Corey Robin in Sidecar:
The historian Arno Mayer recently died at the age of 97. His career began with a book scrutinizing ten months of diplomacy during the First World War. It ended with a pair that ranged from ancient Greece to modern Israel. It’s not unusual for scholars to start small and finish big. But Mayer’s was no journey from narrowness and caution to largeness and risk. From the get-go, he took on the deepest questions and widest concerns, finding a vastness in the tiniest detail. Political Origins of the New Diplomacy (1959) discovered in the fine print of the months of diplomacy from March 1917 to January 1918 how the Russian revolution transformed the war aims of the contending powers, leading to Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and inspiring ‘the parties of movement’ to act against ‘the parties of order’. The follow-up, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles (1967), which covered, again, roughly ten months, this time from 1918 to 1919, charted a reverse movement: the triumph of right over left.
But something did change for Mayer over that half-century of writing history. He discovered the bookend truths of Jacob Burckhardt and W.E.B. Du Bois – that you can never begin a work of history at the beginning and can never bring it to a satisfactory end. You’re always in between. Mayer liked to attribute his in-betweenness to being born Jewish in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The child of a marginal people in a marginal country, Mayer was repelled by nationalism and drawn to cosmopolitanism like those other great historians of Europe from small countries: Pirenne (Belgium), Huizinga (the Netherlands) and Burckhardt (Switzerland). That inheritance led him to diplomatic history, a world in between states.
More here.