Alan Montefiore (1926-2024)

1948, Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy 1961-1994, Tutor for Admissions 1962-1967, Emeritus Fellow from 1994

Dr Andrew Graham (Fellow and Tutor in Economics 1969-2001, Master 2001-2011, Honorary Fellow)

I sometimes remark that being at Balliol is rather like having a stone in your shoe – tiny relative to your body mass but altering the whole way you walk. Alan Montefiore had much the same impact. Initially, I was too much in awe of him to think clearly about what was going on, but I gradually came to understand the shape of his conversations. At the start, he often appeared sympathetic to whatever position one had taken, but a few steps down the road, he would be inviting you to realise that you must have been mistaken as you were now so clearly contradicting yourself.

Over the years, the ‘Alan stone’ led me to see three things, obvious to philosophers, but often overlooked in general discussion. First, if a line of reasoning leads to a contradiction or clashes with reality, either the logic is mistaken, or the starting assumptions are adrift – the latter a particular affliction in economics.

Second, if you are going to have a discussion – rather than a shouting match – there must be something on which you agree. Alan illustrated this vividly in one of my very first encounters. He had been in Singapore on sabbatical in 1968 and had listened to the broadcasts by the Americans and by the Chinese (I later learned that part of his National Service had been spent in Singapore and that he could speak Hokkien). Their accounts were diametrically opposed, yet on one issue they were agreed – there was a war.

Third, most of our claims about the world are context dependent. Alan was impressive across the board, but to my mind where he excelled and where he made his greatest contribution was in teasing out how the context mattered – whether that context is internal (who am I and to whom do I owe commitments?) or external (in what ways has this idea been seen differently in varying cultures and languages?).

When Alan started teaching at Balliol, Oxford analytical philosophy, concentrating heavily on logic and the philosophy of language, was at its height. An ‘is’ was never to be confused with an ‘ought’. The positive and the normative were not only in different boxes but needed to be kept so. However, from early on, Alan, bilingual in French, had an interest in Continental philosophy where context was allowed full sway, especially the position of the speaker. Or, as Alan might have put it, given the fact (an ‘is’) that he was born Jewish, this entails an obligation (an ‘ought’) to that faith, or to that community.

Once the study of Kant was brought formally into PPE in the 1960s, Alan began a seminar devoted to Kantian philosophy. The seminar soon became legendary. In the collection of essays marking Alan’s 85th birthday, no fewer than six contributions were devoted to it, with Michael Sandel (1975) writing that it was ‘a centre piece of academic life at Balliol’.

Alan was a wonderful example of the engaged intellectual, willing not only to think but to act. When the Wiener Holocaust Memorial Library faced a funding crisis in 1980, it was Alan who stepped in and persuaded the former Prime Minister, James Callaghan, to become the first President of the Endowment Appeal. Alan was the Governor of the Froebel Educational Institute (which later became part of the University of Roehampton) and, alongside his Balliol work, he was actively engaged with Kathy Wilkes (St Hildas) and his Balliol colleagues, Tony Kenny (Fellow 1964–1978, Master 1978–1989) and Bill Newton-Smith (Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy 1970–2005), in organising underground seminars with dissidents in what was then Czechoslovakia. He was a founding member of the Jan Hus Educational Foundation which backed this work and in 2019 he was awarded the Czech Honorary Jan Masaryk Silver Medal.

After retirement, he and his second wife, French philosopher Catherine Audard, founded the Forum for European Philosophy, which ran weekly seminars at LSE for 25 years, broadening access to diverse philosophical traditions. Catherine was the Chair, and they worked closely with three former pupils, Simon Glendinning, Hilary Lawson (1972) and Paul Flather (1973). He continued to write, producing, amongst others, A Philosophical Retrospective (2011) and Philosophy and the Human Paradox (2019). In his 97th year, he was as sharp as ever, and was in Paris with Catherine, doing The Times cryptic cross word when his fatal heart-attack struck.

Alan was born in London in 1926, the son of Leonard Montefiore (the first President of the Wiener Library), and grandson of Claude Joseph Goldsmid Montefiore, a theologian and the founder of the London Society for the Study of Religion. He was educated at Clifton College, Bristol, earning high praise from them for his multiple talents, including ball games, especially squash. His housemaster wrote in his final report, ‘No other boy within my experience has won so much affection and respect from both masters and boys throughout the school’.

Many years later, I learnt to my cost how skilfully he played squash when I spent a Sunday morning scrabbling desperately to rescue the ball from corner after corner as Alan stood at the centre nonchalantly dispatching my returns. In squash, good players focus not on where the ball was hit, but where it will land. Later, I saw an analogy with arguments. Especially when discussing with someone as clever as Alan, it paid to think as much about his desired end point as about the current move.

After three years of National Service, much of it in Singapore, Alan came to Balliol to read PPE in 1948 – he had been admitted in 1945 but demobbed only in 1948.  He had first considered Classics, then English, before settling on Modern Studies, as PPE was known. In 1951, he took up a teaching post at Keele University. Keele had only been founded the year before (the moving force being ‘Sandy’ Lindsay, Master of Balliol 1924-1949), and the story is that Alan was in the quad when his personal tutor called down to him that Keele was seeking young lecturers, so why not apply? Around the same time, in March 1952, Alan married Hélène (née Pivant) in Paris. Since she was a gentile, neither of his parents came to the wedding, and his mother avoided speaking to Hélène or even seeing her first granddaughter for several years. Alan and Hélène had three children: Anne, a counsellor, Claire, a psychotherapist, and Paul, a photographer and interior designer.

In 1961, armed with impressive references from, amongst others, ‘Sammy’ Finer (Lecturer in Politics 1946–1949, JRF in Politics 1949–1950), who had also moved from Balliol to Keele, and Stuart Hampshire (1933), he was elected to a Fellowship at Balliol, where he remained until his retirement. In 1984, he married Catherine Audard, bringing her children, Sylvain, Laure-Hélène, and Florence, into his life, and he and Catherine worked intensively together for the remainder of his long life.

In addition to, and entirely in tune with, his interest in continental philosophy, Alan believed strongly in multi-disciplinary exchange. Bill Weinstein (Politics Fellow) and I (Economics Fellow) contributed to his 1975 volume on Neutrality and Impartiality: the University and Political Commitment – an issue right back in the news as I write. In 1997, he edited Integrity in the Public and Private Domains with economist David Vines (Emeritus Fellow), and in 2021, Goals, No Goals and Own Goals with physiologist Denis Noble (Emeritus Fellow).

Steven Lukes (1958) has memorably described Alan as the ‘Le Grand Anti-simplificateur’. This brilliantly evokes Alan’s multidimensional manner of thinking, as well as what I regard as his highly ‘leveraged’ way of arguing. By ‘leveraged’, I mean the way in which Alan could focus on what, to most of us, might seem a quite narrow issue where a decision was required, and show that, viewed with more thought, it had geopolitical implications. In the nicest possible way, this tended to happen most when he hoped one might change one’s mind or could be persuaded to do something – if only one had the breadth of intelligence to see the light. On one occasion, we were about to turn down an applicant for admission, when Alan brought into play that the applicant’s first language was German and that, philosophically, what he had been trying to argue would be much richer in German. We duly re-interviewed him in German – and admitted him.

Steven’s description should not, however, be taken as implying that Alan was unclear. Complex – yes; unresolved – sometimes; lengthy sentences with multiple qualifications – frequently; but lack of rigour – rare. Indeed, his contributions remain of value precisely because he bridged and combined the sharpness of analytical philosophy with the breadth and imagination of continental philosophy.

Nor does Stephen’s moniker well describe Alan’s interactions with his students which were often forthright, perceptive, and straightforward. After just a single tutorial, he asked a student from India whether they were feeling homesick. They were and were very touched that Alan had noticed. A second was told in no uncertain terms that the difficulties with his family could not be side-stepped. He had to confront his father. A third was told to rewrite his essay leaving only the first sentence of each paragraph. If a clear argument remained, carry on. If not, start again. The last is always good advice, but it was especially suited to its recipient, a clever student, but easily distracted. 

He was also always on the side of his students. On numerous occasions, the poor performance of X or Y was reported to Tutorial Board with suitable disciplinary action seemingly inevitable, until Alan spoke. His remarks were often complex, but, in essence, suggested that we (the other Tutorial Fellows) had failed to see the full picture. It often took time, but Alan frequently prevailed. As one former colleague said when I suggested the ‘stone in the shoe’ analogy, ‘I like it. It captures not only his influence but also his persistence’.

In many ways Alan was a simply wonderful colleague – supportive and challenging in equal part, keeping one’s wits alive, and endlessly opening new avenues of thought – and everyone, young and old, speaks of how they were always treated as his intellectual equal. But I wish to emphasise a deeper contribution that I personally think Alan made. PPE is often regarded merely as an interesting joint degree that allows students to study three social science disciplines alongside one another with little real connection between them. That has never been the Balliol view and, most assuredly, was never Alan’s view.

The key question is this: are economic theorists better for having done philosophy, and philosophers better for having done politics, or are these three subjects necessarily inter-related? Alan, I am sure, was convinced that the connections between the disciplines were essential. He would have expressed it in a more nuanced way, but I believe that he regarded theories based on the assumption that the person exists ‘as if’ they are independent of society as fundamentally flawed. He felt it essential to inquire what it means to be a person. Alan especially liked Hume’s confession that he, Hume, could not answer this question; and he believed that once this question is addressed and once the person is contextualised, there are deep implications for all three sides of PPE.

Moreover, this philosophical underpinning, I suggest, has provided both an element of continuity and an element of difference to PPE within Balliol and I see Alan as having been an exceptionally significant contributor to this distinctiveness.

Certainly, the prevailing Balliol view of PPE stands in sharp contrast to the study of the social sciences in many other universities (and even most other colleges in Oxford), where ‘economic science’, ‘political science’ and ‘formal logic’ are seen as entirely separate disciplines.  For me, Alan’s insistence on context and on the fuzziness and complexity of the connections between facts and values are not just quirks of his but derive from a deep philosophical underpinning and is a core part of what made – and makes – Balliol PPE distinctive.

This same Balliol continuity can be extended to include many of the people with whom Alan interacted or whom he taught. I think, for example, of Bernard Williams (1947), Akeel Bilgrami (1971), and Stephen Mulhall (1980) in philosophy; Charles Taylor (1952), Michael Sandel, Steven Lukes and Rajeev Bhargava (1975) in political theory; and, in economics, Tommy Balogh (Fellow 1945–1973, Emeritus Fellow 1973–1985), Paul Streeten (1944), Wilfred Beckerman (Fellow and Tutor in Economics 1964–1969 and 1975–1992, Emeritus Fellow 1992–2020) , Hugh Stretton (1946), and Keith Griffin (1960).

Of course, at Balliol we also believe passionately in diversity and, if Balliol had a motto, it might well be ‘The promotion of heresy’. The delineation that I have sketched therefore has had many distinguished exceptions. Nevertheless, when I observe the extent to which in much of the non-Balliol world, the curricula of politics and international relations have tended to be formalised and de-contextualised (especially in the obsession with game theory), and how much philosophy has become focused on logic, and how economics has become a branch of mathematics, it underlines the distinctiveness of PPE as studied at Balliol. If this claim about the difference in approach at Balliol is even remotely true, it is an extraordinary achievement. It is very rare for even a university to have sufficient strength of tradition for it to count as a ‘school’ (Chicago economics is an exception that illustrates the point), but, apart from Balliol, it is unheard of for a single Oxford or Cambridge college to represent a ‘school’.

Perhaps I push the point too far, but I would not be tempted to do so were it not for the influence of Alan. He did not start the tradition, but he revived it, amplified it, filled it with rich furniture, caused many of us to expand our intellectual boundaries, and passed it on, greatly enhanced, to the next generation of students and teachers. Thank you, Alan.

(Reproduced with the kind permission of the author).