On Saturday November 29, 2008, Max Teichmann died aged eighty-four. He left us as one of this nation’s most formidable public intellectuals, appreciated in recent years for his insightful and witty contributions to Quadrant and News Weekly. I met Max Teichmann in March 1984, when he was an academic in the Politics Department at Monash University. I was a wide-eyed young student sitting in a lecture hall waiting for his arrival. I had read some of Max’s politics textbooks in high school, liked them, and I was keen with expectation. Max cheerfully shuffled in, a little late, as was his…