Lewis Bernstein Namier

Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier (June 27, 1888 – August 19, 1960) was an English historian.

Namier's family were secular-minded Jewish gentry. His father, with whom Lewis often quarreled, idolized Austro-Hungary. By contrast Lewis Namier throughout his life detested the Dual Monarchy. Namier was educated at universities of Lemberg in Austrian Galicia (modern Lviv, Ukraine), and the London School of Economics. Namier migrated to the United Kingdom in 1906 and became a British subject in 1913. During World War I, held positions with the Propaganda Department, the Information Department and finally with the Foreign Office. After leaving the government, Namier served at Balliol College (1920–21). Later Namier, who was a long-time Zionist, worked as political secretary for the Jewish Agency in Palestine. Namier served as professor at the University of Manchester from 1931 until his retirement in 1953. He remained active in various Zionist groups and from 1933 was engaged in efforts on behalf of Jewish refugees from Germany.

He is best known for his work on Parliament and its composition in the latter part of the eighteenth century, which by its very detailed study of individuals caused substantial revision to accounts based on a party system. Namier's best-known works were The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, England in the Age of the American Revolution and the History of Parliament series. Namier used prosopography or collective biography of every MP and peer who sat in the British Parliament in the latter 18th century to reveal that local interests, not national ones, often determined how parliamentarians voted. Namier argued that, far from being tightly organized groups, both the Tories and Whigs were collections of ever-shifting and fluid small groups whose stances altered on an issue-by-issue basis. Namier felt that prosopographical methods were the best for analyzing small groups like the House of Commons, but was opposed to the application of prosopography to larger groups. He used other sources such as wills and tax records to reveal the interests of the MPs. In his time, Namier's methods were innovative and were quite controversial. Namier's obsession with collecting facts such as club membership of various MPs and then attempting to co-relate them to voting patterns led his critics to accuse him of "taking ideas out of history". Namier was well-known for his dislike in ideas and people who believed in them, and made little secret of his belief that the best form of government was that of a grubby self-interested elite.

A friend, admirer and patient of Sigmund Freud, Namier was an early pioneer in Psychohistory. He also wrote on modern European history, especially diplomatic history and his later books Europe in Decay, In the Nazi Era and Diplomatic Prelude unsparing condemned the Third Reich and appeasement. In the 1930s, Namier had been active in the anti-appeasement movement and together with his protégé A. J. P. Taylor spoke out against the Munich Agreement at several rallies in 1938. As an ethnic Jew (Namier had converted to Anglicanism), Namier was horrified by the Holocaust and his writings on German history have been criticized for Germanophobia. Namier's diplomatic histories are generally poorly regarded by historians because Namier was content to condemn appeasement without seeking to explain the reasons for it.

In 1952, Namier was given the honor of delivering the Romanes Lecture, on which subject Namier chose Monarchy and the Party System. Namier held very right-wing views, and has been called the most reactionary British historian of his generation. Ironically, Namier’s principal protégé was the left-wing historian A. J. P. Taylor.