Abstract

In March 1963 Isaiah Berlin asked David Caute what “in principle should disbar a man from holding a senior academic post.” It was, he explained, Deutscher he had in mind, a man “peddling pernicious myths” and “falsifying evidence—deliberate falsification!” He was “not fit to teach,” indeed “dangerous.” Deutscher, author of the three-volume life of Trotsky, one of the great biographies of our time, was applying for a teaching post at the University of Sussex. There was unanimous enthusiasm in the faculty for appointing Deutscher, and Berlin was asked by Lord Fulton, the vice-chancellor of the university, to participate in the committee to appoint a new chair in Soviet studies. In the archives, Caute has found Berlin’s reply containing these sentences: “The candidate of whom you speak is the only man whose presence in the same academic community as myself I should find morally intolerable…. I think there is a limit below which lack of scruple must not go in the case of academic teachers…. The man in question is the only one about whom I have any such feeling—there is literally no-one [else], so far as I know, to whom I would wish to urge such objections.” Deutscher’s appointment was effectively vetoed.

pdf

Share