A. J. P. Taylor

For others named John Taylor, see John Taylor.
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A. J. P. Taylor (March 25, 1906–September 7, 1990) (full name Alan John Percivale Taylor) was a renowned British historian of the 20th century. Taylor was probably the best-known British historian of the century and was by far the most controversial.

Throughout his life, Taylor was basically sympathetic to the Soviets. Likewise, Taylor was bitterly anti-American, blaming the United States for the Cold War, which he was opposed to. In the 1950s-1960s, Taylor was one of the leading lights of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Despite his pro-Soviet feelings, Taylor was not entirely blind to the crimes of the Soviet regime. In 1948 he attended and did his best to sabotage a Stalinist cultural congress in Wroclaw, Poland. However, despite this act of dissent, Taylor always felt that the United States was the principal threat to world peace and that the Americans were guilty of far worse acts than the Soviets. For this reason, Taylor never visited the United States, despite receiving many invitations.

Taylor graduated from Oriel College, Oxford in 1927. After working briefly as an legal clerk, Taylor began his post-graduate work, went to Vienna to study the impact of the Chartist movement on the Revolution of 1848 in Vienna. When Taylor's topic turned out to be unfeasible, he switched to studying the question of Italian unification over a two year period, which resulted in his first book, The Italian Problem in European Diplomacy, 1847-49. Taylor's main mentors in this period were the Austrian-born historian Alfred Francis Pribham and the Polish-born historian Sir Lewis Namier. The opposing influences of Pribham and Namier can be seen in Taylor's 1941 book The Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918. The first edition reflected Pribham's favorable opinion of the Habsburgs; the second and much-reworked edition of 1948 shows the influence of Namier's unfavorable views about the Habsburgs. In the second edition, Taylor stated that the Habsburgs saw their realms entirely as an tool for foreign policy and thus could never build a geniune nation-state. In order to hold their realm together, the Habsburgs resorted to playing one ethnic group off another, and promoted German and Magyar hegemony over the other ethnic groups in Austria-Hungary.

Taylor went on to lecture in history at Manchester University before becoming a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford in 1938, a post he held until 1964. After 1964, Taylor was an lecturer at the Institute of Historical Research in London, University College of London, and the Polytechnic College of North London. At Oxford, Taylor was an extraordinary popular professor who had to give his lectures at 8:30 AM in order to prevent over-crowding in his classroom.

Until 1936, Taylor was an opponent of British rearmament, as he felt that a re-armed Britain would ally itself with Germany against the Soviet Union. After 1936, Taylor fervently criticized appeasement, a stance he would disallow in 1961. In 1938, Taylor denounced the Munich Agreement at several rallies. During World War Two, Taylor served in the Home Guard, and befriended emigré statesmen from Eastern Europe such as the former Hungarian President Count Mihály Károlyi and the Czechoslovak President Dr. Edvard Benes; these friendships helped to enhance Taylor's understanding of the region.

Taylor's speciality was Central European, British and diplomatic history, especially the Habsburg dynasty and Bismarck. Taylor held fierce Germanophobic views. In 1944, he was temporarily banned from the BBC following complaints about a series of lectures he gave on air in which he gave full vent to his anti-German feelings. In his 1945 book, The Course of German History, Taylor argued that National Socialism was the inevitable product of the entire history of the Germans going back to the days of the Germanic tribes. Taylor was an early champion of what has since been called the Sonderweg (Special Way) interpretation of German history; namely that German culture and society developed over the centuries in such an way as to make Nazi Germany a preordained conclusion.

Taylor was an prolific writer who wrote dozens of books and hundreds upon hundreds of articles and book reviews. Starting in 1931, Taylor worked as book reviewer for the Manchester Guardian, and from 1957 onwards, Taylor served as an columnist with the Observer newspaper. From these writings, Taylor helped to populized the term the Establishment to describle Britain's elite. Taylor often took stands on the great issues of his time. As an Little Englander, he was opposed to the British Empire, against Britain's participation in the European Economic Community and NATO, and he demanded British withdrawal from Northern Ireland. Taylor argued in a 1976 speech in Dublin that it be best for Britain if London would argee to letting the IRA, who Taylor regarded as freedom-fighters, expel the entire Protestant population of Ulster in the same manner that the Czechoslovak government had expelled the ethnic Germans of the Sudetenland after World War Two. In international affairs, Taylor was opposed to the existence of West Germany (which Taylor saw as an dangerous neo-Nazi state), demonstrated against the Suez War of 1956 (though not the Soviet crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution), and condemned the Korean War and Vietnam War.

Taylor was fearless in championing unpopular people and causes. In 1979, Taylor resigned from the British Academy to protest the expulsion of the art historian and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt, which Taylor saw as an act of McCarthyism. More closer to his work as an historian, Taylor championed less government secrecy and more open access to government archives, and fought for more privately-owned television stations.

He was one of the first television historians. In 1957, 1957-1958 and in 1961 Taylor starred in a number of TV shows on ITV in which he lectured for a half-hour per show without the benefit of notes and with perfect delivery on a variety of topics such as the Russian Revolution and the First World War. Taylor had a famous rivalry with Hugh Trevor-Roper, whom he often debated on television. Another frequent sparing partner for Taylor was the writer Malcolm Muggeridge. The frequent television appearances helped to make Taylor the famous British historian of the 20th century. It was an measure of Taylor's fame that he was featured in an cameo in the 1981 film Time Bandits. Historians normally do not possess sufficient fame with the general public to be offered movie cameos.

In 1954, he published his masterpiece, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1918, and he followed it up with The Trouble Makers (1957), a critical study of British foreign policy. The Trouble Makers was an celebration of those who had criticized the government over foreign policy issues, an subject dear to Taylor's heart. In 1961, he published by far his most controversial book, The Origins of the Second World War, which earned him a reputation as a revisionist.

Taylor saw the existing capitalist system as wrong on both practical and moral grounds. He felt that the status quo in the West prevented an international system that would be just and moral from coming into being. In particular, Taylor saw the status quo as incredibly unstable and prone to
accidents. A recurring theme in Taylor's writings was the role of accidents in deciding history. In Taylor's view, leaders did not make history; instead they reacted to events. In Taylor's view, what happened in the past was due to sequences of blunders and errors that were largely outside anyone's control. To the extent that anyone made anything happen in history, it was only through their mistakes. Thus, in his biography of Bismarck, Taylor argued the Iron Chancellor had unified Germany more by accident then by design.

These ideas were most clearly expressed in The Origins of the Second World War, where Taylor argued that the widespread belief that the outbreak of war in 1939 was Hitler's fault was wrong. Taylor's thesis was that Hitler was not the demonical figure of popular imagination, but in the field of foreign affairs, just a normal German leader. The foreign policy of the Third Reich was the same foreign policy of the Weimar Republic and the Second Reich. As a normal Western leader, Hitler was no better or worse then Stresemann, Chamberlain or Daladier. Taylor's argument was that Hitler wished to make Germany the strongest power in Europe, but he did not want or plan war. The outbreak of war in 1939 was an unfortunate accident caused by mistakes on everyone's part. The Origins of the Second World War set off a huge storm of controversy and debate that lasted for years.

Having noted this much, it is fair to add that Taylor did think that individuals sometimes could play an positive role in history. Taylor's heroes were Vladmir Lenin and David Lloyd George. But for Taylor, individuals like Lloyd George and Lenin were the exceptions, not the rule. Another individual Taylor admired was the historian E.H. Carr, who was Taylor's favorite historian and an good friend.

Taylor also wrote significant introductions to British editions of Ten Days that Shook the World, by John Reed, and The Communist Manifesto, writing from a virulently anti-communist position. It might be noted that Taylor was an advocate of a treaty with the Soviet Union, something that has been tied to his apparent support of Appeasement in his work on the road to the Second World War.

Taylor lived in Disley, Cheshire for a while, where Dylan Thomas (who was his first wife's lover) was his guest; he later provided Thomas with a cottage in Oxford so he could recover from a breakdown. Taylor was married three times. His first wife was Margaret Adams who Taylor married in 1931 (divorced in 1951) and whom he had 3 children by. She was frequently unfaithful towards her husband, but she was the love of Taylor's life. His second wife was Eve Crosland whom Taylor married in 1951 and divorced in 1974; he had two children by her. Even after divorcing his first wife, Taylor continued to live with her in a common-law relationship while maintaining an household with his second wife; this was a virtually bigamous marriage. Much of Taylor's prolific output was motivated by his need to both support his legal and common-law wives. Taylor's third wife was the Hungarian historian Eva Haraszti who he married in 1976.

Taylor possessed a magnificent literacy style, which allowed him to get away with many of his more frivolous ideas such as that First World War's major cause was the wrong turn taken by the chauffeur of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. Taylor views were those of a quirky, idiosyncratic and flamboyant individualist who adopted the stance of an professional contrarian and gadfly in order to challenge orthodoxies and thus to move society towards what he regarded as more humanist behavior.

Books