Maurice Cranston, R I P.

MAURICE CRANSTON, a notable contributer to NATIONAL REVIEW, had a fatal heart attack on November 5, while recording a television program. A professor at the London School of Economics from 1969 to 1985, he led a double life as both philosopher and man of letters. Before taking up his academic career, he wrote detective novels and taught philosophy part time. It was during this period that he wrote a pathbreaking biography of John Locke. This made his reputation and earned him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. At his death he was engaged in a massive life of Rousseau. Two volumes had already been published, and the third was well advanced.

Never merely conventionally academic, Cranston brought political theory to a wider public by such devices as imaginary conversations between great figures of the past (a genre he pioneered on the BBC and later brought to NATIONAL REVIEW): Paine and Burke, for example, or Machiavelli and Savonarola. His talent in this direction made the history of ideas irresistibly readable as for example in his recent essays on Enlightenment thought, published as Prophets and Philosophers, which had begun life as the Carlyle lectures at Oxford.

He was a notable wit, and balanced his profundity with a delight in gossip. In character he was the kindest and most helpful of men. He wrote a book on freedom and took practical steps to help those denied human rights, especially writers imprisoned by repressive regimes. He was closely involved with PEN and energetically promoted Anglo-French cultural relations. His political views became rather more conservative as he got older, largely as a result of his disapproving the tendency to turn every demand into a human right--rights, as he sardonically put it, "to free wigs, false teeth, and free cosmetic surgery."

He was married to Baroness Maximiliana von und zu Fraunberg and is also survived by their two sons. The Cranstons as a couple entertained stylishly and were splendid figures in London social life.