Eric Alfred Havelock (; 3 June 1903 – 4 April 1988) was a British classicist who spent most of his life in Canada and the United States. He was a professor at the University of Toronto and was active in the Canadian socialist movement during the 1930s. In the 1960s and 1970s, he served as chair of the classics departments at both Harvard and Yale. Although he was trained in the turn-of-the-20th-century Oxbridge tradition of classical studies, which saw Greek intellectual history as an unbroken chain of related ideas, Havelock broke radically with his own teachers and proposed an entirely new model for understanding the classical world, based on a sharp division between literature of the 6th and 5th centuries BC on the one hand, and that of the 4th on the other.
Much of Havelock's work was devoted to addressing a single thesis: that all of Western thought is informed by a profound shift in the kinds of ideas available to the human mind at the point that Greek philosophy converted from an oral to a literate form. The idea has been controversial in classical studies, and has been rejected outright both by many of Havelock's contemporaries and modern classicists. Havelock and his ideas have nonetheless had far-reaching influence, both in classical studies and other academic areas. He and Walter J. Ong (who was himself strongly influenced by Havelock) essentially founded the field that studies transitions from orality to literacy, and Havelock has been one of the most frequently cited theorists in that field; as an account of communication, his work profoundly affected the media theories of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. Havelock's influence has spread beyond the study of the classical world to that of analogous transitions in other times and places.
Education and early academic career Born in London on 3 June 1903, Havelock grew up in Scotland where he attended Greenock Academy before enrolment at The Leys School in Cambridge, England, at the age of 14. He studied there with W. H. Balgarnie, a classicist to whom Havelock gives considerable credit.Havelock, The Lyric Genius of Catullus, second ed. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1967), i. In 1922, Havelock started at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
While studying under F. M. Cornford at Cambridge, Havelock began to question the received wisdom about the nature of pre-Socratic philosophy and, in particular, about its relationship with Socratic thought. In The Literate Revolution in Greece, his penultimate book, Havelock recalls being struck by a discrepancy between the language used by the philosophers he was studying and the heavily Platonic idiom with which it was interpreted in the standard texts.Quoted and summarized in Swearingen, Jan, "Oral Hermeneutics during the Transition to Literacy: The Contemporary Debate" (Cultural Anthropology Vol. 1 No. 2 , 138–56), 141. It was well known that some of these philosophical texts (Parmenides, Empedocles) were written not only in verse but in the metre of Homer, who had recently been identified (still controversially at the time) by Milman Parry as an oral poet, but Cornford and other scholars of these early philosophers saw the practice as a fairly insignificant convention left over from Hesiod.Cornford regards philosophy per se as a distinctly post-Hesiodic invention; he says of Anaximander, "We seem to have left the supernatural behind and to have passed at one step into the shining air of reason" (Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation [originally published 1912; reprinted Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991], 41). Havelock eventually came to the conclusion that the poetic aspects of early philosophy "were matters not of style but of substance",Literate Revolution, quoted in Swearingen 141. and that such thinkers as Heraclitus and Empedocles actually have more in common even on an intellectual level with Homer than they do with Plato and Aristotle.
In 1926 Havelock took his first academic job at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. He married Ellen Parkinson in 1927, and moved on to Victoria College at the University of Toronto in 1929. Havelock's scholarly work during this period focused on Latin poetry, particularly Catullus, far from the early Greek philosophy he had worked on at Cambridge. While in Canada Havelock became increasingly involved in politics. With his fellow academics Frank Underhill and Eugene Forsey, Havelock was a cofounder of the League for Social Reconstruction, an organisation of politically active socialist intellectuals.King, Carol, Guide to the Eric Alfred Havelock Papers, Yale University Archives (<>, accessed 12 February 2006). He and Underhill were also the most outspoken of a group of dissident faculty members at the university.Horn, Michiel. "Professors in the Public Eye: Canadian Universities, Academic Freedom, and the League for Social Reconstruction" (History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 4. , 425–47) 433.
Havelock's political engagement deepened rapidly. In 1931, after Toronto police had blocked a public meeting by an organisation the police claimed was associated with communists, he and Underhill wrote a public letter of protest, calling the action "short-sighted, inexpedient, and intolerable."Friedland, Martin, The University of Toronto: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002) 318. The letter led to considerable tension between the leadership of the university and the activist professors led by Havelock and Underhill,Friedland 320 as well as a sharply critical public reaction. All of the major newspapers in Toronto, along with a number of prominent business leaders, denounced the professors as radical leftists and their behaviour as unbecoming of academics.Massolin, Philip, Canadian Intellectuals, the Tory Tradition, and the Challenge of Modernity, 1939–1970 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 82.
Though the League for Social Reconstruction began as more of a discussion group than a political party, it became a force in Canadian politics by the mid-1930s. After Havelock joined the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, along with several other members of the League, he was pressured by his superiors at the university to curtail his political activity. He did not, continuing to act as an ally and occasional spokesman for Underhill and other leftist professors. He found himself in trouble again in 1937 after criticising both the government's and industry's handling of an automotive workers' strike. Despite calls from Ontario officials for his ouster, he was able to remain at Victoria College, but his public reputation was badly damaged.Tudiver, Neil, Universities for Sale: Resisting Corporate Control Over Canadian Higher Education (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1999), 36.
While at Toronto, Havelock began formulating his theory of orality and literacy, establishing the context of a later movement at the university interested in the critical study of communication, which Donald F. Theall has called the "Toronto School of Communications". Havelock's work was complemented by that of Harold Innis, who was working on the history of media. The work Havelock and Innis began in the 1930s was the preliminary basis for the influential theories of communication developed by Marshall McLuhan and Edmund Snow Carpenter in the 1950s.
During World War II, Havelock moved away from the socialist organisations he had been associated with, and in 1944 was elected founding president of the Ontario Classical Association. One of the association's first activities was organising a relief effort for Greece, which had just been liberated from Nazi control. Havelock continued to write about politics, however, and his political and academic work came together in his ideas about education; he argued for the necessity of an understanding of rhetoric for the resistance to corporate persuasiveness.Gorak, Jan. Introduction to Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), xxviii.
Toward a new theory of Greek intellectual history
At the same time that he was becoming increasingly vocal and visible in politics, Havelock's scholarly work was moving toward the concerns that would occupy him for the bulk of his career. The first questions he raised about the relationship between literacy and orality in Greece concerned the nature of the historical Socrates, which was a long-debated issue. Havelock's position, drawn from analyses of Xenophon and Aristophanes as well as Plato himself, was that Plato's presentation of his teacher was largely a fiction, and intended to be a transparent one, whose purpose was to represent indirectly Plato's own ideas.Havelock, Eric Alfred, "The Evidence for the Teaching of Socrates" (Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, Vol. 65. , 282–95), 283. He argued vociferously against the idea associated with John Burnet, which still had currency at the time, that the basic model for the theory of forms originated with Socrates. Havelock's argument drew on evidence for a historical change in Greek philosophy; Plato, he argued, was fundamentally writing about the ideas of his present, not of the past."Teaching of Socrates" 287. Most earlier work in the field had assumed that, since Plato uses Socrates as his mouthpiece, his own philosophical concerns must have been similar to those debated in the Athens of his youth, when Socrates was his teacher. Havelock's contention that Socrates and Plato belonged to different philosophical eras was the first instance of one that would become central to his work: that a basic shift in the kinds of ideas being discussed by intellectuals, and the methods of discussing them, happened at some point between the end of the 5th century BC and the middle of the 4th.
In 1947, Havelock moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to take a position at Harvard University, where he remained until 1963. He was active in a number of aspects of the university and of the department, of which he became chair; he undertook a translation of and commentary on Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound for the benefit of his students. He published this translation, with an extended commentary on Prometheus and the myth's implications for history, under the title The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man (and then changed it back to Prometheus when the book was republished in the 1960s, saying that the earlier title had "come to seem a bit pretentious"Havelock, Prometheus [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968], 6.). During this time he began his first major attempt to argue for a division between Platonic or Aristotelian philosophy and what came before. His focus was on political philosophy and, in particular, the beginnings of Greek liberalism as introduced by Democritus. In his book The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics, he argued that for Democritus and the liberals, political theory was based on an understanding of "the behaviour of man in a cosmic and historical setting":The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics, quoted in Larsen, J. A. O., "Liberalism in Greek Politics" (The Philosophical Review Vol. 68 No. 1 , 103–09), 105. that is, humanity defined as the poets would define it—measured through its individual actions. Plato and Aristotle were interested in the nature of humanity and, in particular, the idea that human actions might be rooted in inherent qualities rather than consisting of individual choices.