Peter Pulzer

The man in the S-Bahn was disappointed by the way the election campaign was going. He had hoped that for the first time in his life he would be offered a rational debate on the issues of the day; that the different parties and politicians would declare their principles and their policies, as in a well-ordered marketplace. Instead they merely slanged and denounced each other. And yet I thought he had acquired the first prerequisite for a functioning democracy: scepticism.

Robert Wistrich’s book is about the Jews of Vienna in their golden age, Steven Beller’s about the city’s culture in its golden age. You could be forgiven for thinking that these amounted to the same thing. Not all Viennese Jews were cultural heroes, and not all Viennese cultural heroes were Jews. But the overlap is impressive and in need of explanation. W.E. Mosse’s is about the German economy in its first golden age. The overlap with creative Jews is less overwhelming here but it, too, is worthy of investigation.

For most of this year some of my colleagues have been taking ‘industrial action’, either refusing to mark scripts and examine theses, or to disclose the marks they have awarded. They have now abandoned this, but that does not invalidate the question: what on earth is going on? What are academics doing, taking industrial action?

The Reading Room of the British Museum is now completed, and if London had nothing but this hall of the blessed, scholars would make it well worth their while to make a pilgrimage here. All the sorrows of the outside would disappear in the mighty rotunda, and it is so quiet in this region of the eternal spirits that one can follow a thought into one’s inmost recesses … Never has wisdom been made so comfortable for the student. Each one has a place, with a desk and accessories, and he needs only to signal for the folios to come floating down from every region.

We have at the moment a Conservative government. It is in some disarray over clashes of personality and questions of political style, but also on matters of political principle. There is a genuine dilemma for an administration dedicated both to the strengthening of national defence and to leaving the future of manufacturing capacity to the sovereignty of the shareholder and the logic of the market. Defence suppliers have only one customer; defence procurers only a handful of suppliers. Their relationship is political and any decision about it is going to be political. There is a Tory solution to such a dilemma: intervene, even if it offends against the sanctity of private property. There is a neo-liberal solution: don’t intervene, even if it means refusing to fly the flag. There is a Peelite solution: do not blink at the inevitable, but call it the national interest. There are many reasons for Mrs Thatcher’s failure to embrace any one of these unambiguously, but one of them is the struggle between pragmatism and dogma that has invaded British political discourse. Are British politics still defined by the old Anglo-Saxon landmarks, or have we ‘joined Europe’?