This book is a timely reminder of a great scholar and the scope of his achievement. Elie Kedourie passed away nearly a decade ago, but the issues to which he turned his austere and masterful mind remain illuminated for his efforts. This should be no surprise, since Kedourie was not a narrow specialist (though few could turn out a scholarly monograph so consummately as he) but a broad thinker who never faltered in his ability to intertwine history and philosophy while writing fruitfully on both.

Kedourie will be remembered for specialist studies like England in the Middle East: The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire 1914-1921 (1956) and those contained in four volumes of essays. With Through the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth: The McMahon-Husayn Correspondence and its Interpretations 19-14-1939 (1976), he produced a crucial study that clarifies what Britain had actually promised, or not promised, Arab parties during the First World War, and demonstates the failings of officialdom and the corrosive impact of ideology that led Britain to champion pan-Arabism. He will also be remembered for works like Nationalism (1965), still the finest dissection, both in scholarly terms and in intelligible language, of the most influential and misleading concept in the political life of all continents in the past two centuries.

In reviewing a book that honours Kedourie, it is instructive to recount some biographical details. Kedourie, who had gone up to Oxford in 1949, presented his thesis on the British role in the destruction of the Ottoman Empire. It was churlishly rejected as submitted by his supervisors, Professor (later Sir) Hamilton Gibb and James Joll. Both men expected a doctoral dissertation on the Arab revolt to provide ready-made and self-justifying reasons for Britain assisting the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and championing Arab nationalism. Kedourie would not do this. He expected British policy and conduct to be reducible to either legitimate self-interest or human frailty, but he had no time, since he had uncovered no evidence, for findings predicated on political advocacy. Rather than alter his thesis to conform to the convictions of his supervisors, Kedourie withdrew it.

Disappointment with his Oxford experience did not prevent him taking up a teaching post in the London School of Economics where he formed a close association with Professor Michael Oakeshott, and eventually published his thesis unaltered as England in the Middle East. He also learned, in the best possible way, from his encounter with Gibb and Joll, that a stultifying and unhealthy academic orthodoxy overlay the study of the Arab world that he duly traced to the gifted but erratic historian-scribe, Arnold Toynbee. His devastating critique of the Toynbee tradition in Middle Eastern studies, encapsulated in a long essay, 'The Chatham House Version', alerted a new generation to the perils of cultural and political understanding built on a marshy sub-strata of guilt, heedless internationalism and millenarian fantasy.

Interestingly, and it is a point no contributor to this book dwells on, both Kedourie and Toynbee disliked nationalism. To this Toynbee brought a hatred of the western world, whose demise he prophesied in his magnum opus, A Study of History. Kedourie had more modest objections. As a proud product of the settled 2,500 year old Baghdad Jewish community, he regretted bitterly its destruction in the wave of nationalism which engulfed the region after the Second World War, and much of his work, not least Nationalism, is informed by a rare sense of loss for those communitarian and multicultural societies, which tend now to be remembered simply as empires. Much as he decried the ruinous impact of the European idea of nationalism, he never felt that imperial powers had to be called to account for its spread. Their sin lay more in the cynical transactions by which they abandoned subject peoples to the various forms of arbitrary rule, French Syria and British Iraq being cases in point.

This little book serves as a neat memorial to an immense scholar, whose peers write generously and often illuminatingly about the debt scholarship owes to Kedourie. We learn, too, of the scope of his insight into governance and its philosophical underpinning, and it is a cause for regret that he died before producing what may well have been a leading work on the subject. (Fortunately, his last lectures on Hegel and Marx have been edited and published by Sylvia Kedourie). Above all, this book, by dint of contributors' repetition, informs us of Kedourie's cast of mind: conservative in its suspicion of utopian agendas, ever mindful of the frailty of the human condition and political institutions, and determined to penetrate to the essence of an idea, shorn of its apologetic gloss. Kedourie antedated the contemporary specialist scourge and conforms to an older notion of breadth and depth in authority. Any memorial to Kedourie that succeeds in making this point clear, as this one does, has amply served its purpose.

What might Kedourie have said of the rising instability threatening the Middle East today? We cannot know for certain, but it is likely that he would perceive more continuity than change. I say this, drawing on the following observations he gave to me in an interview in 1989:

"The Middle East is bound to be unstable for a number of fundamental problems. There is no accommodation as yet with western civilisation. The norms of Islam and the norms of western civilisation conflict, or are seen to conflict, and there is no way at the present moment at any rate they can be made to compromise with one another ... On the other hand, the Middle East is dependent on western civilisation for many things. The disappearance of traditional regimes and their legitimacy is a fundamental [problem] and bound to lead to disturbance ... When Nasser was on the rampage in the Middle East, there were very serious fears about what he was up to. These conditions have not disappeared. There are still the same conditions, the same volatilities."

Elie Kedourie obviously has an axe to grind about nationalism - as a Jew he was exiled from Iraq and settled in London. In this book he traces the ideological development of nationalism from Kant, Herder and Fichte, claiming that nationalism was invented when Fichte gave his Addresses to the German Nation in the early nineteenth century. Kedourie unfortunately places far too much emphasis on Kant - who was much more concerned with the individual than the community - and not enough on Hegel. Kedourie also neglects such important writers as Rousseau and Mill and does not attempt to trace just how Fichte et al. influenced specific nationalists. Nevertheless this is a well-written polemic against nationalism from someone who dealt with it first hand.