberal"—but it wouldn't be easy to make that sound like a sneer...

...Thus the role of the lone defender became natural—particularly after educated older men, some of them university teachers, crossed to the other side...

...In the former, Beloff shrewdly analyzes the way the British seized on America's friendship as a prop for their own waning power, and at the same time misjudged the extent to which the United States remains "Anglo-Saxon" in ethnic composition or allegiance...

...Nowhere, in fact, does he betray the standards he sets himself...

...In the latter, he explores an episode in World War II that has had small place in the standard histories: Jean Monnet's proposal, taken up by de Gaulle and Churchill, for joint citizenship and political union between Britain and France...

...Eliot's "if and perhaps and but"?were bound to feel exposed, defensive, touchy...

...This explains and partly excuses the asperity of BelofFs asides and apothegms—barbs to protect the soft porcupine flesh of the bristling scholar...

...Arthur Koestler once maintained that since the creation of Israel Jews must choose either to be assimilated or to become Israelis...

...As these examples suggest, the general tone of the lectures and articles collected in The Intellectual in Politics is firm, sharp, aloof, rather grimly determined not to be fooled by "fashion," an unfavorite word...

...Once again, the worst of all afflictions was to possess excellent knowledge and lack effective power...

...Beloff points out reasonably enough that Monnet's idea was not novel, and this was true even of his later successful projects for unity in Europe after the War...

...Yet in some of these papers his writing suddenly acquires a force and a resonance that is lacking in the rest of the book...

...Envy, which used to be condemned by moralists, has now acquired considerable standing as the backbone of a fashionable political creed...

...In the case of his lecture on "Lucien Wolf and the Anglo-Russian Entente 1907-1914," he actually thanks a colleague, now dead, who loaned him the papers and press clippings that made possible his detailed study of a very perceptive Jewish journalist...

...At home in Britain, he questions that shibboleth of educationists, the "comprehensive school," by challenging the view that " 'equality' demands that the clever and the stupid, the industrious and the idle should be educated in the same schools and as far as possible in the same classrooms...

...Until it appears, Beloff's is the best interim report...

...Student protest, fueled by manifest injustice, threatened to impose a "revolutionary" orthodoxy no less stifling than the conformism it attacked...

...The whole story of the Mon-net proposal, as I have heard its author tell it, has yet to be published...

...Two cheers, however, are certainly in order from everyone: one for Beloff's scholarship, the other for his worrying out of how he feels about Israel and the Jews...

...Sometimes Beloff teases the enemy to draw his fire...

...In a few of the essays, like "Zionism and Nationalism," Beloff's approach is as aloof and scholarly as ever...

...In South Africa, he quotes a medieval dictum against apartheid: Quod omnes tangit, ab omnibus ap-probetur—what affects everyone should be approved by everyone...

...elsewhere the breadth of his own knowledge is evident, but not obtruded...

...his feelings are stirred, and he lives the anguish and contradictions involved in the new coexistence of Israel and the diaspora...

...To read these pages is to live with a wise, expert, Jewish mind grappling with its own dilemma: how to reconcile scholarship with loyalty, detachment with commitment, being an intellectual with being "in politics...

...for others, surely, it was youth-snobbery, demagogy, folly, or a new kind of color bar...

...Like reasonable agnostics in Rome, democrats in Moscow, tolerant liberals in the old South, or music-lovers at a rock session, they were obliged to devote most of their time and attention to simplistic issues they wanted to transcend, yet couldn't because so many people totally disagreed with them...

...He nonetheless overplays the importance of Monnet's precursors, perhaps because—like most intellectual historians—he tends to overstress continuity and underrate the sheer ignorance underlying many great men's plans...

...While the intellectual," he writes, "should not actively seek unpopularity, it is probably healthy that he should be rather widely hated...

...Reviewed by Richard Mayne Author, "The Community of Europe" PROFESSOR MAX Beloff, Fellow of All Souls College at Oxford University, is a middle-class elitist—and bully for him...

...on "dislike of elitism, which is the bane of education...

...So he speaks his mind...

...on Leninism, because "the world has been a poorer and bleaker and more dangerous place because Lenin lived...

...In the United States, he condemns the Vietnam war as a costly failure, but avoids special pleading for the North Vietnamese...