We all know people who have led charmed lives, either by grace of high birth or, perhaps compensating for one’s birth, by extraordinary effort. Certainly, luck plays no small role in these cases, for even the most fortuitous beginning requires constant attention.

Raymond Klibansky, born in 1905, is still leading such a life. His recently published autobiography (more accurately, an extended conversation with a former pupil originally prepared for radio broadcast in Canada) is a stunning testimony to how an individual can tap some of our civilization’s deepest intellectual roots and play significant roles in our time’s most demanding conflicts, all the while maintaining contact with some of the leading players of nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual history.

Klibansky is probably best known for a collaboration with art historians Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl on Saturn and Melancholy, written in German during the 1930s but only published in English in the mid-1960s. Revised and expanded editions have appeared in French and German. It has been acclaimed as a classic in the history of ideas, medicine, art, philosophy and science, but inexplicably the English edition has been out of print for years. The chapter in the autobiography dedicated to “Saturn’s Children,” especially when read in tandem with Klibansky’s 1989 preface to the French and German editions, offers fresh perspectives on melancholy as well as on the intricate genesis and reception of the book.

Needless to say, the author’s connections with the leading lights of the Warburg circle alone would have vouchsafed his standing in twentieth-century humanities studies; in fact Aby Warburg handpicked him to organize the philosophy section of the famed Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg. It was also Klibansky who wrote the letter that finally persuaded Warburg’s brothers to dispatch the library to Great Britain. Klibansky, along with Edgar Wind then in London, accomplished this delicate feat in the months immediately following Hitler’s ascension to the Chancellorship. During the war, Klibansky, like Warburg’s eventual biographer Ernst Gombrich, worked as an intelligence officer for the Wartime Political Executive in London.

But this is to get ahead of the story considerably. Klibansky was born in Paris to a Jewish wine merchant of Lithuanian-German descent. The family emigrated to Germany with the outbreak of war in 1914. Klibansky studied at the prestigious Goethe Gymnasium in Frankfurt and subsequent- ly at the progressive Odenwald school, alongside later luminaries such as the physicist Hans Bethe. Klibansky came to know the children of many of Germany’s leading professors; his youthful acquaintance with Ernst Cassirer’s family certainly provided an ease of movement in Hamburg’s academic elites. Klibansky launched his university career in Heidelberg, where he was quickly befriended by Karl Jaspers.

The roster of his personal and academic acquaintances during the Twenties is mind-boggling, from close family contacts with the Weber family to an abiding literary curiosity kindled by Friedrich Gundolf (a leader of the Stefan George circle), from seminars with Ludwig Curtius, the preeminent archeologist of the day, to close contact with the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies. It was due to Tönnies, whose youthful admiration of Marx had led to a friendship with Engels, that Klibansky would be able to later rouse his students by declaring that only three people separated them from Marx.

Klibansky’s philosophic interests were expanded in courses with Heinrich Rickert, the leading neo-Kantian scholar of the day, as well as at Martin Heidegger’s 1929 lectures “What is Metaphysics?” Friendships with Alexandre Koyré and Karl Löwith round out the picture of a man who by his mid-thirties had established what is surely one of the most enviable academic circles of acquaintances of his generation.

Other odd events added surreal flourishes. Leo Szilard, Einstein’s Hungarian colleague at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, confronted Klibansky with a frantic warning about atomic fission in 1933. There was also Klaus Fuch’s brother, a former Gymnasium classmate, who contacted him while in London. A strident Communist “of a manner [Klibansky] could not approve,” Fuchs sought out Klibansky’s help in emigrating from Germany. By the time one encounters the exchanges with Albert Einstein concerning the possibility of setting up an international university in Israel, such matters seems routine, almost to be expected.

As one might imagine, this book bristles with unusual and unexpected insights. For instance, his opinion of Hannah Arendt, a contemporary and Jaspers’s protégé, is not what one might have imagined: she has, Klibanksy says, “beautiful formulas, but if more carefully examined, her thought is not profound. She is more a writer than a substantive critic” is not what one might have imagined. His characterization and explanation of military intelligence work as “simply the synthesis of historical and logical methods” is familiar enough, but perhaps never has the case been made so eloquently. Experiences of this nature are bound to endow even the most ethereal continental philosopher with a certain degree of political realism. Indeed, Klibansky emerges as a hardened realist when confronted with all varieties of National Socialist maneuverings, and he even regards the French collapse in 1940 as an essentially internal phenomenon only triggered by external events.

Klibansky’s philosophical work began with the recovery and mastery of Nicolas de Cusa’s oeuvre and with Meister Eckhart— ironical badges of honor, considering their appropriation by the Nazis. Klibansky’s discomfort with the supposed opposition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance led to extensive work on their philosophical continuities, above all the enduring legacy of Plato. He extended and deepened the knowledge of these issues for new generations by launching the Corpus Platonicum Medii Aevi. After his move to Great Britain, Klibansky took up the study of John Locke to enhance his feeble English; here again he became a leading figure. Direct participation in establishing open international lines of communication among philosophers during the Cold War was just another sidelight to his activities of the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies.

The precarious balance between free will and the exigencies of an open society was one of Klibansky’s philosophical touchstones, and it is to Leroux’s credit that these concerns are distributed fairly evenly over the course of the book. Like the autobiography of the late Erich Voegelin, the conversational tone of this memoir enables one to move through a great deal of conceptual material at a good clip, but, again as with Voegelin, the autobiography only constitutes the tip of the iceberg. Klibansky and Voegelin were raised amidst the high-flying historicist abstractions of continental philosophy after the First World War, yet both were profoundly affected by what Voegelin calls “Anglo-American common sense philosophy.” For Voegelin, it came with the duties of teaching American students political science; for Klibansky, it came from his contact with Locke. But while Voegelin evolved into a prodigious contributor to the “common sense” school, Klibansky seems to have always had a soft spot for the Leftist conceit that all differences can be mediated. While he can, rightly, reject Rorty, he never seems to have shed his continental Romanticism.

Indeed, this Romantic streak may have saved Klibansky from becoming a comic anachronism. One need only think of fictional characters who find their way into the leading events of the day, like “Forrest Gump” or Woody Allen’s minor classic “Zelig,” to appreciate just how quickly coincidence becomes farce. Klibansky, although appearing in many of the most important frames in twentieth-century life and letters, is too high-minded and accomplished a scholar to allow such a lapse to occur.