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Élie Halévy*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Raymond Aron
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Extract

NOWHERE IN HIS WORK DOES ÉLIE HALÉVY SHOW THAT HE felt any particular preference for those whom man hold to be his predecessors or masters. He refers at Length to Montesquieu at the beginning of his third volume on England in 1815, but indirectly, through his English interpreters, especially Blackstone. Blackstone interpreted the British constitution in the light of the interpretation which Montesquieu gave it in l'Esprit des Lois. In so doing he yielded to the force of French logic and falsified the analysis of reality. As French logic is unable to understand the British procedure, and imposed upon the English a stylized representation of their own practice, this paradoxical exercise was greatly to the taste of Halévy, an historian who always enjoyed the paradoxes of history, and who understood so well the native genius of both peoples.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , 01 October 1984 , pp. 407 - 422
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1984

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References

1 Quoted by Alexandre, Jeanne, in Alain: Correspondance avec Élie et Florence Halévy, ed. Alexandre, J. M., Paris, 1958, p. 13.Google Scholar

2 Alain: Correspondance avec Élie et Florence Halévy, op, cit., p. 325.

3 Cf. The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism, trans. M. Morris, London, 1972, Part I, chaps 1 and 2.

4 Ibid., p. 371.

5 Ibid., pp. 371–2.

6 Ibid., pp. 341–2.

7 Halévy to Bouglé, 26 June 1896, Alain: Correspondance avec Élie et Florence Halévy, op. cit., p. 325.

8 Ibid. p. 327.

9 Ibid.

10 The Era of Tyrannies, ed. and tr. R. K. Webb, New York, 1967, p. 274.

11 This epilogue appeared in English in two parts: Imperialism and the Rise of Labour (1895–1905), London, 1929 and The Rule of Democracy (1905–1914), London, 1934.

12 Halévy to Xavier Léon, 11 February 1915 in Alain: Correspondance avec Florence et Élie Halévy, op. cit., p. 345.

13 Alain to Florence Halévy, 13 June 1915 in ibid., p. 206.

14 Halévy to Alain in ibid., p. 131.

15 The Era of Tyrannies, op cit., p. 247.

16 Ibid., p. 227.

17 Ibid., p. 229.