Chapter Eight—
From Socialism to Sociology

Nathan Glazer

A young scholar, Douglas Webb, has been at work for a few years on a book he proposes to title From Socialism to Sociology . I hope he does not mind me appropriating it for this memoir, for I am one of those—we seem to be legion—who has followed that trajectory. There are different variants of those of us who have managed the passage. I am tempted to construct one of those fourfold tables beloved of sociologists with the horizontal axis reading "strong or weak final commitment" and the vertical reading "strong or weak initial commitment." The upper left-hand box holds those who were solidly socialist and ended up solid sociologists. Three other possibilities exist, including the lower right-hand box containing those whose commitment to socialism was not as firm as it might have been—and whose commitment to sociology is not as firm as it might be.

Despite Saint Paul's injunction against those who blow neither hot nor cold, I feel I am best placed in that lower right-hand box. This is not to say I have no commitments, but they were not to socialism then, nor to socialism now. It is true that before college, during college, and after college I thought of myself as a socialist. But by 1947 I was no longer writing articles in which, directly or indirectly, I indicated such an affiliation. My transition from socialism to sociology occurred rapidly. My fourfold table does not include all crucial possibilities: there were those who were socialists before becoming sociologists and remained socialists after becoming sociologists. But in the mid- and late 1940s there

was something about sociology—for those of us who were socialists and were becoming sociologists—that undermined faith.

Certainly, the kind of sociologist I became was affected by the kind of socialist I was. I was a socialist not by conversion but by descent. My father always voted for Norman Thomas for president. I recall—it must have been the 1936 election, when many New York socialists and social democrats were voting for Franklin D. Roosevelt, on the new American Labor party ticket, designed for such as they—becoming aware on election day that my father, a quiet man who did not try to convert anyone to anything, had voted for Norman Thomas. His children of voting age had voted for Roosevelt and the others naturally supported Roosevelt. (He had seven children, and I was the youngest.) But the term socialist by descent in New York City in the 1930s requires further definition: I was what would be called today a social democrat. Again, it was a matter of descent. My father, though mild, was strongly anticommunist. He was a member of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and, after the fierce battle over control of the union in the 1920s, communists had as bad a reputation among ILGWU members as among middle Americans. Had he been a member of the Fur Workers Union, my politics by descent would very likely have been communist.

Undoubtedly other parts of my early political and cultural makeup must also be ascribed to family influences. My father was an observant Jew, but he read the Forward, not the Morning Journal, and did not like those who made too much of their orthodoxy. He expected his children to go to synagogue, as he did. Since he did not base his expectation on intellectual or theological grounds, there was no way of disputing him on those grounds, had we been of a mind to. To him it was simply what was done, without explanation or justification. His mildness extended to Zionism: ours was not a Zionist household, but neither was it anti-Zionist. He was content to send his children to a Hebrew school that taught Hebrew and displayed a map of Palestine, the Jewish national flag, and the Jewish National Fund collection box. He did not especially seek out a Yiddishist school, though that was the language he and my mother used at home and, I am sure, at work. I cannot recall him ever speaking English, though I think he could. In the clothing shops in which he worked, while there might be Italian and other workers, there were always enough Jewish workers, and Jewish foremen and owners, to make Yiddish a shop tongue. I do remember my mother speaking

some English, however: I would go shopping with her, and not all the tradesmen were Jews.

I suspect that Jewish eclecticism was common in New York when I was growing up: socialist, but not too socialist; Orthodox, but not too Orthodox; friendly to Palestine, but not a Zionist; Yiddish-speaking, but not a Yiddishist. I was aware—who could not be?—of those who were more intense about some part of this mix and of those who were communists. Even in my father's landsmanshaft, a club or organization of people who came from the same town or village in Eastern Europe, there was at least one reader of the Jewish communist daily Freiheit . Our family culture rejected the extremes—an intense commitment to communism, Orthodoxy, freethinking, anarchism, Yiddish. Of all the Jewish variants of the day, the one for which I think my father had the most respect was Young Israel—the "modern" Orthodox youth organization that supported the creation of a Jewish state.

I speak of my father, not my mother, though she was by far the more vivid personality. She did not have strong views about anything outside the realm of proper personal and familial behavior. There she could be a terror. But when it came to all those variants of Jewish religion, politics, and culture into which the Jewish population of New York had splintered, she had no strong views except that, like my father, she opposed all excess and extremism.

In education, once again I think we were placed with that very large group, not written about much in memoirs and histories, in which the passion for education was muted. This meant we would get more education than our Italian neighbors, but we were not expected to go to college. My father's formal education was limited to a few years of religious school in Poland; he read Yiddish and the Hebrew prayer book. Both my parents wrote long letters in Yiddish to those they left behind in Poland.

We knew there were Jewish parents who were indifferent to education and showed their indifference by insisting that their children go to work, in the family store, or as errand boys, or doing whatever they could to bring in some cash. Poor as we were, there was no pressure to work while we were going to school. And I suspect my older brothers and sisters simply followed the norm for Jewish immigrant and second-generation children of their ages. My oldest brother went to work at twelve or thereabouts—but at that time graduation from high school was far from universal. The next two children, my older sisters, went to high school and took the commercial course. The next brother was the

first to go to a regular high school; my parents, thinking of our needs, insisted to his distress that he attend a trade school. Graduating during the Depression, he never worked at his trade.

The three youngest children all began college—my brother finished (and went beyond), and my sister left after a few years to go to work. I am enough of a sociologist to know that the fact that I was not put under any pressure to work or contribute to family expenses was simply because I was the youngest. I showed no sign of being the brightest; indeed, some evidence indicates that I was not. But I was able to pursue my education wherever it would take me. I do not recall my parents ever making a suggestion as to what I should become or do. My next oldest brother, the only other sibling who graduated from college, was my "manager," noting that I did well at school and figuring out what would be best for me.

I liked drawing. In another family someone might have suggested that I pursue a career based on that. But by the time I entered high school, it seemed clear—why, I do not know—I would do something with words, not in math, science, or the arts. The fact is role models were in scarce supply. I recall there was someone on our block who had become a high-school teacher. He was the object of universal admiration, as it was known to be very hard for Jews to become high-school teachers. It was believed they could not pass the oral examination because of their Jewish accent. But enough did: there were quite a few Jewish teachers in my high school, James Monroe, which we were told was the largest in the world—sixteen thousand students. Most of them attended "annexes," high-school classes in elementary-school and junior high-school buildings, and even when we got to the main buildings, we attended only a half-session, morning or afternoon. Classes were large, and it was not possible for teachers to pay much attention to us. We seemed often (perhaps more commonly in elementary school and junior high school) to be arranged by size, the smallest in the front and the largest, unfairly, doubling up in the back seats.

But the education must have been sound. For one thing, the curriculum was dictated by the requirements for entry into the city colleges, City, Hunter, Brooklyn, and Queens: three years of one language, two of another, four years of English, two and a half years of math, and similar amounts of history and science. One did have electives: most of my classmates added physics or trigonometry to their two or three years of math and science. In my senior year I took the course that made the deepest impression on me, fourth-year French, and found myself in a

small class in which the first assignment was to read eighty pages of a detective story. (I had never before been asked to read more than three pages of French.) It certainly did wonders for my facility in reading, if nothing else.

The first glimmer of what was to end up as a career in sociology was neither an exceptional curiosity about the social world nor a bent arising from family culture. Rather, I realized that one should pursue one's best chances, and since I was not particularly good at math and science, and no one dreamed of a career in the arts, it had to be words. But what to do with words was not clear.

I entered City College in February 1940 (City in those days had two entering and graduating classes a year, keyed to the New York City public-school calendar) and majored in history. I liked history and had a good memory. But my academic life soon had to contend with another interest. I was persuaded by a fellow student to attend a meeting of Avukah, the student Zionist organization. I was not a Zionist but was willing to hear what there was to be said for Zionism. It was an accident that had a strong impact on the rest of my life. The speaker was Seymour Melman, a recent graduate of City College who had just spent a year in Palestine and was reporting on his experiences. Had Avukah been simply a Jewish organization, I doubt that it would have made much impact on me. But these were socialist Zionists. What is more, they were intellectual socialist Zionists and looked down on nonintellectual socialist Zionists.

Melman was a charismatic figure. (The author of many books, he is now a professor of industrial engineering at Columbia University. At the time there was no hint of what he might become—as was true of most of us.) What led me to speak to him after his lecture I do not know. But soon I was on the staff of Avukah Student Action (the organization's national newspaper) and had become a Zionist; indeed, before that was settled, I was named editor. No loyalty oaths were required to become a member of Avukah. We had a three-point program, presented in documents portentously titled "theses," and in theoretical pamphlets. The organization may have been Zionist but the culture was in most ways left sectarian. We were generally allied on campus issues with the anti-Stalinist left—the socialists and the Trotskyites.

The three points of our program were to build a "non-minority Jewish center in Palestine," to fight fascism, and to foster a democratic American Jewish community. This program represented a somewhat off-center Zionism. The term non-minority was meant to leave room

for a binational state of Jews and Arabs. In those days we believed it possible for the two nations to share power, with neither being in the minority in a political or cultural sense. Our notion was that if both nations were guaranteed equal political rights, the Arab majority of Palestine would allow unrestricted Jewish immigration. At a time when Jews were being hunted down by the Nazis, when the doors of the United States and other Western countries were closed to Jewish refugees, and when Palestine itself had been closed to Jewish immigration by the British, unrestricted immigration was the minimal demand of every Zionist group, even one as eccentric as ours. In retrospect, our views were naive.

Avukah was a switching point on the road from socialism to sociology. At first it emphasized the socialism, of which I knew little until I became involved. But Avukah, following the pattern of other left sectarian organizations, had "study groups," in which we read not only Zionist classics but also socialist classics. Bukharin's Historical Materialism was particularly favored by some of our elders. But we were not Leninists. Though left, and critical of social democrats, the radical leaders of Avukah who tried to influence us were (Rosa) Luxemburgian—revolutionary, but against a directing central party and for education of the working masses. It was a very congenial bent. The only issues that called for action were Zionist ones; for the rest, education was sufficient. The doctrine hardly mattered, I am convinced. It is almost embarrassing to say we believed in revolution. The only way to relieve the embarrassment is to confess that we really did not.

What actually mattered to us was not our doctrines but the people we met and the things we read. For example, we read Partisan Review and The New International , in which Sidney Hook, James Burnham, and Dwight Macdonald then wrote. We often invited Macdonald to our summer camps, devoted to intensive "education." He had started the journal Politics ; some members of our group attended the early meetings and some wrote for it. My predecessors at Avukah Student Action had been Chester Rapkin, then beginning a career as a housing economist that would lead him to Columbia and Princeton, and Harold Orlans, who studied anthropology at Yale while working in an insane asylum as a conscientious objector during World War II (he wrote brilliantly on the joint experience for Politics ). Alfred J. Kahn, one of the three (very modestly paid) officers of Avukah, was to become a leading social worker and analyst of social policy; another, Meir Rabban, was to become, after some years in Palestine and Israel, a professor of psy-

chology at Sarah Lawrence. It would be impossible to list all the members of Avukah who became professors. No one expected that they would become professors before the war.

As editor of Avukah Student Action one of my duties—as Chester Rapkin explained—was to liven up the pages with pictures and cartoons, and I could find them free at the New Leader by burrowing through a pile of cuts they received from unions and other sources. There I met Daniel Bell. An informal seminar took place every Friday afternoon at the New Leader office. I did not participate directly but listened as I looked for something we could use in Avukah Student Action . Seymour Martin Lipset, with whom for a while I took the subway to college, joined Avukah briefly. He told me about the gifted and learned new Marxist refugee, Lewis Coser.

Thus a second effect of Avukah was to introduce me to the New York intellectual milieu. I will not exaggerate my modest position: I went to more meetings than I can remember on what is living and what is dead in Marxism, and I heard Philip Selznick, then moving steadily toward sociology, speak brilliantly. Just what he said I no longer recall.

A third effect, as the names Bell, Selznick, and Lipset suggest, was to make sociology a possibility—not as a job (who dreamed of any job except a clerkship with the government?) but as a role definition. I recall I abandoned history for economics, economics for public administration, public administration for sociology, and graduated in January 1944 with a degree in sociology.

The inner core of Avukah believed in social science as the handmaiden of socialism and revolution. In our little study groups we learned about Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom and about the interesting mix of the two scientific approaches, as we then thought of them, of psychoanalysis and Marxism being developed by the Frankfurt school, some of whose members had just arrived in the United States. Later, when Max Horkheimer was lecturing at Columbia, we all went religiously. After one or two lectures, he turned over the course to Leo Lowenthal. We were all deeply impressed by Lowenthal's range of learning. We read articles from the old Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , aided by our German-reading members (young refugees), and from Studies in Social Science and Philosophy . We learned about Horkheimer, Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin before they became the objects of serious study, though we did not learn much about them—that may have been our failing. Having known them in their early years in America (of course, not Walter Benjamin; he, alas,

never made it to the United States) colors our reading about the Frankfurt school now, when they have become legendary figures.

It was clear my bent toward social science owed more to nonacademic influences than to City College. I did not get to sociology until my third or fourth year. Though the sociology department had some able people, it did not influence me greatly. I remember other courses, in philosophy and psychology, better. These were the areas of strength at City College then, but I found that out too late.

I did learn one thing in the sociology department of City College, though. I learned about community studies and was fascinated by it. I wrote an honors paper on American community studies, and without ever having been to Chicago, I was converted to the Chicago style of ethnographic sociology. I knew very little about it, but I knew it was the kind of sociology I liked best.

By 1942, through Zelig Harris, one of the older people connected with Avukah and a gifted theoretical linguist, I had an opportunity to join a small wartime group at the University of Pennsylvania who were trained under Harris in what was then called descriptive linguistics. We were to specialize in various African languages and prepare teaching materials in case we were called on to teach them to soldiers. At that time I was in my third major at City College (public administration) with the vague thought it would help me get a government job. I leaped at the chance to work with Harris, and on something for which I would be paid (modestly). Harris believed that the only really difficult subjects were mathematics and theoretical physics and that anyone could learn linguistics and languages, in short order. He gave me two books, Edward Sapir's Language and Leonard Bloomfield's Language , and a few theoretical articles, and said, "Really, that's all there is. You won't have to spend much time on it [learning linguistics]." His was the arrogance of a supremely gifted mind. In time I was to be part of a team teaching Bengali; another team taught Moroccan Arabic. My own language, Swahili, was never called on. The fact that I was assigned Swahili indicated either that the American military was then very pessimistic (it is spoken in Tanzania and understood in the surrounding countries) or that Harris was particularly interested in it. Meanwhile I took courses in anthropology with A. Irving Hallowell and worked on a master's thesis on Swahili.

In the spring of 1944 I received a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a fellowship to study there for a doctorate in anthropology. Hallowell took me aside and said it was not a sensible thing

to do; there would be no jobs. (Whether he also thought, and said, that there would be no jobs for Jews, I do not recall; I had the impression later that that is one of the things he must have meant, but I may be wrong.) I regret taking his advice. I realized linguistics was not for me, but I found social anthropology very appealing.

And so I returned to New York to look for a job. One of the people one saw in those days when one was looking for a job was Daniel Bell. He told me that Max Horkheimer had been hired by the American Jewish Committee to do studies on anti-Semitism and was looking for an assistant. He tried me out, and I became his reader of American social-science literature. By the time he realized that was not what he wanted, I had found a job at another branch of the American Jewish Committee, the Contemporary Jewish Record , then being edited, surprisingly, by Clement Greenberg, the art critic of Partisan Review . He appreciated my modest connections with the intellectual left (after all, I had written for Politics ) and the fact that I must have learned something about Judaism and Jewish life and politics while I was in Avukah. I knew less than he had hoped, but more than he himself knew. The future of the Contemporary Jewish Record was then being reviewed by a committee headed by Lionel Trilling, whom I did not know, and as a result of their proposals it was transformed into Commentary , under the editorship of Elliot Cohen, not long after I joined the staff.

I was twenty-two, I had a job, but I do not know what to call the "occupation" of a staff member of the new Commentary of 1945. I did not call myself a journalist because I did not go out on stories, except perhaps to cover a speech. Cohen, aware of my interest in sociology, suggested I write a column on the social sciences titled "The Study of Man." One reason it suited a Jewish magazine was that so much of the research of the time dealt with anti-Semitism, incipient fascist tendencies, and national character—why were the Germans that way, or the Japanese, or the Russians? Or, for that matter, the Americans? All this interested me enormously, and the column played a role for a while in the early postwar period in bringing the work of the social sciences, in particular sociology influenced by social psychology, to an audience that would not have known it.

Simultaneously I was taking courses at Columbia toward a Ph.D. in sociology, but my time horizon was extended indeed. In those days one could work toward a Ph.D. as a part-time student, taking most of one's courses at night. Robert Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld taught at night or in the late afternoon. The classes were large. I do not know how many

of those taking courses really intended to become, or did become, sociologists. I received no support, but courses cost something like $12.50 a credit. The New School, where a galaxy of German refugees was teaching, was just as cheap. Since our friends often acted as ticket takers, we could sneak in and hear Erich Fromm and Meyer Shapiro free. Had I known of them, I would have tried to listen to Alfred Schutz, Albert Salomon, and Leo Strauss, all of whom I heard later but in individual lectures rather than courses.

I would not underestimate the education I received in sociology at Columbia University; the education I received at Commentary was, however, deeper and wider. At Columbia those two remarkable sociologists, Merton and Lazarsfeld, were presenting an exciting picture of the possibilities of sociology as a science. Merton's lectures brilliantly illuminated the nature of sociological thinking and sociological analysis; Lazarsfeld's were equally brilliant in demonstrating how the most subtle points of theoretical analysis could be tested through the analysis of quantitative data. C. Wright Mills lectured at that time in the college rather than in the graduate sociology department. But everyone went to hear him, and, from his own perspective, he also demonstrated the possibilities of a science of sociology. A few of us worked with him Saturday mornings at the old cavernous quarters of the Bureau of Applied Social Research on Fifty-ninth Street (where the New York City Convention Center now stands). Our task was to extract from long interviews, done by a previous class for the work that ultimately became White Collar , evidence in quantitative form for a large statement about what was happening to society.

Certainly I was as taken by these possibilities as anyone. For a while I was enthusiastic for sociology as a science. But by 1949 I had become doubtful. In that year I published a long essay in Commentary , "'The American Soldier' as Science," reflecting those doubts. Man, I wrote, was part of history, not nature, and the uniformities we might discover, whatever their interest and importance for a given time, place, and issue, could never achieve the generalizing power of theory, hypothesis, and law in the natural sciences. The American Soldier , a short series of books on which some of the leading sociologists of the time worked, made the greatest claim to establishing sociology as a social science or at least putting it on the road to becoming one. I argued that it was simply no more than a study of the American soldier in World War II: the generalizations that flowed from it and might be used in other settings were weak and thin, and the infinite variety of situations in which men

were found in history ensured that result. What we learned would inevitably be bound by time and place. My efforts at generalization after that point were carefully restricted and narrow: situation, facts, and data were crucial for determining what was in fact true, and any large statements about society, culture, personality, capitalism, industrialism, social control, and so on I met with skepticism. It always seemed to me that whatever the large generalization, one would always have to comment, "It all depends."

Was it the counterpoint of Commentary versus Columbia sociology that led to this result? Very likely. I spent most of my time at the magazine, and only one day or so a week at Columbia. Commentary was then one of the best schools one could attend (as is probably true for all intellectual magazines). There was Elliot Cohen, once a brilliant student of English at Yale and a remarkably creative editor of the Menorah Journal , an excellent Jewish magazine in the 1920s and 1930s. He was a radical in the early 1930s, part of that group of New York intellectuals who founded Partisan Review and have since become the subjects of memoirs and research.

The staff was much younger, except for Clement Greenberg, still an editor of Partisan Review and becoming a major figure who explained and promoted the work of the then young New York school of painters. In his double life (one assumed Commentary provided him with the basic living that neither Partisan Review nor his art reviews in The Nation could) he represented good English style and a particular empathy (though I am not sure that is the right word to apply to his crusty personality) for the intellectual German refugees he had strongly favored during his tenure at the Contemporary Jewish Record . I learned more from the younger members of the staff, and the particular view of man and society that I have presented owed the most to Irving Kristol. Kristol had come out of the same radical group that had once included Phil Selznick and Marty Lipset, but he had, without any apparent guru, abandoned socialism and radicalism and was reading European philosophers and theologians. He brought to our environment a concrete, practical interest in politics and journalism. Other members of the ongoing shifting seminar that Commentary was in those days included Robert Warshow, a celebrated critic who died young, Martin Greenberg, Clement's younger brother, and of course the many authors who dropped in and talked. The pressure was remarkably low. There seemed to be time for work on the magazine, attendance at Columbia courses, my own writing, and even chess games beginning at lunch that sometimes lasted

through a good part of the afternoon. The concrete education received at a magazine of high standards addressed to the general reader made us intolerant of nonsense or, even if it was not nonsense, anything that could not be made clear. This attitude was in some ways a help to me as a sociologist—we have a good deal of nonsense in our discipline (what academic discipline does not?). But it perhaps also led to an unwillingness to penetrate obscurity. Considering how much of what is, and has been, important in sociology is undoubtedly obscure, this unwillingness may have been a handicap to me.

In 1946 I went to the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Chicago to write a column on it for Commentary . There I saw Dan Bell, who had recently joined the staff of the social-science survey course at the University of Chicago, and I was taken with the idea of joining it myself. I was deeply impressed with the solid grounding in sociological classics the course gave. It is hard to realize that at the time the major works of Weber and Durkheim were not translated or in print in English, and special editions had to be prepared for these courses. Not long after, David Riesman passed through New York. As a member of the staff of the social-science course he was in a position to report back on my suitability. I did not go the University of Chicago: instead I took a leave from Commentary and worked with David Riesman on the project that became The Lonely Crowd and Faces in the Crowd . By the time The Lonely Crowd was published in 1950, it was clear to me that in addition to being a social commentator, an editor, and an expert on American Jews, I was also a sociologist.

It is true that my attendance at Columbia was erratic. Some years I took no courses; others, I returned to coursework with gusto. Whether I would ever get the doctorate was neither clear nor important to me. In 1955, at the invitation of Daniel Boorstin, I gave the Walgreen lectures on American Judaism at the University of Chicago. American Judaism, based on those lectures, was published the next year in his series on the history of American civilization. It might have served as my Ph.D. dissertation, but in a fit of bravado I decided I did not want to adapt it.

By that time I had left Commentary and was working as an editor at Anchor Books. Anchor Books was the brainchild of a recent graduate of Columbia, Jason Epstein, an editor who had wanted to start an American series of serious paperbacks modeled on the British Penguin series. In 1955 all American paperback series were for the mass market. It was Epstein's idea that there was or was going to be a market for paperback books in colleges. Among the first of the books he wanted to publish

was The Lonely Crowd . It was, however, too long for his series, which required books short enough to keep prices down. It fell on me to cut The Lonely Crowd by about a quarter, a task I approached not only with an eye to reducing size but also to some modest restructuring for clarity. I do feel the resultant work was easier to read, and it was that abridged edition that was read by a million American students (sales reached that figure by the early 1970s).

I have been associated with David Riesman since, and for some years as a collaborator, for following The Lonely Crowd we published Faces in the Crowd . All along we produced joint articles sociological and political, including "The Intellectuals and the Discontented Classes," which first appeared in Partisan Review and then in The New Radical Right (1955), edited by Daniel Bell. This book was a collection of essays in response to McCarthyism, on which we held a somewhat middle position owing to our sense that intellectuals could not be entirely applauded for their distance from the experience and feelings of middle America. The article—and The Lonely Crowd —demonstrated David Riesman's remarkable ability to understand general currents in American culture even without spending much time experiencing them directly. He can from a few fragments imagine the rest—and most of the time get it right.

The nature of our collaboration, as of all collaborations, was distinctive. When we first met, I was still excited over learning something about how to analyze qualitative questionnaires with C. Wright Mills, and Riesman thought of me as possibly bringing the then newer techniques of social science to his intended study of apathy, the origin of The Lonely Crowd . And indeed, we did work with questionnaires of various selected groups and occasionally individuals either selected or found accidentally (many are in Faces in the Crowd ). We also tried to develop ways of extracting meaning from them. But my role changed as we worked together. Influenced by the scientizing tendency of social science in those distant days, I tried to put Riesman's ideas, which were always intensely concrete, into some more general structure. He would take my bare, thin manuscripts and expand and embroider them, filling them with evocative details. These details often fought with the structure, and that clash is what many readers of The Lonely Crowd felt.

Collaboration with Riesman at Yale was an experience of living and working together, exchanging manuscripts for revision, expansion, and clarification (Riesman doing most of the elaboration, I attempting to introduce order). I believe, from conversations with Christopher Jencks,

a later collaborator, that he too tried to bring order to the richness and variety of Riesman's insights. That often meant sacrificing a few of them. So many thoughts and observations in so many directions was not my style: my work alone is rather more bare and, I must confess, less original.

Collaborating with Riesman involved more than scholarly work: for him, as for me, analysis and action (at least some kinds of action) were never far apart. While we worked on The Lonely Crowd, Israel was being born. Riesman opposed a Jewish state, as did Hannah Arendt and his mentor Erich Fromm, and as I did, from my own perspective. He became involved in efforts to divert the steady march to the creation of such a state. I participated to some extent in those efforts. In retrospect, however, I believe the opposition did not fully grasp the power of the demands by the two ethnic groups, Jews and Arabs, for separate and independent states regardless of the costs—internal disorder and poverty in many Arab states, eternal conflict for Israel. I believe now that there was no alternative to statehood; Riesman's thinking has not proceeded in that direction.

On the danger of nuclear warfare we shared the same view, and this was one of the principal concerns of the Committees of Correspondence, which Riesman helped organize in the late 1950s and which I served for a while as editor of its newsletter. Riesman's path was from liberalism to sociology, rather than socialism to sociology; he was never a socialist. But he retained, as I did, a sense of sociology as more than a scientific discipline divorced from a life involved in political and social issues. Sociology is still for many socialists and sociologists the pursuit of politics through academic means, though it is today a far different politics, pursued with different means.

As a result of my work in abridging The Lonely Crowd, Jason Epstein asked me to join him at Anchor Books, and I left Commentary . My years at Anchor also served as an education: in an institution in which there were almost no Jews (the first time in my life I was in such an environment); in the strange divorce between commercial publishing and what I conceived of as the intellectual life, a divorce that it fell on Jason Epstein to overcome; in the incredibly dynamic quality of American business. For no sooner had the first dozen paperbacks come out at Anchor than we already had competitors—many of them. Unlike us, Penguin had had a clear run of some years because no one had thought to challenge it.

For some reason I did not think of myself as someone who would

remain in magazine publishing when at Commentary, nor as someone who would remain in book publishing when at Anchor. The option of sociology was always available, and undoubtedly something in my temperament kept pushing me toward academic life.

In 1957 I joined the staff of the Communism in American Life project, funded by the Fund for the Republic (itself funded by the Ford Foundation), to write a book on the question of who became communists in the United States. Marty Lipset was originally supposed to do the book but decided not to and suggested I do it. It looked like a good idea, and I left Anchor. I thought that topic would fit the bill for a Ph.D. dissertation in sociology and submitted the published book, The Social Basis of American Communism, to Columbia University in 1962 to complete the requirements for the degree.

By that time I had already taught as a visitor at the University of California, Berkeley, at Bennington College, and at Smith College. I felt like a medieval journeyman, going from place to place with my tattered course outlines. But I had more or less defined my role as a sociologist. I taught race relations, or the sociology of ethnic groups, as well as urban sociology—I was, or felt myself to be, an heir to the University of Chicago tradition. I filled out my schedule with other courses—social change, nonquantitative research methods, and a variety of other topics. At Bennington I taught a course on women in developing societies. Over the years I thought of a number of projects in ethnicity or urbanism and finally ended up doing a study of the ethnic groups of New York City; this project became Beyond the Melting Pot (1963).

Beyond the Melting Pot was my second major effort in collaboration, but in this one I took the lead. It was not to be the end of my work with Daniel P. Moynihan, for afterward we considered, particularly after I relocated at Harvard in the late 1960s, conducting conferences and publishing multiauthor volumes on ethnicity as an international phenomenon. One such volume was published, Ethnicity (1975). I helped organize another conference on international dimensions of ethnicity and social policy, which has resulted in another book, edited with Ken Young, Ethnic Pluralism and Public Policy (1983). My original intention in Beyond the Melting Pot was to recruit a number of persons who had experience as members of an ethnic group and knew it from the inside to participate in a joint work I had outlined. Each section was intended to fit into an overall thesis about the character and meaning of ethnicity in New York and, by implication, in American society. At the time ethnicity was not a hot topic, and it was hard to find people I

respected who were willing to collaborate within the framework I had designed. Moynihan was then at Syracuse University, after serving with Governor Averell Harriman. He had already written widely noted articles in The Reporter, then edited by Irving Kristol, particularly on the epidemic of slaughter on the highways, which made him an authority on automobile safety long before Ralph Nader. Kristol suggested Moynihan: it was clear on the basis of early meetings he could do just about any work, including an essay on the Irish of New York, that was responsive to the framework I had set out. In the end he was the only person I recruited for Beyond the Melting Pot .

Working with Moynihan was entirely different from working with Riesman: Moynihan's prose is so elegant that I hesitate to touch it. Our collaborations have consisted of my writing what I have to say, and he writing what he has to say; then I knit the two together at the seams. Our styles are very different, and often we are saying somewhat different things, but the method has seemed to work, as in the long introduction to the second edition of Beyond the Melting Pot and the introduction to Ethnicity . Daniel Bell played a key role in the origins of Beyond the Melting Pot, because he suggested me to his friend James Wechsler of the New York Post, who was considering doing a series of articles on the ethnic groups of New York. The New York Post Foundation put up some money—a very modest sum. The foundation didn't like the first installments and cut off my funding, an action that may not have been legal. Whether the New York Post Foundation was a funding agency or a means of getting publishable copy for the New York Post was not clear to me. It also insisted, despite having withdrawn support, on sharing royalties. From its financial point of view the grant was one of the most productive it ever made.

I was not sure what I would do after Beyond the Melting Pot . From an academic journeyman spending a year teaching at one institution after another I had become a wandering semiacademic grantsman, collecting small grants to write one book after another. One possibility that attracted me strongly was to become an expert on Japan. During my year in Berkeley, 1961–62, I had become captivated by the Orient. Though China was closed, Japan was a possibility. I perhaps could learn Japanese and write about the one non-Western society that was becoming Westernized in some key respects (such as achieving technological competence). I would go to Japan, although to do what besides learning Japanese was not clear to me. I would tell my academic friends just to needle them; and without a definite project—except self-improvement!—I would go on my

own money (I had some savings) rather than ask a foundation for a grant. My academic friends were shocked and prevailed on me not to do such a silly thing. One day when leaving Random House, where I was consulting for Jason Epstein—the publishing firm was then located in the wonderful brownstone Villard Houses that now form a forecourt for the Helmsley Palace—I decided to visit the Ford Foundation across Fifty-first Street. Doak Barnett was then working there. I told him that I wanted to go to Japan, and he asked me to write him a letter explaining what I planned to study. I did so, saying I wanted to learn about Tokyo by living in Tokyo, the way I had learned about New York by living in New York. How gloriously free and easy were the foundations in 1961! I was given a substantial grant and first-class airfare without having to trouble anyone for letters of recommendation, at a time when I held no academic position in the United States, and without having to arrange any academic affiliation in Japan.

My Japanese experience was too mixed to be summarized easily. After hard work I discovered that I would not, at thirty-nine or with my native talents, get very far in learning Japanese in the year I had available; instead, I decided to learn about Tokyo. I had some contacts and began writing about the city. I was able to publish articles, which I think still express a rather fresh sense of what makes cities work, in the Japan Times and in the Japanese periodical Chuo Koron . But it was clear I would never become an expert on Japan. I returned to the United States after one year with the strong feeling that I wanted to devote my attention to a country I could know well, as against one I could never know well, and get involved with something practical and useful to mankind. Washington, D.C., was then the seat of a wonderfully optimistic administration; Moynihan arranged for me to see a number of people, and since I now fancied myself an urban expert, I ended up in an undefined position in the Housing and Home Finance Agency (which later became the Department of Housing and Urban Development), then headed by the economist Robert Weaver. It was certainly one of the most exciting years of my life. The Peace Corps had started; major programs were being launched in the cities, with money from the Ford Foundation and the federal government, to deal with juvenile delinquency specifically and with poverty generally; the War on Poverty was being designed; and the model cities program would soon be under way. Since my job was poorly defined, I got involved in everything. But before the end of my first year Lewis Feuer, then teaching a huge (three to four hundred students) social science integrated course at the University of California,

Berkeley, and finding it difficult to recruit fellow teachers in that period of ample support for academics, asked me to become a permanent member of the course staff. I had met Feuer originally through Irving Kristol, whose teacher he had been at City College. And so in 1963, at the age of forty, I became a sociologist by appointment and profession as well as through the content of my work, and I have remained one ever since.

What kind of sociologist? As a sociologist I have been more interested in specific issues than in the discipline of sociology itself, more in empirical subject matter than in theory, more in substance than in methodology. The issues, subjects, and substance have been drawn mostly from my experience. I wrote about Jews because I knew something about them and worked on a Jewish magazine. I wrote about American communists because having been a radical I had some experience of communism and felt I could understand why people become communists. I wrote about student radicalism in the 1960s and 1970s for similar reasons—and had so published Remembering the Answers (1970). I wrote about cities because I had always lived in New York (though by 1963 I could reckon a year in Berkeley, a year in Tokyo, and a year in Washington) and felt I knew about them; and I wrote about public policy because after my year in Washington and my subsequent involvement in various committees dealing with public policy I thought I understood that subject. I would not have dared on my own to tackle such a topic as the American character, as David Riesman dealt with in The Lonely Crowd; but the one aspect of anthropology that truly interested me was the new culture and personality school of Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Geoffrey Gorer, and others, and I felt fully committed to applying it to the United States. How to apply it is another problem: the culture-and-personality orientation has foundered on methodological issues, in part, but also because general confidence in social psychology and psychoanalysis has been deeply shaken.

Culture and personality are the only topics on which I have worked that I have never fully abandoned. A book is often a hostage to the future. Even if one desires to get away from a subject, the investment of time and energy and commitments to speak or write on the subject lead, in the absence of a strong will, to reengagement with it. My involvement in ethnicity and race led into involvement in the policy issues they raised: and so Affirmative Discrimination (1975) and Ethnic Dilemmas, 1964–1982 (1983). Though I have not written a book directly on urban issues, I have written many articles—and in the American context there

is no way of making a sharp distinction between urban sociology and the sociology of race and ethnicity. Dealing with race, ethnicity, and urban issues, I was inevitably drawn into social policy, and much of my writing for the past fifteen years has dealt with issues in that field.

Clearly my experience has circumscribed the areas on which I feel I can write with any sense of confidence, and rarely does an article, essay, or book review of mine go beyond these bounds. I regret this narrowness. But with no base in either large theory or a generally applicable methodology, I do not feel I can deal effectively with a topic I cannot approach, at least in some measure, through experience—if not directly, then by analogy.

Plainly I am only in part a sociologist. I have also been an editor, for Avukah Student Action , the Contemporary Jewish Record, Commentary , and The Public Interest and at Anchor Books and Random House. The role of early connections is evident in my current editorial role with The Public Interest , founded by Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell while I was living in Berkeley. My succeeding Bell as coeditor reflected not only my own shift to policy concerns—a shift I date from the late 1950s and early 1960s but which was evident before—but also the shift of others, such as Kristol and Bell. Because I was, on the one hand, an editor, interpreter, and translator—not, I think, a popularizer—through my editorial roles and, on the other, interested in policy, sociology, which in its contemporary form has eschewed policy advice, was not fully congenial. Thus while I was a member of the sociology department at the University of California, my main job was the interpretive one of presenting the social sciences to non–social-science majors, and I cultivated connections with the Department of City Planning and the School of Social Work. As a member of the sociology department at Harvard my main job is in the Graduate School of Education—which is also something of a school of public policy and social issues. These mixed roles are in part a result of the mixed career I have followed and consequently of the opportunities that were offered to me; but they are in larger part a matter of taste. The skepticism about the sociological theory that I first expressed as early as 1949 has not been modified by the history of sociology since then.

But sociology, I believe, was the only academic discipline that might have accommodated me and people like me. For a long time it was necessary to explain that sociology was not social work and not socialism. But for some of us who were involved with socialism, and who would never abandon concern with the practical issues of society that

social work represented, sociology offered a spacious home. It was not necessary to vow fealty to any theory or methodology. With some key issues in the world, an involvement in which one abided by the normal canons of scholarship—read the literature, footnoted the facts, and examined the validity of one's ideas the best one could—was all that sociology demanded, at least of those who, through accidents of history, selected it as the discipline within which they would work. I hope that at the margin it will continue to offer this opportunity.