James Joll

St. Antony's is among the smallest and newest of Oxford Colleges. Established shortly after World War I, it restricts its membership to graduate students specializing in political science and modern history. Its Warlen--a friend, appropriately enough, of Churchill's,--is W. Deakin, whose reports on the Jugoslav partisans of the war helped substantially to convince the British to hit their support to Tito; its sub-Warden (a sort of Senior Tutor) is James Joll, the ruddy, fluent, enormously charming visiting lecturer who taught Franklin Ford's course on German history this Spring.

Besides the middle name of Bysse, which he never uses, Harvard's Directory of Officers has awarded Joll two degrees, both of which he denies. He attended Winhester and New College, but before being graduated from Oxford he was caught up by the war, and abandoned the study of philosophy to work for British Intelligence. For a time he served as liaison between the War Office and various German emigre political groups in London; and indeed it is from his war experience that he derives much of his interest in modern German history. He returned to New College to teach, and to discover that many colleagues of his generation--Alan Bullock, A.J.P. Taylor, H.R. Trevor-Roper, for example--were reoccupied with the same problems, and for much the same reasons. The result was "a great revival in Oxford of historical study--a new interest in the whole field," and, of course, the founding of St. Antony's.

Joll stresses "the whole field" emphatically, for he is by no means exclusively a historian of Germany. During this term he also led a seminar in European socialism and communism in the interwar period; he has written a book on the Second International, and another on Three Intellectuals in Politics, Leon Blum, Walther Rathenau, and F.T. Marinetti. The last of the three, the Italian futurist painter who had so much in common with D'Anaunzio, is an especially illuminating corner of Joll's work: he confesses to fascination with the "links between artistic and social and political development" in this century, between "the breakdown of conventions in the arts...and the growing interest in why people do do things."

This concern is in fact reflected in his view of the uses of history: the historian is concerned with "widening the range of people's experience, much as an artist does." So "the pople who fail"--and here he deliberately rejects E.H. Carr's recently published ideas--"are often just as interesting as those who triumph." At the moment Joll is beginning a study of "people who have gone under," anarchists, trying to find out "why there have been anarchist movements, whether anarchism is backward looking, or political Bohemianism or what." If, he says, any thing connected his three intellectuals, it was concern with industrial society, centralised states, and so forth; and the anarchists have after all "gone farthest in repudiating the whole thing." Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and those "wildly and apocalyptically optimistic" Spanish anarchists who, following Proudhon's teachings, immediately abolished money when they took over villages--will all appear in his book.

It will not, he insists, be a history of anarchism; if his past works are any guide it will most likely be a graceful, analytic but highly sympathetic discussion of the ideas of individuals and of the times and places they were used. Joll often seems very like a quieter, more diffident, more wistful version of a man he describes with great admiration. Sir Isaiah Berlin (who will, incidentally, stay at Harvard this Fall) has "had a vast influence on everyone of my generation;" he is "an ebullient figure, with an endless flow of ideas and speculations and paradoxes; an excellent historian of ideas. Others may simply write: 'Hegel said this, and it was wrong for the following reasons'; Berlin does succeed in recreating...enough of the atmosphere of the time, and he can make one see why a thinker should have had great influence when he did."

Joll leaves Lowell House tomorrow for England and St. Antony's. He expects to spend time in Sicily ("perhaps I shall discover some more anarchists there"). This has been his fourth visit to the U.S., where he found "sun-tanned gods and goddesses" at Stanford, good students and a History and Literature program that he likes greatly at Harvard. Some of those who took History 150b this term recall the lecturer as a figure swaying gently back and forth at the podium, obviously, amusedly and earnestly interested in ideas for their own sake..

Besides the middle name of Bysse, which he never uses, Harvard's Directory of Officers has awarded Joll two degrees, both of which he denies. He attended Winhester and New College, but before being graduated from Oxford he was caught up by the war, and abandoned the study of philosophy to work for British Intelligence. For a time he served as liaison between the War Office and various German emigre political groups in London; and indeed it is from his war experience that he derives much of his interest in modern German history. He returned to New College to teach, and to discover that many colleagues of his generation--Alan Bullock, A.J.P. Taylor, H.R. Trevor-Roper, for example--were reoccupied with the same problems, and for much the same reasons. The result was "a great revival in Oxford of historical study--a new interest in the whole field," and, of course, the founding of St. Antony's.

Joll stresses "the whole field" emphatically, for he is by no means exclusively a historian of Germany. During this term he also led a seminar in European socialism and communism in the interwar period; he has written a book on the Second International, and another on Three Intellectuals in Politics, Leon Blum, Walther Rathenau, and F.T. Marinetti. The last of the three, the Italian futurist painter who had so much in common with D'Anaunzio, is an especially illuminating corner of Joll's work: he confesses to fascination with the "links between artistic and social and political development" in this century, between "the breakdown of conventions in the arts...and the growing interest in why people do do things."

This concern is in fact reflected in his view of the uses of history: the historian is concerned with "widening the range of people's experience, much as an artist does." So "the pople who fail"--and here he deliberately rejects E.H. Carr's recently published ideas--"are often just as interesting as those who triumph." At the moment Joll is beginning a study of "people who have gone under," anarchists, trying to find out "why there have been anarchist movements, whether anarchism is backward looking, or political Bohemianism or what." If, he says, any thing connected his three intellectuals, it was concern with industrial society, centralised states, and so forth; and the anarchists have after all "gone farthest in repudiating the whole thing." Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and those "wildly and apocalyptically optimistic" Spanish anarchists who, following Proudhon's teachings, immediately abolished money when they took over villages--will all appear in his book.

It will not, he insists, be a history of anarchism; if his past works are any guide it will most likely be a graceful, analytic but highly sympathetic discussion of the ideas of individuals and of the times and places they were used. Joll often seems very like a quieter, more diffident, more wistful version of a man he describes with great admiration. Sir Isaiah Berlin (who will, incidentally, stay at Harvard this Fall) has "had a vast influence on everyone of my generation;" he is "an ebullient figure, with an endless flow of ideas and speculations and paradoxes; an excellent historian of ideas. Others may simply write: 'Hegel said this, and it was wrong for the following reasons'; Berlin does succeed in recreating...enough of the atmosphere of the time, and he can make one see why a thinker should have had great influence when he did."

Joll leaves Lowell House tomorrow for England and St. Antony's. He expects to spend time in Sicily ("perhaps I shall discover some more anarchists there"). This has been his fourth visit to the U.S., where he found "sun-tanned gods and goddesses" at Stanford, good students and a History and Literature program that he likes greatly at Harvard. Some of those who took History 150b this term recall the lecturer as a figure swaying gently back and forth at the podium, obviously, amusedly and earnestly interested in ideas for their own sake..