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.