Volume 20, Number 11 · June 28, 1973
On George Lichtheim
By Steven Lukes
Europe in the Twentieth Century
by George Lichtheim
Praeger, 424 pp., $12.95
Collected Essays
by George Lichtheim
Viking, 492 pp., $15.00
George Lichtheim's death has silenced the voice of a writer unique in the English-speaking world. It was a distinctive voice—dry, precise, subtle, shrewd, sophisticated, detached, ironic, mordant, supercilious, magisterial. It was also a profoundly European voice, addressing the Anglo-Saxons, urging them to deepen their vision of the world by taking serious account of the German intellectual tradition, above all of what he called 'the great tradition of German idealism—a tradition extending from Kant, via Hegel and his pupils, to Marx,' only to be cheapened and perverted first by Engels and subsequently by Russian communists and their Western counterparts. For Lichtheim, the importance of that tradition, and of Marxism in particular, was not only historical and sociological but also philosophical. It made the only possible sense of the past and provided the most promising basis for understanding the present and the future. It furnished the intellectual tools for achieving what he saw as 'the urgently required integration or interpenetration of sociology and history.' And, above all, it was the only ground from which one might hope to 'make sense of human history as a whole.'
Review, 2577 words
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