Richard Arthur Wollheim 1923–2003
Richard Arthur Wollheim (1923–2003), a Fellow of the British Academy, was an advocate of pacifism. Born in London to Eric Wollheim and Constance Baker, he went to Westminster School as a King’s Scholar at the age of thirteen and was influenced by Aldous Huxley’s Encyclopaedia of Pacifism. After volunteering for service during World War II, he returned to Balliol College at the University of Oxford in 1945, obtaining two first class BA degrees, one in History in 1946, the other in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1948. His first substantial piece of work, F. H. Bradley (1959), notable for the elegance and lucidity of its writing and its unrivalled mastery of Francis Herbert Bradley’s philosophy, was immediately recognised as the best book on its subject. Underlying his concern with social issues was one of the deepest commitments of Wollheim’s life, ‘devotion to the cause of socialism’, and it is in the final section of his Fabian Society pamphlet Socialism and Culture (1961) that his own conception of socialism becomes clear.