George Lichtheim 1912-1973

I first became aware of George Lichtheim’s powerful and distinctive gifts in 1953 and 1954 when he wrote under the name of “G. L. Arnold,” although I had read him under his real name in Commentary on Middle Eastern and British politics as early as 1947. George wrote under both names through the 1950s, but G. L. Arnold disappeared after 1959 just before the publication of Marxism: A Critical and Historical Study, which won George a reputation as an important scholar and thinker never again to be described as a “journalist” in biographical notes. To those of us, however, who—aware of his double identity—had been reading him for over a decade in half a dozen British and American intellectu...