The last time – literally the last time, when he had an advanced stage of cancer – I visited Christopher Hitchens, we talked about the books and writers that had influenced him. He told how, in 1967, he picked up a volume of essays called Writers and Politics by Conor Cruise O’Brien in a public library in Tavistock, Devon. Reading it, he formed the ambition to be able to write like that.

I had a similar experience. I never met O’Brien but he was one of the earliest and most important influences on my political thinking and my wish to be a writer. As an undergraduate at Oxford, I picked up one of his books in the Bodleian Social Science Library. It was a collection of essays and reviews called Herod: Reflections on Political Violence (1978). His arguments throughout the book were a different face of O’Brien’s politics (though he would certainly have claimed they were the same politics in essence) from his volume of the 1960s. In condemning America’s war in Vietnam, he was recognisably a writer of the anti-imperialist Left. In his later volume, encapsulating his experience as a cabinet minister in Ireland’s coalition government in the mid-1970s, he wrote of the destructiveness of absolutism.

It’s a great book. In it, O’Brien not only denounces IRA terrorism, as you would expect from a mainstream politician, but – in a sense quite different from the rationalisations offered by ideological apologists for political violence – seeks to understand it. I mean, really understand it – not extenuate it by equivocation and non sequitur. And his thinking leads him to attack the republican mythology at the heart of the Irish state. Few writers have analysed terrorism so acutely or been as effective in undermining its ideological justifications. Here is how O’Brien recounts his thinking:

In the politics of the Republic, I was not quite where I was expected to be. In the Congo time, sections of the British press had assured their readers (quite wrongly) that I was motivated by anti-British fanaticism. My career in America had shown me as opposed to imperialism. So I was expected at least to fall into line with the view that the troubles in Northern Ireland were caused by British imperialism. When instead I said that, in relation to Northern Ireland, it was the IRA who were the imperialists, since they were trying to annex by force a territory a large majority of whose inhabitants were opposed to them, my remarks appeared either incomprehensible or outrageous to a number of people who had liked what they heard about me much more than they like what they were hearing from me.

As a prophet, O’Brien was fallible. He doubted that the Irish constitution, with its irredentist claims to the whole island of Ireland, could be reformed in order to excise those articles. Yet eventually it was, and politics in Northern Ireland became marginally more normal (or at least less sectarian and violent). What was significant, even brilliant, about O’Brien’s analysis was its lucidity in exposing cant. He realised that it was an untenable position for democratic politics both to condemn terrorism and to rely on a romanticised view of how the state had come into being and won its independence. O’Brien was repelled by the ‘cult of the blood sacrifice’ (expressed most eloquently but chillingly by Yeats in his one-act play Cathleen ni Houlihan) which underlay republican thinking. Being O’Brien, he didn’t hold back in saying so. It took courage – raw physical courage, and not only political heterodoxy – to say such things in Ireland in the 1970s.

O’Brien had many roles in his long and eminent life. He was diplomat, statesman, politician, historian, literary critic, journalist and polymath. But most of all, he was a public intellectual in the best sense of the term. He applied his knowledge and critical intelligence to matters of great public interest, and he expressed his thinking in elegant, spare prose that argued a case with remorseless logic. He was a great man and a great Irishman, and Faber are to be congratulated in reissuing his work.

O’Brien’s written output is best represented by his historical studies. Three of those volumes stand out in my estimation. First, States of Ireland (1972) remains the finest historical account of how the Troubles in Ireland erupted. It was a seminal revisionist treatment of the myths of Irish republicanism. If, as many of his admirers (including me) thought, O’Brien eventually went too far in embracing the cause of unionism and underestimated the capacity of a constitutional nationalism to reform itself, he did so with an unflinching humane intelligence.

O’Brien’s history of the Zionist movement and Israel, The Siege (1986), is also a fine work of scholarship whose analysis stands up well in the light of later events. O’Brien was a friend to and admirer of Israel and often a lonely voice in media circles in explaining the Jewish state’s security dilemmas. His downbeat but realistic conclusion was that Israel could not be other than it is, a Jewish state, which merited the sympathy of liberals in maintaining its democratic and secular character in spite of being in a state of permanent siege. Devoutly as he wished for a peaceful solution to the conflict in Palestine, O’Brien believed that a solution was not available. On his analysis, conflicts don’t have solutions: they have outcomes. I hope he is eventually proved wrong, and that a two-state solution between a sovereign Palestine and a safe Israel comes into being. But O’Brien’s pessimism seems historically well-grounded.

Probably O’Brien’s greatest achievement of historical scholarship is his biography of Edmund Burke, The Great Melody (1992). Burke is much cited by modern conservatives, and not necessarily accurately. The ‘little platoons’ that they celebrate aren’t what Burke meant by the phrase; he was instead appealing to a notion of a fixed social order, in which each man knew his place. It is far removed from the modern ideals of social (and sexual) equality. Yet O’Brien retrieved the idea of Burke as a Whig of unrivalled historical farsightedness. On O’Brien’s telling, Burke foresaw the bloody degeneration of the French Revolution even while celebrating the potential of the American Revolution. Among the gems in the paperback edition of the book is his respectful and affectionate exchange with Isaiah Berlin. O’Brien, as a confirmed Rousseau-basher, will have no quarter with any romantic idealisation of ‘the general will.’

O’Brien’s was a tough-minded version of liberalism, which stressed the dangers of untrammelled reason. In that respect, he was a worthy inheritor of the tradition of Burke. In his late collection On the Eve of the Millennium (1995), he noted that the worst crimes of the twentieth century had been committed by forces that considered themselves thoroughly emancipated from superstition – Nazism and Communism. O’Brien was a man of the Enlightenment, who believed its greatest enemy was absolutism.

His contrarian streak sometimes led him to mistaken and even perverse positions: against European integration; against intervention to stop the aggressive designs of Slobodan Milosevic; opposition in principle, and not merely pragmatic objections, to the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland; and most notably a deep hostility to the American‘civic religion’ that celebrates Thomas Jefferson. His book The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution (1996) depicts America’s third president as (and I don’t exaggerate) an ideological precursor of Pol Pot.

It’s an extraordinary argument and not, I think, O’Brien’s finest. His historical revisionism, so valuable a tool, tended to overreach itself. The strict taxonomy that O’Brien set out – the American Revolution extended liberty, the French and Russian revolutions negated it – was, in reality, fuzzier than he allowed. But, again, O’Brien arrived at his conclusions with an intellectual honesty that caused him not to shirk unfashionable sentiments. The reforms enacted by the Constituent Assembly in France from 1789 to 1791 were quite limited, but went in the direction of secularism and the removal of the hereditary principle. Those who believe, crudely, that the American Revolution was good and the French Revolution bad do have the problem of explaining why Jefferson, as ambassador to Paris, saw these causes as consistent. O’Brien provides his own answer, which may be mistaken (I think it is), but it is an answer: Jefferson’s politics were more French than American.

The French revolution of 1789 was admired throughout Europe, including Britain and particularly in Germany, for good reason. It was, like the American Revolution, a historic moment for the cause of reform, secularism and (I use the term without irony) progress. The turning point was war with Austria and Prussia in 1792. This precipitated a second revolution and all that followed: regicide, terror, and the reassertion of autocracy and nationalism. There was no reason that European governments should have sought to undermine the movement of 1789, and in doing so they became steadily more authoritarian at home. The Enlightenment tradition is perhaps more consistent than O’Brien allowed for. But he was brilliant at seeing its darker side. There were idiosyncrasies in his outlook but his was fundamentally an advocacy of a humane and liberal politics. He richly deserves a new generation of readers.

September 2014

Oliver...