PART I—
ACADEMIC MEN

Chapter One—
Imagining the Real

Dennis Wrong

As one grows older, one is always surprised—and sometimes depressed—to realize the truth of "in my beginning is my end" and "in my end is my beginning." T. S. Eliot was, of course, thinking of personal identity in its deepest and fullest sense, but his words also apply to "merely" intellectual beginnings and ends, the more so when reading, writing, and thinking have from a fairly early age been central to one's self-definition.

I decided more or less consciously that I wanted to become an "intellectual" at a moment of abrupt and unwelcome transition in my life several months before my sixteenth birthday. After living two years in Geneva, Switzerland, where my father was Canadian delegate to the League of Nations, my parents sent me to board at a prominent preparatory school in Toronto. The school was not altogether strange to me, for I had been a boarder in its junior division the year before we moved to Europe after living in Washington, D.C., for most of my early life. Until now I had always identified myself entirely, indeed overeagerly, with my peers and had in fact been bitterly unhappy over the previous move to Europe. Twice my parents had dragged me, in a sulky and sullen mood, across the Atlantic. This time I was not only older but, feeling that my European sojourn had made me more refined and cosmopolitan than my schoolmates, I resisted making yet another readjustment to an environment I had not chosen.

We returned in the summer of 1939, and the coming of the war removed all possibility of my going back to Switzerland. It lessened my anger at my parents, but it made me, if anything, more inclined to

idealize my years at school in Geneva and more determined than ever not to become a hearty, provincial, prep-school philistine. Since I laid claim to a personal relation to Europe, where the great events of the war were unfolding, I decided that I ought to be more fully informed about them. So I started to follow the world news and tacked maps of the battlefronts from the Sunday New York Times "Week in Review" section on the wall of my dormitory room, which my schoolmates regarded as a pretentious affectation.

I bought my first "serious" book, Fallen Bastions , by a British newspaper correspondent in Central Europe, to learn about the events preceding the war, especially the Munich crisis, which had the year before impinged on even our self-centered adolescent concerns at school in Geneva. The author, G. E. R. Gedye, passionately denounced the appeasement of Hitler and wrote favorably of "socialism." The leading Toronto bookstore—Britnell's, incredibly still there and looking much the same more than forty years later—carried other British Left Book Club publications; I bought a few and was quickly converted by a John Strachey pamphlet entitled Why You Should Be a Socialist . In the next year I read books, many of them British Pelicans that still sit on my shelf by Strachey, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, G. D. H. Cole, and Harold Laski on socialism, politics, and world affairs.

I also exchanged long, nostalgic letters with my closest Geneva friend, the late Stuart Schulberg, son of pioneer Hollywood movie magnate B. P. Schulberg and younger brother of the novelist Budd Schulberg, who later was for a long time the producer of the NBC "Today" show. I was astounded by his opposition to American entrance into the war, for at school we had all declaimed against the wickedness of Hitler. I wrote a letter to Life magazine denouncing the American isolationists—my first appearance in print—and Stuart wrote a letter disagreeing with me. His opinions, as I began to grasp, reflected those of the Communist party, to which he had been exposed through his brother, who had been a leading figure among the Hollywood Communists of the 1930s. Stuart had always been the older, dominant figure in our friendship, so I wavered in the direction of his views. I bought and read International Publishers' editions of the shorter writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, as well as Capital , managing to plough through at least the first (and most difficult!) chapters. The war maps on my wall were replaced by cut-out pictures of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, though some vague, intuitive wisdom kept me from including Stalin among them.

Never one to do things by halves, I offered my services—at the suggestion of a teacher who claimed to be a secret sympathizer—to the Canadian Communist party newspaper just before it and the party itself were banned, for Canada was at war and it was, of course, the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact. The editor, who was elected a few years later to the Ontario legislature after the Soviet Union had become our ally, asked me to proofread a huge manuscript, so I carried galleys of The Socialist Sixth of the World by Hewlett Johnson, the "Red Dean" of Canterbury, back to my dorm room. Even at my tender age, I found it hard to believe that there could possibly be a land of such milk and honey as the contemporary Soviet Union in the dean's description of it. Still, I rather cherish the memory of sitting in my room at Upper Canada College, identified by recent Canadian Marxist sociologists as the seedbed of the Canadian corporate elite, reading tracts for the soon to be outlawed Communist party.

I sometimes wonder if I am perhaps not the only person in the world who became a Communist sympathizer after the Stalin-Hitler pact and was disillusioned within a few weeks by the Soviet invasion of Finland. In my case, at least, the time at which I became politically conscious—which almost invariably meant adopting left-wing views—was undoubtedly crucial in shaping my later outlook. I began to read, even subscribe to, the Nation, the New Republic, and the New Statesman, which during the twenty-two months of the Soviet-German alliance were firmly anti-Stalinist, printing articles, often by former Communists, that were highly critical not only of Stalinism but even of Marxism. All these journals reverted to pro-Soviet apologetics and at times outright fellow traveling after Hitler invaded Russia, but I was immunized forever against the illusion that truth and virtue are always to be found on the left. I also picked up an occasional copy of the Trotskyist monthly, the New International, which provided crucial "anticipatory socialization" for my later encounter in New York with former or near Trotskyists associated with Dwight Macdonald's Politics, Partisan Review, Commentary, and, a bit later, Dissent . I continued to think of myself as at least a qualified Marxist and an ardent democratic socialist, generally sympathetic to the Canadian Commonwealth Federation, the Canadian party modeled on the British Labour party, in which I was later active as an undergraduate.

The political weeklies also contained cultural "back of the book" sections, which were resolutely highbrow, drawing their reviewers and authors from the most advanced Bloomsbury and Greenwich Village

circles. Here I gleaned an idea of the proper preoccupations and values of the bona fide intellectual, a label that, as Daniel Bell has recently shown, scarcely predates this century and has today acquired a much looser, vaguer, and doubtless less "elitist" meaning than it used to have. I took up smoking cigarettes, cultivated less plebeian tastes in classical music, and plunged into modern literature. In the course of my two years at Upper Canada I read the poetry of Eliot, Auden, Spender, and Jeffers and the fiction of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, the early Joyce, Lawrence, Malraux, Romains, Silone, Isherwood, Saroyan, Thomas Wolfe, and Richard Wright. (I did not read the great Russians or the more "difficult" writers, except for some of the poets, until later.)

I decided, as many did in those days, that I wanted to be a writer. I wrote about a dozen sketches and short stories, very much in the vein of William Saroyan, most of them full of wide-eyed adolescent romanticism about the wonder and glory of it all. Several were printed in the school literary magazine and won me a prize on graduation for the best prose fiction. I also wrote political articles, especially in a short-lived school newspaper that I edited, exhorting my contemporaries to build a new, more just social order after the war and liberally quoting Marx, Lenin, Eugene V. Debs, Big Bill Haywood, and other left-wing luminaries.

I first encountered sociology in V. F. Calverton's 1937 Modern Library anthology. Calverton was hardly a sociologist or even an academic, but an independent, "premature" anti-Stalinist Marxist who included selections by, among others, Lao-tze, Augustine, Machiavelli, Locke, Darwin, Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini, Max Eastman, and Sidney Hook as well as such unambiguous sociologists as Spencer, Durkheim, Weber, and Cooley. When Robert Bierstedt revised the book more than twenty years later, he dropped many of the original choices, complaining that V. F. Calverton's "predilections" were "Marxian" and that he included too much "social philosophy." Accurate enough, but it occurs to me that my own sense of sociology may have been permanently formed—or, if you like, deformed—by Calverton's comprehensiveness. I would love to have possessed the wit and self-confidence, or perhaps the chutzpah, that led Daniel Bell as a fledgling graduate student to describe himself as a "specialist in generalizations" (though Dan says he spoke "without wit or irony"). I was, in any case, voted by my graduating class at Upper Canada the member "with the most opinions on the most subjects."

Although I acquired strong later interests, world politics and interna-

tional relations, ideological politics centering on the left and Marxism, and literature have somehow stubbornly remained my bedrock intellectual concerns, perhaps helping to explain why I have never been able to embrace fully the identity of sociologist. Often enough I have tried to set aside and resist the claims of the first two—never, never, never those of the third! Politics was a kind of family heritage—obviously so in the case of international relations because my father was a diplomat and I lived for two years at an impressionable age in Geneva on the eve of the most terrible war in history. I thought of my radicalism as a rebellion against my family, Upper Canada College, and my class. But I grew up in Washington, D.C., and later spent much time there visiting my parents, who lived in Washington for a total of eighteen years in three separate periods from the 1920s to the 1950s. I lived more briefly in Ottawa but regularly visited my parents and my sister there and vacationed at a family summer cottage nearby for more than thirty years. Washington and Ottawa are notoriously one-industry towns dominated by the business of government and politics. I hardly needed to be instructed about the significance of the state, solemnly declared to be "relatively autonomous" by recent sociologists, having spent so much of my youth in capital cities as well as in the Geneva of the ill-fated League of Nations, where conflicts among states loomed so large.

I can't remember ever even contemplating going to any university other than the University of Toronto, though this may be only because with the war on, my choices were inevitably limited to Canada. My parents were both children of well-known Toronto professors. My mother's father, a classicist, had married the daughter of the second president of the university and had himself served as acting president and as principal of its largest college (the University of Toronto is a federation of publicly supported faculties and several small church-related colleges). My father's father had virtually created Canadian history as a serious field of scholarship, had founded the Department of History, and had written the textbooks on British and Canadian history used for many years in the Ontario high schools. My father had taught history at the university before joining the newly created Canadian foreign service. I did make a point of separating myself from my Upper Canada College classmates by entering the large nondenominational college, a third of whose students were Jewish. I had already acquired a kind of philosemitic outlook, for in Geneva most of my friends had been American Jews from New York or German Jews on the first leg of permanent migration from Nazi Germany. But there

was an awful lot of anti-Semitism, at least of the genteel variety, in Toronto at that time.

During my freshman year I stumbled in my own reading on various mystical ideas, chiefly in the writings of Aldous Huxley and Henry Miller, and turned to philosophy in search of answers—to popularized accounts by C. E. M. Joad and even Will Durant, Schopenhauer, the essays of William James and Bertrand Russell, and some writings of Bergson, Dewey, and Whitehead. All of this reading knocked me for a loop because I wanted to think of myself as a hardheaded, atheistic scientific materialist. I didn't know what was happening to me and thought I might be having some kind of mystical experience or that I had been unlucky enough to hit on the ultimate secret, hidden from, or suppressed by, others, that nothing had any meaning. I babbled incoherently to a few people, including teachers and my father, and obtained a psychiatrist's certificate that I was suffering a nervous breakdown so as not to flunk out. In spite of doing little or no studying for my courses, I wrote and passed all my exams, achieving respectable grades.

I realize now that I was undergoing an acute anxiety attack. The discovery of so much that I didn't know and couldn't understand, of so many books that I hadn't read, overwhelmed me. I had never been any good at sports; I was not very successful with women, usually vainly pursuing popular, good-looking girls a bit older than me; and I had turned my back on wanting to be "one of the boys" in a passive, conforming spirit. My sense of personal worth depended totally on my intellectuality. I thought that I was nothing if I could not sound like the supersophisticated characters in Huxley's novels, or like Jallez and Jerphanion, the Parisian students of Jules Romains's endless "Men of Good Will" series of novels (utterly forgotten, it seems, today). Pathetic and juvenile, as I even half knew, but it was a long time before I fully recovered from this experience, which often recurred in milder forms for years afterward, usually at the beginning of the new academic year, and was the main cause of the writing block that I suffered in graduate school and for some time after.

The best students at Toronto enrolled in the honors program, requiring higher grades and an additional year of study to earn the degree. The program was designed as the opposite of Harvard's general-education curriculum, providing three years of fairly intensive specialized study in a particular field. I was tempted by a philosophy and English literature combination, but feared it after my "breakdown." Why did I choose sociology? Partly for no better reason than that my first girlfriend had

chosen it, but also because it seemed relevant to my socialist beliefs and, the status of sociology being a lowly one, we were required to take courses in political science, economics, and philosophy as well as others chosen from an array that included history, psychology, and anthropology. My choice of sociology was also a rebellion against the family association with history. Several onetime colleagues of my father and grandfather even sought me out to try to dissuade me from wasting my time on such an unsound, newfangled, and disreputable pseudodiscipline.

Despite a small teaching staff, sociology was a popular honors subject, partly because an undergraduate degree in it entitled one to credit for a full year's work toward a degree in social work. This advantage attracted many women, who in my year outnumbered the four males by more than three to one. One of us was an older man who had already begun a career as a social worker, but the other two and I became close friends; with the addition of a few women, including several from the psychology program, with which we shared many courses, we formed a kind of nucleus of serious and interested students. In my senior year we were joined by a short, articulate young man named Erving Goffman. I had met him on a summer job for the government in Ottawa; on learning that he planned to resume his interrupted studies by coming to the University of Toronto to obtain the remaining degree credits he needed, I urged him to try sociology. (It may well be the only thing I am remembered for in future histories of sociology!)

Goffman stories are legion among those who knew him at all well, although mine go back farther than just about anyone else's. I shall confine myself to a few recollections about his intellectual outlook. The widespread notion that Erving was an inspired naïf, a novelist manqué with unusual powers of social observation, is utterly wrong. He already had an acute and far-ranging theoretical mind when I met him. He was much more intellectually advanced than the rest of us; I remember him rebuking us for reading textbooks and popularizations instead of tackling the originals. Once he defended Freud's emphasis on the body and the priority of infant experience against the more congenial neo-Freudian culturalists we all favored. His later antipathy to psychoanalysis is well known, but he created in me the first small twinge of doubt as to whether there was not perhaps more truth and profundity in the vision of the founder than in all the Erich Fromms, Karen Horneys, and Gordon Allports who were so ready to revise him. Erving had studied philosophy and had actually read in full Whitehead's Process and Reality . He argued in Whiteheadian language that reality should be con-

ceived "along the lines on which it is naturally articulated," a rule he obviously followed in his later work.

All of us, including Erving, were most attracted by the cultural anthropology that strongly shaped the sociology we were taught. Its chief purveyor was the senior sociologist, C. W. M. Hart, an Australian anthropologist who had been a student of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Some of us also took anthropology courses from Reo Fortune, Margaret Mead's second husband, and in our senior year from a young anthropologist out of Chicago with whom we mixed a good deal socially. But Hart was the most inspiring of teachers and undoubtedly deserved major credit for the surprising number of Toronto students from this period who went on to become professional sociologists or anthropologists. He was a large, saturnine man, resembling depictions of Simon Legree. He had a reputation for being something of a reprobate; it was rumored that he had been banned for drunken brawling from several local taverns. This reputation, in conjunction with his witty mockery of conventional pieties in the classroom, led the Catholic college to forbid their students from studying sociology, and another denominational college to discourage theirs. Hart was a convinced functionalist. He gave us a year-long course (all Toronto courses ran for both semesters, with an exam at the end of the year) on Durkheim, especially Le Suicide, sections of which I translated since it was not yet available in English.

I missed the theory course offered by S. D. Clark, the other senior sociologist and later the dean of Canadian sociology, because he was on leave one year, but I first learned of the importance of Max Weber in his course on the development of Canada, in which he discussed religious movements. We thought of Clark as a historian rather than a sociologist, and unlike more recent students we were not very interested in Canada, whoring, rather, after universal generalizations. In many ways Clark was ahead of his time—not, as we thought, behind it—in his historicist conception of the atemporality of functionalist community studies. But he failed to enchant us with new vistas like those apparently opened up by functionalism and the study of culture and personality. In common with others at this time, my sense of the potentialities of sociology was strongly awakened by Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom, which tried to synthesize three of my own major interests: an interpretation of fascism and the rise of Hitler, a version of psychoanalysis that was culturally relevant, and left-wing political sympathies.

Both Hart and Clark introduced us to Talcott Parsons's Structure of Social Action, and Parsons himself visited us for several public lectures.

I remember Goffman and me infuriating our classmates by asking him questions that gave him the impression that all present had read and understood his book as thoroughly as we had, with the result that his later remarks were over the heads of most of the audience. Robert Merton also came and gave us his famous discussion of manifest and latent functions. I was enthralled by his clarity and rigor after the rather fuzzy, organicist anthropological functionalism to which I had been exposed and decided then and there to do graduate work at Columbia instead of following the usual path of Canadian students to Chicago. To be sure, I was also excited by New York, where I had visited Geneva school friends several years before, and looked forward to the prospect of finding congenial literary and anti-Stalinist left political circles there.

In my senior year I read George Orwell and Arthur Koestler (including Darkness at Noon and his essay collection The Yogi and the Commissar ) and discovered Partisan Review . I was fully aware that the political views I formed from these sources were far from popular in the university community. It was the last year of the war, and I could not know that in the passionate debate among intellectuals over communism and the Soviet Union that lay just ahead, the side I had chosen would be confirmed by world events before the end of the decade and was already attracting the most able and independent writers and thinkers. But the guest speaker at my graduating class banquet was a Soviet Embassy official resplendent in a Red Army uniform. (Less than a year later he was expelled from the country when it was revealed that he was the coordinator of Soviet espionage in Canada. Fifteen years later the same man became the first Soviet ambassador to Cuba after Anastas Mikoyan's famous visit had secured Fidel Castro's alignment with the Soviet bloc.) I was aware of the efforts of the Communists to penetrate the CCF, including the student CCF club of which I was president, and of their insistent demands for a new popular front. They were firmly resisted on grounds of principle by David Lewis, the CCF national secretary, later leader of the New Democratic Party, its successor party, and a former Rhodes scholar whom I knew and respected. When they failed, Communist candidates ran in several Toronto federal and provincial constituencies, in which I campaigned arduously for the CCF. Two of my teachers who were Americans took me aside and solemnly warned me to be sure in New York to shun the "profascist" followers of Trotsky and the Norman Thomas socialists. I silently resolved to do just the opposite and in due course acted accordingly.

Merton's lectures did not disappoint me, but my first year at Colum-

bia (1945–46) was frustrating. I found that I already knew more sociology than most of my fellow students and, needing less time to study, was eager to explore the New York scene but could find no companions to join me. I retained a tendency to court unattainable women. Also, most of the students still adhered to the old pro-Soviet progressivism and were shocked at the idea that the Soviet Union was as totalitarian as Nazi Germany and that Soviet domination was a tragedy for the nations of Eastern Europe.

Years before, when I had first aspired to be an intellectual, I had been much impressed by the declaration of a character in André Malraux's Man's Hope that the way to "make the best of one's life" was "by converting as wide a range of experience as possible into conscious thought." (Still a pretty good definition of the intellectual's vocation, I think.) I was acutely conscious of the narrowness of my own experience and strongly regretted (I still do) not serving overseas in the war. So I jumped at the chance to work as a temporary seaman on a ship out of Montreal carrying a United Nations relief cargo to Europe. I enjoyed a proletarian-style Mediterranean cruise, stood the graveyard watch from midnight to four A.M., and caught at least a glimpse of the underside of postwar Europe when we docked for long stays in Venice and Trieste. Two summers later I repeated the experience, this time to the Baltic, docking at Gdynia, Hamburg, Rotterdam, and Antwerp. I was able to arrange to leave the ship and spent most of the summer in Paris, with shorter visits to Geneva, London, and Oxford. It turned out, alas, to be sixteen years before I again set foot in Europe, so these summers were much valued. I also cherish the memory of having worked and lived at close quarters—and played, on visits ashore in port—with a lively group of men from a working-class background quite different from my own. I have the impression that such an experience is less common among young people today than it was in my generation.

Back in New York, I fell in with a group of young literary bohemians in Greenwich Village. They were considerably more highbrow and self-consciously intellectual than the Beats who became famous a few years later. Essentially, they were a kind of junior auxiliary to the Partisan Review , toward which, though they were occasional contributors, their attitude was highly ambivalent. I was much influenced by this circle for nearly a decade. They were scornful of academic life and particularly contemptuous of sociology, which did not strengthen my own far from robust self-confidence. I felt guilty for lacking the nerve to emulate them by burning my bridges to an academic career, although I was also

sensibly restrained by the unstable, Luftmensch traits I sensed in several of the group whom I knew best.

Thanks to Nathan Glazer, a fellow Columbia graduate student, I began to review books for the old Menshevik organ, the New Leader , and for Commentary , of which Nat was a junior editor and to which several of my literary friends were also contributors. My first two published articles, on family sociology and on demography, eventually appeared in the "Study of Man" section created by Nat, who was himself its most brilliant contributor. I wrote regularly for Commentary for more than twenty years until the early 1970s, when its editor, Norman Podhoretz, turned the journal in an increasingly strident and monolithic antileft direction, and I switched to Dissent as my major place of publication.

At Columbia I was inevitably drawn to C. Wright Mills, who was a link between the sociology faculty and the larger New York intellectual world. His conception of sociology was more to my taste than that favored by most of the Columbia department in this period of strenuous discipline building. Ten years later his Sociological Imagination was a book I would dearly love to have written myself—certainly my favorite of Mills's works, most of which I commented on in print at the time of their appearance, applauding their vigor and scope while criticizing the rhetorical radicalism that later made Mills a founder and hero of the New Left. As Irving Louis Horowitz has correctly stressed in his biography, there was more to Mills than his politics. His later work suffered, I think, from his rupture with the New York intellectuals and, more specifically, with his Columbia colleagues Merton, Richard Hofstadter, and Lionel Trilling (as reported by Horowitz).

I completed my course work and passed my written and oral comprehensives within two years but avoided writing any papers with the single exception of a long one, for Mills, on bureaucracy in the novels of Franz Kafka. I spent another two years in New York teaching part-time at New York University and fiddling with several abortive dissertation projects. Then I got married and took my first full-time teaching job at Princeton but was let go after a year. The experience was repeated the next year at the Newark branch of Rutgers University. The pay was low and the teaching hours long by today's standards. The main reason I lost both jobs was the shrinking enrollment caused by the small college-age cohorts born in the worst years of the Depression, but my confidence was shaken, and I still had not even settled on a dissertation topic. Partly to appease my parents' anxieties over my career vacillations, partly to show them that I was capable on their own terms, I twice took

the examinations for the Canadian foreign service and was one of the dozen or so out of several hundred candidates who qualified on both occasions. But at the point of decision I drew back from the only serious alternative to an academic career that I have ever contemplated.

I was, however, much more influenced during those years than I then cared to admit by the world of my father. He was appointed the first Canadian ambassador to the United States and served for all but the opening eighteen months of the Truman administration, remaining in Washington for such a long time because old friends going back to the 1920s were now top State Department people, most notably Dean Acheson, the secretary of state. I visited my parents often, not only because the luxurious comforts of the embassy were welcome after drab graduate-student living conditions, but also to get the feel of official Washington and enjoy at least a worm's-eye view of history in the making. The succession of international crises and major decisions in the six years from the Truman Doctrine to the Korean peace settlement is surely unparalleled in American peacetime history. Canada, more than ever before or since, was involved in nearly all of them, and my father, always a tremendously hard worker, wore himself out. He died in his sixtieth year only seven months after finally leaving Washington.

In addition to what I had learned at second hand, I had chances to hear Acheson and other leading figures—among them Lester Pearson (often), Oliver Franks, Felix Frankfurter, Hubert Humphrey, and Christian Herter—discuss informally world (and also domestic) events. The decisions of those years were improvised under intense pressures, as is true, to be sure, of most political decisions. Acheson in 1969 entitled his memoirs Present at the Creation , but twenty years earlier neither he nor anyone else could have imagined that they were laying the foundations of an American foreign policy that is still in effect after nearly forty years. I learned enough to know that the attacks of the "nationalist" Republican right were mostly nonsense, as were the charges of American imperialism still heard at the time in my own liberal-left milieu and revived in the 1960s by the revisionist historians of the cold war. Realism about the cold war and foreign policy in general has perhaps more than anything else isolated me from the conventional pieties of academic liberalism.

I had one year of systematic education in the field of international relations. After losing my second teaching job, the opportunity came through my father to work as a research assistant to George F. Kennan on problems of American foreign policy at the Institute for Advanced

Study in Princeton. Few, if any, graduate programs could possibly have matched this experience. Most important, Kennan tried out his own developing ideas on his small staff. J. Robert Oppenheimer, then director of the institute, and several top Princeton professors often participated in our group discussions. Several State Department officials and foreign diplomats visited us, as did Isaiah Berlin and Hans Morgenthau. It was an unforgettable year.

Kennan used to say that diplomats differed from their fellow citizens because their careers required them to know sin. A slight exaggeration, perhaps, but one recalls that Machiavelli was one of the first professional diplomats. In any case, failure to understand the most elementary realities of relations among sovereign states is characteristic of Americans, American liberals, and American academics—in descending order of generality but ascending order of incomprehension, or so it often seems to me. Sociologists are probably the worst offenders, although Raymond Aron was an outstanding non-American exception. But despite the fact that Aron was Weber's heir on this as on other matters, his writings on international relations are not much honored, or even read, by American sociologists. Speak to a liberal academic about national interests, about the role of military force, or about necessary official relations with right-wing authoritarian governments and the response will be frowns and pained looks followed by a barrage of trendy clichés and a ringing declaration of principle morally condemning the whole wretched business. Since Vietnam a lofty and self-righteous isolationism has once again after half a century become the norm for many, if not most, American liberals.

My work for Kennan ended when President Truman unexpectedly appointed him ambassador to the Soviet Union. Seven years after having entered graduate school, I found myself unemployed, with a record of having been fired from—or, as Bob Bierstedt would prefer to say, non-reappointed to—two academic jobs, still with no dissertation even under way, and rumored to have left the field by working for Kennan. The time had come to fish or cut bait on the dissertation. Kennan had hired me to work on population problems, although I had merely taught one undergraduate course on the subject without ever having formally studied demography. But I had learned quite a bit and had overcome my block by writing reports for Kennan, one of which I had revised for publication in Commentary . Kingsley Davis had recently joined the Columbia faculty, and several friends were writing dissertations in demography under his direction. Davis gave me welcome encouragement,

and, with some financial help from my father and a little part-time teaching, I was able to spend most of the next two years completing the first draft of a dissertation in demography.

With revisions yet to make, I returned to my old undergraduate department at the University of Toronto for a year of research on Canadian voting patterns. I was moving into political sociology as a research field, but I also managed to write a short introductory book on the study of population (which has gone through six editions and is still in print). The next year I joined the regular teaching staff. I was happy in Toronto, surrounded by old friends, but my wife, a New Yorker to the bone, was not. So after two years I reluctantly returned to the States, accepting a position at Brown University, where in time I was granted tenure.

Although I was past thirty, the five years at Brown through the quiet late 1950s were for me years of incubation. I became a father. My major ideas and areas of interest within sociology crystallized. Brown was developing a graduate program in demography, but many faculty members in the program knew so little else that I ended up teaching broad undergraduate courses in theory and social organization, with the result that I taught, thought, and wrote myself—the three have for me always been closely connected—right out of demography. I retain, however, much respect for that craftsmanlike discipline; a field whose basic subject matter is natural quantities, it never offended my sensibilities by artificial quantification or by forcing human reality into the mode of what Mills called "abstracted empiricism."

At Brown I buried myself in the growing literature on the Holocaust to the point where I sometimes not only thought it the most significant thing that had ever happened but the only significant thing. I also read Freud more widely and deeply, partly to accommodate students disappointed by a behavioristic psychology department and a quantitative sociology department. The article for which I am best known to sociologists, "The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology," was conceived and written at this time. I was powerfully affected by the utopian Freudian writings of Herbert Marcuse and, especially, Norman O. Brown some years in advance of the rise of the counterculture of the 1960s to which their vision contributed. Their influence on me was not only intellectual, for it played a part in the ending of my first marriage when I fell in love with a woman to whom I have now been happily married for nearly twenty years.

The crisis in my personal life took me back to New York as a member

of the graduate faculty of the New School for Social Research. I became editor of the New School's social-science journal and learned much from having as colleagues the exiled German scholars who were still well represented on the faculty in the early 1960s. But financial problems, aggravated by alimony and child-support obligations, induced me to move in 1963 to New York University, where I have remained ever since except for short visiting and summer-session stints at various places, including interesting ones at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Nevada-Reno, Trinity College in Connecticut, and Oxford. Our department at NYU has since the turmoil of the late 1960s been extraordinarily stable and harmonious; truly collegial relations among people of widely varying interests and backgrounds have prevailed there to an unusual degree. Although I live in Princeton, I have become, I suppose, a full-fledged New York intellectual, even serving on the editorial boards of Dissent and Partisan Review . Of course, New York intellectual life is not what it once was—what is?—and I often wryly remember Goethe's advice to be careful of what you wish for in your youth because you will get it in middle age.

Mills's definition of the sociological imagination as the understanding of "the intersection of history and biography within society" has always appealed to me, though not, as for Mills, because it makes possible the redefinition of "private troubles" as "public issues," thereby providing a rationale for political action. With age I have become not only more anti-ideological but more antitheoretical in general, and it now seems to me that historical knowledge is not just necessary but often sufficient to answer many of our most urgent questions. I remember my father arguing that sociology should only be a graduate subject studied after the acquisition of broad historical knowledge. That was also Sorokin's view when he was invited to head the first sociology department at Harvard, but he did not get his way. However, I am not prepared to capitulate completely to the shades of my father and those historians who long ago tried to dissuade me from studying sociology, for history as a discipline has since then enormously widened and deepened its concerns. To a considerable extent this expansion has been the result of enrichment by ideas, methods, and even subject matters—stratification, cultural mentalités , the family, demographic trends—taken over from sociology and anthropology. I was one of the first people to review at length Philippe Ariés's Centuries of Childhood ; I suggested that because it deals with the lives of our own ancestors, archaic and distorted echoes of which still surround us, social history of

its kind conveys more successfully to the reader than anthropological reports on primitive peoples both "the strangeness of time and change in the life of man and society" and, in Ariés's own words, "the tremor of life that he can feel in his own existence." But forty years ago we were right to be excited by the subjects sociologists studied. And this was a more important source of its appeal than the chimera of creating a social science modeled on the natural sciences that played so large a role in sociology's drive for disciplinary respectability.

"As we grow older the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated." T. S. Eliot was the poet of my generation, and some of his lines have become so much a part of me that I scarcely know when I am quoting. There is the strangeness of the sheer pastness of the past: anything out of the 1930s is for me bathed in a special light, a distant glow from the lost country of childhood. Not only is there the further strangeness of realizing that one's memories have become history, or the awareness of "a lifetime burning in every moment," but I find myself reaching back before my own life to find continuity in "not the lifetime of one man only / But of old stones that cannot be deciphered." Here, too, history and biography intersect. "People are always shouting they want to create a better future," writes Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting . "It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past." Un-American, that, but so be it.

What I have come to value most in a sociologist is not theoretical reach, logical rigor, empirical exactitude, or moral passion but a palpable sense of reality. It is not a unitary trait, and it is more easily pointed to than described. My old classmate Erving Goffman had it, which is why his work will live. But it is not limited to accounts of microinteraction or everyday life. Raymond Aron had it too. Of the "classical" sociologists, it was preeminently possessed by Max Weber. When I first read Weber as a graduate student in the then new Gerth-Mills translations, my response was the same as that of Ernst Topitsch: "In the midst of this twilight atmosphere of insidious intellectual dishonesty, the work of Max Weber shed a flood of cold hard light. Anyone who has once been thunderstruck by contact with him can never see the world in the same light again."

If one lives long enough, one sees history—the sequence of events, not the discipline that studies them—disaggregate many things that

once seemed indissolubly connected. At least that is true of life in the present century. Here are a few examples, fairly obvious ones no doubt. In contrast to forty or fifty years ago, protest against technological change and modernization comes today from intellectuals on the left rather than the right, although this may be further evidence that the left-right distinction itself is becoming obsolete. Who can believe any longer that the elimination of Victorian sexual repressions makes people more selfless, loving, and less acquisitive? The association between modernist cultural tastes and political radicalism, virtually the hallmark of an intellectual when I "decided" to become one, clearly no longer holds. To understand the world, one needs a feeling for the peculiarity and fragility of the present historical moment to avoid the fallacy of both eternalizing the present and exaggerating its novelty. No abstract theoretical model identifying relevant variables, nor the careful empirical charting of trends, can make up for the absence of such a sense of the present.

A keen awareness of the particularity of the historical moment, its precise location along the moving continuum of political and cultural events, was one of the most characteristic features of the New York intellectuals when I encountered them in the 1940s. Sometimes the striving for this awareness seemed labored, even ludicrous. I remember an intense, opinionated friend complaining after a woman had resisted his overtures that "women are taking the period badly." I thought this was a pretty classy way of easing the pain of sexual rejection, although even in those unenlightened days its unabashed male chauvinism seemed a bit raw. But this highly charged sense of the historical moment was not just a by-product of commitment to Marxism, for it reflected the truly apocalyptic events of the first half of the century. The theme of ceaseless change afflicting all of us with what has been called future shock has been rather overdone in recent decades. I sometimes like to argue that nothing really important has happened in the world since about 1950—nothing, that is, at all comparable to two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, the Stalinist terror, the Holocaust, the birth of new and powerful non-Western nations, the invention of nuclear weapons, and the beginnings of the cold war with the Soviet Union. A provocative exaggeration at best, at worst a half-truth. Despite the ever-changing surface, we still live in a world that assumed its present shape in the first half of the century. All epochs—or generations—may, as Ranke said, be equal in the sight of God, but not all of them are equally consequential in history.

Important as a sense of reality is to a sociologist, he or she is also

subject to stringent additional intellectual requirements. For literature, however, the communication of a sense of reality through language is its very essence. I mean a sense of reality beyond the words on the page, the fashionable notions of structuralists and deconstructionists to the contrary notwithstanding. Because my intellectual generation had "literary sensibility," we had no need to develop the kinds of arcane and abstract theories of the primacy of the simple and concrete that have been so prominent in sociology since the antipositivist revolts of the 1960s.

I have never been to Dublin. I have sometimes been tempted to take one of those tours on or about June 16 to walk the streets that Leopold Bloom walked, peer at the façade of Number 10 Eccles Street, go out to the headland slope where Molly said yes, visit the Martello Tower, and perhaps even swim in the snotgreen sea. But I don't really need such a trip, for I can imagine well enough standing on the bridge over the Liffey where it flows into the harbor and listening to the water murmur, "And it's old and old it's sad and old it's said and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold and mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms."

I was once in northern Mississippi for little more than an hour when driving east across the country alone. It was January; I was slowed up in Memphis by school buses delivering children to their homes, and when I crossed the state line a pale, late-afternoon sun shone on light snow. But everything looked as it should, and the air was full of voices—Sartoris voices and Snopes voices, the voices of Ike McAslin and Lucas Beauchamp, of Addie Bundren and Rosa Coldfield—but most of all doomed Compson voices—Benjy saying, or rather remembering since he could not speak, "Caddy smelled like trees"; Mrs. Compson whining, "It can't be simply to flout and hurt me. Whoever God is, he would not permit that. I'm a lady"; Quentin insisting, "I don't hate the South . . . I don't hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I don't, I don't! I don't hate it! I don't hate it! " Clearest of all was the voice of Dilsey, walking home from the Negro church on Easter morning of 1928, tears rolling down her face, saying to her embarrassed daughter, "I've seed de first en de last. I seed de beginnin, and now I sees de endin." As I approached the next state line, I wondered how long I would have to live there before the voices would fade and it would become for me something more than Faulkner country. But the voices are not heard only in Mississippi. A few years ago a plaque was set in

the wall of one of the bridges over the Charles between Cambridge and Boston commemorating the site where on June 2, 1910, Quentin Compson committed suicide by drowning himself in the river. But such an event never happened; Quentin Compson never existed, he is nothing but words on a page, the product of one man's fancy. The reality of the imagination and, inversely, the power to imagine the real lie at the root of all successful creations of the mind.

Chapter Two—
Becoming an Academic Man

David Riesman

I

My shift from law to an academic career in the social sciences, and sociology in particular, is perplexing to some people; it is a puzzle especially to my law colleagues, who regard their occupation as vastly superior to being a professor in a supposedly "soft" field teaching mere undergraduates. Some also have been bewildered by my ending up in a sociology department without passage through the ordinarily requisite Ph.D. program. That I became an academic, though, is not so surprising to those who know that my father, an exceptionally learned man, had been clinical professor of medicine and, later, of the history of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania; and that my mother had led her class at Bryn Mawr College and had won a European Fellowship at a time when it was still rare for women to go to college. Unlike many children of academic and intellectual parents, I was not openly rebellious, either at home or at school. Nevertheless, the picture of a young man following a parental bent would be a mistaken one. In fact, my father's example and the internalized verdict I accepted from my mother were perhaps the principal obstacles I overcame in becoming an academic man. And as my story will show, I followed a rather fortuitous, zigzagging path.

My father was born in Germany. His widowed mother brought him as a boy to Portsmouth, Ohio, where he worked in an uncle's store through his high-school years and then went to the University of Pennsyl-

vania to study medicine, graduating in 1892. He had almost no money and lived with extreme frugality, as he continued to do out of dislike for ostentation when he won recognition as a diagnostician in internal medicine. In 1908, at age forty-two, he married Eleanor Fleisher, an elegant bluestocking, like himself of German Jewish background, of a family established in Philadelphia for three generations. He had a gift for clinical observation and immense conscientiousness. In medical education he became an admired teacher of interns and residents; he supported the more clinical focus of Pennsylvania as against the research preoccupations of Johns Hopkins and Harvard. He was sympathetic to the education of women as physicians and took an early interest in new forms of psychiatry. His concern with the societal aspects of medical care was evident in his last book, Medicine in Modern Society (1939), written at a time when I was old enough to help with editing and commentary. My father worked tirelessly. He would come for the summer to our cottage in Northeast Harbor, Maine, but to my mother's dismay would at times interrupt his vacation to look after an ill patient in the city.

He did not bring his medical problems home with him, even during the many years when his consulting office was on the ground floor of our four-story brownstone on Spruce Street (at the time known as Physicians' Row), near Rittenhouse Square. When being driven in his car, he would scribble notes on the yellow pad he had always with him, sometimes for a clinical paper or conference, sometimes for an essay such as "Irish Clinicians of the Eighteenth Century." My father was a bibliophile, and he had an amateur interest in astronomy. Cultivated Philadelphians enjoyed his company at the Franklin Inn Society. Occasionally he would entertain medical men from here or abroad at our house; I remember our Scottish maid saying to my mother during one such dinner that she should put on a waitress's uniform so she could listen to the splendid conversation!

But at the family dinner table, save on rare expansive occasions, my father's presence was more forbidding than inviting. Fastidious in manners, he was critical of mine. Moreover, if something came up in conversation, I would be sent for the encyclopedia to look up precise meanings or references, which I felt as a chore rather than an opportunity. When he and my mother were learning Italian to be able to read Dante in the original (already at home in Latin, Greek, French, and his native German), or studying the theory of relativity, I was avidly watching Philadelphia's two last-place baseball teams, the Phillies and the A's, and read-

ing detective stories. But I also read some authors who were outside the Europe-centered orbit of my parents—almost everything by Mark Twain, sharing his deeply sardonic pessimistic side and not then put off by the brutality of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court . I read Jack London and admired Rudyard Kipling.

Not surprisingly, my parents loved the opera and the Russian ballet, as did my younger brother (who followed my father into medicine and then disappointed him by becoming a surgeon) and also my musical younger sister, but I did not. However, I did regularly attend the Friday afternoon Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra concerts. At one of those concerts a dramatic event occurred, of the sort no longer likely when the patrons lack self-confidence and are afraid of appearing shocked. Leopold Stokowski played a symphony by a composer of whom I had not heard, Edgard Varèse; members of the audience started to shout in opposition, and a great many walked out. I found it thrilling. It was the first modern music I had heard, and I went on to look for more—a rare aesthetic area where my mother had not anticipated me.

One summer my brother, John Penrose Riesman, who was attending Bedales School in England, joined me in Grenoble for a bicycle trip down the Rhône valley to Marseilles and then west to Carcassonne. John knew the ground plans of the Gothic and Romanesque cathedrals, whereas only the Roman ruins had at that time much interest for me; indeed, for a time I actively disliked Gothic architecture. Often I would talk with museum guards or sextons in the cathedrals.

That I lacked the aesthetic tastes considered important in my family was probably less salient for me than my incompetence at the competitive sports valued at school. Only when I came to college could I find people as avid as I and yet of about my mediocre speed; I discovered squash and went on playing tennis, occasionally with Radcliffe "girls" (whom most of my classmates affected to scorn).

My father did things easily and deftly, whether mastering subjects or dealing with people; he was critical of me for my awkwardness, while he took for granted the fact that I did well at school academically. In contrast to my father's distance, my mother saw her older son as someone who shared her own style of intellectuality and what she also saw as its limitations. For her, intellectuality without creativity was sterile. Only the creative were "first-rate"; she was not, and by direct implication I too was not; hence I came to share the harsh judgment she passed on herself.^[1]

There were some women in my mother's day who hoped to pursue

both marriage and a career. More common was the acceptance of the verdict of M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr, that "our failures only marry." Despite the encouragement of her teachers, my mother resigned herself after college to wait for callers from the small covey of eligible men, one of whom, a Philadelphia physician fifteen years her elder, had made a shy but persistent presence felt. My mother and her friends had discovered the excitement of books and ideas in college, and a few of these women did go on to pursue careers. But my mother's family had been very traditional, fearing that when she was awarded the European Fellowship to study in Europe, it would lead to spinsterhood, and did not encourage her. She herself was too self-mistrustful to embark on such an independent course.

She was indisputably an intellectual and later astonished my roommates and other friends, who envied me for having a mother with whom they could talk about Freud and Proust, D. H. Lawrence and Faulkner. For her, the only people who really counted in the world were the first-rate, the creative artists whom she early recognized and a few innovative scientists of such originality that they could be included in her pantheon. Correspondingly, in her romantic view the rest of worthwhile human activity served art as a kind of infrastructure or, as she would have put it, was merely second-rate.

Stricken in the 1920s with Parkinson's disease and later confined to a wheelchair, she could still lose herself in enthusiasm for Bach's B-minor Mass and Beethoven's late quartets, and she could enjoy the seascapes of Northeast Harbor and admire Florentine and French Impressionist painting—the latter in the extraordinary art collection of her and my father's friend, the acerbic collector and critic Albert C. Barnes. Most of the time her attitude toward life was relentlessly unillusioned. She hardly needed Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, of which she was an early reader, to believe in his prognosis; she had already absorbed the views of Henry and Brooks Adams. But she added to those a particular curse, one which, pondering it in retrospect, may have served as a partial rationalization for the failure she felt at not pursuing the academic career toward which the award of the European Fellowship had pointed her. Descended from German Jews on both sides, whose businesses (silk, yarn, and banking) were now in the hands of those she called Russian Jews, she concluded that German Jews were a particularly doomed lot, too inhibited and univentive to compete with the rambunctious, if crude, new immigration.

My parents were agnostic rationalists without religion. Being Jewish

was not a theme discussed at home or elsewhere. It was certainly no asset to be Jewish, but neither did it make itself felt as a liability. For me a sense of Jews as in some respects different entered my consciousness most strongly when I went to Harvard Law School. For seven years at William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia I attended Friends Meeting every Fourth Day (Wednesday). I had a devout German Catholic governess to whom I was close. My mother arranged for a novelist friend of hers, Shirley Watkins, to read the Bible with the three Riesman children and the four children of my mother's Wellesley-educated sister. Although a few of my parents' acquaintances were observant Sephardic Jews, proud of their colonial American heritage—founders later, in opposition to Zionism, of the American Council for Judaism—my siblings and I had no familiarity with Judaism at all. My mother's brother had married a White Russian of the lesser nobility, an Orthodox Catholic. I married a Unitarian and became one; my brother married a nurse he met while serving as a doctor for the Grenfell Mission in Newfoundland and joined the Congregational church to which she belongs; my sister, still agnostic, married a Spanish Catholic.

II

My mother thought I was too young to attend Harvard College immediately after William Penn Charter School and suggested Exeter—perhaps to be followed by Antioch College; she admired Arthur Morgan, who had revived Antioch. I wanted to go on an educational cruise around the world. We compromised, and my mother found a school near Tucson, the now defunct Evans School. It was a dismal year. My principal pleasure and escape came from horseback trips in the mountains every weekend. A few of the students were semidelinquents who had been thrown out of schools like Saint Paul's, although I found in John Heinz II a good friend; he and I edited the humor magazine, where we used our sardonic energies against the lackluster masters and the largely indolent students. The English headmaster, Dr. Evans, taught Latin, but without the slightest interest in it.

At Harvard College I soon found myself for the first time in a place where I wanted to be. I actively went out for activities; I competed twice for acceptance onto the staff of the student newspaper, the Crimson, and, succeeding on the second try, made it my "club" for the next years. The Crimson not only legitimated my roaming curiosities concerning Harvard University but also focused my energies, and the severe criticisms we made of one another as writers and editors in the

"Comment Book" engendered a kind of competitive camaraderie and, at best, craftsmanship.

Mistakenly I thought my parents sensible when they encouraged me to study subjects at Harvard that could only be pursued in an academic setting, and that meant the natural sciences, for one could always read books. Thus I majored in biochemical sciences, making clear to curious friends on the Crimson, most of whom majored in English or another discipline of the humanities and had no heavy laboratory work, that the last thing I would ever be was a premed. Neither did the idea occur to me that I would ever become a professor. The science teaching I experienced, including that of James B. Conant, was routine until in my senior year I encountered Lawrence J. Henderson's magnificent course, focused on the physiology of blood.

But I did enjoy reading history, and as a sophomore I petitioned Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., for permission to take his course on American social history, open to juniors and seniors. It was a disappointment, for although Schlesinger was a fine person and an admired mentor of graduate students, he was a poor lecturer and did not seem to me to be a penetrating scholar. The following year I had a piece of good fortune in the visit of Charles Kingsley Webster from the University of Aberystwyth in Wales who gave a course in British diplomatic history in the era of Castlereagh and Canning. Webster had burrowed with ingenuity and thoroughness in the archival materials, and it was engrossing to be able to learn something in such fine-grained detail, including the British origins of the Monroe Doctrine—a relevant concern for me in the light of my already established misgivings concerning Manifest Destiny. I enjoyed a few conversations with Webster in his rooms in the Continental Hotel. I had "discovered" Webster, and I wandered about in the humanities, sometimes briefly auditing courses in literature favored by my friends. I shared their admiration for John Livingston Lowes but not their enthusiasm for George Lyman Kittredge's course on Shakespeare, which in my view was philosophical pedantry not made more palatable by his carefully cultivated eccentricities.

In my senior year, however, I had better luck and perhaps better judgment. Since I was writing an honors thesis (on a theoretical topic in biochemistry I have forgotten), I was permitted to reduce my course load to two rather than the standard four courses. In addition to Henderson's course, which entranced me (as did his book, The Fitness of the Environment ), I opted for Irving Babbitt's course on romanticism. Babbitt's personality was not appealing to me, but I found his outlook bracing and attractive.^[2] (Most students were uninvolved with Babbitt's

judgments. He displayed his erudition, and there was a students' betting pool on the number of names he would drop each day; I sympathized with Babbitt in the face of the philistines!) I wrote a long essay on an extravagantly ambitious topic, "The Educational Theories of Goethe and Rousseau." I did not read much secondary literature, and I pondered Émile and other apposite writings of Rousseau as well as Goethe's Conversations with Eckermann .

I appreciated Rousseau's originality, but not his vision. Well before I encountered Irving Babbitt, I had gained a keen sense for the fragility of civilization. Eight years old when the United States entered World War I, which led to the internment of my governess's fiancé, a German merchant seaman, I was aware of the storm of hatred for "the Huns"; frankfurters became hot dogs; schools stopped teaching German. In the 1920s I read about the propaganda campaigns that helped bring the United States into the war on the side of the Entente, whereas I concluded that had the United States sought to impose a peace in 1917, the Germans would certainly have been willing, and the French might have been forced, to accept a settlement. My sense of the volatility of public opinion in a democracy and my misgivings concerning nationalism, in the United States and among other potential combatants, have been fairly constant in my outlook to this day.

III

I cannot recall how it was that I became a member of the Liberal Club, but it was not out of an interest in politics. My involvement with the club had to do with education, which was one of the interests I did share with my parents, especially my mother, whose interest in Bryn Mawr College was lifelong and who had an admiration for, and some acquaintance with, John Dewey. As chairman of the Liberal Club speakers committee during my sophomore year, I invited some venturesome college presidents to speak to our little group. The most memorable was Alexander Meiklejohn, whose ouster as president of Amherst College had caused a sensation and who had then founded the Experimental College of the University of Wisconsin. Clarence Cook Little, the reform-minded president of the University of Michigan, came to speak; so did Hamilton Holt, who had put Rollins College on the map. (Holt is admirably sketched by John Andrew Rice, who left Rollins to found Black Mountain College, in I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century, as well as in Martin Duberman's fine book, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community .)

Through my own interest and the default of other reporters and editors, I was able to make education at Harvard my beat on the Crimson (my fellow editors, notably Paul M. Sweezy, who easily beat me out for the presidency, prided themselves on their lively sports coverage). I "discovered" Henry A. Murray and his Psychological Clinic, devoting a full page to a story about his work—an unexpected visibility he regarded with a mixture of pleasure and unease. I gained a scoop on the iron lung that Dr. Philip Drinker, a friend of my father, developed at the Harvard Medical School. I prowled the law school, encountering, not for the last time, its pugnacious, spirited dean, Roscoe Pound. I ventured to the business school, then as later terra incognita to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. I wrote an occasional column, "The Student Vagabond," about courses that seemed particularly interesting.

As a Crimson assistant managing editor the most difficult times came during reading period, when (unlike in the present lush days) there were hardly any advertisements and I had the responsibility for filling what seemed like acres of print, including writing editorials (a few of them attacking the Reserve Officers' Training Corps and the anti-German militarism of the war memorial murals in the Widener Library). I was an anxious perfectionist, and in slack news times I would wonder whether I would be the first editor in fifty years to end the night without a Crimson in press. I preferred to work on stories with a long lead time. My greatest excitement came in collaboration with Benjamin West Frazier III, who had been a Penn Charter classmate until sophomore year, when he had gone to St. Paul's School and from there to Harvard. He had come onto the Crimson as a photographer. Both of us were architecture buffs, and Ben, a concentrator in architectural sciences, was to go on to spend his life restoring old Hudson River valley houses. We discovered the incipient Harvard House Plan of President Lowell. Where Eliot House now stands was a gas station. We asked the manager when his lease was up, and made similar inquiries elsewhere in the area along the Charles River. Then we went to the offices of Coolidge, Shepley, Bullfinch, and Abbott, the Harvard architects, whose permanent hold on the university had not yet been moderated, and there saw mock-ups of the actual buildings. We learned from President A. Lawrence Lowell himself that land assembly was not yet complete, and withheld the story, exercising journalistic restraint in the interest of Harvard.

When it was permissible to break the story, I had developed an entire issue of the Crimson for a fall Saturday (for which the favorite journalistic assignment was the Yale game). I not only described the House Plan

in detail, with its background in a Harvard Student Council report of 1926 as well as the Harkness gift, but also wholeheartedly supported the Plan. Among my friends I was alone in this judgment. Members of Final Clubs (Harvard's exclusive clubs for upperclassmen), whose mode of life Lowell intended to disturb, were of course opposed. So were others who had anticipated spending their senior year in the Yard—on such matters of tradition students then, as now, were conservative.

Even so, the two Houses that opened in the fall of my senior year were oversubscribed. My roommate, Alexander Langmuir (later one of the first persons to go directly from medical school into public health), and I were delighted to be selected for Dunster House and to find ourselves in a corner room overlooking the Charles. For us, living in Dunster House well illustrated Lowell's hope of close contact between tutors and undergraduates.^[3]

IV

Living in a House dramatically changed the quality of life for me. Before my senior year, other than the historians I have mentioned, I had met no faculty members in the social sciences. Crane Brinton, the historian (later to write The Anatomy of Revolution, a book I admired), and Seymour Harris, the economist (with whom I was later to work, along with McGeorge Bundy, on a plan for a national self-liquidating student loan bank), were tutors in the House, as was Carl Joachim Friedrich of the Government Department. (I met Pitirim Sorokin only once, when I invited him to address a House colloquium; I still recall his opening comment that he was educating his son to shoot straight even before he taught him to think straight!) Entertained by tutors, Langmuir and I would in turn give tea parties for them, for fellow students, and for young women from Boston and occasionally Radcliffe.

What was truly decisive for me was meeting Friedrich, a nonresident tutor who had come to Harvard as part of a small group of German exchange students in the mid-1920s; he had not intended to stay, but at some point Professor Arthur Holcombe invited him into the Department of Government as an instructor. Friedrich was primarily responsible for my becoming an academic man. He had taken his doctorate at Heidelberg with Alfred Weber. At Dunster House he quickly had around him a circle of some of the most intelligent students. He was energetic and ambitious, of sanguine disposition, though capable of anger and contempt; he was a vigorous cello player. He was at home in French as well as

general European art history (he later published The Age of the Baroque ). He went on to a distinguished career in scholarship and public affairs in the United States and in post–World War II Germany. In due course I became one of his closest disciples. When I had become a student at Harvard Law School, we bought a rundown farm together near Brattleboro, Vermont. He introduced me to the European social sciences and to some American writers such as Thorstein Veblen. What was decisive for me, as I realize in retrospect, was that Friedrich was a magnetic and cultivated person, who not only was fond of me but also respected me as a potential intellectual colleague.

Had I lived in the Yard with most of my class, I would not have had this opportunity for easy intellectual commerce with faculty members and would have been less likely to encounter James Agee, then a junior, a haunted and engaging person, who was also in Dunster House. My interest in the Houses provided a few opportunities for conversation with President Lowell. (I quixotically sought to interest him in having Walter Gropius design one or another of the new Houses.) I was startled and found it clarifying to have Lowell dismiss my admiration for Henry Adams by saying that he was a whiner, full of self-pity. Lowell wanted Harvard, and particularly its law school, to turn out tough-minded leaders, potential statesmen, and also leaders of the bar—not aesthetes.

V

But my reasons for going to Harvard Law School had nothing to do with such ambitions. Like many people, particularly during my last two years, I had found a home in Cambridge and Boston more agreeable than my own home had been in Philadelphia.

Even if I had thought I had the capacity for the life of a scholar, I resembled my friends in not regarding our professors as leading lives we would want to follow. Since Harvard of that time had no rules for tenure, some of my teachers had been frustrated failed scholars, instructors in mid-life teaching affluent, uninvolved youngsters. When in Dunster House and elsewhere I met more interesting and sophisticated faculty members, I did not envisage them as models for myself. I had several classmates who were planning to enter Ph.D. programs, but they were not people with whose interests I could identify. One had an interest in forestry, worked for the Harvard Forest, and eventually got a Ph.D. in agricultural economics. Another, my school and college friend and classmate William Aydelotte, got a Ph.D. in history and was one of

the pioneers in cliometrics. (He is the son of Frank Aydelotte, who had as president developed the honors program at Swarthmore College and who had impressed me as an almost ideal-typical Rhodes Scholar in his strength of purpose, his athletic prowess—when I knew him, at tennis—and his personal heartiness.)

I sought and did not get a Rhodes Scholarship myself (something I have not regretted since I dislike Oxford common room–style gamesmanship). However, a lot of my friends, and indeed about a hundred of my classmates, were going on to Harvard Law School. I recognized that intellectually I would probably find Yale Law School a more engaging locale. Yale already had a reputation for innovation and an effort to introduce the social sciences, chiefly economics. But since my primary purpose was to stay put, Harvard Law School was the obvious choice. Staying put, moreover, had the great advantage of allowing me to continue my association with the magnetic Friedrich.

By my choice of roommates I took care to minimize what many of us who went from the amiable amateurism of the college to the fierce competitiveness of the law school experienced as culture shock. Having met Alexander Meiklejohn's son Donald, who was coming to Harvard as a graduate student in philosophy, I arranged to room with him. Another roommate was to be James Henry Rowe, Jr., a charming and ostentatiously indolent literary man, whose father was a judge in Butte, Montana; before coming to Harvard College he had spent a year at the Jesuit University of Santa Clara and astonished his classmates by arriving from Butte with all the aplomb of one to the manor born. Rowe went on to become Oliver Wendell Holmes's last law clerk, an early energizer of the New Deal, and one of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "anonymous assistants."

We lived at the Brattle Inn, along with several other lively would-be philosophers. I tried again what I had already done, which was to make something of Alfred North Whitehead's lectures. I could not get interested in his discussion of Plato's Timaeus and Plato's imagery of the planets; the pleasure I had in the occasional Whitehead teas I attended could not be matched in the lecture room. In fact, my philosopher friends made me feel stupid; they seemed to play intellectual Ping-Pong, trading arguments back and forth, and this experience was one of the reinforcements I had of my parents' judgment on me. Philosophy seemed central to intellectual life. Only later did I discover philosophers—several of them European-born women (Suzanne Langer and Hannah Arendt)—whose work I could appreciate.

More interesting for me than the philosophers was Elton Mayo, who also lived in the Brattle Inn, where he and I, when we were having dinner together, were occasionally joined by Lawrence J. Henderson. I was fascinated by Mayo's work in the Fatigue Laboratory of the Harvard Business School, and it was through him, as I recall, that I learned about Lloyd Warner's research then under way in what became the Yankee City series of anthropological studies of Newburyport. Mayo took an interest in what he regarded as my naïveté about the world and what he saw as my obsessiveness. He told me about Pierre Janet's psychology both to interest me and to help me. Mayo's combination of physiological and social-psychological concerns was as remote from law school as I could have wished. Moreover, I felt that there was something mysterious about Mayo.^[4]

VI

The atmosphere at the law school was rapacious, in contrast with the gentlemanly—and, in the eyes of Lowell and others, too leisurely—spirit I had experienced in the college. Fearful of failing on the one hand, and desperately eager to make the law review on the other, students formed into study groups, underlined their notes, and read and reread their cases. Virtually all casebooks at that time were prepared by the professors themselves and were unannotated selections of appellate opinions, from whose obiter dicta we were supposed to extract the holding—a figure-and-ground exercise many of us quickly learned. I enjoyed the cases for their details, though these were of course filtered through what the judges regarded as important.

But what the law school was about was teaching one, as the phrase went, to think like a lawyer. This adage primarily meant giving up sentimentality and naive notions of justice. I could appreciate, against the claims of distributive justice, the need for precedents and stability. It was periodically my common sense that was offended, as for example by some interpretations of the intricate rules of evidence, especially the hearsay rule, which frequently excluded evidence that was clearly relevant because the source could not be cross-examined in court. Also my common sense (but not that of anyone else I came across then or have come across since) was offended by the Fifth Amendment, for I did not think the democracies that had no such prohibition against self-incrimination were more oppressive or unjust than the United States, and I thought the amendment an overreaction to the fervent propa-

ganda of the American Revolution that sought to portray the relatively mild British rule as archaically tyrannical. When legal rules led to what were clearly untoward outcomes, the legal system was upheld by most of my professors and ultimately by fellow students on the ground that allowing each side its day in court and its opportunities for argument would in the main lead to the discovery of the relevant facts, with the debate among opposing counsel eventuating in their correct interpretation. I found this debaters' outlook inadequate. But I was even less attracted to iconoclastic Thomas Reed Powell, who taught constitutional law in what was already known as the Yale realist style—an easy cynicism that saw judges manipulating precedents to arrive at decisions satisfying to their egos, their interests, or their whims; for Powell and his followers, it was enough to debunk the law.

I admired and came to know two of my first-year professors who were dramatically different from one another. Calvert Magruder, Jr., was an almost universally popular, cultivated, noncombative Marylander who taught torts and later became an eminent federal appeals court judge. The other, James Angell McLaughlin, taught property law; related to presidents of both the University of Michigan and Yale, he flouted courtesy and convention. He sometimes frightened students, like Professor Kingsfield in The Paper Chase; more often he offended them. Mischievous as well as sharing the then prevalent Bostonian snobbery toward Irish Catholics, he wore an orange tie on St. Patrick's Day and later changed his name from McLaughlin to MacLachlan.

As the academic year drew to a close, Rowe was convinced that he would flunk out, as allegedly a third of the students did. He had read French novels, spent much time at Smith College, slept late, and far more than I refused to adjust his Harvard College style to Harvard Law School routine. I decided that I would work hard in my second year in the hope of making the law review, and the way to do that was to have a roommate who was deeply involved in his legal studies. I found such a person in Donald Field, who had been on the Crimson and came from a legal family. We moved into the law school dormitory. I joined Lincoln's Inn, a semirefuge for the more socially acceptable law students, where some faculty were also members and where conversation at lunch was generally shop talk.

My sheltered youth gave me a desire to see how people lived under different conditions, an interest that had led me the previous summer to the Soviet Union; it was one motive for bits of settlement house work I did as an undergraduate under the auspices of Phillips Brooks House,

Harvard College's social-service center. It was through that center that I was taken on as an unpaid "wop" for a summer with a Grenfell Mission station at Northwest River in Labrador.^[5] There I received a cable telling me that I must return at once to Cambridge to take up my duties on the law review, duties that began several weeks before the start of the fall term. I was incredulous. After an all too long and hazardous sailing cruise down the coast to Halifax, I left my three fellow sailors to bring the boat to Boston while I took the train so as not to be further delayed. I discovered that I not only was on the law review but also had led my class.

VII

Jim Rowe returned, having done a little better than just scrape by, his ingenuity and literary gifts coming to his aid. I regretted my decision to leave our Brattle Inn residence, and after a year with Donald Field returned there both for my third year of law school and for the fourth, postgraduate year to which those who had been anointed as Louis Brandeis's prospective law clerks were entitled.

I enjoyed the work of the law review. Even more than the Crimson, the law review was a diurnal affair. Few of the editors worried about their law school classes. It was heady to be able to edit one's own professors, or professors from elsewhere—I remember editing an article by the man I most admired in the law, Columbia's Karl Llewellyn. I should add concerning editing that it has helped me as a writer to have edited the work of others as well as to have been edited by the stringent standards of the law review. Sometimes these seemed silly standards, as when even a biblical proverb was said to require a citation. I was elected legislation editor, a position that took me out of the area of case law and into legislative draftsmanship and public policy. I took part, with fellow editors, in an assessment of the constitutionality of the early New Deal legislation, my assignment being Section 7a of the Wagner Act, whose constitutionality I defended and whose vague language was seized on by John L. Lewis and his cadres of organizers to encourage workers to join unions; the act was ultimately sustained by the Supreme Court.

A few of us debated the merits of Legal Realism, then in vogue at Yale Law School, which seemed to me to be simpleminded reductionism. But the mode of analysis of many of the Harvard Law faculty was not vastly superior, though it was more attractive because it did not seek to shock. It assumed that the task of judges, within the limits of

precedent, was to balance interests. Decisions were admired that appeared appropriately to have balanced interests of contending parties and the larger groups they might be thought to represent. For example, decisions, even by the most strained reasoning, that found large corporations liable in suits for negligence and ignored the negligence of the presumably impecunious plaintiff were generally justified because they spread the risk of accidents, even though they did so in haphazard, nonactuarial ways that were of enormous benefit to the litigating bar and sometimes produced a windfall for the plaintiff. Law professors made no accompanying investigation into the real interests; assumptions were made of a generally liberal sort as to what was in whose interest, and the question was happily left at that. In fairness I should add that many of the law professors were men of exceptional integrity, fair-mindedness, and dedication as teachers and as the scholarly house-keepers of the law. Half a dozen became good friends during my law school years. Felix Frankfurter, to my surprise a pedantic teacher, was a frequent, lively host, quick to explode in outrage at local or national injustice, corruption, or stupidity, happy to introduce the young men he sponsored to each other and, where appropriate, to people in power.

VIII

Antitrust law as MacLachlan taught it was an exception, involving some understanding of economics and of industrial organization and combination. In my third year I had a one-term course with Ralph Baker, an older man who had come from the Harvard Business School. He devoted the entire course to a single utility rate case involving the utility's financial structure. I enjoyed that course more than any. (I realize, writing these reflections, that what I seem to have enjoyed was getting thoroughly into something reasonably complicated, whether British diplomatic history or the intricacies of utility rate regulation in a particular instance.) Most materials read in law school were appellate court opinions.

Though making the law review spared me from having to care a great deal about my courses and, beyond the necessary minimum to remain on the law review, my grades, I never became reconciled to the general atmosphere of the place. We were taught to the point of redundancy how to deal with case law, how to make and, presumably, win an argument. Some of my friends and teachers were remarkably intelligent; hardly any were reflective or had an interest in ideas beyond gamesmanship. I con-

cluded that two years of law study was sufficient (with much to be said for a clinically oriented program whose time-consuming work with clients could occupy a full year or more). I showed my boredom with much of the program, more than perhaps I intended by writing one of my third-year examinations in rhymed verse.

IX

More important than law school was my growing closeness to Friedrich, who was a reflective person with interesting ideas and serious interests. He had originally looked forward to a career that would bridge Heidelberg and Harvard, much as Harold Laski had linked England and the United States in his transatlantic forays. But when Hitler came to power, Friedrich, who had feared that prospect, decided to become an American citizen. And what better way to become American than to buy a farm? In the depths of the Depression, Vermont farms were cheap. Many had been purchased with Federal Land Bank mortgages at very low interest. I had inherited some money from my grandmother and I put it into a farm Friedrich and I bought jointly. In my last law school years we would go up weekends, staying at a tourist home and spending our time clearing brush and working on the farmhouse itself, a sizable place that had been turned into a granary. And of course we would talk endlessly. Through him I met Gaetano Salvemini, a refugee from Mussolini's Italy, and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a fascinating German refugee, and many others. (Friedrich and I were to work later on a project he founded and I directed for retraining refugee lawyers and jurists.) Friedrich encouraged the Busch family and Rudolf Serkin, also refugees from Germany, to relocate in Marlboro, near Brattleboro. We both enjoyed meeting Vermonters, whether gentlemen farmers or herdsmen, county agents or bankers. In The New Belief in the Common Man (1942) Friedrich expressed a faith in the capacity of ordinary Americans for self-government. That faith grew in part out of our experience with the Agricultural Extension Service and with self-reliant, competent dairy farmers in New England; it left out of account the slovenly farmers whose barns we visited, looking for cows to purchase. We were in agreement in our opposition to plebiscites and to proportional representation, were admirers of representative constitutional government, and were aware of virtues in the federal systems of both Australia and the United States.

Friedrich had wide academic interests, having written a book on

Althusius and having immersed himself in Roman law, early European history, and political philosophy. The study of public opinion was something of a side interest for him, but it was already close to my interests in contemporary events and history. I learned from him to do what I still do today, which is to look at the letter columns of a newspaper or journal as a way of getting a sense of opposing views. Later he was to bring Charles Siepmann over from the British Broadcasting Corporation, where he had been director of research, to introduce the study of mass communications for the first time at Harvard.^[6]

Before me, every person who had preceded the Brandeis clerkship by a postgraduate year at Harvard Law School had received a doctorate in law. However, I had offended Dean Roscoe Pound by arranging for Karl Llewellyn to come up from Columbia for a talk billed as "What's Wrong with the Harvard Law School?" and by asking my faculty friend Zechariah Chafee, Jr. (who still suffered, despite his national distinction as a civil libertarian, from not having made law review), to talk in rebuttal. Pound first forbade us the use of a law school classroom but then relented. But he was also feuding with Frankfurter, and the combination of animosities led him to change the rules, so that the doctorate in law could no longer be given to anyone who came to the requisite year immediately after law school. To me it did not matter at all; the doctorate was useful to those planning to teach, especially in the nonelite law schools, or to any hoping for an academic career outside a law school. But since I had at the time no such aspirations, I did not contest the dean's ruling.

I did something else, however, which my friends considered reckless. Frankfurter had formed a strong dislike of Friedrich. He suspected this blond Teuton of being a secret sympathizer of the Nazis, and in addition I think he was jealous of Friedrich's influence over me. The person designated as the Brandeis clerk usually worked with Frankfurter on a thesis. But I intended to work with Friedrich; I held my ground, and Frankfurter, to his credit, said that though he distrusted Friedrich, I could work with him if that was my preference during this post-law school year.

X

My year with Brandeis at the Supreme Court did little to turn me toward an academic career and did even less for my self-esteem. I did not think I served the justice well. I worked only to try to improve,

which I could rarely do, the opinions he had drafted; he had already arrived at his judgments. The "Brandeis brief" had been developed by him as an advocate, introducing evidence from the social sciences to sustain the reasonableness and hence the constitutionality of legislation. The very first case I worked on dispelled any illusion that Brandeis himself would be influenced by empirical data when in pursuit of the larger goal of creating precedents for federal judicial restraint. It was the "Oregon berry box" case (Pacific States Box and Basket Company v. White ), in which Brandeis upheld for a unanimous court an Oregon statute concerning the shape and size of berry boxes. Assigned to write the opinion, Brandeis wanted to establish that the law fell under the state's power to protect the public interest and welfare. He sent me out to discover the actual reasons for the law. I soon found at the Department of Agriculture and the Interstate Commerce Commission that the law was designed to keep out berry boxes manufactured from redwoods in California (redwoods do not grow in Oregon); the law resulted in boxes less equipped for stacking in freight cars. To me, the law was an interference with interstate commerce. Brandeis thought in terms of a long-term strategy in which he wished to reduce centralized power, including the power of the federal courts to declare state legislation unconstitutional. In his building block of precedents he ignored the real story in order to uphold the state's authority, even though in principle he favored free trade and opposed monopolies. Other cases I worked on, such as the famous case upholding the Tennessee Valley Authority indirectly by denying the plaintiffs standing to sue (Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority ), involved only library work and not what was for me more exhilarating detective work and fieldwork.

I shared a house in Georgetown with a group of New Deal lawyers, including Rowe. One of my housemates was Thomas H. Eliot, several years my senior at college and law school, who helped draft and pilot the Social Security legislation through the Congress. Other young men from Columbia, Yale, and Harvard were exercising similar responsibilities. The brisk self-assurance of many of the young New Deal lawyers struck me as awesome in some cases but as disagreeable in others. I had already concluded that Harvard Law School and other national law schools cultivated a belief that outside of a patent, admiralty, or antitrust case, there was nothing one could not get up in a pretrial two weeks. If I lacked the self-confidence of others around me, I was growing in confidence that I might be able to understand events. For example, my early judgment that even unemployed Americans in the years of

the Depression were basically conservative and would not become converts to socialism, let alone communism, was being borne out day by day. I sympathized with the strong Southern Agrarian streak in Brandeis, his distrust of centralized power, and his hope to use the states for small-scale, incremental experiments. However, I lacked the crusading spirit of Brandeis and many of his devotees.^[7]

When I told Brandeis that I wanted to return to Boston, he sought to dissuade me, saying I had enough privilege and enough education; he advised instead that I go to Tupelo, Mississippi, and work there for the TVA and help develop Appalachia. I rejected his advice (as I had also rejected his harsh judgments against the English, based on the restriction of immigration to Palestine, and against the Germans, rather than simply the Nazis). Many notable lawyers and law professors had preceded me as Brandeis's clerk, and I compared myself unfavorably to them in terms of how I had served the justice; but as several Brandeis biographers have suggested, I also did not share the exalted view of Brandeis most of them held.

I was offered a position with the Securities and Exchange Commission but instead said to the lawyer who had hoped to recruit me that I wanted his help to get a job with a small Boston law firm, where I could learn my way in the law. He found me such a job with Lyne, Woodworth, and Evarts, a firm that defended Metropolitan Life and John Hancock in insurance cases and handled corporate reorganizations.

XI

Brandeis's law clerks were forbidden to marry. I had become engaged the previous summer to Evelyn Hastings Thompson. Evelyn's father was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; her mother of an old Bostonian family. Evelyn followed her mother to Winsor School, a girls' school of high academic as well as social selectivity, and on graduation won the Nora Saltonstall Scholarship given by the Winsor School to study for a year in Paris. On her return she went to Bryn Mawr, where she majored in English, edited the Lantern, the college's literary magazine, and directed and acted in plays. When through a Boston classmate of hers I met her at a dance at Bryn Mawr in the spring of my last year at law school, I asked her what she planned to do on graduation; she replied that she wanted to put on Greek plays and act in them. That summer I looked her up in the course of a sailing cruise my brother had organized when we stopped off at our parents'

home in Northeast Harbor. She was acting in a summer theater company in Bar Harbor. That fall I persuaded Evelyn to come to Washington, where she found a position as an editor of the consumer affairs magazine published by the Department of Agriculture. She had given up her dream of working in Greek drama and instead decided to turn to writing criticism and short stories. (Having done a great deal of editing in college, her gifts as a critic and editor have been of the greatest benefit to my own thought and writing.) We were married in Boston the next summer, in July 1936. I borrowed a car from a former law professor, Ralph Baker, and we took a trip out west to Seattle (this was before interstate highways), traversing some drought-ravaged and depressed areas in the farm states, as well as some magnificent country.

In the fall I began to work with Lyne, Woodworth, and Evarts. What I was looking for was an apprenticeship. I have already indicated that I regarded my legal education as too bookish and insufficiently clinical. Lyne, Woodworth, and Evarts handled more litigation than most corporate firms. Had I worked in Washington—or, indeed, for the TVA—I would have had as a young lawyer large responsibilities and a decent starting salary; in a private law firm I was only an adjunct at one hundred dollars a month, helping prepare trial briefs. But with a small private income I could afford to do it.

The few appellate cases I handled, involving relatively small amounts, did not give me a high opinion of the judges. In one case a man was receiving disability benefits under an insurance policy for "total and permanent disability." The insurance company had photographs of him actively playing tennis and golf in Florida, and on the basis of his recovery we appealed from a judgment against the company. The judge asked me, "How permanent is a permanent wave?" and went on to support the plaintiff's cause.

I found much of the work of a trial lawyer at once frustrating and strenuous. It was frustrating because I spent so much time waiting for a case to be called. It was exhausting during a trial to be always on the qui vive, at a time before discovery proceedings limited the surprises one might encounter; and when the courtroom day was done, I was busy preparing for the next day as well as trying to keep up with the regular flow of office work. Yet there was much novelty and hence interest in the actual trials, often in outlying towns like Salem or Quincy, in courtrooms far removed from the elevated discourse and the solemn and ceremonial quality of the United States Supreme Court.

The firm's trial lawyers, particularly a Mr. Murphy, for whom I largely

worked and whom I liked, possessed a kind of combative idealism, a quixotic belief in justice, leading them to prefer fighting to settling cases of fraudulent claims against John Hancock or Metropolitan Life. By contrast, most of the large Boston firms settled such cases since the cost of defending them was more than the policy was worth and the defense seldom won. In a typical case a man would be told by his doctor that he had pericarditis; he would then with a zealous or perhaps corrupt insurance agent take out a policy with Metropolitan Life or John Hancock for his wife's benefit; shortly thereafter he would die of heart disease. Since he had said he was in good health in his application and the autopsy showed otherwise, the insurance company would refuse to pay and suit would be brought. In his summation to the jury, counsel for the plaintiff would read the Metropolitan Life's billion-dollar balance sheet and ask why the company was unwilling to help out the widow. It was a rare triumph for honest policyholders when suits based on egregious fraud were not successful. Fraud often was abetted at the trial by medical experts, such as a Harvard Medical School specialist who testified that myocarditis was no worse than a bad cold. At that time, and later when I worked in the New York County district attorney's office, I could observe the power of demagogic oratory on the part of solo lawyers virtually unrestrained by the rules of evidence I had learned in law school or anticipated in trial briefs. Conscientious but easily swayed juries had not yet been "educated" to award multimillion-dollar damages in accident, malpractice, and, quite recently, libel cases, but they were moving in that direction under the tutelage of a bar that Tocqueville had seen as a possible source of aristocratic restraint in a democracy.

I glimpsed high tragedy and low comedy in some of the trials. My superiors impressed me with the astuteness of their trial tactics, and I learned from them that the rules of evidence I had studied in law school were of little help in predicting the tactics of the plaintiffs' lawyers or the capriciousness of the judges. The office work generally was of greater intellectual interest, for example, grasping the details involved in the reorganization of the International Paper and Power Company.

Most of my evenings were free. I had time to attend sessions of a seminar Friedrich was giving and to keep in touch with the bright graduate students he was gathering around him, as well as with friends on the law school faculty. Evelyn and I also had time to make new friends in Boston, and we became particularly close to Mark DeWolfe Howe, Jr., a former law clerk for Oliver Wendell Holmes then also practicing in Boston, and to his actress wife Molly Howe, from the

Abbey Theatre in Dublin, who lived near us on Beacon Hill. This friendship turned out to make easier my decision on the next step in my career.

XII

By the luck that seems to have come my way at crucial times, the year in which I started work in Boston, 1936, marked the beginning of a new administration at the law school of the then private University of Buffalo. It had been a locally oriented school run by practitioners. Samuel Capen, president of the university, wanted to create a full-time, scholarly, national school. He turned to Francis Shea, a Harvard Law School graduate and former New Deal administrator in Puerto Rico. Dean Shea, a Frankfurter protégé, had recruited Louis Jaffe, who had preceded me as Brandeis's law clerk, and Ernest Brown, who had clerked for a federal appeals court judge; through Frankfurter's recommendation Howe and I were invited to join the group the following year. We encouraged one another to accept. When I told my friends on the Harvard Law faculty that I was planning to go to Buffalo, several of them warned me that I would ruin my career and added that if I wanted to teach law, they would try to find something for me at Harvard Law School. (They were wrong about the careers of all four of us; the other three—Jaffe, Brown, and Howe—became professors at Harvard Law School after World War II.) The fact that Buffalo was in no fashion a major law school made it more attractive to me because I would not be beginning my teaching in the highly competitive atmosphere of a national law school.

Moreover, for Evelyn and me the city of Buffalo had its own appeal. We were aware of our having been bounded by the northeastern "province" of the country, interrupted by transatlantic experience. Buffalo's primarily industrial character, with its large, not yet mobile Polish population, the whole city heavily Catholic, invited our restless curiosity.

XIII

The law school was in an old town house in downtown Buffalo, and the main campus was some distance away. The principal interest of my Harvard-trained colleagues was in the great subjects made central by the New Deal, constitutional law and the newly expanded fields of labor law and administrative law. The recruiting orbit of the school did

not change with the replacement of most of the practitioner faculty by new full-time faculty. The students came from nearby and were mostly the first generation in their families to attend college. Some were disoriented by the high aspirations of the new faculty, which could not be matched by our influence in getting jobs in the New Deal agencies for even our ablest students in competition with the graduates of the major law schools. I was assigned two of the five first-year courses, criminal law (which I had not taken in law school) and property, and was glad to teach the staple subjects to the entering students. I would have preferred a chance to teach torts, for I had begun to develop an interest in the study of libel and slander, in the bearing of litigation over defamation on issues of public opinion and civil liberties. However, torts was in the hands of Philip Halpern, later a judge, a capable Buffalo practitioner who fitted in well with the newly recruited faculty. Teaching the property course, I used in addition to a standard casebook the advance sheets of the most recent New York State court opinions. When I had taught what I believed to be the law in New York State, I could briefly speculate concerning people's attachments to possessions—to what extent attachments to certain sorts of objects could be thought of as "natural" and other sorts as customary and particular.

This interest led indirectly to my first bit of empirical research, "Possession and the Law of Finders."^[8] Traditionally the law is finders, keepers, unless the owner is known. I surveyed the policies of public-transit systems and department stores, as well as the practices of people themselves when they find something in a public place; many do turn it in to the lost-and-found department of a transit depot or store. They might, of course, believe they have a right to reclaim it if the owner does not, but few seem to act with this motive in mind. I did not conduct a survey of the general population but made sufficient inquiries to indicate that most people assumed that if they found something that had plainly been lost in, say, a store or a subway, they should turn it in to the lost-and-found department. The traditional case law did not support what was, in fact, common and desirable practice.

I realized that I greatly enjoyed teaching, always seeking to discover what my students might be learning, in contrast with what I thought I was presenting. I also took the more difficult and chancy road of eliciting discussion rather than calling on certain students to state a case and then on other students to say what was wrong with the exposition until I had elicited the "correct" response. Since a class based on discussion cannot be in the lecturer's control but depends on the students' motiva-

tion, preparation, and willingness (though not bombastic eagerness) to volunteer, I found then, as in all my teaching, that the discussion method often miscarried, leaving both students and instructor disappointed. I had to prepare questions that I hoped might provoke discussion, an effort that for me has never been free of anxiety. Focused as I was on what seemed requisite for the students, there could be only the most peripheral connection, if any, between my research and my teaching. The prospect that I might some day teach in a setting where there was less separation between my agenda for research, growing out of my intellectual interests, and what I was teaching did not occur to me.^[9]

I was twenty-seven when we went to Buffalo, which did prove to be an interesting city. I soon became a member of the board of the Foreign Policy Association, gave a lecture to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and began my first teaching of social science at evening classes of the YWCA. I found friends at the university, notably Fritz Machlup, an evocative refugee economist; Walter Curt Behrendt, the city planner; and others in sociology, political science, history, and English. Evelyn and I met musicians, painters, and a poet, Reuel Denney, whom I was later to recruit as a colleague at the University of Chicago. Our efforts to explore the city did not extend to the Polish neighborhoods, which seemed to be isolated even from the other traditional Roman Catholic groups. At about this time I began an unorthodox psychoanalysis with Erich Fromm. I did so not because I thought I needed it—I did—but to please my mother, who wanted to be able to talk with me during the time she was an analysand of Karen Horney, who had recommended Fromm to her for me. Karen Horney had said of me that I was a rather resigned person, and this struck me as perceptive. On alternate weekends and when feasible, I would take the train or fly to New York and have two two-hour weekend sessions with Fromm before returning by train to be sure not to miss my Monday class.

When I went to see Fromm for the first time at his apartment on New York's West Side, I noticed a large shelf of the collected works of Marx and Engels. I assumed that a Marxist or Leninist would seek to propagandize me. When I had gone to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1931 with an Intourist group, some of whom were then in law school or graduate school or starting careers in journalism, there were fellow travelers among them who idealized whatever we were shown in the Soviet Union and derogated the United States. I had little use for either side of that seesaw.^[10] Although several people I had known in college, for example Paul Sweezy, had later become Marxists, and several of the

New Deal lawyers I had met in Washington, notably Alger Hiss, had turned out to be Communists or close to the Communist party, none of my friends was even so much as a fellow traveler, and many of my law school friends, including Chafee and Howe, were vigilant civil libertarians. I had gotten this far in life with virtually no exposure to scholarly Marxists.

Fromm amusedly reassured me that he had no intention of converting me to Marxism. However, we often talked as if he were my teacher rather than my analyst. We discussed the study of society and the work on social character that he had done with Ernst Schachtel, whom I also met and admired, when Fromm was part of the Frankfurt group. Later, I was to attend seminars in New York for analysts in training, given by both Fromm and Harry Stack Sullivan at the William Alanson White Institute, and lectures by Schachtel and Fromm at the New School. While I resisted the efforts of my mother, with whom I stayed at her New York apartment, to draw me into intrapsychic inquiries, I was happy to talk with her concerning the larger social-psychological issues raised by both Horney and Fromm.

Fromm, who had, like Friedrich, a Ph.D. from Heidelberg, was widely read in history and biography. Like Friedrich also, he greatly assisted me in gaining confidence as well as enlarging the scope of my interest in the social sciences. Although he did not accept my criticism that his view of the United States and especially its middle classes was too monolithically and stereotypically negative, he did accept my criticism of his English prose and once encouraged me to redraft a chapter of Man for Himself; he thought my version perhaps improved, more nuanced, but characteristically decided to write "for himself."

If one recalls that my parents were Francophile and Italophile in culture and Anglophile in manner, then my interest in contemporary German—that is, Weimar—culture was a way of finding my own direction as distinct from theirs—a direction facilitated not only by Friedrich and Fromm but also by the many refugees I met through both those men and through my own concerns.^[11]

XIV

Becoming a professor in a law school is not the same thing as becoming a professor in an academic discipline.^[12] Competing directly with the profession, law schools pay higher salaries and give instant or virtual tenure to attract and retain young recruits. The law professors under

whom I studied at Harvard Law School were categorizers of the law, organizing decisions for the purposes of teaching and, sometimes in proposed uniform codes, for the benefit of the profession and the country. Of course the major law schools housed researchers (as Harvard did Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck to study juvenile crime) and a handful of scholars who taught legal history, jurisprudence, and sometimes Roman law or contemporary foreign law. At Buffalo, in contrast with such recondite work, I taught a third-year seminar on the ordinances of the city of Buffalo. And I did what law professors do, which is to "keep up" with developments in the law by reading the advance sheets, that is, skimming through recent decisions in the areas of my teaching or research. But this harvest was not nourishing to me unless I was on the trail of a specific topic, such as the studies of defamation in comparative perspective to which I will come in a moment. Nonlawyers often have read the opinions of some of the virtuosos of literature and the law, such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Benjamin Cardozo, Learned Hand, or Louis Brandeis. But most judges are journeymen who crib from the briefs of counsel, do not employ an annual crop of Harvard, Columbia, Michigan, or Yale clerks, and provide the case materials by which the professors in the major national law schools, who are brighter and better educated, can develop their not always endearing classroom sharpness. In comparison with the excitement I found in reading Democracy in America or The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the regular gruel of the law appeared thin. I could teach it in a sufficiently evocative way to relatively unsophisticated students who had to face the bar examination and the practice of law.

I shared many interests with my Buffalo Law School colleagues. But I differed from them and from the other law professors I came to know in several significant respects. I have mentioned my belief that the Fifth Amendment was a harmful archaism. (I had a similar view of several others.) I was opposed to the use of the First Amendment in what I thought to be a vigilante way to oppose aid to parochial and other church-related schools. Although I cared about intellectual freedom (as my later writings attest), that did not make me an automatic supporter of the agenda of the American Civil Liberties Union. Mark Howe was offended by my skepticism and, as a stoic, disapproved of my psychoanalysis. My colleagues and many other law professors found their involvement in New Deal reforms and the corresponding legal questions rejuvenating, but neither for pedagogic nor research purposes did I see superiority in the new subjects. I published an article, "Government

Service and the American Constitution," that developed some of the work I had done with Friedrich.^[13] I wrote another article on a topic still germane—the question of legislative restriction on the freedom of Americans to travel abroad and fight in foreign armies, as some Americans were doing at that time in support of the Loyalists in Spain.^[14] I wrote essay reviews of books such as Otto Kirchheimer's Punishment and Social Structure and Edwin Mims's offbeat Majority of the People .

After the intense work of learning to teach three courses, I cast about for a research topic that might relate my interests in public opinion to the law. Defamation, though in all countries a tort or civil wrong and in some still considered a crime, was not a major interest of professors of torts. What I wanted to understand in comparative perspective was themes in the scattered American case law concerning defamation, that is, libel (written) and slander (oral). The cases and comments on them indicated that in the United States not only politicians but also ordinary folk were supposed to be able to take it and, if need be, dish it out. Successful libel suits were uncommon. By contrast, in England, Austria, Argentina, and elsewhere slander and libel were deemed extremely serious in both criminal and civil proceedings. What did all this imply concerning American public opinion and attitudes toward individual privacy, publicity, and the press? In an earlier day in our history did different attitudes prevail, when someone might issue a challenge to a duel—at least against a social equal, perhaps especially in the South—in response to regarding himself as having been defamed? Along with Friedrich I had done some work for the Council for Democracy, a group combating fascist tendencies in the United States and Hitler and Mussolini abroad. I wondered whether the Jews, as a defamed group, might bring suits for libel, and I observed the use of libel suits by fascists to intimidate their critics in the press—much as Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli defense minister, recently attempted to do vis-à-vis Time magazine, and General William Westmoreland, no fascist but supported by the radical right, vis-à-vis CBS.

I recruited one of the refugee lawyers I had met, Lucie Krassa, as a research assistant and embarked on a comparative study eventually published in 1942 as "Democracy and Defamation."^[15] In that work, and in a long essay, "Civil Liberties in a Period of Transition," I made use of cases as a social historian would, as clues to the temper of a country, region, or epoch. On the basis of such partially empirical grounding, I was prepared to speculate concerning the public policy that might permit freedom of opinion while exploring how the intimidation

of opinion through defamation, as well as suits for defamation, might be prevented. I did not then, and do not now, believe that I found a "solution" to these again vexing problems, but at least I did not approach them on the basis of flat American contemporaneity.^[16]

Among the law professors I knew, there was intense focus on the Supreme Court as it began to uphold, rather than interdict, New Deal legislation. The social-psychological and cross-cultural themes that interested me rarely had immediate focus in public policy through law. A handful of law professors, such as Willard Hurst, who taught legal history at the University of Wisconsin, and a cluster of the lively men at Columbia Law School could respond to my interest in the significance of defamation in an amiably tolerant way more characteristic of colleagueship among law professors than of that among comparably ambitious faculty members in arts and sciences. The people from whom I was learning, however, were primarily not in the law but in the social sciences. Robert and Helen Lynd's Middletown had attracted me during my student days, and I was delighted to meet them in New York and to begin to exchange ideas with them. I think it was through them that I met Paul Lazarsfeld and then Marie Jahoda. I also met Franz Neumann, a refugee political scientist and analyst of Nazism.

In 1940 I applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship to devote full time to this research; but I chose instead to accept a visiting fellowship for 1941–42 at Columbia Law School, which provided an office and potential universitywide colleagueship. New York also had the advantage of allowing more frequent analytic work and intellectual companionship with Erich Fromm.

Of the people Evelyn and I met in New York, Lionel and Diana Trilling were particularly important. Many of their interests overlapped with ours. They introduced us to their circles at Columbia and to editors and writers for Partisan Review . We met other writers, artists, and intellectuals through Dorothy Norman, founder and coeditor of Twice a Year, a journal devoted to the arts and civil liberties where an article of Evelyn's had been published. We met Selden Rodman, with whom I played tennis, mostly unsuccessfully; he edited the irreverent journal Common Sense, which supported the isolationists (as did my cousin Fred Rodell, one of the Legal Realists at Yale), fearing that America's involvement in the war might irretrievably destroy the country's liberties. Some of my colleagues at Columbia Law School (Karl Llewellyn, Herbert Wechsler, Paul Hays, and Walter Gellhorn) had broad intellectual and cultural interests in and beyond the law. I met Ruth Benedict

and joined the ever-expanding circles around Margaret Mead.^[17] Fromm and Helen Lynd were teaching at Sarah Lawrence, where a number of "New York intellectuals" taught part-time.

Friedrich had counseled me to pursue a Ph.D. in government. The financial constraints of a wife and three children aside, I never came to the point of seriously considering the idea. Moreover, as I got more deeply immersed in sociological questions and preferred to start with empirical data, the concerns with political theory of Friedrich and his disciples began to seem a bit abstract to me. In other words, I was in search of a mode of work more empirical—ethnographic, even—than government as it was then being taught could provide. If Robert and Helen Lynd had given me an opportunity to take part in a community study, I think I would have welcomed the chance. Innovative law deans at the University of Wisconsin, Ohio State University, and the University of Oregon offered me joint positions in law and political science. However, since my primary base would still have been in a law school while coping with a new intellectual challenge, I hesitated to commit myself and was inclined to return to Buffalo.

Soon, with American entry into the war, the Buffalo Law School prepared to close, and the question of returning there was rendered moot. I thought it likely that despite having three children, I would have to enter military service. (I also had some inclination to do so, and unsuccessfully sought commissions, knowing enough from others to fear the ordeals of basic training.)^[18] Then by chance a Harvard Law School friend and classmate, Whitman Knapp, offered me a position as deputy assistant district attorney of New York County, working in the Appeals Bureau under Stanley Fuld, legendary for his erudition and his scrupulousness. It seemed like an interesting temporary job at that unsettling time, and wishing to remain in New York, I took it.

XV

My work was to read the records and write the briefs on appeal. Thomas Dewey had been the district attorney and had prosecuted a number of racketeers on evidence gained from wiretapping. A few were convicted, and I was one of a group writing the appellate briefs in an effort to sustain the convictions. The trial lawyers for the defense in criminal cases were mostly histrionic, objecting to practically everything presented by the prosecutor and then seeking to find flaws for appeal. The extravagantly permissive state lower-court judges allowed the de-

fense to try to browbeat often reluctant prosecution witnesses and behave in ways that would be considered unprofessional in federal court. By a tacit agreement between party bosses and the bar associations, the elected judges, including those holding lucrative probate judgeships, were slotted in the lower courts on the basis of patronage, whereas the Court of Appeal, the court of last resort in New York State, though also elected, was allowed to become respectable and even distinguished; it had been Benjamin Cardozo's base and later was Fuld's. The latter was a perfectionist and insisted that we overprepare our briefs, no doubt boring the judges' clerks who had to read them since if a case from New Zealand was in any way apposite, we would be sure to cite it!^[19] The experience gave me a sense of the appeal of Wall Street and other metropolitan law firms whose predominantly corporate clients can afford (and are sometimes constrained by) the most carefully researched advice that hourly billing can buy.

XVI

I could have stayed in the Appeals Bureau, but after a few months I had pretty well exhausted the variety of cases and had many times rehearsed work not terribly different from that of the law review or clerkship in doing meticulous research and then writing a brief. When the United States entered the war, Friedrich undertook to direct the Civil Affairs School at Harvard to train administrators for a future occupation of Germany; no one doubted that the Nazis would in due course be defeated. Friedrich asked me to take part, but I declined. My knowledge of Germany was slim, and I questioned my competence to be of help in such a school.

As an alternative, I had the idea of seeking a commission in some branch of the armed forces where I might learn something about business. The services turned down my application since I lacked business experience, and plenty of lawyers were already available. Casting about for opportunities, I was introduced by a friend to James Webb, treasurer of the Sperry Gryoscope Company (later head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), who asked me to become his assistant. He wanted to assign me to labor relations, but I pointed out that as a professor I would be regarded as friendly to labor and would hence possibly be given undue trust by the United Auto Workers local. I preferred to work on problems not directly involving personnel. My expectation was that with some experience at Sperry, if I then were drafted, I

could secure a commission where I would hope to be useful and also to learn something about organizational and business problems. Since I was not drafted but ended up as contract termination director after Webb left (to become a combat flier), I actually found myself dealing directly with the military for two and a half intense years.

Sperry was a small engineering firm of one thousand employees that had exploded to thirty-three thousand as a war contractor. The senior officers of the operating company were primarily engineers, patriotic and of high integrity. But with the enormous expansion much was out of their control. Sloppiness and waste occurred in the manufacturing process. Extramurally I confronted the familiar story of interservice rivalry. Intramurally some of my own effort was spent making clear to junior managers and workers on the shop floor (who thought that they were protecting Sperry against its naive and idealistic top officials) that the company could only lose, in reputation as well as through negotiation of profits later if materials were sequestered (this was not done for private gain) or contracts terminated with more than the considerable delays I had already explained to the military.^[20] I found several capable people (chief among them Elizabeth Klintrup, a brilliant lawyer trained at the University of Wisconsin) to help me make the quick judgments on the basis of limited information that the tasks required. The deficit of competent people, and changes in procurement as emphasis shifted from the European to the Pacific theater, added to my responsibilities.^[21]

I had to learn my way simultaneously among the military services (where I ran into the most difficulty with the shore Navy) and among the production control people and accountants in the company's Brooklyn and Long Island plants; I had no direct dealings with the hundreds of subcontractors whose contracts had to be canceled when Sperry's prime contracts were terminated. I worked hard under great pressure, with a kind of stubborn rationality. Negotiating a modus vivendi for settling Sperry's claims to recover for canceled contracts raised strategic and practical questions but not ones of intellectual substance; hence it surprised me that I was so intensely involved. It was, as I would remind myself, primarily only money (and occasionally matériel) that was involved, not people's fates—and the money itself, as already mentioned, was not Sperry's to keep but was subject to renegotiation. Sometimes anxious, sometimes exhilarated, and often both at once, I persevered in a way that I regarded as responsible both to the company and, in a microcosm, to the rational conduct of the war.

I had come to view the war as necessary, though after many hesita-

tions and without believing (like the interventionists) that the end of the war would be wholly benign or (like my friends among the isolationists) that America would become fascist. In terms of the way the war was fought, my sympathies were with positions Dwight Macdonald took in Politics: I opposed the mass air raids on German and Japanese cities, which Sperry's products were helping make less inaccurate. At the time and since, I regarded the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and, far more, on Nagasaki as the use of means wholly disproportionate, certainly vis-à-vis Japan, which could not directly threaten the United States. Moreover, I believed that the demand for Unconditional Surrender was wrong in principle and pragmatically, making it difficult for the emperor (always threatened by military fanatics) to negotiate a surrender that would keep him in place.^[22]

XVII

With the war clearly ending, I had to consider what I would do next. In 1945 Helen Lynd and Esther Rauschenbush, two prominent leaders of Sarah Lawrence College, asked me if I would consider becoming its president. Shortly thereafter, the then president of Reed College approached me with a similar proposal. My interest in women's colleges, beginning, of course, with Bryn Mawr, had combined with an interest in educational innovation and led me to visit Bennington College while I was at Harvard; hence the attraction of the offer from Sarah Lawrence. I had great respect for a few coeducational colleges, notably for Reed. I have noted my admiration for presidents whose approach was experimental—for Frank Aydelotte of Swarthmore College, and for what President Lowell was seeking with the House Plan and other reforms at Harvard College. Academic administration is, however, still administration, and I had learned at Sperry that it did not fully engage me. More important, I recognized that I lacked some of the qualities I knew to be essential in a college president.^[23] Academic administration would demand of me tireless energy almost certainly without the summer respites in Vermont working on our dairy farm. Moreover, I lack the equable, sanguine temper that an administrator, and especially a college president, needs. I can rarely assuage irritation and impatience with wit and good humor.^[24] I could not imagine assuming the responsibility of leadership in the semiparticipatory milieu of an experimental college, so I declined these possibilities.

There was some talk that I might be invited to join the Yale Law

School faculty. But by this time I was thoroughly converted away from an engagement with the law that was never wholehearted. What I most wanted was colleagueship—colleagueship in teaching in a setting where I could educate myself more fully in the social sciences and, if possible, colleagueship in research—something the individualism of law school professors, comparable to that of professors in the humanities, did not provide.

At this point I had remarkably good fortune. I had gathered some of my work on public opinion and civil liberties together in a monograph, "Civil Liberties in a Period of Transition," which I had contributed to an annual series edited by Friedrich and Edward Mason and which was also available independently.^[25] In the third-year social-science course in the College of the University of Chicago Edward Shils had gotten the staff to assign my essay. When he discovered that the author was still alive, unlike those of the social-science classics read in the course, he went to the administration of the College and proposed that I be recruited to the staff. Reuben Frodin, assistant dean of the College, had been editor in chief of the University of Chicago Law Review and had edited an article of mine in that capacity; he lent his support to Shils. I went out to the university to meet Shils and the other members of the staff of the course. I eagerly accepted the invitation to come as visiting assistant professor, confident that this opportunity was right and, had I thought it possible, the one I would have looked for.

I arrived in January 1946, alone, since no housing for my family was available (our farm in Vermont came in handy as a base during times of relocation). In my first several months emergency regulations forced hotel tenants to find a different location every five days or so; this anxiety of where I would spend the night added to all my pedagogical ones.^[26] Although I had spent the previous summer immersed in my own crash course in sociology, beginning, as I recall with Comte and then some Durkheim, I had inadequate preparation for the course in which I would be teaching. I had two different reading lists to master simultaneously, one for the course that had begun regularly in the fall term, and another for an accelerated course for veterans who arrived on campus when I did, in the winter. Shils was welcoming as a sponsor and learned as a mentor. So in a different way was Milton Singer, who had a Ph.D. in philosophy and was beginning to reeducate himself as an anthropologist. Our staff and our coverage included political science and history. One member, Gerhard Meyer, a German refugee, was steeped in Weber and German philosophical thought. Familiar with psychoanalysis, Singer shared an

interest in "culture and personality."^[27] Economics was represented on the staff by Abram Harris, with some reading and lectures from Frank Knight; economic history was the province of Sylvia Thrupp. We met regularly for discussion of readings and assignments of the two lectures a week, which we took turns delivering, and were responsible for the separate sections, ranging from ten to thirty-five students with whom we discussed readings twice weekly.

The three-course social-science sequence at Chicago seemed to me extravagantly ambitious then, and even more so in retrospect. While experimental psychology lay at the boundary with the natural sciences, Piaget and psychoanalysis, and especially its cultural foundations and impact, were on the social science side; I gave four successive lectures on Freud in his cultural context.^[28] I learned a great deal from lectures given in turn by my colleagues. I found pleasure in teaching undergraduates in the college's required curriculum, for every student was reading the same books, attending the same lectures, and becoming engaged, if erratically and sometimes even overzealously, with a curriculum that invited efforts at coherence.^[29] I soon began to audit the graduate courses of Everett C. Hughes, who personally as well as professionally became my closest colleague.^[30] I profited particularly from Hughes's course on field methods. Lloyd Warner, whose work I had known and admired earlier, was a member of the Sociology Department also, and we were soon involved in discussions concerning new directions in community studies. Having come with an interest in public opinion, I was grateful for the presence of the National Opinion Research Center and its director, Clyde Hart.^[31] At Chicago, more than anywhere else, there was great overlap of intellectual and academic interests, nourished by the fact that the university is relatively small, not only in comparison with the major state university campuses, but also with its eminent private East Coast competitors or Stanford. Moreover, at that time virtually everyone on the faculty lived in the Hyde Park and Woodlawn areas, within easy walking and bicycling distance from the university. Stymied from influencing the academic departments in the graduate school, Robert Maynard Hutchins, the university's maverick president, encouraged the creation of interdisciplinary committees in social thought, human development, communications, and planning—the latter two short-lived; and the milieu allowed for relatively fluid grouping and regrouping among sanguine, energetic scholars.^[32]

Much of the social-science program in the College consisted of what

had been defined as Great Books and hence was compatible with Hutchins's distaste for what he regarded as merely empirical and transient. Yet the third-year social-science course, dubbed for short Soc 3, as well as the first- and second-year courses (Soc 1 and Soc 2), differed from a similar integrated program at St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland, in including contemporary social, political, and juridical problems—otherwise, something as contemporary as my essay "Civil Liberties in a Period of Transition" could not have been made a required reading.^[33]

My own attitude toward Hutchins was one of admiration tinctured with ambivalence. I believed then, and still believe, that he added greatly to the diversity and potential intensity of American higher education. Chicago's willingness to recruit students after the tenth and eleventh grades of high school still seems to me worth pursuing, while recognizing its hazards.^[34] I admired the effort of the College under Hutchins to group disciplines into more comprehensive divisions and the refusal to allow student consumerism to dictate the curriculum.^[35] Consequently, I supported Hutchins against his academic enemies in the graduate divisions and his political enemies elsewhere. His characteristic arrogance of the bright lawyer, coupled with wit and charm, made him an effective debater. One argument where he carried the day was a case of overreaching—his insistence that the College program be self-sufficient and sealed off from electives in the graduate divisions. When I came to the College, students had the option of taking two courses in one or another of the graduate divisions, which therefore retained the hope that they might acquire Ph.D. candidates who had become attached to a particular specialty as undergraduates. In his grand manner Hutchins despised specialists. When he, along with those I came to refer to as the "College patriots," added courses in history and philosophy to the College curriculum, thus closing off apertures for electives, I opposed the decision as a mistake—as indeed it turned out to be since the limited capital of goodwill the College had among the graduate divisions pretty much evaporated at this point. I also believed that students should be exposed to specialists as well as generalists as part of their general education—a judgment that Hutchins and his devotees easily dismissed. Another issue where we differed concerned my wish to increase the proportion of empirical work in the sequence in the social sciences. Hutchins considered such work trivial and ephemeral. Soc 2, though also drawing on the classics (Freud, Durkheim, Veblen, Marx, and Tocqueville), included materials with some empirical substance, for ex-

ample, Piaget's Moral Judgment of the Child and Gunnar Myrdal's then recent American Dilemma. I decided to shift from Soc 3 to Soc 2 and persuaded Milton Singer and Gerhart Meyer to make the move along with me. Milton Singer was crucial in accepting the leadership of the expanded staff of Soc 2 and in retaining the breadth of intellectual horizons that informed the development of the course.

Milton Singer became the chairman of Soc 2 in 1946–47 and assigned to me the task of revising the course in cooperation with the other people teaching in it.^[36] Among them, one of the most important, who left his mark on Soc 2, was Daniel Bell. Versed in the work of the great European theorists—Marx, Freud, Weber, and Durkheim—he also supported my effort to include unprocessed data that students and their mentors could interpret (for example, unprocessed field notes from community studies, or life histories, or the interviews gathered in a public-opinion survey). Robert Redfield, thoroughly interdisciplinary in spirit, became a part-time lecturer in the course.

Both Soc 2 and Soc 3 differed from Soc 1 and other College courses in the balance between discussion sections and formal lectures in Mandel Hall to the entire class. Some courses had three section meetings and one lecture a week. I found the section meetings so intense that two a week seemed just about right. And the number of lectures we had made it possible for specialists on the staff to exhibit their erudition to their colleagues as well as to students; if they sometimes spoke over the heads of many students, then the section leaders could help interpret what was said in later section meetings.^[37]

The Chicago quarter system had advantages for faculty members. There was always a certain student attrition by the winter quarter, so that it was possible to teach (and do one's stint of lectures) during the fall quarter and take the winter and spring quarters off without imposing an excessive burden on the staff. Correspondingly, after teaching in the fall quarter in 1946, I was granted the next two quarters off to work on developing Soc 2 into what already existed of a course that would be termed "Culture and Personality," although still under the rubric "Soc 2."^[38] The reading, consultation, and discussion involved in launching the revised Soc 2 gave me a splendid opportunity for learning as a teacher some of the things I would have learned had I been a graduate student in sociology at the University of Chicago at a time when the line between sociology and anthropology (united at the graduate level until the 1940s) was not sharply drawn.

XVIII

The intense demands of learning and teaching, of curriculum development and negotiation, of staff recruitment, and of service on the interdisciplinary committees all prevented me from embarking on research of my own. By the nature of the interdisciplinary curriculum in the College, only a part of my research interests and disciplinary ties could be embraced except by accident or at the periphery. For example, my interest in survey research and in the survey interview could only be brought vicariously into the classroom. In my few spare moments I wrote several articles that were extended essay reviews or drawn from addresses I was invited to make. Only in occasional work with doctoral students who had research interests congruent with mine was I able to combine research interests with my commitment to teaching.

I do not recall when I met Harold D. Lasswell, but I know I read his work with excitement long before going to Chicago; he was the principal American-born political scientist who in the 1920s was using a psychoanalytic approach to politics. I went to hear him lecture in downtown Chicago some months after my arrival, and when the lecture was over, he suggested that we go across Michigan Avenue to the Art Institute. There he proceeded to delight me by his detailed and discriminating knowledge of painting. In person, more than in print, he was fascinating.^[39] Lasswell was then a professor at Yale Law School. In 1947 the interdisciplinary Committee on National Policy at Yale, composed among others of Lasswell and his law school colleague Eugene V. Rostow (whom I had met when I was a law professor as well as at their summer place not far from us in Vermont) invited me to come to Yale to do research on some aspect of national policy. There was no definite assignment of what I was to investigate, but previous work had been in economics, and there was some talk that I would focus on public opinion and mass communications. But I was to be free to proceed as I liked—an awesome prospect, but one I saw as an opportunity. However, more immediately troubling was whether I could seize this occasion when I could give Chicago little advance notice. I did not have tenure and was warned that a request for leave would make me seem flighty, even disloyal to Hutchins's aims. But when I made clear that I would teach the fall quarter, and do so for two successive years, the arrangement went through with the support of Milton Singer and Dean F. Champion Ward.

In his essay in this volume Nathan Glazer gives at once an acute and

generous account of our collaboration on what became The Lonely Crowd and Faces in the Crowd . I had not met Glazer but had been reading his "Study of Man" columns in Commentary, with their cogent analysis of sociological work. I knew he had a connection of some sort with the Columbia Bureau of Applied Social Research, and having admired its director, Paul Lazarsfeld, since his days running the Office of Radio Research in Newark and then Princeton, that was a connection from which I thought I could learn. When I asked Glazer to join me in this research project, at first he was in doubt, but in the end he agreed to come part-time; Glazer's part-time, however, is worth more than time-and-a-half for most people! We began by examining interviews concerning political issues at the eastern office of the National Opinion Research Center. We were struck by the opinion-proneness of the respondents: that there were so few responses of "don't know" and that so many people had opinions on matters quite remote from them and often outside the orbit of even vicarious experience. Americans appeared to feel entitled to have opinions and almost embarrassed not to have any. My own continuing sense of the fragility of a democratic society helped lead Glazer and me to look at political apathy, including nonvoting, as not necessarily a bad thing; on the contrary, a wholly civic, mobilized population, expressing itself by referenda and similar direct measures, can be a risky departure from representative government.

Glazer had been working on the interviews done for C. Wright Mills that later went into White Collar, and we studied those interviews and made rough efforts to code them according to a dichotomy we first termed conscience directed and other directed .^[40] Then we started to do interviews ourselves, borrowing what we thought might be projective questions here and there, adding our own, and then working painstakingly to interpret the answers as a gestalt in the mode illustrated in Faces in the Crowd . Reuel Denney contributed materials on popular culture. The effort to understand social character drew especially on the Fromm-Schachtel study of German workers. Glazer and I both profited from a seminar the Yale anthropologists were conducting to see whether or not culture and personality theorists, such as Ralph Linton, who chaired the seminar, and Erich Fromm, who came up from New York to participate, could interpret a culture on the basis of ethnographic accounts of the Truk Islands presented primarily by George Murdock and Ward Goodenough.

Rostow and Lasswell arranged for me to have a pleasant office on the

top floor of the Yale Law School building, but I had virtually no contact with the school. The Yale committee that sponsored the work kept pressing me to make a report on it to Yale's social scientists, but knowing the tentativeness of our ideas, I was reluctant to do so. I recall that my audience, when I finally had to present material, was generally critical, with the economist Max Millikan being rather harsh—he had been, and remained afterward, personally friendly. Economists understandably dismissed our ideas as lacking in scientific rigor and probative value; some sociologists said we were simply translating into new terminology familiar concepts of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. More derisively and imposingly, Joseph Schumpeter, whom I greatly admired, ridiculed my notions when I spoke at Harvard, declaring that I was trying to pull a heavy historical load with an oxcart. In the Department of Social Relations, M. Brewster Smith, Clyde Kluckhohn, and Talcott Parsons were interested and supportive. My rather limited Yale colleagueship came from John Dollard and other psychologists with anthropological connections and interests, from political scientists, and from historians—Yale at that time had no sociologists to speak of.

In the second preface to The Lonely Crowd, written in 1968–69 for the Yale paperback edition, I make clear how speculative and tentative an essay the work was intended to be. Friedrich had read it in manuscript and said that it was a difficult book, which he would use with graduate students, but it was too subtle to assign to undergraduates. We never anticipated the kinds of adolescent sophistication that would lead many to read the book while in high school. Moreover, since the themes of the book were confined to certain sectors of American life, we did not anticipate the following it continues to have. Although attacks on me by reviewers and essayists have never been particularly agreeable, attacks on the theses of the book itself, even when astringent, discovered few lacunae that Glazer and I had not already sensed. We saw the book as a contribution to an ongoing discussion shifting away from national character to the character of particular strata at a particular period—a less ambitious, but also perhaps more fugitive, focus than the nation as a whole.

XIX

In the fall of 1949 I returned to my position in the College at the University of Chicago, supplemented by membership on three graduate committees. One, which lasted only a short time, was the Committee on

Communications, which Bernard Berelson directed. I had already been a participant in the American Association for Public Opinion Research and a contributor to its journal, Public Opinion Quarterly; what I especially enjoyed in AAPOR was the inclusion of nonacademics—members of the professional survey organizations, on whose work I drew for understanding and for secondary analysis, and market researchers, who in my perhaps too vivid imagination generally know more about Americans in our "market segmentation" than do sociologists. I had informal ties with the Committee on Planning, from which I had recruited Martin Meyerson to teach in the College and then, with his wife Margy Meyerson, one of Everett Hughes's students, to work on a small community study in Vermont, which is briefly reported in Faces in the Crowd . From that committee I also recruited Staughton Lynd, who helped me analyze the sources of Thorstein Veblen's economic concepts for a small book I had agreed to write on Veblen.^[41]

During my apprenticeship my most important graduate involvement was my membership in the Committee on Human Development, which included Lloyd Warner, Everett Hughes, Robert Havighurst, Allison Davis, Bernice Neugarten, and William Henry.^[42] Plans were adumbrated to find a new locale for a community study, and I proposed that we look for a much larger community than the small and provincial Illinois town variously known as Jonesville and Elmtown—a community I defined as manageable in that one could gather forty influentials in a room and they could pretty much decide what was to be done. I recognized that no community was typical, not Granville Hicks's "small town" nor Lloyd Warner's Newburyport (Yankee City, later restudied by Stephan Thernstrom), nor the Lynds' Middletown (later restudied by Theodore Caplow and associates). Nevertheless, after I had briefly visited Springfield, Illinois, we concluded that with its one main "industry" of state government, it would not be a good locale, and Racine, Wisconsin, also with a single major industry, did not appear inviting either. At that time Homer Wadsworth, then director of the Kansas City, Missouri, Association of Trusts and Foundations, one of many organizations of pooled local charities, had set up Community Studies, Inc., to do social research in Kansas City. Havighurst, Hughes, Warner, and I considered Kansas City and connection with Community Studies as a practicable possibility. With the aid of the energetic Homer Wadsworth (formerly a Pittsburgh social worker and executive and now for many years doing similar work in Cleveland) it was possible to meet interested local elites who appeared to be the moving forces of the city.^[43]

After I taught the fall term in Chicago in 1951, Evelyn and I moved to Kansas City, where I was hoping to learn how to conduct a community study with Martin Loeb and four graduate students in sociology (one of them, Warren Peterson, was working on a dissertation of great interest to me about Kansas City school teachers). I was a resident researcher from the supervising Committee on Human Development quartet, and Loeb was the director. The community study was framed around gerontological questions, but I wanted to go beyond those and also beyond the questions of social class that preoccupied Loeb and Richard Coleman, one of Lloyd Warner's students and his later collaborator.^[44] For example, I was interested in the religious life of this predominantly Protestant community (so different from overwhelmingly Catholic Buffalo) but was unsuccessful in persuading Loeb and the others to spend their Sunday mornings visiting churches (discreetly of course) to understand, for example, the difference in liturgical practices, Sunday school, and sermons among the three Churches of Christ, one of which in an upper middle-class neighborhood had been built by Frank Lloyd Wright. In the hope of stimulating the group of colleagues, I made field notes of observations and interviews and circulated what I loosely termed "notes on this and that"; but neither Martin Loeb nor the graduate students reciprocated my efforts, and I found that I could neither lead nor follow a project that for a time floundered.^[45] I had been made a pro tem member of the Department of Sociology, chaired by the genial and reflective Ernst Mannheim, at the University of Kansas City, then a private institution, and gave a course of evening lectures on sociology.

I also continued a mode of ad hoc inquiry into the varieties of higher education that was to develop into my own specialty in community studies, namely, the community of colleges and universities. I accepted invitations to speak at those types of academic institutions with which I was unfamiliar, and if the Midwest Sociological Society was holding its annual meeting at Indiana University, I would try to go a day ahead or stay a day after its conclusion to meet people at that splendid institution and learn more about its ecological niche in the state (for example, its relationship with Purdue), in the region, and in the country. I accepted invitations to visit sociologists at the University of Kansas, Kansas State University, and the University of Missouri at Columbia (where I briefly explored the limited legacies Veblen had left during his time there); in Kansas City I met Jesuits teaching at Rockhurst College, and educators experimenting with a modular program at Park College; I had earlier been interested in Stephens College, also in Columbia, Missouri, as an

aspect of a continuing concern for women's education and the role of women's colleges in that education. These visits were exploratory, not systematic, but forerunners of later dedication to a kind of academic ethnography pursued in brief bouts of fieldwork of the sort Ray Rist once characterized as blitzkrieg ethnography.^[46]

In 1954 Everett Hughes, as chairman of the Department of Sociology and with support from Morton Grodzins, then dean of the Division of the Social Sciences, persuaded the department to allow me to join it on a split appointment with the College. However, there was dissent from the demographers, notably from Philip Hauser. He insisted that I not be given the title professor of sociology but retain the one I already had as professor of the social sciences, and in the end that arrangement was agreed on.

But the enmity was a problem for graduate students who worked with Hughes and with me, as well as for nontenured colleagues, particularly Nelson Foote and Anselm Strauss, with whom I shared research projects and to whom I was personally and professionally close. Unrealistically, if understandably, translating acidulous comments by faculty members into actual proscriptions of what would pass muster, some able graduate students feared to write a dissertation without tables in it. Fears increased when Hauser, after a rough political campaign, was elected to the chairmanship in place of Hughes. I sometimes had the dismal experience of having as a doctoral candidate someone who had been a spirited undergraduate and watching that person become more timid and less original as time went by. Meanwhile, I had been engaged in cooperation with Hughes in recruiting members of a group who called themselves the Young Turks at the Bureau of Applied Social Research, of whom a modest and percipient account appears in James Coleman's contribution to this volume. Coleman himself came; we had adjoining offices in the Social Science Research Building, which is so constructed that secretaries do not act as buffers. Everett Hughes was on the other side of me, and communication was frequent among us. I recall my excitement in looking through high-school yearbooks with Coleman and pondering the reasons why in some schools an overlapping group of students not only occupied the elected offices but also edited the yearbook, played in the band, served as cheerleaders, and so on, whereas in other schools there was more of a division of labor. Elihu Katz came, and I brought in Rolf Meyersohn to be research director of the Center for the Study of Leisure, which I established with Ford Foundation support in 1955. Katz, Meyersohn, and I offered seminars

on mass communication, among other things comparing academic with journalistic ethics in interviewing. Hughes and I traveled to Cambridge and were successful in persuading Peter and Alice Rossi to come to Chicago; they had formerly worked at the Bureau of Applied Social Research.

None of these people had tenure, and if the liveliness facilitated by their arrival was to be maintained, and the combativeness of the department contained, Hughes and I agreed that there needed to be a new, hence not previously involved, chairman. We went to New York to see if we could persuade Leonard Cottrell, Jr., then at the Russell Sage Foundation, to accept a position, if one could be worked out, at Chicago, where we had the strong support of the dean of the Social Science Division. He declined. We made other overtures, which of course had to be to persons of such distinction that there would be no question as to their academic legitimacy. None worked out. Concurrently, in the wake of Hutchins's departure, less autonomy was being granted to the College.

In the summer of 1954, I taught sociology in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard's Summer School. That fall McGeorge Bundy, the dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, whom I had met and admired, asked me whether he could stop over to see me in Chicago as he would be on his way to Wisconsin; I responded that if he were coming with any thought of persuading me to leave Chicago for Harvard, he should not stop by, and he did not. The intellectual excitement of the University of Chicago outweighed the price it seemed to exact in terms of combative personal and professional relations.

Several years later, however, the balance began to tilt against Chicago, and I quietly began thinking about finding a more equable place. The California Institute of Technology was one place I considered. Cal Tech possessed able faculty in economics, history, anthropology, and psychology. I would have been happy to teach bright undergraduates who might be willing from time to time to relax narrow definitions of what is scientific and examine social life with disciplined subjectivity. Stanford was another possibility. However, when in 1957 Bundy again approached me, he persuaded me to come to a newly created chair where my principal responsibility would be to undergraduates. It was an additional attraction that I would be affiliated with the Department of Social Relations. Even so, I found it very hard to leave the University of Chicago, toward which I had developed intense institutional loyalty, almost a kind of patriotism. It was a wrench to leave colleagues with whom I had worked in teaching and in research, and the many friends

Evelyn and I had made and who urged me to stay. At Harvard I quickly managed to develop an interdisciplinary cadre to join me in teaching a large course, "American Character and Social Structure," in the General Education program.^[47] Rather than returning to Dunster House, I took part in shaping Quincy House, which opened in 1959, a year after my arrival at Harvard, and which, with Henry Kissinger, H. Stuart Hughes, and others as associates, became the most politically engaged of the Houses.

One of the ironies of my shift of locale has been to observe that the University of Chicago survived the student-faculty protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and also more recent controversies over issues of race and gender, with its undergraduate curriculum unimpaired, its academic seriousness unquestioned. By moving to Harvard I did not escape departmental controversy! However, the small number of graduate students with whom I have worked and with whom, happily, I continue to work, though emeritus, have not been at risk. In 1976, I became in addition a member of the faculty of the Graduate School of Education. Some of the most mature and interesting graduate students with whom I have worked have come from that school.

Chapter Three—
Columbia in the 1950s

James S. Coleman

Introduction

When at the age of twenty-five I left a job as a chemist at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York, and took on a new life, the transformation was nearly complete. Except for my wife (and other kin, who lived far away in the Midwest and South) I shed all prior associations. The resocialization I underwent at Columbia University from 1951 to 1955 was intense; after that resocialization, I was a different person, with different goals, headed in a different direction.

It could be put differently; my life can be divided into two parts: before I first entered Fayerweather Hall (the building in which sociology is housed at Columbia), and after Fayerweather. I could, then, write about before Fayerweather to give a sense of how the first twenty-five years led me there. But what went on in Fayerweather Hall and vicinity during this four-year period is of more general interest, for during those years Columbia's importance for sociology was at its peak. Thus, to write about them is to do more than give a view of the resocialization that shaped my direction as a sociologist. It is to tell something about an important part of the history of the discipline at Columbia in the early 1950s.

Recognizing this, I will concentrate in this essay on that four-year period, which generated the orientations I had when I left Columbia. I will approach this examination by abstracting, successively, five kinds of information from the concrete reality that was sociology at Columbia

from 1951 to 1955. The first three are necessary to understand what was going on at Columbia in sociology. The fourth and fifth give additional information relevant to my own development.

1. I will try to describe the social system of sociology at Columbia, the loci of power and authority, the distribution of attention, the status system, and the allocation of rewards.

2. Analytically distinct from the social system are the personalities of certain Columbia professors, in particular Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton. While much can be understood about sociology at Columbia by knowing the social structure, more is revealed by learning something about the modus operandi of its two principal figures, Lazarsfeld and Merton.

3. But there was simultaneously a content to sociology at Columbia. To describe it constitutes a kind of history of ideas or sociology of knowledge to give an understanding of the relations, not between persons, but between ideas. It is this content, this interplay of ideas, that had special importance in shaping my (and others') work in subsequent years.

4. Certain of the ideas current in the Columbia sociology department in the early 1950s were especially important for me; to understand my intellectual development at Columbia requires knowing something about them.

5. Finally, I will try to describe my own trajectory through the social system of Columbia, entering as a neophyte and leaving as a professional sociologist.

To proceed in this way rather than more anecdotally and unsystematically may result in some redundancy and may even be less interesting. But I would not attempt such an enterprise without taking it as a sociological challenge, a challenge to describe and analyze the functioning of a social system.

The Social System of Columbia Sociology, 1951–55

In June 1951 I arrived at the steps of Fayerweather Hall to enroll in a course on the professions given by Everett C. Hughes, a summer visitor from the University of Chicago, and one on political sociology given by Seymour Martin Lipset, a Columbia graduate newly returned as an assis-

tant professor. Those courses, my first in sociology, began to give me a sense of what the discipline was about. But it was not until fall that I got a sense of the social system of sociology at Columbia, for it was then that the department emerged from its summer hibernation. To a new student the social system of sociology at Columbia first appeared to be a planetary system with Robert K. Merton as the shining sun around which all revolved. The most intellectual of the graduate students from the hothouse that is New York City (who could brandish quotes from obscure authors whose very names were unknown to me, a chemical engineer from the provinces) thronged to Merton, crowding each lecture and hanging on each word. I followed at a respectful distance, entranced and enamored. Only slowly it became apparent that someone else was important as well, Paul Lazarsfeld, whose domain was not a lecture room in Fayerweather but the Bureau of Applied Social Research.

Much later it became evident that the system was in fact governed by a triumvirate. Robert S. Lynd was the hidden member. Robert MacIver, a major figure in the discipline, but by then retired, continued to have an office in the Department of Government but played no role in a sociology student's life. There were a number of others, but in the peculiar social system of Columbia sociology they seemed to matter little, or mattered only to those who themselves seemed to matter little: C. Wright Mills in the college, William Goode in general studies, Theodore Abel, William Casey (with his own brand of social theory, shared by no one else), Kingsley Davis, Bernhard Stern, and the young assistant professors, Lipset and Herbert Hyman. The list may be as startling to others as it is to me as I read over it, for it includes not only persons whose importance to the discipline has subsequently become great (Goode, Lipset, and Hyman), but also some whose importance even at the time was great (C. Wright Mills and Kingsley Davis).

The authority of each member of this triumvirate gained legitimacy from a different source. Merton's authority gained its legitimacy first from the students, through the extraordinary attraction of his lectures, and secondarily from the strength of his position in the discipline, which was recognized by the university administration. Lazarsfeld's arose also from students, but not primarily through his teaching in formal courses. It arose, rather, from the quantity of empirical research he generated and his leadership of the Bureau of Applied Social Research, which provided an institutional base for the research. But that base itself had only tenuous acceptance by the university. Such applied research as market research and communications research for radio networks,

magazine publishers, and other business firms was an upstart activity with which traditional Columbia administrators were uneasy. Merton, by accepting, participating in, and sharing the governance of the bureau, was, it seemed, Lazarsfeld's protector, a shield against the university administration.

Lynd's rumored power was, from the students' point of view, the strangest of all because he held almost no interest for students and was not active in research. (I heard of his importance only indirectly, from Lipset, who was still close to graduate students in age and not far removed in status.) It seemed, according to students' second-hand information, to result entirely from the deference paid by Merton and Lazarsfeld to his views, thus deriving in the end from the bases of legitimacy that gave them their authority. (I attended a few lectures in a course of his one semester, but these were hortatory, more closely related to the style of the midwestern evangelists that were part of his background [and mine] than to that of a professor engaged in a search for knowledge. He preached his particular brand of homegrown leftism and had few student converts.)

It is relevant, in describing the concentration of power in this social system, to note the numbers of graduate students. If we had been fewer in number, there might have been less concentration. But in my year about one hundred graduate students were admitted. We were still part of the war-generated backlog, slowly making our way through the educational system. Indeed, for my first semester or so at Columbia I still had some GI bill benefits remaining. (The next year the incoming class was limited to fifty, and I congratulated myself on having entered when I did since I might not have made it after the limitation was imposed. I had applied also to Michigan and Harvard but was accepted only at Columbia.)

Certainly matters must have been more complex than this simple picture I have presented. Kingsley Davis (who left for Berkeley while I was at Columbia) had a smaller power base through a large Air Force contract which employed some students interested in demography. But his attractiveness was limited to the small set of demographically inclined students and was not spread throughout the student body, as was that of Merton and Lazarsfeld. He was outside the closed tripartite structure of power. (I took a course on the family from Davis but was unnerved by what I saw as his blunt manner. For example, in a draft of a term paper I used the growth in year-to-year variation in suicide rates to obtain a measure of the increasing interdependence [or common depen-

dence on the same events] of apparently independent decisions of individuals. But I was afraid of a possibly caustic response to such a venturesome paper and instead submitted another, nonempirical paper, on which I received the comment, "A great deal of logic-chopping.")

To a student coming into Columbia, then, there were really only two persons at the apex, two persons whose attention one must try to get, two persons whose judgments mattered above all—Merton and Lazarsfeld. This concentration of attention was intensified by another fact as well: to the graduate student, there was no discipline of sociology outside Columbia. Instead we saw a self-confidence, a looking inward coupled with inattention to the outside. There was a sociological literature of some importance, a literature to which Merton especially directed our attention, but except for the work of Talcott Parsons, which Merton admitted to it, that literature was all written by Europeans no longer alive. The effective absence of a discipline west of the Hudson River was most strongly emphasized by the absence of interest in reading or publishing in the journals. Graduate students were not encouraged to read the professional journals; no self-respecting graduate student at Columbia entertained the thought of journal publication as a goal. To us, Lazarsfeld and Merton had no such interests (no matter that they did publish in the journals); the world of sociology was confined to Columbia. Graduate students followed suit, with no interest other than having a paper read by Merton or Lazarsfeld. Once that had occurred, there was little interest in having it read by others.

The interest of graduate students in gaining the attention of Merton and Lazarsfeld was strengthened by the imbalance in the supply of, and demand for, their attention. Appointments to see either during his office hours were made weeks in advance. The line outside Merton's door offered recurrent testimony to this imbalance. By contrast, a student could see and talk to other faculty, if not at will, at least with far less difficulty.

This small social system, with its abundance of eager and impatient graduate students, its periphery of young and also-ran faculty, and the concentration of attention on the two major figures in the department, had some special characteristics. One of them was the concentration of graduate-student prestige in only a few students. In my second year, at the Bureau's Christmas party, someone pointed out Maurice Stein, a figure whom I knew only by reputation—at the top of the heap a year earlier—who had returned to bask in his graduate-student glory. I stood in awe at the fringes and watched as he received homage.

But reputations were unstable and could rise or fall quickly on the basis of one piece of work liked or disliked by Merton or Lazarsfeld. Hanan Selvin, in a cohort ahead of me, and the reader of my paper in Merton's lecture course the first semester, was one of the few favored by both Lazarsfeld and Merton and had an especially high reputation. But once, when he produced something Lazarsfeld or Merton found wanting, his reputation plummeted, and his lustre disappeared for a time; he was never completely to regain his lofty position. And there were those who, though potentially very good, never caught the attention of either Lazarsfeld or Merton and remained among the mass of graduate students who would have to make their reputations, if at all, after they left Columbia.

Students who worked with faculty other than Merton and Lazarsfeld were less neglected, but their reputations never soared (nor plummeted) as did those of Merton and Lazarsfeld favorites. Martin Trow is a good example. He and I worked together with Lipset intensively in analyzing the data of the ITU (International Typographical Union) study, and he largely managed the project. He was a course assistant for Mills as well. But he never worked closely with Merton or Lazarsfeld. Even though as the Union Democracy manuscript progressed, it began to have an internal reputation as something of interest, Trow never gained the reputational heights while in graduate school. His reputation came only later. Lazarsfeld once asked me about Trow as we were riding in a taxi, near the end of my Columbia period, after a frenetic meeting characteristic of his style. He knew me and my work, and knew Lipset and his work, but wondered about Trow, whose years at Columbia had failed to give Lazarsfeld any sense of his abilities.

There was another phenomenon as well. A number of sociologists with high status in the system were neither graduate students nor faculty but were brought by Lazarsfeld, Merton, or Davis to work on one of the projects. They included Renee Fox, Herbert Menzel, Natalie Rogoff, Samuel Bloom, and Duncan Luce. For some of these young social scientists the postdoctoral years at Columbia played a central role in their careers.

During my stay at Columbia the social structure was undergoing a kind of change. Earlier Lazarsfeld's students and Merton's students had been more distinct and separate. Many of Lazarsfeld's, trained in audience and market research through his projects at the Bureau, had never written dissertations and were employed in the emergent market research industry in New York; few entered academic sociology. The

stellar graduates had been students of Merton or Lynd. They were products of the prewar intellectual ferment that was largely Jewish, largely from New York high schools and City College. They had constituted the first postwar cohorts at Columbia; they included Lipset, Philip Selznick, Daniel Bell, Lewis Coser and Rose Coser, Suzanne Keller, and Peter Blau. Maurice Stein, who left Columbia as I arrived, was a remnant of those cohorts. There were rumors of others, such as Seymour Fiddle—mysterious, with an unbounded reputation but some incapacitating flaw. (He came in the night, it was said, to practice his magic in a course in general studies.)

Peter Rossi was of that crowd, but he was a Lazarsfeld student and reflected the beginnings of Lazarsfeld's move toward academic respectability. The succeeding cohorts, mine included, lacked the rich ideological, historical, and intellectual pre-graduate-school background possessed by those who had grown up in New York high schools in the late thirties. Hanan Selvin, who was my age but came to Columbia before me, was one of the earliest Lazarsfeld-Merton students, a coeditor of a reader in bureaucracy with Merton but writing his dissertation under Lazarsfeld. Patricia Kendall was another. What was happening about the time I arrived at Columbia was a merging of two streams of activity that had been rather distinct. Lazarsfeld was becoming more academic, Merton was becoming more quantitatively empirical. The Bureau provided the context and the facilities for Merton's shift, and its increasing acceptance by Columbia (it moved uptown to Columbia, at 117th Street, shortly before my arrival) provided the setting for Lazarsfeld's.

During my stay the Bureau became increasingly important to sociology at Columbia. There Lazarsfeld began the Behavioral Models Project with an Office of Naval Research grant, brought Duncan Luce from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, enticed Theodore Anderson and Howard Raiffa from the Department of Mathematical Statistics at Columbia (Luce and Raiffa's Games and Decisions was born in this project). With the project they initiated an activity less stimulating, less frenetic, less innovative, but more like that of an academic research institute than the pickup projects in audience research that had built the bureau. Merton began the extensive and prestigious medical-school project with George Reader, Patricia Kendall, and Renee Fox. Kingsley Davis had his Air Force project in methodological research. Seminars involving graduate students and postdoctoral research associates were created around such projects as the medical-school project. In all these ways the Bureau was becoming respectable.

Much of this change took place shortly before I arrived. But the Bureau's importance to sociology at Columbia continued to grow during my stay. That growth can perhaps best be illustrated by a development that, though it was temporary and depended on particular persons, exemplified the change. It was the formation of what Lazarsfeld and Merton called "Charlie Glock's Young Turks" and what the members themselves called "the traditions group."

Around 1953 Lazarsfeld turned over directorship of the Bureau to Charles Glock and became less active in Bureau affairs. Glock was not a dynamic figure, but there were a number of restless people, all involved in one way or another in Bureau projects. I was working with Lipset and Trow on the ITU project and occasionally on one or more of Lazarsfeld's projects; Elihu Katz was working on the Decatur study (which produced Personal Influence ), Herbert Menzel on concepts and indices, Lee Wiggins on Lazarsfeld's panel project, Philip Ennis on a popular-music project, and Rolf Meyerson on research in popular culture. Lazarsfeld had plucked William McPhee from a local polling organization in Denver to work with him and Bernard Berelson on the Elmira study (which produced Voting ). We all needed research projects to support us, and without Lazarsfeld to generate the small-market research and mass-communications projects on which earlier cohorts of graduate students had thrived, we set out on our own, with McPhee as the popular leader and instigator. We held a weekly seminar, circulated memos to one another about potential projects in mass culture, uses and gratifications of the mass media, contextual analysis, and methodological issues in panel studies. We saw ourselves not as working in the established traditions of Bureau studies but as starting new traditions. Despite our declarations of independence (I once wrote a first draft of a manifesto for the group, and McPhee wrote a programmatic paper on research in mass dynamics), Lazarsfeld found this enterprise interesting, and once or twice he attended the seminar as an observer. His and Merton's interest in it, and the attention of others that that interest generated, increased for us the importance of our enterprise. We gained the confidence of our own ideas, the sense that we were initiators, sociologists inventing the future of sociology. For us, there was no sociology east of Morningside Drive nor west of Broadway; and the Lazarsfeld-Merton domain between these limits was showing signs of aging. We saw ourselves as successors with our own ideas (even though grounded in theirs).

The Power of Two Personalities

Though it was not quite proper to take Merton's course in theory as a beginning graduate student, I managed to do so in the fall of my first year. I found myself in a class of students from earlier cohorts; the classroom was completely full, with students sometimes sitting on the windowsills. Merton would enter and begin a kind of rhapsody. All were entranced. A few dared occasionally to ask questions. I did not.

What did Merton do? For all of us, he revealed a vision of sociology as a challenge to the intellect. He worked in detail through Durkheim's Suicide, showing the excitement of the problem and the methodical way Durkheim set about examining it. He demonstrated how Durkheim used the aggregate data that were available to examine deep questions about the psychic state of members of a social system—questions that could only be answered conclusively by disaggregated data but were turned this way and that until Durkheim had enough kinds of data to make firm inferences about the psychological states induced by social structure.

Merton's lectures were widely known. Nonsociologists from other parts of the city would steal into the room just to listen. Students, on meeting sociologists from other universities who knew him only through his writings, would smile condescendingly, armed with the secret knowledge that came only through presence at the lectures themselves. The word to describe his effect is one whose meaning he taught us, charisma, but that word is so loosely used that it fails to convey a sense of the almost electrical charge that pervaded those lectures.

Merton was excited by the publication in the fall of 1951 of Talcott Parsons's Social System, which he saw as the theoretical guide to the future of sociology. But when he set us to reading it, he demanded that we locate in the text every empirical generalization, every proposition, and every definition. In the end the enterprise—for me, at least—defeated the original goal, for I found definition after definition, with few empirical generalizations and few propositions that could be tested and confirmed or disconfirmed. Merton, by his demands that we analyze the text sentence by sentence, showed me that Parsons had designed a set of categories, a classification scheme, that might or might not be useful but could hardly be tested.

A part of Merton's impact lay in both the personal and professional distance he maintained and in the unreachable goal of sociological truth

he held out. He brooked no compromise; his standards demanded perfection in what we did. A few of us formed a study group to discover together the precise meanings we fumbled for alone. He visited us once, and we were in awe, taking every comment as a command from above. We read, over and over, his essays in Social Theory and Social Structure . Merton held out to us a vision of a sociology that could understand society. That understanding, of which only the barest outlines had been discovered, lay in the future, and if we persevered, we might be part of that future. He captured us for sociology, even those who had come to sociology merely to be journeymen. He showed us that sociology could be—indeed, was—an intellectual challenge. We were affected by his singleness of purpose and his dedication to that challenge.

But it was important not to get too close. Some who attempted to work with Merton found themselves paralyzed by the incisiveness of his mind. One student reported in frustration that in writing a thesis for Merton, he felt a presence continuously perched on his shoulder, watching every sentence put down on paper, ready to pounce on the slightest fault.

I was not, during my time at Columbia, immobilized by this penetrating intelligence. In my third or fourth year I was a course assistant for him (not in the large theory course but in another), taking notes on his lectures, typing them up, and discussing them with him occasionally over lunch at the faculty club. On those occasions I continued to feel the awe of those first days, but he was perhaps more gentle with me, sensing my vulnerability. Once, as an outgrowth of Lazarsfeld's project on concepts and indices in the social sciences, I worked on a paper for him on the concept of social isolation and its use by social theorists. The paper was never completed in final form, and remained a learning exercise. Unlike Lazarsfeld's projects, for which a product was urgently needed to fill a specific niche, sometimes for a client, papers for Merton were finished for their own sake, or to complete a thesis, and the goal could stretch out into the indefinite future.

Much later, after I had left Columbia, I did feel the full thrust of Merton's critical intelligence. He and Robert Nisbet were gathering materials for Contemporary Social Problems, and had asked me to write a chapter on community disorganization. To gain the necessary state of mind to organize and develop the structure of the chapter, I went to the St. James Hotel at Mount Vernon Square in Baltimore (I was teaching at Johns Hopkins at the time) and isolated myself from the world for four days while I wrestled with the problem and finally devel-

oped an outline for the chapter. When I finally completed it some weeks later and felt satisfied with the result, I sent it to Merton and Nisbet for editorial comments and critique. The single-spaced, many-paged criticism I soon received from Merton devastated me—not merely because of the depth of his criticism but also because, agreeing with most of it, I felt that my shallowness of thought and weakness of documentation lay wholly exposed. I was ashamed of the manuscript, angry at myself, angry at Merton. I was unable to touch the manuscript, able only to write Nisbet (certainly not Merton) that I had to resign the task, that there was obviously nothing I could do to the manuscript to make it acceptable. But through nurturance, reassurance, and urging, Nisbet induced me to go back to the manuscript, deal with the criticisms as best I could, and send him the result. I did so, and the chapter became part of the book.

My first impression, that fall of 1951, that Merton was the center of Columbia's sociological universe was approximately correct, though I was to modify that impression later. It was Merton who defined sociology as a challenge worthy of the intellect, a pursuit at least equal to any other in the university. He created the intellectual tension that energized students in pursuit of the chalice of sociology.

Lazarsfeld, however, was no less important. I had originally applied to Columbia because of someone there named Lazarsfeld or Lasswell—I was not sure which—whose work I had read in a course in social psychology I was taking in evening school. (I had never taken a course in sociology and had never heard of Merton.) In the spring of 1952, my second semester at Columbia, Paul Lazarsfeld accosted me for the first time. I had been in a methods course of his, which was uneventful. The problem he raised with me was that there was a biophysicist from the University of Chicago, Nicolas Rashevsky, whom he had invited to give a lecture in a series on mathematical sociology the year before, and now, for the book Lazarsfeld was attempting to put together from the lecture series, Rashevsky had written up his lectures, in Lazarsfeld's opinion unintelligibly. He had asked Allen Birnbaum, a Ph.D. student in statistics, to write an intelligible exposition of Rashevsky but did not like what Birnbaum had done. Could I give it a try over the summer? We talked, he outlined what he wanted, and for the first time ever in the educational system I felt that someone had given me a responsible task to do. We met twice during the summer—once at a typical Lazarsfeld breakfast meeting in a hotel where he briefly alighted on his return from Europe—and I delivered the product he wanted at the end of the sum-

mer. Lazarsfeld's project was now complete—Rashevsky was exposited, and he could send the book to the publisher.

The incident is characteristic in one way especially: Lazarsfeld did not simply accept the paper of this distinguished mathematical biophysicist. It was unintelligible to him, and he wanted each of the papers in that book (which became Mathematical Thinking in the Social Sciences ) to teach him something. Until it did so, he was not willing to publish Rashevsky's lectures. Indeed, in many respects one could characterize part of Columbia at the time—certainly in mathematical sociology and to a considerable extent in Lazarsfeld's other areas of interest—as a collection of people he had gathered around himself for the purpose of teaching him. His appetite for learning—and thus for people—was insatiable. He brought the economist William Baumol from Princeton to a seminar to teach him how differential equations could be adapted to study the dynamics of qualitative attributes—and then remained unsatisfied. He brought the philosopher Gustave Bergman from the Midwest to Hanover, New Hampshire, to teach him about intervening variables and then so pestered him with insistent questions that Bergman, a round little man, ended up rolling on the floor, flailing with arms and legs in helpless frustration. He brought Harold Kelly, John Thibaut, and Leon Festinger to Hanover to teach him about how Lewinian and other social psychologies constructed concepts. He brought William Vickrey from the other side of the Columbia campus to teach him how economists treat the concept of utility. He listened intently to his students—Lee Wiggins, Allen Barton, Elihu Katz, Hanan Selvin, William McPhee—whenever he thought he could learn from them. He invaded the statistics department and got Theodore Anderson to teach him about Markov chains. He brought Duncan Luce and Gerald Thompson to work on mathematical problems he could not solve. He brought Merrill Flood from Rand and, unawed by Flood's previous distinguished work, immediately found Flood uninteresting.

The attention of those in Lazarsfeld's orbit, unconcerned about the outside sociological world, was directed to problems. Each was concerned only with convincing Lazarsfeld that he had solved one of the problems that Lazarsfeld had set. Each of us after we left (and I write now only of those who did, for some found it exceedingly difficult to break away from the attractive forces that the combination of Merton and Lazarsfeld constituted, and some were institutionally affixed to Columbia) encountered what seemed at first a strange and far less exciting world outside. We found no one in the new environment who cared

as Lazarsfeld did. If there was a sociological community out there, it seemed a distant and impersonal one. No one seemed as interested as he in solving problems, and certainly no one was as interested in the problems that anyone else might solve.

Despite all this, many of us around Lazarsfeld felt extreme frustration because at times the problems themselves appeared spurious or unimportant. Lazarsfeld was not satisfied to see his protégés and colleagues solve problems that others outside considered important but was only satisfied when a problem he considered important was solved—and solved in a way that made sense to him.

Toward the end of my time at Columbia, in 1954, I experienced this insistence. Lazarsfeld showed me a sheaf of extended quotations from various qualitative studies, mostly community studies, many from the Chicago school of Robert E. Park, such as Black Metropolis and The Gold Coast and the Slum , and some from an anthropological tradition. These quotations were examples of what Lazarsfeld called global indicators—indicators of some concept or property of the community or the neighborhood that could not be derived from individuals by aggregation. They had been gathered by members of a seminar that he and Patricia Kendall had led, and he wanted somehow to systematize them, to create a transmissible method out of what had been art. Lazarsfeld had a continuing interest in such global indicators, an interest that he describes in "Notes on the History of Concept Formation," one of the essays that appeared in his Qualitative Analysis (1972). It was this interest that led him to induce colleagues and students to examine work they would never otherwise have looked at. For example, with this sheaf of global indicators he directed me to read such diverse authors as Wilhelm Dilthey (on the characterization of a cultural system), Harold Guetzkow (on properties of a group), and Meyer Shapiro (on the use of art to characterize the style of a period).

In this case, as in many others, Lazarsfeld saw the person he put to work (and I was not the first with this problem) as an extension of himself. When the work I did failed to reflect his ideas, he argued with me at length over it. He could not be persuaded that the way I had done it was right; he did not want to see it published as I had conceived it, and I would not change my views. (I saw his distinctions as too mechanical, lacking in substance; he saw mine as blind to the methodological differences.) So he went ahead and with Herbert Menzel developed his own ideas further and published them in a paper that later became well known. I, some years later, published my long paper separately. This

example could be duplicated, with minor variations, by many of Lazarsfeld's students. Before I arrived at Columbia, the "Decatur study" was one on which C. Wright Mills, as well as others, had been tried by Lazarsfeld and found wanting. Elihu Katz was set to work on it and it ended successfully, as Personal Influence .

The extent of this invasion of self that Lazarsfeld practiced was so great that many of those who had worked most closely with him (or, more properly put, whom he had pursued and captured) remained permanently hostile or ambivalent. For several years after the global-indicator affair I myself was angry. And when in 1978, two years after his death, I gave a warm and appreciative account of Lazarsfeld's work, several people who had been close to him mentioned how surprised they were that I could give such a positive and unambivalent account of this predatory man. Yet some of those same people were bereft when they left Columbia and were free of him.

Lazarsfeld's dual concern with people and with problems led to unlikely combinations, some of which foundered while others, perhaps equally unlikely at the outset, flourished. When he set C. Wright Mills to work on the problem of personal influence in Decatur, Illinois, this did not last long. Or when he began to work with pollster Lou Harris on a study of college faculty, this aborted. (Lazarsfeld completed the study with Wagner Thielens as The Academic Mind .) His work with Martin Lipset on a review of political behavior was somewhat more productive but rather short-lived. No one would have predicted that he and Ernest Nagel would manage a successful series of seminars in mathematical sociology, or that he and David Riesman would come as close together as they did—even so, remaining at arm's length—in the study of college faculties. And who could have guessed that his association with Merton would flower and become so important? That was Lazarsfeld's personal style: he could not stand to have a bright person, whom he respected, whether colleague or student, in the vicinity yet not working on problems he saw as significant. He used his own time, flattery, and attention; he used money, he used summers in Hanover, New Hampshire, he used projects at the Bureau; he used all the inducements at his command to draw others into his orbit. This was not charisma, which could properly describe the attraction to Merton. It was more nearly a matter of pursuit.

To bring this about was costly to Lazarsfeld. The tactics did not allow a posture of knowing more than he did. To engage the efforts of others on a problem, he had to declare his own defeat. But that he was willing to do. For him, getting the problem solved was most important (or

perhaps getting another to work on his problem was most important); the fact that another might be the one to solve the problem was a sacrifice he was willing to make.

This unassuming aspect of Lazarsfeld combined with another attribute to make him a perfect complement to substantive sociologists. For Lazarsfeld had a difficult time understanding sociological theory. In some of his writing (the best sampling can be found in Qualitative Analysis ) he exhibits his long-standing concern to understand action and his rich sense of the history of the theory of action. But substance that was more sociological came slowly to him.

The success of the Merton-Lazarsfeld seminars was this peculiar complementarity both in substance and in personality. Merton knew what Weber and others had written about bureaucracy, for example. He knew the theory. Lazarsfeld most explicitly did not know, and he asked questions. In part Lazarsfeld asked because he simply did not understand the substance. But in part he asked them because his desire for an answer outweighed any concern he might have had about being regarded as sociologically naive. In other cases the interaction was somewhat modified. Merton would lay out a substantive sociological analysis he himself had carried out, and then Lazarsfeld would pose the same or similar questions. In at least one case, having finally felt that he understood what the theorist meant, he attempted this understanding through formalization, in a joint paper with Merton.

This account of the personalities of Merton and Lazarsfeld does not do justice to the combination of the two and the impact of this combination on each of them and on those at Columbia. The difference in their personalities and the power of their personalities could have produced a standoff or an unending conflict. But each respected what the other could do, each deferred to the other in the other's realm of expertise, and perhaps each even yearned somewhat to have the other's talents. Whatever the complex character of this relation, its strength is what gave Columbia sociology its strength over the long period beginning in the 1940s and extending to the 1970s. Not surprisingly, its strength is what created such a vacuum in sociology at Columbia, a vacuum felt beyond the limits of that university once the combination was gone.

As has often been pointed out, at the same time Harvard had a counterpart to Paul Lazarsfeld in Samuel Stouffer, and to Robert Merton in Talcott Parsons. But there was never the joining of activities nor the joining of ideas between Parsons and Stouffer that occurred between Merton and Lazarsfeld.

The Content of Sociology at Columbia

In the early 1950s sociology was undergoing a change, and Columbia was on the forefront of that change. (I write this from the perspective of the present, not from my perspective as a graduate student at the time. Then, the Columbia sociology of 1951 was all I knew as sociology.) The watershed at Columbia came with the decline of Lynd and the arrival of Lazarsfeld. (It is perhaps ironic that Lynd brought Lazarsfeld to Columbia and then watched with some disfavor the transformation of the discipline that Lazarsfeld helped bring about.) Before this watershed, the unit for most empirical research in American sociology had been a community or an organization. The Lynds' study of Middletown is an example, as are Columbia Ph.D. dissertations of a slightly earlier period, such as Philip Selznick's T.V.A. and the Grass Roots , Martin Lipset's Agrarian Socialism . At the University of Chicago, W. Lloyd Warner's Yankee City series and A. B. Hollingshead's Elmtown's Youth were studies that, although they used the new methods of sample surveys, focused on the stratification system of a given community and thus continued the Chicago school's focus on communities or neighborhoods as the units of analysis.

But the four volumes in the American Soldier series by Samuel Stouffer's group during World War II provided a strong stimulus for change to a sociology based on sample surveys with the individual as the unit of analysis and individual behavior as the phenomenon under examination. That stimulus was amplified by the immensely influential Continuities in Social Research: The American Soldier , edited by Merton and Lazarsfeld. The Merton and Kitt essay on reference groups and the Lazarsfeld and Kendall essay on methods of elaboration in survey analysis, which covered both the substantive and methodological flanks of the new individualist movement in sociology, were the centerpieces of that volume.

Lazarsfeld's work in radio research, and mass-communications research more generally, was a major force for this new individualist direction at Columbia. The appointment at Columbia of Herbert Hyman, a social psychologist who had done work on reference groups, was another indicator of the change. Even the research that was close to traditional sociological concerns began to take the same form. Lazarsfeld's voting studies, Merton's study of the Kate Smith war bond appeal (Mass Persuasion ), and Katz and Lazarsfeld's Personal Influence all took individual

behavior or attitudes as the dependent variables to be explained; all were concerned with varying individual responses to a mass stimulus.

Other work at Columbia attempted to combine the new methods of quantitative survey analysis with studies of problems that involved the behavior of a social unit—a community or an organization. This work was in part due to Merton's influence always pulling Lazarsfeld toward sociological questions and in part due to the fact that the "community-study" period of sociological research had not completely passed. Even the two voting studies, precursors of national voting studies, were set in two communities, Elmira, New York, and Sandusky, Ohio, with the structured interviews supplemented by additional data on community organizations and the social relationships of the respondents. These attempts, reflecting a tension between the old problem and the new methods, met with variable success, though none was completely successful. In the voting studies the community data never came together with the interview data, and the problems studied remained those of individual voting behavior. In Personal Influence , set in Decatur, Illinois, snowball sampling led to greater success and to the concept of the two-step flow of communication. In Merton's medical-school project, questionnaire data from whole cohorts of medical students, rather than from samples, made possible the study of contextual influences on behavior, and the use of two medical schools rather than one allowed the study of school-level effects, though again on individual behavior. In the ITU study Lipset's focus on substantive problems of democratic theory at the system level led to an analysis that kept the behavior of the system at the forefront, but without fully integrating problems and methods. In all these ways sociology at Columbia in the 1950s contained a sizeable component of social psychology. In a large and steadily increasing fraction of the empirical research done at Columbia during the period, individual behavior was the phenomenon under study, not the behavior of a social system or any part of it beyond the individual.

Yet in large part this emphasis merely reflected the increasing individualism of society. In the 1940s Hollingshead had examined social stratification by studying Elmtown's youth, showing that the social position of the parent was transmitted to the child by way of the school. In the 1950s it no longer seemed sensible to study generational transmission of social stratification by studying Elmtowns; young people were changing their socila positions, not within the stratification systems of these towns, but outside them by leaving their hometowns. Thus it

became natural to study the individuals rather than the towns. Sociology at Columbia reflected that change and helped develop the methods and redefine the problems of sociology in such a way as to make the academic study of society congruent with new social reality. Much of what is today regarded as the mainstream of sociology constitutes the further development of that paradigm. Path analysis as a logical extension of the ideas of elaboration in the Lazarsfeld-Kendall paper, status attainment research with nationally representative samples as the replacement for the Yankee City and Elmtown community studies, and national election studies as the replacement for community-based samples all suggest the extent of change of the discipline as it mirrors changes in society.

The change that was occuring in the 1950s at Columbia can be described in another way. As the discipline embraced quantitative methods to study America's changing social structure, it retained the ability to study the effects of social structure on individual behavior (in part through methods of contextual and relational analysis that were being fashioned at Columbia). But it lost the capacity to reconstitute—still quantitatively—from individual actions the behavior of the social system composed of those individuals. What can be done discursively, in describing how the interplay of actions by individuals leads to system-level outcomes (say, in community decision making or organizational behavior or in the election of a president), remains largely beyond our quantitative grasp. This uneven development of quantitative methods has led to a concentration of quantitative empirical research on determinants of individual behavior, a shift from problems that occupied the discipline before the watershed I have described.

The Impact of These Ideas on Me

Because I came to Columbia with almost no background in any social science, the frame of reference imposed by sociology at Columbia was the only frame I had. I reflected, both in the methodological skills I developed and in the substantive problems I saw as important, the then current Columbia definition of sociology. But my development as a sociologist reflected more specifically the confluence of three streams of activity: the activities of Lazarsfeld, the activities of Merton, and the activities of Lipset. From Merton came not only the vision of sociology as a calling but also a focus on sociological determinants of individual behavior, following in the pattern of Durkheim, on whose analysis of

social determinants of suicide (not The Division of Labor or The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, both of which had more a systemic, less individual, focus) Merton lavished attention in his lectures on theory.

Whether it was Merton's own orientation, the individualist direction of sociology at Columbia, or a positivist orientation I carried over from the physical sciences, midway through graduate school I concluded that Durkheim was engaged in one kind of endeavor and Weber in an altogether different one, and that I would choose Durkheim's path. I saw that path as the study of the force of social structure and social organization on the individuals embedded in that structure. Weber I thought of as engaged in the other side: the study of consequences of individuals' values, and the actions following from them, for social organization. Parsons I saw as trying to realize a Weberian program of theory construction and research, and although I felt it might have been done better by another, part of Parsons's problem seemed to lie in the Weberian starting point.

I have subsequently changed my orientation toward social theory to one more consistent with the Weberian program by taking purposive action as a starting point for social organization rather than social structure as a starting point for individual action. This problem, which can be described as the micro-to-macro problem, was not what I took away with me from Columbia. The Durkheimian orientation was far more compatible with the quantitative methods and the mathematical sociology I was learning there.

My orientation toward mathematical sociology came from Lazarsfeld via three channels, in addition to the Lazarsfeld-Nagel seminar and the evening university seminar on mathematics in the social sciences. First was the project he gave me of translating Rashevsky's mathematical biology for a sociological audience. Although this work (published in Mathematical Thinking in the Social Sciences ) had little, if any, significance for the discipline, it was important for my development. Rashevsky was a mathematical biophysicist who had turned to sociological problems and had developed models of various social processes. What was important for me about Rashevsky's work was what was important later in Nagel's orientation and in some of the mathematical models we studied in the Lazarsfeld-Nagel seminar: it was mathematics dedicated to mirroring social processes . It was not just a compilation of statistical indices nor a static representation of structure (as was Lazarsfeld's latent structure analysis, a development that excited La-

zarsfeld but left me cold). In this it was compatible with the applications of mathematics I knew from physics and physical chemistry and reinforced my belief that this mirroring of social processes was the most profitable application of mathematics in sociology. The orientation I found in Rashevsky, Nagel, and much of Herbert Simon's work (which influenced me while I was still in graduate school) is not one I have seen among users of mathematics in sociology whose background is in mathematics or statistics rather than the physical sciences or engineering. Nor did I find it in Lazarsfeld, whose preoccupation was with latent structure analysis and index construction.

The second channel was the Behavioral Models Project, for which I contracted to do a review and exposition of mathematics as applied to the study of small groups. In that work I learned about systems of nonlinear differential equations, beginning with Simon's modeling of Homans's propositions about small-group processes, and then discovering A. J. Lotka's work and Volterra's equations for predator-prey models—again a reinforcement of the process orientation I had found in Rashevsky. I also stuffed my head full of the work on random and nonrandom nets by Rashevsky's colleagues (Anatol Rapoport and others) at Chicago, which I applied to, and modified for, social networks. This work, however (which has recently been rediscovered by sociologists engaged in the study of social networks), attracted me far less than process modeling.

The third channel was Lazarsfeld's Panel Project, designed to develop methods for the analysis of panel data. The problem of panel analysis that Lazarsfeld posed was one I leaped on because it was hospitable to a model of a process; but his own solution to that problem involved index construction rather than construction of such a process model. It was the struggle to find a solution to this problem that led (with the aid of a suggestion from Richard Savage the year after I left Columbia) to the continuous-time stochastic process models that form the core (chapters 4–13) of my Introduction to Mathematical Sociology (1964) and to subsequent work in the same direction, as represented most recently in Longitudinal Data Analysis (1981). The compatibility of this direction of modeling with the substantive problems surrounding mass communications and mass behavior is not accidental, for those were the problems occupying Lazarsfeld as he formulated the problems of panel analysis.

Though Lipset was less important to the social system of Columbia sociology than Lazarsfeld or Merton, he was no less important than they to my development as a sociologist. Through a series of fortunate

accidents I came in 1952 to be the third member (with Lipset and Trow) of the ITU research team. Lipset had started to plan the research as early as 1949, and it began as an organized research project in 1951. What was of central importance about the ITU study was the fact that it focused on a substantive macrosocial problem in political sociology (the social bases of political democracy) that had a rich history in sociological theory. Yet the research used quantitative data based on the new sample survey techniques to study the problem.

Macrosocial problems and sample survey techniques usually do not mix well in social research. How was Lipset able to bring about a successful mix? The answer, I believe, lies in the dominance of the problem over the data, a dominance buttressed both by the rich store of knowledge that Lipset had about the printers' union and by the fund of social and political theory bearing on the problem that he had at his fingertips. And as Union Democracy documents, the survey of New York printers was only one of a number of data sources, some of which (such as literature about printing unions and informant interviews with printers) Lipset had amassed before the survey project and some of which (such as observation of union meetings and chapel meetings, records of voting by locals in international elections, written material about union political issues gleaned from union publications) were obtained during the project itself. Although quantitative analyses of the survey data can be found throughout the book and indeed are central to the study, it was the framework of ideas from social theory that generated the analyses. Those ideas were, of course, modified by the results of the data analysis. For example, Lipset began with an idea of the importance of the occupational community for political participation in the union; but only in the analysis of the survey data did we discover the importance of certain formal clubs within the union for providing an organized base of opposition to the incumbents. Thus the initial ideas were richly developed, elaborated, and modified by the data. But the main point is that the framework of ideas was set by the macrosocial theory; the data analyses were forced to cope with those ideas, often partially testing a hypothesized macrosocial relation by testing the one or more implied micro-level processes necessary to generate it.

This data analysis, moving between theory such as that of the mass-society theorists and data that only indirectly bore on the theory, was far more important to the development of my data analysis skills than were any courses in research methods. It also led to orientations different from those I would have developed in such courses. One of these was a

low level of interest in statistical inference (an orientation characteristic of Columbia sociology as a whole). The complexity of the linkage between, on the one hand, survey analysis involving relations between attributes of individuals and, on the other, the structure of macro-level relations they were designed to test made a prima facie case for ignoring standard tests and using other criteria to aid in drawing inferences about the social bases of political democracy.

Quite apart from these theoretical and methodological aspects, I found the ITU study appealing because it was consistent with, and reinforced my interest in, political pluralism, the social sources of political diversity, and the structural bases for opposition to an incumbent authority. It was partly these ideas that led to the proposal for a study of high schools that I tried to get funded when I was at the Bureau in early 1955 and finally pursued at the University of Chicago in 1957 (published in 1961 as The Adolescent Society ). Treating the social system of adolescents in a high school as a partially closed social system, I wanted to study the effects of monolithic and pluralistic status systems on the behavior of adolescents, and to study the sources of these variations in status systems. (The proposal is included in an appendix in The Adolescent Society .) The theoretical aims of the study were never realized; The Adolescent Society was written largely for a lay audience and education professionals, with the theoretical work deferred to a later publication that never materialized. The contrast of The Adolescent Society, in which the theoretical aims did not dominate the data analysis, with Union Democracy, in which they did, is instructive, showing the ease with which the constraints of survey analysis can come to distort the original goals of the research.

Besides Merton, Lazarsfeld, and Lipset, others were also important to the development of my ideas. One was Ernest Nagel, both in his courses (logic, and the philosophy of science) that I audited and in the seminar with Lazarsfeld. Herbert Hyman, remarkably ingenious in using survey data to test social psychological ideas, was another. Others included statisticians, particularly Howard Raiffa and Theodore Anderson. Still another was a visitor, Harold Pfautz, who late in my Columbia career introduced me to some of the sociological classics I would otherwise have missed, including Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, an extraordinary set of ideas about the self and society. (I had already been entranced by G. H. Mead's ideas, but I found Smith even more compelling.)

Quite apart from faculty, the set of fellow students and research associates at the Bureau was of considerable importance to each of us. It

was, for example, in the traditions group seminars that the ideas about informal social structure and (as McPhee put it) the dynamics of masses began to emerge, ideas that strongly influenced my Community Conflict, the study that Herb Menzel, Elihu Katz, and I did (Medical Innovation ) on diffusion of a new drug through the medical community, a paper on relational analysis that described ways of capturing the effects of informal social structure with survey-type data, and other methodological innovations, such as snowball sampling. These and others were the ideas that emerged four or five years downstream from the watershed that substituted mass communication and social psychology for community studies and social structure at Columbia. This orientation toward the study of behavior in loosely structured social systems is not all of sociology; but it was an important direction, and one that emerged not only from the combination of inputs we had received from the faculty and the research at Columbia but also from the further development of those ideas through our interaction.

This intellectual direction, which I had when I left Columbia, has not, of course, remained unchanged over the years. It has taken at least one abrupt turn, along with other, more minor ones. That, however, is another story, for which there is no space here.

My Traverse through Columbia

I came to Columbia resolving to give the educational system one last chance. It had failed, I felt, through high school and the several colleges I had attended. My teachers had been engaged in transmitting information, but none (except for two at Purdue) had been interested in me, in what I might do with the information they had imparted.

From nearly the beginning at Columbia I felt a difference. I sensed that some faculty members had a personal (that is, selfish) interest in some of their students. They seemed to be interested in those students in a way I had never felt since the ninth grade: their interest seemed tinged with the interest that parents have in their children. If asked to explain that now, I would say it is because, as children do for parents, graduate students help bring professors closer to immortality, extending their influence beyond their own life span. In the then large sociology department at Columbia this interest was in conflict with another, the faculty's desire to protect itself from graduate-student demands, so that for many of my fellow students graduate school did not have this special—perhaps essential—quality. For me, from nearly the beginning, it did.

I moved into an apartment at 111th Street and Broadway and sold my 1947 Chevrolet to a couple of Puerto Ricans, hoping they would not notice an ominous sound in the differential. I entered Columbia still a naive boy from Seven Mile, Ohio, and Herndon, Kentucky, with training as a chemical engineer and work experience as a chemist. I was not, however, in great awe of sociology. I had read enough by that time to have discovered that the density of ideas was not comparable to that in a book on physical chemistry. I wanted to progress rapidly, to skip background courses and proceed with the more advanced ones. As for statistics, I had had no courses but had read Quinn McNemar's statistical text over the summer so that I could enter the regular course on sociological statistics without preliminaries. But I decided after the first session to opt out of the course and take my statistics along with the statistics students in the mathematical statistics department. (It was the first of several courses I took in that department. My mathematical background from chemical engineering was strong enough to enable me to take courses in statistics that my sociology colleagues could not.)

As I have already indicated, Merton's theory course was riveting, a conversion experience for those of us eager for conversion. But my interest in coursework was largely confined to Merton's course and to the mathematical statistics courses. I did learn something about methods from Herbert Hyman and Charles Wright's research methods sequence. But with rare exceptions I have never found lecture courses particularly appealing as a medium for learning. Ernest Nagel's course in philosophy of science, which I sat in on, unregistered, was one such exception. The class always continued for ten or twenty minutes after its time with a group of students clustered around him, asking questions and arguing points. I stood on the periphery, verbally inadequate and unsure of myself, listening to the interchange and wanting to interrupt but remaining mute.

Seminars were another matter altogether. Some of the seminars were run by two faculty members, and the interchange was far more instructive than the lectures. In seminars we were induced to perform, to write and present papers, to show what we could do. The Lazarsfeld-Merton seminar in bureaucracy had both these components, as did the Lazarsfeld-Nagel seminar in mathematical sociology.

I sat in on a number of courses and seminars outside the department, stimulated by the extraordinary range of intellectual activity. One was Abram Kardiner's seminar, which I attended while I was reading his

Psychological Frontiers of Society; a second was Greenberg's course on linguistics; and a third was George Stigler's course in microeconomics. In an informal course on operations research I found an interesting mixture of statistics, mathematics, and an engineer's approach to problem solving. And I took a course in industrial engineering from Albert Rubenstein in which we engaged in a kind of sociology of formal organizations with an emphasis on patterns of communication.

So much for coursework. In my second semester I learned that Lipset and Trow were looking for interviewers for the ITU project, which was just going into the field. I applied for a job interviewing printers and was hired. I learned New York this way, riding the subways to the World-Telegram, the Sun, the Times, the Herald Tribune, the Daily News, the job shops, and printers' homes in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. I also learned interviewing. When the officials of the union were to be interviewed, Trow kept Joseph Greenblum and me on, and the three of us did those interviews. Then I helped in sending out mail questionnaires to get panel data on New York printers' voting preferences in the international union election.

That summer Lipset went to teach at the Free University in Berlin, and Trow went to help C. Wright Mills build a cabin on an island in one of the Great Lakes. The data were in, and they left me alone with it. At the end of the summer I had written up an analysis that I could show to them. Lipset read it, then asked me if I would like to be a coauthor of the book they were writing on the ITU. I said yes.

Thus began an enormously productive and instructive experience. We talked, wrote, tore each others' drafts apart and rewrote them. Lipset provided the intellectual framework and background for the study in the first chapters, and from there we shaped the analysis in extended discussions. Trow and I spent hours on the counter-sorters in the Fayerweather basement, pored over cross-tabulations together and separately, and in our extended arguments over data analysis, we taught each other. There were no long lines of students to curtail our interaction with Lipset. Nor was it all data analysis. We reread Michels, we read and argued over Mannheim, the mass-society theorists, Scheler, Emil Lederer, Hannah Arendt, and Selznick's The Organizational Weapon . I have coauthored books, but the interaction during the academic years 1952–53 and 1953–54 was unlike any other.

In the fall of 1953 Lazarsfeld asked me if I would work, for pay, on the panel project. I had to decide between that and continuing work without pay on the ITU project. I had a tuition fellowship and could

manage without the extra money, so I said no and stayed with Lipset and Trow.

Lazarsfeld had three large projects, the Behavioral Models Project, the Panel Project, and the Concepts and Indices Project. In all three I was involved with Lazarsfeld but never was employed by him. Following the pattern of the Rashevsky paper, he paid me for products, not hours. One might say I worked as an independent contractor. It may have been this distance that made me less bitter at Lazarsfeld than those who had been closer. I stayed on the periphery of the Behavioral Models Project, never employed by it but attending seminars and, in the end, writing a report for the project on mathematical models of small groups. For the Concepts and Indices Project I wrote papers analyzing economists' use of concepts and analyzing economic indices (learning along the way more economics), and gained admission to the summer seminar at Dartmouth on concepts and indices. I was greatly interested in methods of panel analysis and wrote a paper attempting to extend those methods (which led some years later to my Introduction to Mathematical Sociology ). That paper got me into another Dartmouth summer seminar, on methods of panel analysis. These summer seminars were extraordinarily important to my socialization in sociology, for I watched social scientists in action, debating points, arguing methods, developing ideas. I began to see myself on the same plane, emerging as a professional among professionals.

After two and a half years at Columbia I had reached an apex of status, prestige, and deference that I have never approached in my subsequent career. I then took my oral qualifying examination for admission to Ph.D. candidacy. I had prepared for the exam over the summer and had a rich and well-organized set of ideas and information about social theory and theorists. I remember the first question of the examination, a statistical question asked by Howard Raiffa, which I bungled miserably. I remember nothing else except that when it was over after two hours, I knew I had failed. I waited outside the examination room; Lipset summarized the examination when he came out and said to me, "If we all had not known before the exam that you would pass, you would have failed." The others were equally grim-faced as they left the examination room.

I trudged disconsolately down Amsterdam Avenue toward my 123rd Street apartment but was hailed by shouts from Sidney Morgenbesser and others from an office window across Amsterdam, a Bureau office I shared with Morgenbesser, with whom I was working on Lazarsfeld's Concepts and Indices Project. My friends had prepared a party in celebration of my passing my orals, but I had decided to skip it. They would

not let me go home, though, despite my agony. So I went to the party and shared my troubles with my friends. Soon the members of my examination committee, including Merton, came over to wish me well and have a drink in what was a muted, but relieved, celebration. The incident was, I am sure, not forgotten (and may have been responsible for my not getting the job teaching Lee Wiggins's statistics course a year and a half later), but it was put aside and perhaps attributed to my general oral ineptitude. I went on to other things—the ITU analysis, my small-group monograph for the Behavioral Models Project, and my paper on properties of groups for the Concepts and Indices Project.

I finished my dissertation in the fall of 1954 and submitted it in December. The defense was in January. But matters were not so simple. Students did not finish so quickly at Columbia. Certainly if I had done my dissertation under Merton, I would not have finished then. No more likely would have been a quick completion under Lazarsfeld. Even under Lipset alone, matters would not have been so simple. But in the spring of 1954, I met with Merton, and he asked me about my dissertation plans. I said I didn't know; I had none. He asked why not the ITU study? Did I have chapters that were largely my own and formed a coherent whole? I said I thought they did. So, armed with this proposal from Merton, I went to Lipset and reported the discussion. He agreed to the dissertation. He might have done so anyway, or he might not have—for he was a young assistant professor, and the ITU study was his first major work after his own dissertation. Then a graduate student proposes to carve a dissertation out of a portion of it. Even though I was the principal author of the chapters I proposed to use, and even though many of the ideas in them were mine, they nevertheless had resulted from long discussions among the three of us and extended critiques from Trow and Lipset. Because they were intended from the start as potential chapters of the book rather than as chapters of my dissertation, Lipset gave them far more attention than dissertation chapters ordinarily receive.

The waters of Columbia were difficult to navigate, at least with any speed. It helped to have a sponsor interested in one's well-being. But it helped more to have two. Still more did it help to have three. Lazarsfeld was my mentor, but I did not do my dissertation under him and was not beholden to him. Lipset was the faculty member under whom I worked most continuously, but the structure of Columbia demanded that he be attentive to Merton's or Lazarfeld's wishes. Merton was less close than either of the others to me but was ready and able to serve as my protector.

I finished my dissertation quickly in the fall of 1954, making the necessary modifications to form dissertation chapters from what had been book chapters and adding one analytical chapter for good measure. But I needed work that fall to support myself. I was finished with the department, and it was finished with me. The Bureau would be, if anything was to be, my home for the academic year 1954–55. Charles Glock rescued me by offering a monograph on community conflicts from the Twentieth Century Fund, a task someone else had botched. I worked on that project, producing Community Conflict, which the fund did not like very much but nevertheless was published by Jeremiah Kaplan's Free Press. (Of everything I have written, this small, awkwardly published monograph has probably sold the greatest number of copies.)

In the winter, in part as an outgrowth of the traditions seminar, a drug company, Pfizer, gave a grant to study the way doctors introduce new drugs into their practices. That project occupied me during the spring (though I wrote most of my portion of the report during one tense, and intense, week in which my wife and I were for other reasons not speaking). Meanwhile, it was not clear what I would do the next year. I had no job offers. Herbert Simon at Carnegie Tech had offered me a job the previous year, but Lazarsfeld had induced me to remain at Columbia. Now there was nothing. Lee Wiggins was to be gone (at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences—its second year), and I hoped to teach his statistics course, a part-time job that would be enough for support. The department, however, decided I was not a sufficiently able teacher.

My time at Columbia was approaching an end. One day I stopped to see Lipset to discuss details of the Union Democracy manuscript, and he introduced me to his new research assistant, Immanuel Wallerstein. He was a bright, energetic, and self-confident member of a new cohort of graduate students. Through his eyes I saw myself no longer as a member of the elite among graduate students but as a former graduate student, outside that system, in limbo, Maurice Stein of 1955.

My destination for the next year was still unclear. I was preparing myself for another year at the Bureau, with hopes of getting funding for my new project, a study of adolescents in high schools. Then, at the beginning of the summer, I received an invitation from the Center for Advanced Study (occasioned by the last-minute defection of a more deserving scholar but also due in part to Lazarsfeld's and Merton's influence). Late that summer I set off for California with a two-week stop along the way at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, at Herb Simon's

invitation. (My wife and son had left earlier, stopping to visit her family in Indiana.) I packed the station wagon with all my belongings and stayed overnight at Philip Ennis's apartment on Ninety-sixth Street. The next morning I found my car plundered; the clothes I had left in the front seat were gone. I didn't much care. I was a journeyman sociologist, off to Pittsburgh and to the Center.

Chapter Four—
My Life and Soft Times

Joseph Gusfield

There is a touch of chutzpah in autobiography, an arrogance that my life is a matter of such significance as to merit the reader's attention. My name may be known in seminars but it is hardly known in households. The self-analysis implied requires me to find some justification in a more universal rationale. I find it in Gerth and Mills's view of social psychology as the confluence of history and biography. An even more useful salve to my sensibilities has been supplied by Alvin Gouldner, who wrote that the perception of sociologists comes from two sources. One is empirical studies and theorizing—the role realities that the sociologist presents to the reader and freely acknowledges. The other, and often the more determinative, is the "personal realities" that the sociologist derives from his or her experiences. These are seldom acknowledged and are often half hidden from the writer as well.

My autobiography is a form of stock taking. It is also an exercise in finding the sources of the personal assumptions that have formed the temperament, the feelings, and the mythic and experienced bases from which theory, research, and conviction often spring. No life exists apart from history, from a time and a place. So too an autobiography that did not reflect the person "of this time, of that place" would mislead and misdirect. It is in this amalgam of person, place, and idea that I find my direction.

Kenneth Burke, whose work has had a great influence on me, writes of human beings as being "rotten with perfection." I understand him to mean the proclivity of people to invent typologies and then push

them to their extremes—for example, for a sociologist to over-sociologize human action, for a Marxist to find capitalism everywhere, or for a Parsonian to see only system. Writing an autobiography induces that kind of perfection. It must lend a narrative quality to the events of a life, as if they had direction, purpose, and goal rather than being the result of accident, impulse, and drift. I have to be aware of who I am now when writing about who I was then. Let me make that discount at the beginning and set it aside, otherwise I might stop writing at this moment.

I write from a gazebo of time, looking backward at my life and discovering the present as future seen from the past. At sixty-five I am an aging sociologist living at the edge of America. Mexico is a half hour away, and the Pacific Ocean is down the street. It seems a fit location from which to write this musing account of a life that is probably duplicated in the accounts of many sociologists of my age.

Growing up in the 1930s

Like many others of my generation, I came into academic life in a period of an expanding system of higher education in a prosperous economy. Growing up in Chicago in the 1930s I would not have expected that kind of future. In retrospect three facts of my childhood seem formative: Chicago, the Great Depression, and being Jewish in the 1930s.

The city of Chicago had, in the Prohibition and Al Capone years, gained an international reputation as a center of the underworld, the place Sandburg had called the "city of the big shoulders." And so it seemed to me—a place of continuing danger, where walking the streets was a daily adventure, and every stranger posed a threat. It was also a city of sharp ethnic lines, both territorial and social. The first question about anyone, of any age, was, What is he?—meaning, What is his nationality? This perception of the city was repeated in the University of Chicago's urban studies. Only later did I learn that Chicago's rigid ethnic boundaries probably represented an extreme among American cities. They extended to aspects of education as well. During my undergraduate days I became friendly with a fellow student, George De Vos (now professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley). We were astonished to learn that we had been living for several years on opposite sides of a narrow street. He had gone to a Catholic

parochial school, and I to public school, and we had not even been aware of each other.

The Depression was more than a bend in the business cycle. It was a cataclysmic destruction of belief in the special providence of America and a long period of deep anxiety and frustration. Many of us who went through it continue to feel that the structure of solid institutions is a facade, always liable to sudden and unexpected tremors that undermine the foundation.

Above all, growing up Jewish in the 1930s was more than a matter of what you were; it was the definitive statement of your place in history. The local ethnic conflicts kept anti-Semitism alive but they were always discounted, the disappearing reenactment of old-country relationships in a new environment. In my neighborhood on the Day of Atonement, Polish-American youth would throw stones at the windows of the synagogue and shout anti-Semitic slogans; Jewish youth would do the same but omit the slogans. (I have said often that I was beaten up by Polish hoods because I was Jewish and by Jewish hoods just for the fun of it.) The deeply serious happenings were overseas, in Germany. They colored our politics, our daily talk, and our sense of the security of being American.

The beginnings of what later became the Holocaust pushed me and many other Jews rapidly into both the Zionist movement and the left in politics in the late 1930s. Here too I learned the vagaries of trust in the stability of movements and organizations. I had been active in an effort to develop a branch of the American Student Union in my high school. The union was then an organization attempting to gain economic benefits for youth and college students. It was also committed to developing an anti-Hitler foreign policy and a consciousness of what was happening under fascism. I had invited the national secretary to a formational meeting. Between his acceptance and the meeting the Soviet Union had signed a nonaggression pact with Germany, and the union line changed to an attack on the war-mongering capitalist countries. I learned early that ideologies and political organizations are fickle lovers.

I suppose that in looking back and perfecting my narrative I could say that all those experiences create the aura of a world in which violence and discontinuity were palpable possibilities. They suggest a world in which rules are broken as much, if not more, than followed. I do not think that was my personal feeling about my own life, but it may well have shaped my sense of history as unpredictable and unmeasurable.

The War Years

The attack on Pearl Harbor was one of those moments when you realize that history and biography meet. Like most men in my generation, I was a soldier in World War II. In one way the war was not a turning point for me. I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago when I entered the Army in April 1943. I was discharged on January 14, 1946 (a day of liberation I still celebrate), and returned three days later to the University of Chicago. But the experience of war and soldiering had a profound impact on how I viewed life. After almost forty years I still see the present historical period as the postwar world.

Perhaps my second day in the Army was a symbol of what was to come. A sergeant lined up the raw recruits and asked all those with some college education to fall out and walk across the yard picking up cigarette butts. "Now," he said to all the others, "I want the rest of you ignoramuses to watch these college kids and see how it's done." I did learn respect for raw intelligence that cuts across class and education. For a bookish and timid Jew from lower middle-class Chicago to live with Cajuns from rural Louisiana was an introduction to the similarities among Americans and among human beings that are not often as evident as the diversities.

I also learned the difference between front and back that distinguishes the sophisticate from the naive. I learned that the pious assistant to the chaplain, who spoke so fervently about the sweetness of his boss and about how much he missed his wife, was a busy whorehound who hated the woman he was forced to marry after he got her pregnant. I learned that he saw the chaplain as a naive man who could be played for gain by feigning a religious commitment. But I also learned that men who affect cowardice can act heroically, that people from whom you expect hostility can be helpful, and that though people can be worse than they seem, they are also sometimes better. What I was discovering, I think, was the appearance of a human quality outside the history and sociology that seem so often to be the constraining and shaping matter of our existence. Only later, in reflection, can it come to our consciousness in forms such as Dennis Wrong's "The Oversocialized Conception of Man."

The war helped create a certain indifference in me to ideologies and political programs that, except for the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, has remained a part of my political quiescence. Two events stick

in my memory. One is like a classic movie scene: the first time I had to go through the pockets and wallet of a dead German soldier to identify him, I found a picture of his wife and child. It made me recognize that wars are fought against human beings, not against abstractions that can be hated.

A second event made me vividly realize the strange mix of good and evil that affects history. In the closing days of the European war the Germans had thrown old men and young boys into the front. After the surrender some members of the Schutzstaffel, or SS (the elite military unit of the Nazi party) continued to fight; some disguised themselves as members of the Wehrmacht (the regular German army). Wounded German prisoners were sent to our company, a medical unit attached to an infantry division, one level closer to the front than a MASH (mobile army surgical hospital). Because of my one year of college French, my smattering of Yiddish, and my sliver of German, I had, mirabile dictu, become the company interpreter. A German soldier was brought in who claimed to be in the Wehrmacht. Because he was in his late twenties I was skeptical and suspected he was an SS man in disguise. He spoke good English and said that he had sat out the war as a theology student but in the final days had been drafted (a story he later substantiated). I asked him if he had been in the SS (Schutzstaffel), for me and most Americans the embodiment of evil. "No," he replied, in an answer still with me. "I was not so idealistic."

The war was the supreme instance of William James's description of experience as "a big, buzzing, blooming confusion." For a soldier it was the experience of being a pawn in a chess game whose strategy and direction he could never make out. It began to seem to us, however, that the chess players were in the same fix; they could no more control the game than could we. Events were, as so often they are in politics and life, in command. The tragedy was the absence of true ideological or political content in the average soldier's commitment to the war—on both sides, as Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz's work on the Wehrmacht later displayed. Though Seymour Martin Lipset is probably correct that World War II was the only popular war the United States ever fought, the soldiers I knew understood little about Nazism and had no more than a vague devotion to patriotism and duty. I, of course, was different. As a Jew I had a strong feeling about the war, though it too was almost lost in the mix of human beings, death, destruction, and anarchy I encountered. That sense of fate, of the unknown, uncontrollable forces surrounding us, has never really left me. The root belief of the

scientific endeavor, that the world is both knowable and malleable, has continued to seem to me a supreme delusion.

The University of Chicago

My decision to enter the University of Chicago on graduating from high school in 1941 was one of those turning points in my life when there was a fork in the road, and I took the right road. That I did so still seems mysterious to me. During my senior year in a Chicago high school I thought a great deal about going to college. It meant that I would be the first in my entire extended family to go to a full-time, four-year college. Neither of my two older brothers could afford that. Scholarships were rare in American higher education, although the University of Chicago was unique in granting scholarships to high-school graduates through competitive examinations. (I tried, but failed, to get one.) I lacked the money for anything but a free education where I could live at home and commute. I had a scholarship to a small college in Iowa and to a four-year "working-class" college in Chicago.

But I had set my heart on the University of Chicago, which I had visited as a high-school debater the year before. Both my uncles, whom I depended on for advice, cautioned prudence. Go to a junior college for two years, they said, or to Roosevelt College (later University), and transfer to the university later; save some money now. It was sound advice, and I knew it. In my senior year I read a collection of addresses by Robert Maynard Hutchins, then president of the University of Chicago and a major figure in higher education. I was impressed by the boldness and philosophical turn those papers displayed. Throwing caution and my uncles' advice in the ashcan, I decided to enter the University of Chicago. I had been working about thirty hours a week during the school year and more than full-time in summers and had saved one hundred dollars, enough to cover one-third of my annual tuition. I continued to work fifteen to twenty hours a week at the same supermarket as clerk and stock handler while going to college. With that income, as well as loans and scholarships, I was able to complete my first two years.

My sense that this was a formative decision well made must be tempered, however, by awareness of the common predilection to read history backward and find the oak tree in the acorn. O. Henry has a story, or stories, in which the hero finds himself at a crossroad and takes one of the four possible directions. The narrator follows him through

each of the four choices and by each, through different experiences, he arrives at the same place. My fellow graduate student and later colleague Bernard Farber (now professor of sociology at Arizona State University and a leading figure in family studies) took another road: he did his undergraduate work at the Chicago college I rejected and has since had a career very similar to my own. But my undergraduate years nonetheless proved to be highly significant.

I entered the College of the University of Chicago in September 1941. Three months later the United States was at war. I lived at home and commuted about three hours a day to and from campus. Though I had friends at the university, I continued to find my social life among high-school friends in my neighborhood, and my work as a supermarket cashier took me to still another part of the city. Despite this fragmentation and the clear recognition that I would be a soldier in the near future, that period was perhaps among the richest intellectual times I have known. The university was the focal point of my existence, and although I was very much aware of the war, it was possible to lead a cloistered life in which Kant and Marx and John Dewey and Shakespeare were as much companions as they have been to others at other times and places. In several courses, I read all the assigned as well as the optional readings listed in the syllabi. As a commuter not engulfed by student norms, I learned only from a study group for the final examinations that such dedication was neither expected nor accepted. I had become a GDCR—goddamn curve raiser.

I regret not being able to convey the excitement of my freshman year and the intensity and exuberance of intellectual discovery. The University of Chicago seemed charged with an electric current that made every question a matter of analysis and argument, in which the intellectual exchange seemed to me to be as keen as possible. We all felt ourselves to be among the smartest and the brightest. Later many colleagues of mine would speak disappointedly of their undergraduate days, and I have felt very privileged to feel otherwise. I recall the intellectual rapture most vividly in an argument with a friend (now professor of mathematics at Purdue) after the final examination in the freshman social-science course. Returning home on the Chicago elevated train, we quarreled about the correct answer to an economics question. We were so carried away by our debate that we pulled down the window shade and drew supply-and-demand curves. Those years were definitive in establishing in me a love for disinterested intellectual play, still the best source, I think, of what we used to call scholarship and today call research.

I learned some other valuable lessons. One was that you don't have to be Jewish. Deep in my view of life was the unstated premise of supreme confidence in the capacity of poor Jews to overcome intellectual obstacles. Being lean and hungry as well as one of the people that had produced the Old Testament, the Talmud, and thinkers such as Einstein, Freud, and Marx, what couldn't I do? I soon became friendly with a group of fellow students who were Greek-Americans, and I learned that poor Greeks were also smart. I then learned that there were rich Jews who were smart and, again, that there were poor Gentiles and, to my amazement, even rich Gentiles who were smart. Many, if not most, of those students were smarter than I. I discovered the painful truths that leisure is more valuable to scholarship than hunger and that poverty does not breed either character or intellect.

Graduate Education and Intellectual Tension

Three days after leaving the Army I returned to student life, completing my college education in the first three-month quarter, almost as if the war had been only an intermission. I was twenty-two and felt that time was running out. My aim, developed in my sophomore year, was to take a master's degree in economics and a law degree and then to become what was known as a New Deal lawyer, working in government. By 1946 the years of study the plan involved seemed too long to wait before beginning "life," and I decided to enter the University of Chicago Law School.

In 1946 the law school students were largely veterans of the war. We were mostly anxious to find a life outside of history, to concentrate on career, marriage, and family—the private aspects of our lives. We felt that we had to make up for years lost in the war and had no time for the play of the mind. The mood of the campus, compared to that of my freshman year, was similarly privatized, though it retained the intellectual intensity I had known. The atmosphere was distinctly apolitical. Although there were great debates and intraorganizational struggles over the role of Communists in veterans organizations, the merits of T. S. Eliot or Thomas Aquinas could arouse more interest than could the coming elections.

After three years in the Army, the study of law was a replenishing change. The daily preparation and possible recitation (much like Professor Kingsfield's classes in the movie The Paper Chase ) meant a rigid routine of disciplined study. Yet despite that routine and the standard

curriculum, the law also possessed an intellectual, philosophical side that the faculty helped emerge from the pages of appellate court opinions. In discovering this side I was fortunate to have two excellent teachers—Edward Hirsch Levi (later chancellor of the university and still later attorney general of the United States under Gerald Ford), who taught jurisprudence, and Malcolm Sharp, whose course on contracts was one of the supreme educational experiences of my life. Sharp made his students see law as a meeting place of psychology, economics, sociology, ethics, and history, but that it was still Law. It had its own character as well.

But my undergraduate education was only completed formally. On my return to campus, my former college instructor in social science, Milton Singer (now professor emeritus of anthropology but then a recent Ph.D. in philosophy), had asked me to teach the sophomore social-science course for adults in the university extension division. College instruction after the war was a seller's market, and I was fortunate for an opportunity that today would go to an advanced graduate student. Teaching that course began to awaken in me the intellectual concerns that could be indulged only on the periphery of legal curricula, smuggled in by some scholarly teachers.

Whitman wrote that he was simmering and simmering until Emerson brought him to a boil. Teaching in the College did that for me. At the beginning of the following academic year I was asked to become a teaching assistant in the Social Sciences 2 course in the College. It has become a historic course, and the years I was associated with it have become legend. (Its fortieth anniversary was celebrated in 1984 with a symposium at the University of Chicago.) The teaching staff, about seventeen people, met each week to discuss the materials for lecture and discussion sessions. These meetings were less conferences about pedagogy than seminars about many scholarly matters, seminars marked by intense debate and rancor, pyrotechnical displays of ego and erudition, and great flashes of insight, wit, and critical analysis. The members of that staff have since found their merited niches in the academic pantheon—Daniel Bell, Lewis Coser, Rose Coser, Morton Grodzins, Abram Harris, Rosalie Hankey (Wax), Martin Meyerson, C. Wright Mills, Benjamin Nelson, Phillip Rieff, David Riesman, Milton Singer, Sylvia Thrupp, and Murray Wax.

Though the intensity of staff meetings was awesome to a timid and unsure assistant, they were nevertheless intellectual adventures that made law school seem confining. In the first quarter of the course we

read Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents , Durkheim's Division of Labor , and Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism , as well as works by Marx and Veblen. It was my first meeting with Durkheim or Weber. Weber's cultural analysis of the rise of capitalism was the most captivating book in social science that I had ever encountered, and it changed the way I viewed history and society. That year I also took a seminar on the sociology of law, which was taught in the law school by Max Rheinstein. We used as basic material Weber's Law in Economy and Society , which Rheinstein and Edward Shils had just translated. These experiences made me restless with a legal education that was becoming routine and constraining. (Ego compels me to say that I was a good law student; I even made the law review.) I decided to continue my education in some other area.

There is an image in my mind of a discussion about my future that took place under a tree on a quadrangle outside the law school with Milton Singer and Benjamin Nelson. Nelson felt that the Committee on Social Thought, one of several innovative interdisciplinary committees formed under Hutchins, was the logical place for me, but Singer felt that it was an unwise choice—a degree without a market. At one point I felt as if God and the devil were debating the disposition of my eternal soul. Whatever the merits of the debate, this time I chose prudence and entered the Department of Sociology.

I led a somewhat schizoid existence, between teaching in the College and being a graduate student in sociology. I have written at length elsewhere about the value of the tension produced by those two contrasting models (broad intellectual exploration and narrow disciplined research) of what doing social science should be. They were diverging paymasters, but I am convinced that the push and pull of each against the other has contributed to my thinking in later years.

The College and the graduate departments had completely separate faculties. The College faculty was junior in age and rank, with fewer Ph.D.'s and contemptuous of the specialization and narrowness of the departments. Its models of social science were those major works that had come to be regarded as classics—those of Marx, Freud, Mannheim, Weber, Schumpeter. These works gave readers a way of placing themselves in the historical stream of their times. They were "big" with significance and wide in scope. They provided the badge of the cultured, educated person; they formed a base for what the classicist James Redfield calls the objective of a liberal-arts education—the capacity for "good talk."

To me the Department of Sociology seemed a dull, narrow place in contrast to the intellectual excitement of the College. Its model of achievement was found in the famous Chicago series of observational studies, such as Harvey Zorbaugh's Gold Coast and the Slum , Walter Reckless's Taxi Dance Hall , and the then recently published Street-Corner Society by W. F. Whyte. Achievement meant completing a Ph.D. dissertation in imitation of the model. It meant becoming a craftsman, a sociologist. It seemed narrow and insignificant, a sop to the necessity of an academic degree for entry into academic life. Only later, in working on my thesis, did I come to appreciate the value of the craft and the necessity and joy of narrowness. Only later did I come to recognize the value to scholarship of the tension between these two different conceptions of social science.

Graduate Years

I entered the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago in 1947 and received my degree in 1954, at the age of thirty-one. Though I left in 1950 to take a faculty position at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, I returned to Chicago every summer to teach in the College. I look on those years as important intellectually but even more important as the source of friendships that have continued throughout my life and have been of great significance to my scholarship as well.

As had been the case in law school, the sociology students were mostly veterans of the war, older than had been typical of graduate students and beginning to marry and have children. Unlike law school, however, in the sociology department there was a greater sense of intellectual and social play. We lived in the Hyde Park area near the university. Graduate-student life was a round of parties, study, and endlessly flamboyant talk. The faculty and classes were its accompaniment as well as its catalyst, but the talk was where the action was. Now, forty years later, it becomes romanticized in nostalgia, but it has long appeared to me as a period in life that I wished could have gone on longer and that I have often wished could return.

Strangely, it was a period without much concern for the future. We did not yet sense the expansion that was coming in higher education and in the economy. Like devout sectarians we felt that somehow God or the economy or the universities would provide. Living on the GI bill of rights and an instructor's salary, we scrimped but felt far from drowning. Since we were all in the same boat, the genteel poverty of graduate-

student existence was no deficiency, and the GI bill kept us afloat. For myself, whatever the future held, it would not be the world of my father. A meat cutter, he had been buffeted by business cycles and the indignities of living on the edge of a statusless poverty.

I was especially drawn to the lectures of Herbert Blumer. He was perhaps the most theoretical and critical member of the faculty. His criticism of most sociological methods, however, made it difficult to think of a thesis that could meet his exacting standards. From Blumer and the reading in G. H. Mead I developed an interest in social psychology and chose self-conceptions as the subject of my master's thesis. As was the case with Ph.D. dissertations, the expectation was that the student would complete an empirical research project and not an exercise in theory or even history. After a course on the life history with Ernest Burgess I decided to study the self-conceptions of the aged among three generations of the same families. My reasoning was that if people develop new self-conceptions from the views of those around them, then the elderly would have a self-concept more like that of the young than would the middle-aged. Burgess served as chairman of my thesis committee; Albert Reiss, then an instructor, was also a member. The project was not exactly a fiasco, but I learned from it the subtleties of self-concept and the difficulties and limits of interview questionnaires. My original intention of developing the topic for a Ph.D. dissertation was discarded.

Despite my exposure to Blumer and my announced view of myself as a symbolic interactionist, my own early politics and my work in the College and the courses with Hughes and Warner had kept my vaguely structural and Marxian assumptions alive. When I left the University of Chicago in 1950, I had not yet found a dissertation topic. Blumer's work on collective behavior and social movements had interested me, and I had been struck by an account of the Women's Winter Crusades of 1873–74 in Park and Burgess's introductory sociology text. Social-movement theory was dominated by the model of the natural history. Weber's writing on the routinization of charisma and Michels's on the iron law of oligarchy had only recently been translated. The transformation of theories about collective behavior and social movements was in the air.

But there is more to the choice of a topic than the logic of theory. I was already interested in the temperance movement, and when I began to read more, I discovered things I had not known and that were hard to explain. This sense of anomaly seems to me the seed of good research.

Answering a question or solving a puzzle is still the model of what I am about in my work—that is, when I most like what I am doing. As I read about the temperance movement in America, I encountered agrarian radicalism for the first time and was astounded. I had always thought of political radicalism as something associated with an urban working class, and its ideology as brought to the United States by European immigrants. I thought that native and rural America was conservative and that the temperance movement and Prohibition were the programs of that conservatism. The discrepancy was a source of wonder. In the language of the 1960s, it "blew my mind," and I wanted to know how the movement had changed from its beginnings to what I assumed was its present conservatism. The effects of organization seemed to me to be a clue.

The final title of my dissertation was "The Woman's Christian Temperance Union: Change and Continuity in an Organized Interest Group." How did I get from there to Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement? I completed the dissertation in 1954; the book was first published in 1963. I could recount the theoretical and practical explanations for the transformation, but one element would be missing. I had fallen in love with the subject. Interviewing the members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, or WCTU, gathering and analyzing WCTU journals and convention reports over seventy-five years of its history, and doing background reading in secondary sources, I had become fascinated by the history of the movement. There were good theoretical and practical justifications for studying it, but they would mask the joy and excitement of knowing a great deal about a subject, of trying to make sense out of what I knew, and of becoming an expert on something that interested me and, through my work, would come to interest others. In recent years historians have gone well beyond me in the study of temperance. I get much satisfaction seeing how my work has become both a stimulant to those studies and the foil against which most must measure their work and their arguments. In writing Symbolic Crusade , I was beginning to be wary of theory as a source of scholarship, to search for anomalies, and, above all, to see what Veblen called idle curiosity as a vital and prized part of being a scholar.

The Establishing Years

From 1950 to 1955 I taught sociology and social sciences at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. During that period I was

the only sociologist in a college of about eight hundred students. (Pierre Bessaignet, now at the University of Nice, was the sole anthropologist in a two-person department.) Hobart and William Smith was an old Episcopalian college. After the war it had expanded from four hundred students and was widening its appeal from its original denominational base. It provided a good intellectual climate with a commitment to integrated social-sciences and humanities courses, modeled somewhat after the College courses at the University of Chicago. The faculty included a number of excellent scholars, many of whom later distinguished themselves elsewhere.

I had gone to Hobart and William Smith with some dread. Chinese entry into the Korean War had caused panic among young instructors in the College at Chicago. The reinstitution of an expanded draft seemed imminent. Instructors were warned they might not be rehired for the next year. Ithiel Pool visited friends at Chicago and told them he was also recruiting for Hobart and William Smith, where he had taught before going to MIT, where he spent the rest of his life. I applied, made a visit, and was hired largely on the strength of my experience in the College.

Hobart and William Smith proved to be a needed, pleasant, and fulfilling experience. For one thing, I learned about sociology. Being the only sociologist on the campus, I taught the gamut of courses from quantitative methods to marriage and family to public opinion. Through that experience I was up on the corpus of sociology for many years to come.

I grew up at Hobart and William Smith. It was my first encounter with a world of manners and tradition and a sense of established and secure authority. With the exception of my Army experience, it was the first time that I had lived in a gentile environment. At twenty-seven I had lived my civilian life mostly in one or another urban Jewish enclave. Neither the law school nor the sociology department at the University of Chicago had afforded a change. Some wit has perceptively described the University of Chicago in those days, and perhaps now as well, as a place where Protestant professors taught Jewish students Catholic philosophy.

Hobart and William Smith maintained, and perhaps still maintains, that mix of education and character training that colleges have provided in many societies. It was this educational approach that the University of Chicago (in Hutchins's speeches as well as in campus lore) so openly despised as anti-intellectual. As a young assistant professor, I, along with my wife, was pressed to chaperon fraternity parties, as the college guidelines demanded. The rules, manners, and poise of the students and

the formality of dress contrasted starkly with the free and easy openness of the University of Chicago. There we had experienced a policy of treating all students as adults and eschewing the parental concerns of other campuses in the late 1940s.

My wife still talks about her surprise at the controls exercised by Hobart and William Smith and their continuity with the family life of many students. Chaperoning a dance one evening, she expressed amazement at the rule requiring women to be in the dormitory by 11 P.M., and midnight on Saturday. "Surely," she said to one young woman, "you don't have to be home by midnight in your own family?" The student replied that indeed she had; at home the curfew was 11 P.M. even on Saturday. For my wife, who was the only child of Russian-Jewish socialists and had grown up in the Socialist Workman's Circle and had gone to college at the University of Chicago, this was a strange world indeed.

Like many American colleges and universities, Hobart and William Smith had not only expanded considerably after World War II but was also in the process of absorbing new students into what was an old and traditional institution. The few Jews on the faculty were tokens in a new era, evidence of the tolerance and goodwill of an old Protestant institution. We were also exotic and thus sought after in a somewhat analogous fashion to the way blacks are today or to the way Hannah Arendt has described Disraeli's use of his Jewish origin as an admission ticket to British high society. But I came to admire a genuine tolerance and attraction that resonated with a New England tradition of fair play and civil liberties, cutting across political divisions of conservative, liberal, and radical.

Writing this sketch of my life, I came also to appreciate another facet of my experience in upstate New York that is bound up in its past. An image of Frankie Merson remains with me. She was professor of political science at Keuka College, a small women's college on Keuka Lake in upstate New York. Keuka College had a work-study curriculum long before Antioch College and was a Methodist school with a strong feminist mission. It was a vestige of the nineteenth century still existing in the twentieth-century world of postwar America. Professor Merson was the leading member of the Keuka WCTU, and she was one of my interview respondents. She had been a suffragette before 1920 and had been active in opposing the presidential candidacy of the Catholic and "wet" Al Smith. She had first come to my attention through a letter in the Geneva, New York, newspaper protesting the execution of the Rosenbergs. Such a strange mixture but not so strange in this piece of

America that had been the scene of many social movements and that one historian had called the burnt-over district.

The Illinois Years

Hobart was a part of the history of American colleges in its movement out from the circle of denomination into a wider world of American diversity. The faculty mirrored that polarity between cosmopolitan and local with which Alvin Gouldner, using Robert K. Merton's terms, described the loyalties and sources of aspiration of American college teachers. I had made use of my Hobart and William Smith years to write my doctoral dissertation. I had begun to feel comfortable in the small-college atmosphere, and that comfort made me uncomfortable. A colleague in another department explained why he left Hobart and William Smith. Only a few years older than I, he was introduced at an alumni meeting as "kindly old Professor Bartlett." I too began to sense the ivy growing around me and felt that if I stayed two or three more years I would lose the drive and stimulus that had come from a university environment. I would begin to feel comfortably at home and start absenting myself from national meetings for fear of meeting those who had been my fellow graduate students and who had lived up to their early promise of scholarship.

I wrote to Herbert Blumer, and he recommended me to the University of Illinois. I remained there from 1955 to 1969. Those were years of immense expansion in American higher education. The evolution of my own career paralleled the evolution of higher education in general, from institutions catering to a small minority of the American elite to mass institutions that absorbed the American middle class. In that process education became perceived as the sine qua non to mobility and the decent maintenance of already established family positions. In this respect the University of Illinois was caught on the same escalator as Hobart and William Smith, though at a different level. It had been a state university whose networks, both socially and occupationally, prepared students to return home to become the professionals of their local communities. As such it did not, except in football, compete with other universities, even the University of Chicago. They were in different intellectual and educational leagues. In the 1950s it was changing and had an eye on greater prestige in academia.

In the postwar world the large and comparatively wealthy state universities were intent on moving up. They became national universi-

ties as America was itself becoming a more national society. It was necessary for students to leave the local community, and even the Midwest, in search of jobs and family. The aspirations of administration and faculty were making even fraternity-sorority life and athletics subservient to the academic aspirations of the faculty. What David Riesman and Christopher Jencks later called the academic revolution was in full swing.

It was a period of expansion and security. For the junior faculty member in sociology it was a seller's market. Not much in the way of publication was needed to gain tenure. Sociology was still a new field, and with new universities springing up and old ones growing, new departments were being formed and old ones expanded. If a sociologist missed tenure at one school, there was another good job on the horizon. The welfare state was coming of age, and people were needed in what I call the troubled person's industries, such as criminology, social work, and clinical psychology. All this meant that college education was in; students were plentiful, and education was trusted to provide the necessary training. The expansion of higher education was also sold as a way of competing with Russian science and engineering. Scholars could ride in on the tails of the post-Sputnik rockets.

The Illinois years were ones of scholarship, teaching, and growth in family and friendships. The years at Hobart and William Smith had been the years of the cold war's beginnings, the McCarthy hearings, the Rosenberg and the Hiss cases, and the first Eisenhower-Stevenson election. The Illinois years were the years of the civil-rights movement. Provocative, disturbing, and flamboyant as they were, it was not until 1968 that the student movements of the 1960s became central to life on most American campuses. Even the Vietnam War does not, in my memory, override the importance and the emotional surge of the civil-rights movement. It set a tone and provided a model that opened the 1960s and gave it its motif.

In the early 1960s I felt that I was in a rut. I had been in school, in one form or another, since 1946. The world was changing in profound ways as new nations came into being, sometimes each week. I was not even sure that I wanted to continue in academic life. With a sabbatical due me, I thought of travel and decided to get out of Western civilization and see life in a developing and new nation. I chose India because I could teach and observe without learning a new language. I meant my year on a Fulbright fellowship to be an interlude. In some respects it was, but only in some.

India, 1962–81

I am writing this section the day following the assassination of Indira Gandhi, and India is unexpectedly and unusually prominent in the attention of the American public. In 1962, when I first visited India, it was a land almost invisible to Americans; it still is. I have been there four times now, for visits ranging from six weeks to nine months. I have taught for at least one term at three Indian universities and have lectured at many others. I have lived for periods from two weeks to five months in several major cities—Delhi, Patna, Bangalore, Calcutta. Though I have done some research and writing in connection with India, it has been peripheral to most of my work. And though some of my scholarship has been concerned with problems of national development, that too has been a minor theme. Most of my studies have been located in the United States.

Yet my experience in India has had a major personal and intellectual impact on me. I first came to India armed with the concepts of American social science. These, following a line from Durkheim through Parsons, were couched in the discourse of modernization with its clear movement from community to society, tradition to modernity, caste to class. India defied the efforts to be seen through such prisms. An aphorism I learned later, when living in Japan, puts the matter well. In India no one trusts the institutions to work because they know that socially organized life is fragile and will disintegrate. One acts to protect oneself and one's interests because social institutions cannot be trusted to sustain themselves. In Japan, there is the same sense of the fragility of social life but there is also the belief that if everyone works at it and helps sustain one another's roles, the social organization can be upheld. Americans are not worried about social organization being destroyed because they know that it will be replaced by a better one.

The culture shock that came from living in a provincial city in India was more than the usual experience of people going from one country to another. What accentuated it was the sense of illusion, that whatever was true today, or true at the level of public rules, or true of one region, was not necessarily a good guide to what might happen in the immediate setting. The intellectual shock was the realization that the concepts I had learned bore little relation to the observations I made. Community and society, tradition and modernity, caste and class, and democracy and autocracy were so far from ideal types that it was illusory to use them as contrasts in anymore than a literary, allusive sense. India was so

big, so diverse, and had been a civilization so long that it humbled the casual visitor who expected a transformation to the American ideal within a decade.

But India did something else. It made me skeptical of much that I had learned in sociology and hence restored some freshness to my thinking. I found that economic man was not dead, that paradox was everywhere (the caste system adapted well to the egalitarianism of political democracy), and that tolerance of diversity was not a mark of Western modernity, nor were Westernization and traditional India as incompatible as I had believed. India was exotic—startlingly different and even frighteningly its own culture. It could not be understood or explained with the concepts in my bag. But if that was so for India, I realized how much it was also the case for America whenever I stopped to look without the blinders of theory. That skepticism toward conceptualization has not left me. Later periods of living in India, Japan, and England have substantiated it.

Pitirim Sorokin once wrote that probably the last thing a fish realizes is the fact that it lives in water. Only when taken out, gasping on the beach, does it recognize water. Like much of what I am writing about, the sense of one's culture as a tangible context forming the necessary basis for understanding is less a series of provable, logical ideas than a series of felt, believed, and acted-on assumptions. Our tacit knowledge sits on that bedrock. It is less ideology than myth.

California

Sometimes, half-facetiously, I say that I have lived in six cultures—general American, Jewish-American lower middle-class, Indian, Japanese, British, and southern Californian. Between 1965 and 1968 I was three times offered positions in southern California at campuses of the University of California, including my present one at UC San Diego. Each time I was tempted, and each time I drew back, in part out of a natural timidity about disturbing a comfortable life in Champaign-Urbana. But I also felt guilt and fear. The guilt came from having been a midwesterner most of my life. The Midwest is a section of American society that has a strong view of itself as having been passed over in American culture. Neither in climate nor in glamour can it compete against the claims of the East to cultural superiority or the attractions of the West and South in weather. In the 1960s it was clearly in decline economically as well. Any move to a place of such flamboyant hedonis-

tic charms as sunshine and year-round bikinis carried a stigma of desertion.

There was also the fear that such charms would remove the press to work. This fear seems to me to have been compounded by a belief that academic work was like other occupations—not play but work, a means to an end, and that it required a whip rather than a steering wheel to keep us scholars at our "tasks." People in Champaign-Urbana would often praise the town by saying that since there was nothing much else to distract you, academics got a lot of work done, and created close friendships because sociability was so necessary.

When the University of California at San Diego again offered me the chance to start a sociology department in 1967, I accepted. I felt drawn by the climate and scenic beauty, as well as the opportunity to create a new department after my own vision. It would be a department that broke with the conventional quantitative bent of modern sociology and emphasized the central importance of observation and data collection. But the offer also held out the opportunity to begin a new intellectual life. I was growing aware of the great revisionist streams of philosophical and linguistic thought in Europe and the United States that were turning the academic world upside down. Noam Chomsky had lectured at Illinois in the late 1960s, and it made me aware of the revolution in thought coming from linguistics. While in Japan I had read Claude Lévi-Strauss's The Savage Mind . On my return to the United States in January 1968 I first heard of ethnomethodology and read Harold Garfinkel's Studies in Ethnomethodology and Jack D. Douglas's The Social Meaning of Suicide . These works displayed originality and yet also continuity with the "messages" of symbolic interactionists and social anthropologists that I had absorbed at Chicago with Blumer, Hughes, and Warner. They were all skeptical of the direction of mainstream sociology toward a scientific model that substituted instruments for a close relationship to subject matter. I had years of reading dissertations at Illinois in which sophisticated instruments and statistical analyses were applied to poor data, of coping with abstract concepts that came between the investigator and the matter being investigated—to say nothing of the poor reader.

Another, quite subsidiary push was that I hoped by moving to diminish the heavy load of what I called "paperwork." It was not only the committee meetings of department and university that caused me anguish but also the recurring mound of correspondence, including manuscripts to read, colleagues' work to evaluate, and journal articles to

referee. Always my desk seemed overlayed by reminders of letters to answer, these to read, and conferences to prepare for. They were continuing goads to my sense of responsibility and collegial duty. At UC San Diego I hoped—in vain, it proved—to manage these responsibilities better and to keep clear the center of my sociological life—teaching, observing, and writing.

On and Off the Wagon

The guilt and fear that troubled me in deciding to move to California were dissolved in the task of building a new department and a new campus. They were multiplied by the stress and storm of the student movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s at UC San Diego. Any idea that I had traded the hurly-burly of Illinois for the laid-back life of the West Coast was washed away quickly. These past fifteen years have been busy ones in all respects, professionally and otherwise.

Symbolic Crusade was published in 1963, and I turned away from alcohol and alcohol control as a subject. I wrote about India and development. With David Riesman and Zelda Gamson, I did an observational study of higher education. I conducted research in Japan and the United States with Ken'ichi Tominaga of Tokyo University. I wrote on social movements and produced a small book on the concept of community. But in 1971 San Diego County asked me to study sentencing and plea bargaining in the case of drinking-driving offenders, and I was back in the field of alcohol studies.

For the past twelve years, while I have continued to do other work, my focus has been the study of alcohol—alcohol and law, alcohol and knowledge, alcoholism and social movements, alcohol and the welfare state, alcohol control and class conflicts. Out of it has come the work of which I am proudest, The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking-Driving and the Symbolic Order . But I have been involved in a variety of other activities, including conferences and papers, review of research and the development of policy at the federal and county levels, and studies and observations at the local level. These activities have led me to audiences and arenas other than academic or sociological.

I like to say that alcohol has kept me honest. I mean by this statement that studying alcohol control has kept me in continuous touch with the nonacademic world. I also mean that study of a restricted body of materials acts as a brake to my disposition toward speculative isolation that lacks substantive existence. I see myself as a person who likes to develop

ideas and explanations, essentially a spinner of tales. I need the bite of depth and complexity that a policy-oriented field of paradoxical and popularly accepted matters can provide. Alcohol has been a field through which I have been able to think through a variety of intellectual issues, to uncover alternative and diverse ways of looking at what others take for granted, as I have tried to do for drinking-driving. It has also given me an arena for bringing a diversity of perspectives and fields to bear. I would describe The Culture of Public Problems as a study in the sociologies of science, knowledge, and law. It draws on historical, literary, anthropological, and philosophical perspectives as well as field observations.

It is this quality of developing ideas on the grounds of a deep understanding of a narrow swath that I find particularly appealing and fun. It comes close to resolving the tension between the analytical generality and the empirical particularity that is, for me, the most useful and also the most difficult form of sociological scholarship. Over the years my distaste for abstract theory, for the gloss on gloss on gloss that fills so many sociological shelves, has increased. I have great respect for scholarship that has resulted from immersion into the detailed observation and study of substantive matter. If one thinks of sociology as a generalizing and scientific discipline, and history as more particularistic and humanistic, I have become drawn toward the historical pole among sociologists.

As part of this transformation, my felt assumptions about the fragility of social organization and the illusory character of much public presentation has deepened. My earlier title for The Culture of Public Problems was The Illusions of Authority . I wanted by that title to emphasize both the limited character of authority in modern society and the illusory quality of much that passes for knowledge and conventional wisdom in the topic of drinking-driving and in the general public and professional understandings of "the alcohol problem." I find the stuff of most public discussion, through the media or the political arenas, to be the maintenance of a facade, a theater of events rather than a reference point for understanding actions. I am writing this section on an election day. I will vote, but I have no great conviction about the importance of the choices. Not only am I skeptical about the assumed relation between political rhetoric and political acts, but I am also equally skeptical about the extent of governmental ability to affect social institutions, international relationships, or the day-to-day behavior of citizens in more than a peripheral manner. I feel a little like the woman I heard about who, when informed that Ronald Reagan slept through Cabinet meetings, said, "Despite that fact, I still won't vote for him."

The Now and Future Years

Writing this autobiography comes at a time of turning points for me. I am now well into my sixties and thinking seriously of retiring. For the next few years I will be engaged in a new intellectual turn—toward literary criticism, the history of ideas, and visual imagery—though in the study of social movements. But for some time I have been upset, frustrated, and angered by the busyness of my life. The mound of "paperwork" that disturbed me when I left the University of Illinois has grown into a mountain of matters that cannot be ignored without grave detriment to others and to my view of myself as a responsible person. I work part of most evenings and weekends. I have less time now for my painting than five years ago, although it has come to mean more to me. I have less time to read the mystery stories, novels, and biographies that I love. Even my teaching and writing suffer from things half done.

I have always been attracted by the Hindu view of life as ideally a series of ashramas , or transformations over the life cycle, from the material to the spiritual, from family to self, from the profane to the holy, and from sexuality to celibacy (that one I never found attractive). The thought of being outside the swirl of institutional life is appealing to me. The idea of a life without a schedule of places to be at set times, without guilt for responsibilities not fulfilled or deadlines not met, and without the need to manufacture opinions seems an attractive utopia. I hear my wife's doubting refrain that I will be grossly unhappy when the phone calls stop, the letters and requests no longer appear, and nobody knows my name. Perhaps.

We live in a time when to be young is the aspiration of the aged. We must do what we can to keep ourselves young; to continue to be what we have been. So says popular wisdom, but I do not feel it. Let me proclaim my right, even my desire, to be old. I wish for the hedonism of the aged, the chance to shun responsibility and prudence. Let me live with only one deadline in front of me.

Afterword

I might have ended this sketch at this point, but in the act of writing, my image of myself and my times has undergone a transformation. I might have let stand the picture of a self-satisfied scholar, proud in his achievements, comfortable in his life, eager to expand his enjoyments. But this

exercise in internal reflection has unexpectedly sharpened a lingering disquiet.

My generation of academics has been a privileged one. Perhaps that sense of having been privileged has caused my restiveness. I am struck by the self-indulgent tone of my account. My generation of scholars has had the luxury of absorbing work and public respect. At the same time academic life has provided us with much discretionary time and supported plentiful travel all over the world. For some time now it has given me more than a comfortable income. Teaching has been easy and enjoyable for me, though less so in recent years.

I watched the television reports of the last presidential election with an Olympian coolness toward the whole process. Skeptic that I am, I could not share the significance that others gave to it. The differences between parties and candidates were to me a dramatization, a symbolic action without much relation to events before or after. The supposed changes made by this or that administration appear to me overstated by friends and foes alike. The area in which government can act seems to me quite limited. The rhetorical bombast of the participants, even for tactical purposes, is more insulting to my intelligence than I can stand. Nor can I share the radical condemnation of the process: it too is grossly simplified and unbearably doctrinal.

Where does that leave me? I can identify with no one. After the elections I am neither happy nor sad. My only connection to them is that of the voyeur. I am not a part of my community, of the people around me—disconnected but not angered, not even alienated. Have I become Camus's Stranger?

The election is a microcosm, a metaphor that serves to locate a feeling. I have been aware of it, at the public level, as a part of the intellectual and scholarly culture of our time. But the other level, the level of personal restlessness, has been submerged. That feeling of being unconnected comes to my awareness more pointedly and poignantly as I write this autobiography.

It has seemed to me for some time that the intellectual and scholarly world of analysis and critical posture has moved us further and further from the communities of our time and place. It makes it difficult for us to lend ourselves to the missions, zeal, and emotional sensibilities with which others engage their worlds. When people outside my scholarly circles heatedly discuss public problems, I find I become the nay sayer. I am the skeptic who destroys the assumptions on which both sides of the argument base their conflict. Like a trained debater, I can always find

something to be said for and against each side and can end up, as I recently titled a paper about the scholar of social problems, "Being on the Side."

The description is as applicable to others as to myself. My work in alcohol studies is a piece of that which characterizes the inner circle of serious scholars in the field. It is perhaps caught again by a title of a lecture I gave in New Mexico a year ago—"The Case for the Drinking Driver." We scholars are the critics of the lay people and professionals who work thinking they are making the world a better place. We undercut them with our skepticism and our knowledge.

That academic pride in, and love of, rational criticism to which I am clearly and fully committed is at the same time a disdain toward those who do not, or cannot, share it. In his history of American universities, The Emergence of the American University , Laurence Veysey writes of the nineteenth-century university as having offered the professor a haven somewhere between a business career and exile—neither monastery nor counting house. That very ambiguity of loyalties, Veysey argues, made an academic posture toward the society possible. We have in my generation tried to retain that quality of monastic retreat while reaping the rewards of the counting house.

My sense about the disconnectedness of academic life would not be so disquieting were it not for the other plane, the more personal one of emotion and feeling toward other people. There is a lack of selflessness in this account of my life, a lack that I find in most of my colleagues. I am amazed at people who perform acts of generosity and kindness that overwhelm me with their self-sacrifice. These are people who devote days of a busy life to help in hospitals, who adopt handicapped children, who give away sizable sums of money to aid a needy family, who leave their societies to work among the people in poor countries, and who minister to the sick. They give of themselves—their time, their income, their love—not for causes but for specific persons and in specific situations.

Selflessness is also a way of giving emotionally, of being attached to persons. We academics use our intellectuality to hide ourselves from each other. It cuts off the emotions of sympathetic feeling that might generate ties and commitments between persons rather than between colleagues. It gives our life and even our work a vision of a world of roles but not of persons. To be sure, I can display a record of public service on this board or that and charity to various causes. But I do not give time, and I do not give of my emotional self.

I have come to admire those whose work moves them to do some-

thing for others rather than to or about others. My wife is a social worker (a profession most sociologists look at with amusement and ambiguity) in a children's hospital. Watching her, the doctors, the nurses, and the volunteers work with cancer patients and their families makes me sense an accomplishment that I envy.

The universities are themselves a party to this pervading intellectual coolness. Still among the more decent institutions in this society, they have come to prize toughness in the struggle to raise the productivity (a word now common in academic circles) of the organization in the quest for prestige. The Nielsen-like ratings that infest present-day campus administration come to be the symbols of successful stewardship. We become ever more suspicious of decent motives of kindness and personal attachment lest human warmth interfere with organizational glory.

It is life lived at this microlevel, at the level called communities, that I miss in my account. Rereading it, I found myself appalled at its self-indulgence. In the very choice of how I would organize this autobiography I could not aim to touch the reader, to give of myself. Here too I had to hide behind the mask of role—the role of sociological analyst. Yet everywhere in the world I have been, in every class, culture, and country, I have learned that the elements that move and absorb our lives are those basic elements of human contact—our children, our parents, our families, our friendships, our communities, and our work. Birth, death, love, hate, lust, greed—they are the places in ourselves where we connect with others.

Such retrospection does not lead me to retract the sense of satisfaction I have with my life and my work. Only I wonder, like the character in that O. Henry story, what would it have meant to have chosen another road, to be writing another autobiography?