1 Introduction

Avner Offer's abundant scholarship may be divided into a number of streams. In his first two monographs, he developed fresh analyses of the course of British and imperial history from the 1870s to the Great War (Offer 1981, 1989), using as a fulcrum the idea of control of land as simultaneously the most basic factor of production and a potent source of political and cultural power.

J. Getzler (*)

St Hugh’s College, Oxford University, Oxford, UK e-mail: j oshua.getzler@law.ox.ac.uk

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 623

R. A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Oxford Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58471-9_25

Avner is a fine historical writer, and his skills of narrative, evocation and exposition have assured him a readership beyond academia (e.g. The Economist 2006; James 2006; Venook 2016). He is as much a political economist and social scientist as a historian. Implicit as well as explicit models of social behaviour and economic structure and careful appraisal of data are always in play in his work, propelling and shaping the enquiry.

Avner's life story is very different to that of his peers in British economic history and political economy. That story can give clues about the ideas that have animated the work of this highly original scholar. He was born in Mandatory Palestine in 1944 (Offer 2014b: 13-33; Nunan 2012) and grew up in Kibbutz Yifat in the Jezreel Valley, the heartland of Israel's communal agricultural settlements which had been founded by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe some two decades before. His father had come from Odessa in 1928, escaping the turmoil of the first decade of the Soviet Union. Avner's mother was born in Palestine, her forbears also coming from the Black Sea region.

Yet there was something old-fashioned in Avner's upbringing in the uto­pian kibbutz. From his parents and also his schooling, he could imbibe high European culture alongside the austere values of pioneering and egalitarian Labour Zionism, which had its own secular canon of song, dance and ritual, much of it distilled from the German Wandervogel and East European folk culture. There was plenty of classical music to hear and fine literature to read, especially Russian classics in translation. Avner's mother was a talented poet and sculptor, and his father was intermittently an ambassador for the kibbutz movement, taking the family for sojourns abroad. Two and a half years in Canada and New York as a child aged five to eight helped form and cement Avner's easy command of English and this was followed, a decade later, by five months in Moscow at age 17, where he failed to learn much Russian, saving him from the risk of being tempted into the study of Soviet history and poli­tics in later life, as he wryly acknowledged looking back over his career (Nunan 2012). These youthful memories may have affected his political outlook as well: he had early seen the superpower rivals at the peak of their confidence and success, expanding his awareness of the wider world beyond the confines and conformities of the pioneering State of Israel. A lifelong immunity to the extremes of market fundamentalism and dogmatic socialism might be ascribed to these youthful experiences of America and the Soviet Union, a kind of ideological inoculation.

On the brink of military service in 1962, Avner developed a liking for pho­tography and soon showed not only devotion to the art but also rare skill and talent. He thought that this might be his vocation after army service. Avner served for 11 years as a conscript and reservist in a paratroop reconnaissance infantry unit, seeing action in Jerusalem in the Six-Day War of 1967, and then in the Jordan Valley and the Sinai in the aftermath of that conflict, lead­ing up to and including the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He captured his soldier­ing experiences of 1967 in an extraordinary series of photographs of soldiers and civilians, both Jewish and Arab, caught in the vice of war, images that were widely exhibited and published at the time and winning him first prize at the 1968 Tel Aviv Museum exhibition of “Photographs from the Six-Day War”. His photograph of the paratroopers of his own unit advancing up the road to the Lion's Gate of the Old City of Jerusalem on their way to the Temple Mount nearby was one of the great images of the war and was widely reproduced. Avner collected these images into a memoir of the war written immediately afterwards, but only published in 2014. The book, entitled Burn Mark (Offer 2014b), can be viewed not only as an intimate record of a crucial campaign, but also a paean to past youth and camaraderie, a remembrance of the fallen and an elegy for a country that was to shed its innocence and dimin­ish its ideals in the long years of conflict.

The jolt of the 1967 victory and the expansion of its borders gave Israel a burst of confidence, even euphoria, with shadows and doubts suppressed. As a loyal scion of the labour movement that still dominated Israeli society, Avner worked after the war as a farmer and pioneer both in his home kibbutz and in the new settlement of Sde Boker in the Negev Desert in the south of the country, where the founding premier David Ben-Gurion, by then in his eight­ies, resided in political retirement.

In 1969, Avner embarked on studies at the Hebrew University ofJerusalem, a seat of learning still under the influence of the Germanic academic culture of its founding professors. He read geography, including a strong quantitative element, as a preparation for further conservation work, and also history as a key to understanding the sources of Israel's growing geopolitical and social predicaments. Avner studied with some of the scholarly greats of that era such as Jacob Talmon, who wrote a notable book on totalitarianism and populist democracy (Talmon 1952), and who courageously opposed the occupation of Palestinian territories. Through Talmon's study of the Rousseauian general will, Avner seems to have picked up a sense of the uneasy relationship between liberalism, democracy and nationalism at the birth of modern politics. He also developed a strong interest in history and philosophy of science and the logic of scientific discovery and explanation, and wrote a dissertation on Darwin. Israel's strong schools of behavioural economics and strategic bar­gaining were also then emerging, with scholars such as Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky and Robert Aumann in Jerusalem producing seminal insights into rationality beyond simple maximisation models. Avner remembers the ferment and excitement associated with those new ideas on the Jerusalem campus. Methodological concerns from these first years of study would come back into play much later when Avner turned his attention to the scientism of modern economic theory.

Avner graduated with high honours in 1973 and decided to accept a schol­arship for study abroad, choosing the University of Oxford. He chose Britain over America as he wanted to study British imperialism and politics as deter­minants of Israeli history. He experienced this move to Britain in his late twenties as much as a severance from the encompassing world of the kibbutz as a parting from Israel. Avner had come to the conclusion that egalitarian kibbutz society, whilst admirable and just, was perhaps past its heroic stage and did not hold out sufficient challenges for the young. Moreover, his wor­ries about the direction of the country were deepening as the dominant Israeli Labour Party became mired in corruption and infighting. He arrived on a scholarship at St Antony's College, Oxford, in the autumn of 1973 to com­mence doctoral studies on land ownership in England from 1870 to the First World War and after. He was supervised first by the Industrial Revolution historian Peter Mathias at Oxford and then by Michael (F.M.L.) Thompson from London University, author of classic works on English landed society and one of the foremost economic and social historians in the United Kingdom. Perhaps the study of a very different, deeply rooted and traditional landed society, a stark contrast to the socialist kibbutz, would help him make sense of the world from which he sprang.

Avner's first Oxford term was soon interrupted by a call back to military service on the fierce Sinai front of the 1973 war. He found himself fighting under the command of Ariel Sharon on the banks of the Suez Canal right up to the moment of ceasefire. Grateful to be alive, he returned to Oxford to bury himself in his research, producing his first monograph on Property and Politics 1870-1914in 1981, completed as a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College. Avner sensed that, after the trauma of the 1973 war, the political mood in Israel was hardening and the compromises necessary to make peace were beyond reach. He and his generation of the 1960s had paid a toll in war service, and, despite the field victories, the future road was dark. More time away made good sense, and he took up a Lectureship in the Department of Economics at the University of York, where he taught economic and social history alongside Feinstein who led the department. Feinstein was a pioneer of the new quantitative economic history with a virtuoso ability to gather and fine-tune the historical national accounts, the bedrock for empirical appraisal of macroeconomic performance (Offer 2017b).

Avner worked at York for a decade and his family enjoyed living there. His York phase was divided by a productive three-year research sojourn at the Australian National University in Canberra, where he became fast friends with the distinguished social historians Kenneth and Amirah Inglis. The fam­ily flourished in the balmy environment of mid-1980s Australia, and there Avner researched and wrote his second monograph (Offer 1989), which described the agrarian origins of the First World War and traced the deeper structures of the far-flung pre-war British Empire. In 1991, he was appointed to a senior position back at Oxford, as a Reader and Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College, moving in 2000 to the Chichele Chair in Economic History at All Souls College in succession to Feinstein and held earlier by Mathias.

At Oxford, Avner helped build up a powerful economic history group which included Feinstein, Knick Harley, Jane Humphries and Robert Allen. The team also included Nicholas Dimsdale, Paul David and other stars. At the time, this may have been the premier economic history group in the world, with new graduate courses attracting an international student body, and a constant stream of distinguished visitors and research collaborators. Avner contributed to the programmes with energy and commitment, helping to launch many scholarly and professional careers. He revelled in collegiate life, where the generations mixed at a common table, bonded by a common pur­pose, and trusting in the good sense and sound motivations of one other. The life of the college was ‘the closest I could find to a kibbutz', Avner said more than once.

In this latter phase, his attention turned to the social and cultural shape of late capitalism and the ideologies of political economy, resulting in a widely read and warmly reviewed monograph on affluence, well-being and post-war capitalism (Offer 2006). He later embarked on a study, joining with the younger Swedish scholar Gabriel Soderberg, which took the history of the Nobel Prize in Economics as a framework to explore the meaning and impact of modern economic theory (Offer and Soderberg 2016). Avner spent several periods in America to study and experience at close hand the epicentre of world capitalism, finding the manufacturing culture of Detroit, even in its decline, as interesting as New York as a financial and cultural capital. These latter works analysed and documented the undermining of individual self­control and satisfaction in consumer society, and the neglect of community, solidarity and social obligation by modern economics.

Avner retired from the Chichele Chair in 2011. Freed from full-time teach­ing and administration, he continued to work on more recent issues in politi­cal economy, tracing the displacement of social democracy by market liberalism in the West, particularly the Anglosphere, from 1970 to the pres­ent. He also explored the trajectories along which finance has affected the organisation of housing, welfare and government. His work on the historical problem of quality of life has evoked wide interest beyond the academy, with governments in the United Kingdom, Sweden and Israel keen to learn from his work.

In “retirement”, the flow of vigorous work has not abated—rather the opposite. Avner remains as a stalwart presence and beneficial force at Oxford, always ready to give attention and good advice to students and colleagues, and continuing with a considerable effort of teaching and supervision. Beyond the university community, he has also contributed as a public intellectual with occasional forays into policy. His main vocation remains as a scholar, and his influence as a writer and communicator in his discipline is exceeded by none. We now turn to investigate more closely that body of work.