Moses Finley and Politics, Edited by W. V. Harris = Columbia Studies In The Classical Tradition, Volume 40

This volume collects papers from a conference held at Columbia University to honor the centenary of the birth of Moses Finley. A parallel volume on Finley edited by Robin Osborne is also due out. Together they attest, as if any such testimony were necessary, to the transformative contributions of Finley to the field of ancient history. The title of this collection, however, attests to a specific dimension of Finley’s contributions and one particular fascination of his overall oeuvre and career, namely, the political emphasis of so much of his writing and the heavily political circumstances under which Moses Isaac Finkelstein became M. I. Finley, Cambridge don. Thus only two of the nine contributors to this slim volume (155 pages) are Hellenists, and only four are professional classicists. The editor, W. V. Harris, perhaps somewhat more a Romanist (his writing has covered the Mediterranean and Greek and Roman issues together), chose to include authors who could recreate the specific political context of Finley’s career in the United States, his specifically political activities, and his handling of issues of race and ethnicity.

I should perhaps acknowledge that I have written at some length on Finley’s relation to Marxism in the introduction of my Class in Archaic Greece (2013), with substantial aid from the publications and email inputs of Daniel Tompkins, of whom Harris justly writes: “[His] acumen and encyclopaedic knowledge of the man and his work have been invaluable, to me as to others” (Harris 2013.vii). Needless to say, Tompkins cannot be responsible for the use any of us make of his unique contributions to this subject, and it is no surprise that the first and in some respects most substantial contribution to this collection is his “Moses Finkelstein and the American Scene: The Political Formation of Moses Finley, 1932–1955.” What is really breathtaking in this essay is the relentlessness and range of Tompkins’ quest for sources: not simply the Finley papers at Cambridge, but archives at several American institutions, interviews with numerous associates and relatives, a Russian historian capable of examining the Soviet archives, memoirs and letters of various US figures of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, Finley’s FBI files, the text of a rare personal interview, even a confirmation and bar mitzvah program and party invitation (Harris 2013.40, n. 31)!

In his essay, Tompkins offers a substantial analysis of Finley’s Master’s thesis on Justice Harlan written at a time when Finley’s father seemed to be pushing him towards a career in law. Finley chose to concentrate on the Justice’s key dissents in areas of racial and ethnic discrimination and also to situate the content of legal systems in their broader societal context. In keeping with the focus of the collection under review, Tompkins concentrates on ferreting out as much as can reasonably be known of Finley’s political formation and actions, first as a very young “fact-checker” (1930–34) for the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences—whose fifteen assistant editors were heavily inclined towards a specifically 1930s leftist political orientation—then as a working member for some twelve years (1934–46) of the Institute for Social Research alongside such luminaries of the Frankfurt school as Herbert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer.

Finley’s direct political activism and, according to Tompkins, “the most consequential of Finkelstein’s left-wing activities” (Harris 2013.19), his collaboration (1938–42) with anthropologist Franz Boas, initially confronted a Nazi eugenicist’s virulent attacks on Einstein in an article on “German and Jewish Physics” (Tompkins quoting Finley at Harris 2013.19 re Stark 1938). Their efforts quickly expanded into the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, which was soon denounced as a Communist front. The committee challenged both imperialist racism and, much nearer home, the opposition of the New York Chamber of Commerce to Jewish immigration based on the alleged findings of eugenicist Harry Laughlin in precisely the period when Jews were fleeing Germany as a matter of life and death.¹ Tompkins suggests that Finkelstein and his [End Page 82...