Shlomo Avineri

Avineri was born in Bielsko, Poland, in 1933 and arrived in Palestine with his family in 1939; the family settled in Herzliyya.[6] He studied political science and history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he earned a doctorate with a thesis titled “The Concept of Revolution.”[6] His education also included study at the London School of Economics.[4]

His early research developed the questions about revolution and political thought raised by his doctoral work, particularly through the study of Karl Marx.[6] He examined the relationship between Marx’s early philosophical, humanistic, and anthropological writings and the later writings more directly concerned with economics.[6] Avineri argued for continuity between these bodies of work, maintaining that the mature Marx could not be understood without the assumptions underlying his earlier writings.[6] This research subsequently led him toward Hegel and the relationship between Hegelian philosophy and modern political thought.[6]

Avineri joined the Hebrew University faculty in 1959, became a professor in 1974, and served as dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences in 1975–76.[6] Over his university career, he also headed the Department of Political Science and the Levi Eshkol Institute and directed the university’s Center for European Studies.[7] His directorship of the Institute for European Studies ran from 1999 to 2001, and he became professor emeritus in 2001.[6] His teaching at the university extended across more than six decades.[8]

His appointments abroad included visiting faculty positions at Yale, Cornell, the University of California, Oxford, and Queens College.[4] He also held fellowships at the Australian National University and the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.[4] Beyond these appointments in the United States, Britain, and Australia, he was among the early Israeli academics invited to speak at seminars in the Soviet Academy of Sciences and in Poland, Hungary, and the former German Democratic Republic.[6]

Avineri’s scholarship covered the history of political philosophy, including Marx, Engels, and Hegel, alongside Zionism, colonialism, and the Soviet Union.[2] His books addressed political theory, Israel, and Jewish nationalism, while his publication activity also included scholarly articles and regular contributions to the Israeli press.[4] Books on Hegel, Marx, and Zionist thought appeared in translation in various languages.[4]

A personal recollection connected his international philosophical work with Jewish communal life in Eastern Europe.[9] In an account published in the Jewish Review of Books, Avineri recalled attending an international Hegel conference in Prague in 1966 and planning to attend services at the Altneuschul on his father’s yahrzeit.[9] He remembered receiving a telephone call that he initially thought might concern Pan Am or Czech security, but which proved to be an invitation from the synagogue sexton’s son, a Pan Am employee seeking Jewish visitors to help assemble a minyan.[9] Avineri also recalled a later visit to the synagogue with the philosopher Herbert Marcuse.[9]

The continuity of Marx’s thought was a central question in Avineri’s early scholarship: he resisted separating the young, philosophically oriented Marx from the mature analyst of economic relations.[6] His interpretation treated Marx’s earlier assumptions as essential to understanding the later work rather than as a stage that Marx had simply abandoned.[6] His subsequent research on Hegel examined, among other questions, the association between Hegelian philosophy and modern totalitarianism, challenging Karl Popper’s presentation of that relationship.[6]

Avineri continued to address Marx across his career, including in Karl Marx – Philosophy and Revolution.[8] In a discussion published by the Jewish Review of Books, his interpretation emphasized that Marx’s Jewish origins and background left “significant fingerprints” on his work.[10] The argument distinguished the influence of that background from the separate claim that Marx should be classified as a Jewish thinker.[10]

His study of Zionism’s intellectual origins placed Jewish nationalism in the setting of nineteenth-century socialist and national movements.[6] The Making of Modern Zionism: Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State, published by Basic Books in New York around 1981, ranged across thinkers including Krochmal, Moses Hess, Pinsker, Herzl, Ahad Ha’am, Jabotinsky, Rabbi Kook, and Ben-Gurion.[3] The volume included bibliographical references and an index and concluded with the epilogue “Zionism as a permanent revolution.”[3] A later reissue included a new epilogue addressing developments after 1967, as described in the Jewish Review of Books.[11]

Other books developed individual intellectual biographies alongside broader studies of political ideas.[6] Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism appeared in 1985, followed by Arlosoroff: An Intellectual Biography in 1989.[6] His publications also included Nation and World and books on Marx and Marxism.[8][6] These subjects extended his work beyond a single philosophical tradition to the connections among socialism, nationalism, and Jewish political thought.[6]

Avineri’s edited or co-authored volumes included Communitarianism and Individualism in 1992 and Jews of the Former Soviet Union: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow in 1997.[6] Later volumes included Integration and Identity: Challenges to Europe and Israel in 1999 and Politics and Identities in Transformation: Europe and Israel in 2001.[6] He also contributed a chapter titled “Self-Determination and Israel’s Declaration of Independence” to a jointly published 2011 book on Israel’s rights in international diplomacy.[12]

Avineri’s Herzl’s Vision: Theodor Herzl and the Foundation of the Jewish State drew extensively on Herzl’s diaries to reconstruct his political development and practical activity.[13][14] The work first appeared in Israel in 2008 and was issued in English by BlueBridge in 2014 in a translation by Haim Watzman.[14] Its chapters followed Herzl through Jerusalem, emancipation, European cities, the Basel Congress, Altneuland, the Uganda proposal, and his final years.[14]

Avineri interpreted Herzl’s emergence as a Zionist leader through the political difficulties of Jewish emancipation and the pressures of competing national movements within the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire.[13] Antisemitism was one influence in this account, but it was considered alongside the wider political crisis of the empire and the conflicting national aspirations within it.[13] His treatment sought to present Herzl as a real person rather than a mythologized figure.[13]

Avineri traced Herzl’s political conclusions to the limits of Jewish emancipation and the rise of modern antisemitism.[13] The review highlights Herzl’s encounter with Eugen Dühring’s 1881 antisemitic essay as one influence, alongside the wider political crisis of the Habsburg Empire.[13] This reading presented Herzl’s Zionism as emerging from a broader crisis in European Jewish life rather than from a single episode.[13]

Avineri credited Herzl with transforming a national vision into practical political organization.[13] The first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 established the World Zionist Organization with representative institutions that later helped provide a foundation for Israel’s political system.[13] Herzl’s achievement was thus not limited to articulating an idea: Avineri described it as moving the Jewish state “from one bandied about by a small coterie of educated but marginal Jews to an item on the international political agenda.”[13]

His interpretation of Altneuland likewise concerned the relationship between political objectives and diplomatic tactics.[15] In a discussion in the Jewish Review of Books, Avineri’s reading treated Herzl’s retreat from an explicitly sovereign nation-state model as tactical, intended to avoid provoking the Ottoman sultan.[15] This interpretation connected the language of Herzl’s projected political arrangements with the diplomatic constraints under which the Zionist movement operated.[15]

Avineri served as director-general of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1975 to 1977 in Yitzhak Rabin’s government.[4] Foreign Minister Yigal Allon appointed him to the post.[6] His tenure placed him in senior diplomatic discussions, including a meeting in Jerusalem on February 16, 1977, attended by Rabin and U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, in which he participated as the ministry’s director-general.[16] He resigned after Likud’s electoral victory under Menachem Begin.[7]

In a first-person account in the Jewish Review of Books, Avineri recalled visiting Washington in June 1976 and presenting Secretary of State Henry Kissinger with a Hebrew translation of Kant’s On Eternal Peace.[17] He remembered their conversation moving from Kant to Hegel before turning to Syrian forces in Lebanon.[17] In his account, Kissinger agreed with Rabin’s assessment, and Syrian forces subsequently withdrew from Aishieh following back-channel diplomacy.[17]

Avineri later discussed aspects of this diplomatic period in an interview with Ken Stein.[18] He recounted Romanian approaches to Rabin concerning a proposed visit intended to gauge interest in another agreement with Egypt.[18] His retrospective assessment emphasized the strategic considerations that Rabin and Begin brought to negotiations and was sharply critical of what he regarded as President Jimmy Carter’s political naivete.[18]

International election observation formed another part of Avineri’s public activity.[4] In 1990 he served on an international team observing elections in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.[4] After the Soviet Union’s fall, he participated in an international delegation supervising democratic elections and transitions to democracy in Eastern Europe from 1991 to 1994.[7] These activities accompanied an academic career that had already included invitations to speak in Soviet and Eastern European scholarly institutions.[6]

At a March 2011 symposium of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations in Jerusalem, Avineri cautioned that “the automatic outcome of the fall of autocracy is not democracy.”[19] Speaking about the Arab uprisings, he argued that democracy develops through decades of civil-society formation rather than appearing automatically when an autocratic ruler falls.[19] He pointed to the French Revolution as an example of a revolution that had not immediately produced democracy and warned against treating demonstrators’ declared wishes as sufficient to determine political outcomes.[19]

In a 2021 essay, Avineri returned to the institutional requirements of liberal democracy, arguing that it faced challenges both to its functioning and to its legitimacy.[1] He connected these pressures with economic crises and the weakening of traditional political parties.[1] Parties that had lost contact with their constituencies, he argued, helped create opportunities for populist leaders.[1] His assessment of the Arab Spring similarly emphasized the difficulty of moving reliably from dictatorship or autocracy to consolidated democracy and considered the differing experiences of republics and monarchies.[1]

At a conference marking the first decade of the Institute for National Security Studies, Avineri identified four factors behind the rise of the nationalistic right in Western societies.[5] These were the exclusion of large groups from political elites, the 2008 economic crisis, social media, and the after-effects of large-scale immigration.[5] His analysis addressed political shifts that included Donald Trump’s election and the United Kingdom’s Brexit decision.[5]

Questions of democratic authority also informed his writing on civil disobedience.[20] In an essay included in Civil Disobedience and Democracy, first published in 1998, he questioned whether individual conscience could provide a general justification for disobeying the law in a democracy.[20] He argued that a minority should seek to change laws through democratic processes while continuing to obey them.[20] The discussion concerned civil protest without resolving the separate question of military refusal.[20]

Avineri also considered the difference between leading a country through crisis and managing ordinary politics.[21] Discussing leaders who returned to office, he distinguished Rabin and Benjamin Netanyahu from Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill, and David Ben-Gurion.[21] He argued that the latter three had moved from being divisive figures to becoming unifying leaders during crises, while suggesting that their weakness could be an inability to manage everyday politics once the emergency had passed.[21]

Avineri publicly advocated dialogue with Palestinians in a 1970 article in Commentary and edited Israel and the Palestinians in 1971, exploring the possibility of negotiations with the PLO.[6] In 2010 he argued that a unilateral Palestinian declaration of statehood would change little on the ground but could make the conflict more “normal” by turning it into a dispute between states.[22] He further suggested that such a development could advance the prospects for negotiations.[22]

He described himself as critical of Israeli policy in the territories while also arguing that Palestinian leaders should acknowledge the rejection of the 1947 United Nations partition plan and the objective of eliminating Israel.[7] At the same time, he said Israel should take the Palestinian Nakba narrative into account.[7] These positions combined criticism of Israeli policy with demands for Palestinian acknowledgment of political choices and objectives that he considered central to understanding the conflict.[7]

Avineri distinguished criticism of particular Israeli policies from a rejection of the Zionist project itself.[23] He characterized post-Zionism as, at its base, a denial of the legitimacy of Israel’s existence as a Jewish nation-state, rather than simply a radical criticism of government policy.[23] He objected to presenting Zionism as colonialism instead of as a national movement in conflict with another national movement over the same territory.[23] He also criticized the rejection of the Zionist narrative when accompanied by an unquestioning acceptance of the Palestinian narrative.[23]

His writing on religion and sovereignty examined the historical circumstances in which halakha developed.[24] Avineri argued that halakha took shape after the destruction of the Second Temple and the loss of Jewish independence, when Jews lacked sovereignty and a binding national legal framework.[24] In his interpretation, halakha sustained collective Jewish life in exile by organizing communal and rabbinic institutions and relations with non-Jewish authorities.[24] He distinguished that historical function from the requirements of a modern state, arguing that halakha did not prescribe how a Jewish state should operate under non-messianic circumstances.[24]

Avineri received the Israel Prize for political science in 1996 and was a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.[6][1] His other distinctions included an honorary doctorate from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2010 and the EMET Prize in 2013.[25] Earlier recognition included the Rubin Prize in 1969 and the Present Tense Award in 1982.[6]

He also received the Naftali Prize for work on Hegel’s theory of the state, the Bublik Prize in 2009, and the Italian Order of the Star of Solidarity.[25] An honorary fellowship from the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya followed in 2011.[25] His books’ translation into several languages accompanied these Israeli and international honors.[4]

Avineri died on December 1, 2023, aged 90.[25] His scholarly work encompassed Hegel, Marx, Zionism, and socialism, alongside the diplomatic and public roles he held during his career.[25] His teaching at the Hebrew University, research on European political philosophy and Jewish national thought, and continuing contributions to the Israeli press formed the principal fields of his professional activity.[4][8] His published writings also extended to Herzl, political developments in the Middle East, and contemporary Israeli affairs, as reflected in the Jewish Review of Books collection of his work.[11]

Avineri’s appointment to the Foreign Ministry encountered parliamentary opposition from Likud members who objected to his advocacy of Palestinian statehood; an attempt to block the appointment through a parliamentary motion failed.[6] The dispute concerned the political positions he had expressed before entering the ministry rather than preventing him from taking office.[6]

A scholarly disagreement concerned his interpretation of sovereignty in Herzl’s Altneuland.[15] In the Jewish Review of Books, Shumsky’s criticism held that Avineri’s tactical explanation lacked support in Herzl’s diary or later reflections.[15] The reviewer defended Avineri’s reasoning by pointing to the Zionist movement’s deliberately vague language and the contemporary example of Egypt’s nominal Ottoman sovereignty.[15] The disagreement concerned how to interpret Herzl’s political language and diplomatic circumstances, rather than the importance of his institutional contribution to Zionism.[13][15]