Heinz Lubasz, 1928–2012

Harry Lubasz in about 2011

Eia Assen

Heinz Lubasz, who died on 5 August 2012 at the age of eighty-three, was a historian of political thought who in 1972 helped found the University of Essex’s history department, which he chaired from 1981 to 1984. Lubasz’s published work was not widely popularized, in part because of a personal aversion to fashionability uncommon on the left, and in part due to his exacting requirements of research and exposition, which gave his scholarship distinction but also limited its output. Harry, as he was widely known, deeply disliked the current climate in British academia, which he saw as promoting mere plausibility under the guise of just-in-time industry.

Born in Vienna to a comfortable but unhappy couple from Galicia, Harry gave little thought to his Jewish background until the Anschluss of March 1938, when he was immediately transferred to a Jewish school and subjected to the daily constraints heralding the ‘Final Solution’, which he would later study. With his brother George, Harry benefited from the Kindertransport programme and spent the war years being schooled and fostered in the English home counties. He flourished, but in May 1945 was called to join his parents in New York City, where he found precarious and unhealthy work as a cutter of industrial diamonds.

A bout of pneumonia meant that he did his military service in Germany, not Korea, but it was as a GI that he picked up the habit of smoking that so discomforted his later years. Upon demobilization, Lubasz gained a scholarship to study at Yale, where in 1958 he gained a PhD with research on late fifteenth-century English legal history. His specialism concerned conceptual disputes over the borough as a corporate body, providing him with keen discrimination between formal appearance and practical reality. It was no coincidence that he took such a sharp (and annoyed) interest in the US Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling to allow corporate funding of political campaigns.

In 1960 Lubasz was appointed to the history faculty at Brandeis University, where he encountered opposition from fellow faculty to his popular undergraduate courses on the state, revolutions and fascism, each of which led to edited collections of articles benefiting from his fluency in German and French (he also had a good working knowledge of Russian). At Brandeis he was influenced by Herbert Marcuse, alongside whom he annoyed the authorities by backing student protests against an endowment offered by the German Springer media group. Marcuse’s contract was terminated, and although Lubasz was not immediately fired, he eventually moved to Essex, in search of an easier environment in which to explore history and its inconveniences. Harry did not much like Marcuse’s declamatory style, and he always insisted that freedom would be in the unpredictable gift of active, autonomous citizens, not wrested from some dreadful doctrine. Better understanding, though, was always desirable, and Lubasz once brought a round-table with Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas to a memorable close by asking the former if Beethoven’s Great Fugue did not have an ‘aesthetic truth’ beyond beauty. In this he revealed his enduring love of classical music, particularly quartets, as well as something of the style of Alasdair MacIntyre, a longstanding intellectual interlocutor.

During the 1970s Lubasz focused on Marx, publishing two studies that challenged orthodox interpretations. The first, on Marx’s articles of 1842–3 concerning the rights of the poor to collect firewood and the distress suffered by the winegrowers of Mosel, persuasively demonstrated Marx to be less in the thrall of Hegel and more advanced in his methodological development of understanding the causes and consequences of ‘poverty’. The second study, by contrast, questioned claims for the originality of Marx’s notebooks of the 1850s with respect to the ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’ (AMP), showing with punctilious textual analysis, calm logic and close knowledge of Marx’s correspondence that the AMP was not carefully worked up from historical evidence, but a kind of speculative ‘dummy run’ that suited Marx’s need to locate European capitalism within wider historical...