On A. J. P. Taylor's Europe, Grandeur and Decline .
There can be little doubt that the writer who most influenced me intellectually was A. J. P.Taylor. I came under his spell as a teenager watching his television lectures. The greatest intellectual joy of my life was getting him as a doctoral supervisor at Oxford.
My chosen field was the Habsburg monarchy and at first I had decided to go to Cambridge. Since nobody there seemed to know anything about the Habsburgs, I transferred to Oxford, where nobody seemed interested either. Eventually the representative of the faculty board took me aside and said: "Would you mind if we gave you to A. J. P. Taylor?" Would I mind? I was over the moon. Taylor himself wrote me a nice little note: "Dear Sked, I look forward to having you as a student. It is 30 years since I wrote anything on the Habsburgs and I have forgotten everything I ever knew. I look forward to learning it again - from you."
Needless to say my first meeting with him was a nervous one. Still, we got on famously and later, after I co-edited a Festschrift, for his 70th birthday, he called me "a pupil to be proud of". One of the happiest moments in my life was when a reviewer of my own book on the Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815-1918 described it as "worthy of A. J. P. Taylor at his best."
On reflection, I think I was probably most influenced by his collections of essays, particularly his Europe, Grandeur and Decline. These show Taylor at his very best - witty, original and stylistically brilliant. Many of these essays started life as book reviews, but they are true gems, hard, polished and with the shimmer of genuine intellectual diamonds.
Taylor's greatest virtues shine through time and time again: his ability to grasp the essence of any historical problem; the clarity of his formulation of it; the wit with which he can expound the ironies and paradoxes involved; the life he breathes into the clay figures of the past.
His essay on The Failure of the Habsburg Monarchy provides the essentials of 19th-century European history in fewer than six pages. My own view of events was profoundly influenced by him. First, because he showed the futility of abstract explanations of history or politics. He ridiculed Marxism and much as he would have liked to believe in Marx and Engels, he confessed that "reality kept breaking in".
Basically his approach was intuitive. Like Ranke he searched for "wie es eigentlich gewesen ist" - eigentlich meaning "essentially". Thus, he did not really believe you could teach history to graduate students; they either had the gift of finding the essence or they did not.
His intellectual opposite was the dreary Marxist political scientist concerned to teach graduate students how to write PhDs on theories of the state. The sad fact about British higher education was that places like Oxford and the LSE were happier to appoint such people than to give Alan Taylor a chair.
I was and am firmly on his side. The modern university, as I see it, is a degree factory filled with dreary academic bureaucrats, people incapable of writing anything original in decent English but who confirm this regularly in works of great length.
Taylor's real influence on me, however, was his belief in the diversity of European history and culture. If there was such a thing as a state system operating diplomatically, it involved different kinds of states with different kinds of cultures. The history of any country was unique. Thus Taylor had no truck with European unity - just another academic theory divorced from reality. Were he alive today, he would be glad to note that reality is once again breaking in.
Alan Sked is a senior lecturer in international history, London School of Economics.
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