Celebrated philosopher and champion of the Wiener Library, Alan Montefiore dies at 97

The Director of the Library, Dr Toby Simpson, described Alan Montefiore as “a highly respected scholar and a dedicated champion of the Library at a time when very few people understood its significance, If he had not rallied other leading lights to support our work, the Library may not have survived, let alone gone on to be a world-leading public resource.”

In his academic world, Montefiore was a familiar and popular figure esconced in his room at the top of Staircase X at Balliol College, Oxford where, clad in his trademark shabby sweater, he guided his students through their thought processes with an open-hearted generosity. Legions of students passed through his politics, philosophy and economics tutorials as well as “counter-cultural” Kant classes. He was so devoted to his students, that he kept notes of every essay they wrote over 50 years and is reputed to have scheduled tutorials with a scholarship student who was short of money at meal times, so they could eat together, according to The Times.

His late PPE colleague, Professor Bill Newton-Smith, once said of him: “Students were encouraged to do their own thing under judicious guidance,”

One former student, Sudhir Hazareesingh (Coolidge Fellow and Tutorial Fellow in Politics, and Senior Fellow) summed up his affection for Montefiore. "Alan was the life and soul of Balliol PPE, and his Kant classes were legendary. I was in his former office in Staircase 10 a few days ago and it brought back so many fond memories of my tutorials with him.”

Alan Claude Robin Goldsmid Montefiore had an impressive family tree. His father was Leonard Montefiore, the Wiener Library’s second president and later chairman, and his grandfather was Claude Joseph Goldsmid Montefiore, a past president of the Anglo-Jewish Association. At Clifton College, Bristol the young Montefiore studied in a house for Jewish boys, where he showed aptitude as a keen sportsman, notably in tennis and squash and expressed a keen interest in international cricket.

He spent his national service in Singapore helping repatriate Japanese prisoners of war, before reading PPE at Balliol College. He was offered a teaching position at the new Keele University in 1952 and returned to Balliol nine years later as a fellow. In the future he would turn his time in Singapore to good use, working with Chinese scholars during the Deng Xiaoping era.

Montefiore’s European philosophical instincts led him to co-found the Forum for European Philosophy, of which he became Emeritus President. He was also a founding member of the Jan Hus Education Foundation, in which philosophers gave underground lectures in central Europe in the 1980s, and for this he received the Czech Honorary Jan Masaryk Silver Medal.

Identity was a recurring theme in his work which involved moral and political philosophy, contemporary French philosophy and the philosophy of education. But Jewish identity was a problem for him. Descended as he was from standard bearers of his faith, who were committed to community leadership and philanthropy – his father had run the Lake District rehabilitation camp for child survivors from Auschwitz, known as The Boys – he struggled to understand his own identity and the idea of secular Judaism.

For more than 50 years he bridged the logic-based Anglo-American philosophy, and the more reflective European philosophy, which contextualises individuals and ideas in society. His body of work includes the Modern European Philosophy series and Philosophy in France Today. His 1999 volume, Integrity, an expansive text including economists, journalists, scientists, doctors and psychologists, raised ethical issues on fundraising and the legacy of the Holocaust.

Other volumes in which he contributed or co-edited were The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals, 1990, Philosophy and the Human Paradox, 2019, Goals, No-Goals and Own Goals, 1989 and Neutrality and Impartiality,1975, which somewhat prophetically deals with politics, free speech and the role of the universities. He explored ideas relating to identity and secular Judaism in his penultimate work, A Philosophical Retrospect, 2011. He honed many of his philosophical thoughts during his regular lunches with the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin.

Montefiore enjoyed polishing stones while he worked, and he would diligently unravel the strings of his children’s kites so they could fly effortlessly and untangled into the sky. But this material challenge literally flew in the face of his belief in complexity rather than simple certainties. He favoured the Socratic preference to continue a dispute rather than see either side win it.

He married Hélène Pivant in March, 1952 and they had three children, Anne, Claire and Paul. The couple divorced in 1985 and he married the political philosopher Catherine Audard, who had three children, Sylvain, Laure-Helene and Florence. He is survived by Audard, his three children, and Sylvain and Laure Helene.