Élie Halévy

(redirected from Elie Halevy)

Halévy, Élie


Born Sept. 6, 1870, in Etretat, Seine-Inférieure; died Aug. 21, 1937, in Sucy-en-Brie. French historian; leading specialist on the history of Great Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Halévy was department chairman at the Free School of Political Science in Paris from 1898 (with an interruption during World War I, 1914-18). His principal work was the four-volume History of the English People in the 19th Century, which covered events from 1815 to 1852. To this he added a two-volume Epilogue, discussing events from 1895 to 1914. The first volume of this was published in Russian translation in 1937. An advocate of social and political compromise, Halévy devoted primary attention to the development of English parliamentarianism, which he idealized. He viewed English imperialism only as a system of foreign policy dictated by the British fear of losing their former economic and political position. In his posthumously published lectures on socialism (1948), Halévy alleged that socialism was a product of war. Works that he wrote after World War I are pessimistic. Predicting that “the nationalistic tyrannies of Berlin and Rome” would unleash a war against the bourgeois democracies of Europe, Halévy saw no force capable of stopping fascism.


Histoire du peuple anglais au XIX siècle, vols. 1-4. Paris, 1923-47.
La Théorie platonicienne des sciences. Paris, 1896.
La Formation du radicalisme philosophique, vols. 1-3. Paris, 1901-04.


References in periodicals archive ?
Pirenne, la Historia del pueblo ingles en el siglo XIX de Elie Halevy, Idea de la Historia de Collingwood y La estructura de la politica en tiempos de Jorge III de Lewis Namier eran los libros que mas influyeron en su vision de la historia; su primera idea de Espana partio de su lectura de Richard Ford y Gerald Brenan.
Compare Elie Halevy in the second volume of his History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, who remarks that "at first sight the student might be tempted to regard" Navarino as "the crowning victory of that policy of national liberation to which Canning had willingly seen his name attached.
Francisco Vergara is a French economist well-known for his critique of Louis Dumont (Vergara 2001), Karl Polanyi (Vergara 2000) and Elie HalEvy (Vergara 1998).
The French historian Elie Halevy reminds us that "the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century did not involve the division of the great ecclesiastical domains.
Namier (born Niemirowsky), Elie Halevy and John Clive (born Kleyff).
To borrow words from The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism, by Elie Halevy, the great French historian of nineteenth-century Britain, British Francophiles and French Anglophiles of the twentieth century may assume "a natural identity of interests" between the two countries that had turned out to be "artificial.
Indeed, the path breaking work of Elie Halevy receives no mention whatever, either in the notes or the bibliography.