Michael O'Brien (1948-2015)

I am deeply saddened and shocked to report that the distinguished intellectual historian Michael O'Brien passed away yesterday.  He was a professor of history at Cambridge University.  He is best known for his two volume work Conjectures of Order, which is about intellectual history in the south from the Age of Jackson to the Civil War.  Michael won the prestigious Bancroft Prize for those two volumes.  His other terrific work includes a biography of South Carolina lawyer Hugh S. Legare, The Idea Of The American South, 1920-41 (1979), and an edited collection All Clever Men, Who Make Their Way: Critical Discourse In The Old South.  The latter helped to introduce the idea that southerners in the years before Civil War had ideas worthy of study.  With David Moltke-Hansen he co-edited an important volume on Intellectual Life in Antebellum Charleston.

I have spent many, many hours with Michael's work -- perhaps more hours than those of any other historian -- and am always astonished at how terrific they are.  He read so much that he was able to see connections between writers that the people he's writing about may not have seen themselves.  When I mentioned that to him back in 2010 when I first met him, he smiled and said something along the lines of, "that's the point of intellectual history!"  Among my favorite chapters in Conjectures of Order are the ones on proslavery thought (no surprise) and the use of books -- so often intellectual historians are interested in books I guess because it's how the receive and transmit their ideas.

There are a lot of places where Michael's work influenced me greatly -- especially in appreciating the influence of European ideas on southerners and on the importance of economic and historical thought to them.  And while judges and lawyers (other than in the Legare biography) aren't central to O'Brien's thought, the framework he developed for discussing conservative intellectuals is extremely useful for discussing them.  I have some thoughts on how O'Brien's framework helps us understand what judges were doing in this chapter in Sally Hadden and Patti Minter's Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History.

About this I have to say, he was a damn smart man and a beautiful writer.  He was a phenomenal scholar.  We have lost one of the very best practitioners of the historian's craft -- and one of the best intellectual historians since Perry Miller.  (About the comparison to Miller I have to have something more to say when I'm done with grading.)  

Michael's wide-ranging interests appear in the variety of projects that his students pursued.  Cribbing now from his Cambridge University webpage, here's a description of the his students' projects:

He has supervised research students at universities in the United States and at Cambridge on various aspects of American history since the late eighteenth century: topics have included Southern intellectuals (Richard Weaver, Thomas Cooper, Basil Manly, St George Tucker), the constitutionality of the Second Amendment, Unionism in antebellum South Carolina, Noah Webster and American concepts of language, prisoner-of-war narratives after the Civil War, Southern concepts of honor, German emigré intellectuals, George Santayana, Henry Adams, freedmen's aid societies during Reconstruction, the pragmatism of Clarence Irving Lewis, the epistemology of American science in the late nineteenth century, African-American thought in the 1960s, and (inexplicably) American foreign policy in Nasser's Egypt.

Update: My friend James Fuller has a remembrance of O'Brien at H-Net.  

Cambridge University's memorial notice is here.  Among my favorite lines from it are "He was a man of quiet passions, including golf, jazz and Spurs, but his deepest passion was words. He said little but wrote much, cherishing the craft and artistry of writing."

The Society for U.S. Intellectual History has a memorial notice up here. 

The Guardian's obituary is here.  H/t Doug Thompson.

Comments

[Dave Garrow]

Geesh--horrible news. Wonderful scholar.

[AGR]

Terrible news, indeed. A great loss. I met him for the first time this past fall at Cambridge. He came to a talk I gave and made very insightful observations. He was charming and funny at dinner.

[Joy Porter]

A great loss of a witty, urbane scholar. American History in the UK has lost a important intellectual and a kind and decent man.

[r. b. bernstein]

Thank you for your post, Al -- I've posted a link to it to H-LAW.
Richard

[Al Brophy]

Thanks, R.B. And great review of Ellis in the New York Times Book Review.