PART V—
THE EUROPEAN EMIGRATION

Chapter Seventeen—
Partisanship and Scholarship

Guenther Roth

I grew up in Nazi Germany in a hurry. War made me a political animal; liberation, an intellectual; emigration, a political sociologist. It is a truism that individuals react differently to the same events, even impressionable young people from the same social background. I lived through World War II more intensely and with greater awareness than most of my classmates, but with them I was part of the war's lucky generation. Not yet ten years old when the war began, most of us missed being pressed into military service in its last hours; hence we were not demographically decimated. More important, we were too young to have to choose between fighting for the Nazis or being persecuted by them. We could afford the luxury of not feeling "really" responsible for what "they" had done. But we were old enough to get a lifelong lesson. In our teens we were ready for the tremendous experience of intellectual liberation and political freedom, in a time that was also the formative period of the Federal Republic of Germany. Too young to actively rebuild German democracy and the German economy, we were prime beneficiaries of the reconstruction. We still studied under various kinds of material handicaps, but we entered professional life during the years of greatest economic prosperity and the best job opportunities. In the 1970s my political generation moved into positions of political influence and governmental responsibility in West Germany, just when the age of social reform came to an end and the world economy was shaken by the first oil crisis. I have remained a member of this generation as an outsider, an observer, and an occasional participant. I still maintain my

friendships from classical school and from my short period of political activism in Germany in the early 1950s.

At some point not very clear to me formative experience turned into life pattern. The exciting things happened to me early, and I will focus my narrative on them. I will then attempt to reconstruct some of the (to me blurry) connections between my life and my work.

1931–1945

If my generation was lucky, I was particularly fortunate. I was born into an unusual family. I received an antifascist upbringing, an advantage that I tended to turn into self-righteousness later in my teens. By contrast, many families tried to shield their children from what was going on around them and exclude them from any political awareness and discussion.

I was born at the end of the Weimar Republic, in 1931, at the onset of the German depression, which had begun in earnest with the spectacular failure of the famed Darmstädter und National-Bank in my hometown, Darmstadt. To give birth my mother went back to her nearby native village, Wolfskehlen, where my great-grandmother, a midwife, delivered me. When the Nazis came to power two years later, my father retreated into free-lance journalism and photography. He had behind him a career as a parliamentary and wire-service stenographer and reporter at the constituent assembly of 1919, the Spa reparations conference of 1920, and the Reichstag. Subsequently he had been on the staff of a democratic newspaper. During the war he was to make sure that I would share his high regard for the men who had been statesmen and responsible political leaders, in contrast to the rulers of the day. Although reprimanded several times for politically questionable reporting, he could eke out a living by roaming the countryside, covering cattle and horse auctions and similarly mundane events. By declaring my mother typist and secretary of his news service—a mere letterhead enterprise—he succeeded in keeping her away first from political, then, during the war, from industrial, recruitment. My mother objected to the Nazis primarily for aesthetic and soundly ladylike reasons: Nazi speakers yelled too loudly and turned red in the face.

When the Nazis introduced military registration, my father was already relatively old—he was born in 1896—and received a low rating because he lacked prior military experience and could point to a history of psychosomatic and nervous ailments. In this manner he had survived

World War I, in which most of his classmates from classical school were killed in action. He taught me early that Langemarck, one of the great nationalist symbols of patriotic sacrifice, had been a crime; there, in Flanders, thousands of German student volunteers stormed to their death on November 11, 1914, four years before the great slaughter came to an end. My draft-dodging father proved that in the struggle for survival the fittest are most likely to get killed off. He never lifted a hammer or any other heavy object in his life, but he could take shorthand in four languages. In later years he reminded me very much of Siegfried Kracauer's self-portrait as a wartime survival artist, which had appeared anonymously in 1928, the same year as Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front .^[1]

My first political memory dates from November 9, 1938, known as Kristallnacht, when synagogues were burned down and Jewish shops vandalized. My parents woke me up and showed me the cloudy sky reddened by flames. Something was said about the horror of it, about the beginning of war. Six years later I watched my hometown being consumed by a fire storm under another red sky. When the second war, which my parents had expected as early as 1938, finally came, it strongly preoccupied my imagination. I can recall the streetlights going out—for many years, as it turned out—and the excitement of blacking out all light from the windows. Matters military fascinated me, but my father, a stern disciplinarian, refused to buy me military toys, although my friends had them in abundance. My gentle paternal grandmother bought me just a few, but it was a rule that I had to keep them in my room on pain of having them thrown at me if a tank dared advance into the living room.

I insisted on finding the newspaper at my bedside in the morning, but I needed my father to learn how to read it. When Denmark and Norway were attacked in April 1940, he called me into his study, showed me the headline, and asked me what it meant. It said something about the protection of neutrality. "It means," explained my father, "that we are invading and overrunning another little country." On June 22, 1941, my mother woke me up with the news of the German offensive against the Soviet Union: "Now Hitler will suffer the fate of Napoleon." When Hitler declared war on the United States in December in a long and rambling speech, my father exclaimed, "Now he has done everything to ruin himself." Other lessons remain in my memory. I remember vividly the day when a group of Jews were deported from our neighborhood. Police quickly cordoned off the area and stopped all traffic, shooing the

pedestrians away. My father, who had noticed the commotion, fetched me and told me to observe the scene and "never forget how they treat human beings." I climbed up a tree to look over a high wall and watched old people being put in a covered truck.^[2] Once when I walked to school in the morning darkness, I saw two armed Sicherheitsdienstmen (SD, i.e., security services) escorting a mother and two children.

Did I know what was going to happen to these people apart from their deportation to eastern "reservations" or "reservoirs," as the language sometimes expressed it with unconscious linguistic treachery? I knew the name of only one concentration camp, Dachau, about which anti-Nazi jokes circulated. I did not learn of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, or Buchenwald until after the war, but I heard one of my political tutors tell about the SD's mass executions in Russia and about huge ditches being dug as graves. Truth remained a rumor since nothing could be verified in a totaliarian state that prosecuted people for spreading gossip when they spoke the truth. But since our little circle considered the Nazis capable of any crime, we tended to trust the very rumors that many people preferred to disbelieve.

I received much of my political education in the deep stone basement of the old villa from the 1870s that served as home for my family and two others. During more than one hundred nights, after air raid alarms woke us up and sent us down, I listened to the political conversations of my father and the two other men in the house, one a local businessman who happened to have an invaluable Swiss passport and brought reliable political news from abroad, the other a violinist in the opera orchestra who had joined the Nazi party early but turned against it when his Masonic lodge was outlawed. We were often joined by a former Schutzstaffel (SS) man who in the 1920s had had his skull cracked by a Hessian policeman in a street brawl but who had come to loathe the regime, which he did not survive. (He was killed in one of the air raids.) I read to them my fledgling attempts at anti-Nazi poetry until they made me promise not to write any more since it could endanger everybody in the house. How was such a house community possible under totalitarian conditions? In our case one important means of neighborhood surveillance had broken down. Our Nazi Blockwart, the party member appointed to watch out for anything suspicious in the neighborhood, was a very discreet janitor who combined deference to his "social betters" with simple human decency.

Another source of antifascist education was my experience in the Jungvolk, the compulsory drill and indoctrination organization for

those between the ages of ten and fourteen. Twice a week after school we had to assemble at a public place or encampment. When I first reported to Fänlein 10/115 in 1941, it turned out that I was the only classical student in a tough working-class unit. As an only child from a middle-class family I was scared of the bullying teenage drill sergeants but perhaps even more of the physical prowess and violence of my peers. After about a year my quick physical maturation and growing self-confidence enabled me to hold my own in wrestling matches and to make friends with working-class children, whose parents had voted only eight years earlier for the Communist or Social Democratic party. At the same time there was much turnover among our "leaders," who volunteered for military service at the earliest possible moment and seemed in a hurry to get themselves killed. Former youth leaders who occasionally visited us during military leaves came away complaining that we were just a "herd of swine." We became ever more truculent and took to greeting one another with a defiant Heil Moskau . Nobody ever squealed.^[3] For a time the police made a special effort to round up truants, but as the bombing raids multiplied and the Nazi regime attempted total mobilization after Stalingrad, there was increasing disarray and personnel shortage, and we managed to stay away more frequently until our local organization practically collapsed.

Much more important for my life than the Jungvolk was enrollment, in 1941, in classical school (humanistisches Gymnasium ), the most prestigious of the secondary schools. Whether a person could someday attend university was decided at age ten, mostly by parents, but a pupil had to be competent enough to pass a fairly demanding examination. Only a small minority went to secondary school after due preparation, which often included private tutoring. The Nazis recruited their own future elite through a small number of boarding schools (Napolas ). They disliked the classical schools and planned to abolish them after the war. Once I had passed the (to me frightening) admission test, my father assured me that henceforth he would no longer spank me since spanking was incompatible with a classical student's dignity. He also considered it appropriate to my new status to tell me that Christianity was a myth that need not be taken seriously. (Behind him were two generations of agnostic country schoolteachers and church organists.) The cessation of physical punishment was important since it eliminated my most basic fear of him. Instead of pushing me into early rebellion and toward the peer group camaraderie of the Nazi youth movement, as other stern fathers sometimes did unintentionally, he won me over to his view of the

world without having to worry that I would report him. I suspect that my reliability was reinforced by another status factor. As an only child in the family and the house I was very adult-oriented and felt even more grown up when I was allowed to listen to serious talk about matters of state.

Our class quickly developed an esprit de corps. It was socially unacceptable to be an outspoken adherent of Nazism. Somehow the two or three self-declared Nazi enthusiasts flunked out soon. Had they been articulate Nazis because they were poor students, or was it the other way round? I have a hazy recollection that another status element may have been involved: these pupils came from lower middle-class families that identified with the regime but still considered classical school a social step upward—unattainable, as it turned out. Most of our teachers were committed to the embattled classical curriculum and tried to continue teaching us Caesar and Cicero in the vaults of our three-hundred-year-old school during air raid warning times. Some teachers taught beyond retirement age and were closer to the monarchist past than the present. Only the director was expected to be a Nazi, but some teachers were known to be true believers. Our art teacher, for instance, had no academic credentials and owed his job to his vociferously expressed party loyalty. We were at perpetual war with him, and he often screamed that we were "cultural Bolsheviks." Once we were kept for two periods after school and had to take turns reading aloud the account of Hitler's abortive march on the Feldherrnhalle in Munich on November 9, 1923, when he was fatefully spared by the police bullets—the most sacred event in Nazi mythology. That did nothing to win us over to the cause.

At that time I developed my first notions about the United States. Before the declaration of war Nazi propaganda had observed some limits, denouncing highly visible persons rather than the United States government. Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor of New York, was a favorite target. A famous photo of La Guardia leaning over the side of Roosevelt's car was evidence of how "the Jews" had the president's ear. I vaguely remember also a picture showing another political figure—perhaps New York governor Herbert Lehman—consorting with a stripteaser. After the declaration of war Nazi propaganda went into high gear and exposed American "cultural decadence." Film reels showed a black jazz band playing syncopated Schubert, boxing matches between big fat women and small thin men, and ladies wrestling in mud or on fish—all fascinating for an eleven- or twelve-year-old.

In 1943 I had my first visual contacts with the Americans, as the Flying Fortresses (B-17s) appeared in the daytime sky. Bombing by the Royal Air Force (RAF) had greatly increased during 1942, but the slow British Lancasters flew only at night and could only be heard, not seen. By 1942–43 many cities had been ravaged, but only 152 persons had been killed in my hometown. I had lived through four major nightime bombings, the last on September 23, 1943, which surprised me in bed. Christmas trees (marking flares) were already illuminating the city when I got up. The bombs came whistling, and their detonations were louder than usual, but I dared racing across the yard to get to a safer basement. Our house was lucky that night.

Relatively late, in May 1944, our school was finally moved into the countryside in a vain effort to get us out of bombing range.^[4] I was sent to a very small village, which had no Nazi youth organization, to live with people I had never seen in my life. As the only classical student I immediately became the object of much taunting by the village youth as a city slicker, although relations improved as I worked with them during the potato harvest. The nine months on my own at age thirteen proved a very important step in my maturation and self-reliance. For about two years I was also free of the tutelage of my father, who in desperation had taken a job late in 1943 with an agricultural agency in another province, escaping by just a few hours the men who appeared at our doorstep to serve him a draft warrant and take him away on the spot.

During the night of September 11–12, 1944, from the safe distance of fifteen miles I watched my hometown being incinerated, knowing my mother to be in the inferno. Using a new fanning-out technique for creating a fire storm, the RAF carried out, according to its own claims, one of the war's most successful raids. About 240 Lancasters, with only two hundred blockbusters, five hundred other explosives, and about three hundred thousand incendiary devices, managed to kill more than twelve thousand people, about two-thirds of them women and children. Seventy thousand were left homeless, and 80 percent of the city was destroyed.^[5] I made my way into the smoldering city past hundreds of bodies, among whom I discovered the parents of a classmate and some neighborhood children. At that moment the American air force appeared for a follow-through attack since most major factories, army barracks, and the railroad junction had escaped the RAF's fury. With the basements inaccessible, still burning and filled with thousands of suffocated and shrunken victims, there was nothing for me to do when the lead plane dropped its smoke signal but lie down in the rubble-

strewn street among the living and the dead and hope to survive. The nearest bombs fell a few hundred feet away. A little later I was told by a survivor standing before the smoking ruins of my home that my mother belonged to the lucky half of my immediate neighborhood. She was alive. To this day I do not like to look at crowds of dozing sunbathers around swimming pools or on the greens of college campuses because they remind me of the bodies I saw that morning.

In 1983 my mother discovered letters I sent to her native village between the great raid and February 22, 1945. It proved an unexpected opportunity to check the accuracy of my fading memories against my sometimes guarded reporting at the time. I had forgotten how often I was cold, preoccupied with the food shortage and torn clothes, and plagued by colds, headaches, and stomach cramps. I had remembered correctly that in the village I lived in a room without heat or running water and that I cracked the frozen water in my washbowl with my fist in the morning before setting off in virgin snow to the railroad stop where I waited hours for a train with the windows blown out to take me to school. The dwindling number of teachers tried in vain to keep instruction going in cold school buildings. Teaching was more and more disrupted by a new scourge, American fighter-bombers, mostly Thunderbolts (P-47s) and Lightnings (P-38s), which bombed and strafed the countryside almost daily, leaving the cities to the big bombers. After a close hit near our school building we were scattered around town as soon as an air raid alarm sounded, but even more frequently the fighter planes appeared without any warning. With a friend I was assigned to a Protestant pastor who had been shell-shocked and buried alive in a bunker in World War I and whose face was distorted by involuntary grimaces when he preached. Discreetly absenting himself, he let me listen to the BBC in his study, after which I supplied my peers with the latest news. Many still considered a stalemate possible and questioned my conviction of the Nazi regime's impending doom. But to me the signs were obvious. On October 20, 1944, I reported to my mother, "All males between the ages of sixteen and sixty have been called up for the Volkssturm [people's army] in the village [ten exclamation marks]. . . . Our school director gave a speech in which he told us, 'We prefer to die for our beloved Führer than to become unfaithful to him.' The slogan of the new Hungarian government is, 'Destroy or be destroyed.' That shows clearly the way things are going." Carelessly I sometimes added the latest anti-Nazi joke.

Terrible moments were to come. I regularly informed my mother

about the growing number of people and draft horses killed in the vicinity. Sometimes I was awakened by strafing planes; once broken windowpanes fell on my bed; another time I interrupted my letter writing to race to the bunker my foster family and I had dug in the garden and braced with old railroad ties. My freedom of movement came to depend exclusively on my bicycle since train travel had become too dangerous. How long would my often patched tires last? On January 15, 1945, several of my schoolmates were surprised in a train by P-38s, which machine-gunned them in the snowy fields that provided no cover. One died; several were seriously wounded, including the one whose dead parents I had found in my hometown. I grimly affirmed much of the violence as being necessary for the destruction of the Nazi regime, but I wanted to see my friends and myself spared. By now I was becoming anxious to be liberated by the Americans before they killed me in the daily chase. In August and early September 1944 I prematurely counted my liberation in weeks. Then came the disappointment of autumn, when Patton's Third Army ran out of gas and exhausted Eisenhower's blessing at the wide-open and undefended German border.^[6] But Patton's hour (and mine) finally came. At 10 P.M., March 22, 1945, the Third Army bested Montgomery by crossing the Rhine at Oppenheim ahead of Montgomery's vast and cumbersome British operation further north. My mother and I were in my birthplace three miles east of the river, directly in the path of the Third Army. The village was supposed to be defended by two dozen overage policemen and a few dozen sixteen-year-old secondary-school students who served in the antiaircraft units. Some retreating students were later caught by the SS and hanged from roadside trees. The scattered remnants of the regular German army were sensible enough to flee. But the local authorities ordered all available hands to dig trenches, and that order should have included me, although I was barely fourteen. I did not care to be killed at the last moment and agreed with my mother that I should flee on my bicycle (she had none). I left at four on the morning of March 23, with exploding artillery shells coming closer and closer. Returning to my foster village, I was immediately taken to a military officer, who did not believe my report of the American crossing. But a few hours later all soldiers had fled. On March 25 I walked to my hosts' home from the house of the village schoolteacher, one of my father's reliable acquaintances, with whom I had discussed the American whereabouts. Spotter planes circled the village, and the hum of engines grew ever louder. The streets were deserted. Walking in the middle of the main street, I encoun-

tered the first tank of Patton's favorite division, the Fourth Armored, rambling over the top of the hill. The young gunner, his face covered with road dust, trained his machine gun on me but did not pull the trigger: I was liberated! That day has always appeared to me the most important of my life.

At the time my elation was ill received by my hosts. The husband yelled at me, "Here is one guy who can enjoy a moment like this!" Since the whole division had raced on, in true blitzkrieg style, without bothering to occupy the village, and German units might appear again, I did not feel safe. I packed a few of my belongings, got on my bicycle for one last trip, and set out for my native village, anxious to know whether my mother had survived. I made my way to a road crowded with thousands of GIs in their unending train of vehicles and, ignorant of curfew regulations, pedaled in the opposite direction from the American advance. The only other civilians were a few liberated foreign workers. Without being stopped once, I reached Wolfskehlen and found my grandfather's house half destroyed by tank shells but my mother alive and unhurt. It took several more weeks before we would know whether my father had outwitted the Nazi regime one last time and survived the dangerous moments of liberation. In the last weeks of the war he was sent to the western front with a rifle and a hand grenade, neither of which he could operate. When his incompetence was discovered, he was put in one of the safest of the Westwall bunkers to do paperwork, while outside most of his Volkssturm battalion was wiped out. In the last hours of the war my father was discharged at the testimony of a military doctor who complained that he was a nervous wreck who should never have been drafted.

1945–1953

Political liberation was an exhilarating experience. With much luck I had survived the Nazi regime during the years of its greatest power and in its period of disintegration. My personal feeling of liberation, however, met an ambiguous reality. In posters hung up in my native village General Eisenhower announced that he had come as a conqueror, not a liberator, and I too was treated accordingly. My maternal grandfather, a small building contractor, did not take the pronouncement too seriously. He had assured me during the war, "First the Americans will defeat us, then they will help us, just as after 1918." Actually what I lived through at first was a period of anarchy—another political lesson.

After totalitarianism and overregulation came the absence of any rule—anarchism in the literal sense of the Greek roots. No civil authority was left, and no police remained to back it up. Just before and after the occupation much looting went on, first by Germans, then by foreign workers. Several murders, which were never solved nor the perpetrators brought to justice, were committed locally. On top of this anarchic world an authoritarian military government was gradually established, beginning with strict curfew regulations and branching out into a thorough regulation of public and especially economic life. The military government was concerned primarily with public health, secondarily with a political purge, and lastly with food distribution.

Living conditions deteriorated in the spring of 1945. For the first time in life I did not have a bed but slept for several weeks in a potato cellar infested with lice and worms. There was no running water, electricity, or gas. Fortunately there was an unpolluted well in the garden, from which I hauled buckets of water. I worked in the fields and at reconstruction and did my share of draft labor for the American army. Some of my grandfather's workers taught me the rudiments of masonry, plastering, carpentry, and roofing—still my favorite relaxation today. The reward for doing much repair work was getting a roof over the house and a bed in which I slept better than ever in my life before or after. For a while I seemed on my way to becoming a farmhand and construction worker, but my father's unannounced reappearance late in May changed all of that. He immediately made me take time to learn from him white-collar skills that might come in handy in the uncertain future—typing and the German shorthand he had helped standardize in the 1920s. He hired the widow of a U-boat captain to teach me what I wanted to acquire most—English. Soon I also began to write shorthand in English, which I still practice as a quaint skill today. At the time fraternization was still forbidden. In spite of this prohibition I felt awkward about my initial inability to communicate with my liberators and much better once I had mastered the rudimentary skills of explaining road directions to lost GIs. I never used my new language skills for the black-market transactions that soon became ubiquitous in violation of all political and economic regulations. A mixture of moralism and social incompetence held me back.

With the world opening wide before me, my father's employment by the military government was crucial for my intellectual liberation and incipient Americanization. As one of the few journalists who had not been a Nazi party member, he was hired by Radio Frankfurt, at first an

American agency, and also went to work for the Frankfurter Rundschau, the second German newspaper to be licensed. Suddenly he had no illnesses anymore, and for twenty-five years he worked full-time, until he was seventy-five, without ever consulting a doctor. For me one benefit of my father's new career was permission to return as early as 1946 to Darmstadt, where our Swiss landlord had rebuilt our old home in record time amid all the ruins.^[7] Another benefit was that over the next two to three years many newspapers and journals, which were published in rapidly increasing numbers in the four occupation zones, heaped up on my desk. To compensate for the book shortage of the time, I set up a meticulously kept archive, which by 1950 comprised more than ten thousand newspaper clippings on politics, economics, geography, history, philosophy, literature, theater, and the arts. (Ever since this excess I have been poor at keeping my files in order.) Not only did I read voraciously, I also tried not to miss any of the plays, operas, dance performances, exhibitions, and American, French, and English movies.^[8] I shared these intellectual and aesthetic excitements with a small group of friends who were of great emotional and intellectual significance to me, in part because philosophy, literature, or the arts were their paramount concerns, whereas I tried to argue also for the importance of politics and society.

How did I discover sociology? It is not difficult to see that the profusion of interests just described—they existed side by side with the classical curriculum—made my friends and me a circle of teenage intellectuals. But my own turn to sociology, which none of my friends followed, needs a more specific explanation. To be sure, my father had taken a course with Franz Oppenheimer at the University of Franklfurt in the early 1920s and told me about him. As early as 1947, at age sixteen, I met Max Horkheimer on his first postwar trip to Germany. Speaking with a soft voice before a tiny adult-education class—an important vehicle of intellectual revival after the war—he impressed me much, but I do not remember a word of what he said. My interest in sociology was not awakened by being told about an academic discipline. Rather, it had to do with my political perceptions. It was my fervent conviction that democratic reconstruction required education to pay more attention to political, economic, and social issues. I was here echoing the American reeducation efforts directed toward changing the German national character through the democratic socialization of the young. It seems to me that I turned to sociology in large part as a protest against the classical curriculum with its emphasis not only on Greek and Latin but also on

literature in general. As a student spokesman I took a hand in shaping the new and embattled civics course as well as geography, the only field in which economic issues could be given some attention. Thus I took a stand against the classical school's time-honored preoccupation with Geisteswissenschaft in favor of adding Gesellschaftwissenschaft .

Apart from the fledgling civics course, history was the curricular subject that lent itself best to the kind of exploration in which I was interested. During the war I had received my first A ever in this subject that had inevitably been the most nazified in our school. I had been fully aware of the propagandistic nature of the texts and had tried to counter them by studying my father's history books from his own schooldays. In the late 1940s I read my way through world history, beginning by memorizing Egyptian dynasties and parallel time tables. Leafing through my old papers, I see that I wrote a thirty-five-page typewritten essay, "On the Enlightenment of the Fifth and Sixth Century B.C.," using Greek sources. I also wrote the traditional composition on the causes of the decline of antiquity. In my last year in classical school, 1950–51, I dropped mathematics with the special permission of the ministry of education and chose history as a main field, producing a hundred-page senior thesis of sorts on a thousand years of Russian history. It was also my first sustained analysis of Leninism and Stalinism, reflecting my strong opposition to them. My eclectic view of Russian history was influenced by Arnold Toynbee's Study of History (1946), then much discussed in its abridgment. Beside it I read Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West (1918–22), Egon Friedell's Cultural History of Modernity (1930), and Hans Freyer's World History of Europe (1948).^[9] My primary historical concern was, of course, the search for the causes of the German catastrophe, as the octogenarian Friedrich Meinecke called it in 1946 in his revisionist book on German history. In August 1949 I finished a long research paper on the rise and fall of Hitler and his Reich, the beginning of a project to write, in due course, my own book on Nazism. (I dropped the plan only many years later.)

In 1951, after ten years of classical school, which had been interrupted for about a year in the months before and after the end of the war in Europe, I graduated summa cum laude in a class of about two dozen students. I was still the most political among us and the only one clearly headed in the direction of the social sciences. Only I emigrated to the United States, probably an indication of how much more pro-American or Americanized I had been in my teens.^[10]

When I went to the University of Frankfurt in the spring of 1951, I

resolved not only to study sociology but also to become politically active. In fact my historical, sociological, and political interests were all bound up with one another in a tangle of scholarship and partisanship. I felt that ominous political developments were coming to a head. My antifascism had not ended in 1945. Since I did not have a father who had been a party member or was otherwise seriously compromised, as was true for some of my classmates, it was easy for me to advocate a farreaching denazification in all major spheres of society. I did not understand that subjective aspect sufficiently at the time, but there was an objective situation: thousands of businessmen, judges, and other high-ranking civil servants, including professors and secondary-school teachers, crept back into their positions. Many vicious crimes went unpunished. It appeared to me that the Social Democrats did yeoman service in rebuilding the shattered communities physically and spiritually but that on the emergent federal level political and social restoration held sway. My political radicalism was a mixture of antifascism and socialism. But because of the cold war and especially the Communist suppression of the Social Democrats in Eastern Europe and East Germany, I never came close to becoming a true Marxist believer and never had to reconvert at a later time. My political concerns and probably also my agnostic Lutheranism made me oppose Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, who ruthlessly mobilized many nationalists of the 1920s and many Nazis of the 1930s for his paramount purpose, the establishment of a bourgeois Rhineland state in which the Catholic element would have not only numerical parity but also political dominance, a reversal of the Prussian and Protestant domination of the old Germany. I did not mind the separation from the Communist-controlled Prussian heartland, but I bitterly opposed Adenauer's resolve to rearm West Germany as the price for its protection by the Western powers and his blunt insistence that atomic weapons be stationed in the Federal Republic. (I remember the seventy-five-year-old patriarch in a peremptory tone informing a silent and stunned audience of fifteen thousand of his own followers in Darmstadt that there was no political alternative.) I feared, as I wrote in an essay on December 7, 1949, that "rearmament will ring the death knell for the young German democracy." Personally I found the idea of having to serve under officers from the Nazi Wehrmacht intolerable. In fact there was so much opposition among my contemporaries that in the mid-1950s Adenauer simply declared us the "white cohorts" and drafted instead younger men who barely remembered the war.

In Frankfurt I did the two things that made the most sense to me: I joined the Socialist Student Federation (SDS) because of my general sympathies for the Social Democrats and my specific interest in opposing rearmament; and I went to the Institute for Social Research, which Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Friedrich Pollock had moved back to its original home in 1950 from Columbia University and California. Even though I was only a first-semester student, I dared to sign up for a seminar on planned and market economies with Pollock, who warned me that I would have to sink or swim. After I had handed in an essay on George Orwell's 1984, Pollock asked me whether I had any experience in the Communist movement since I seemed to know what I was talking about. When I answered no, he offered me a job at the institute. Thus I became its youngest research assistant. For the next two years the institute was my workplace and intellectual home. At the time the Institute for Social Research fully deserved its name, although since the upheavals of the 1960s, which made the Frankfurt school of critical theory famous, it has not been much more than an empty shell. Most of my work at the institute involved its biggest project, a United States–financed inquiry into German postwar attitudes.^[11] It was thematically, but not methodologically, related to The Authoritarian Personality, which Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkl-Brunswick, Daniel Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford had published in the United States in 1950 as part of Horkheimer's series "Studies in Prejudice."

In the early 1950s the University of Frankfurt did not yet have sociology or political-science curricula nor the bachelor's and master's degrees. There was no introductory sociology course, with the exception of Horkheimer's proseminar on basic sociological concepts. His idea of teaching that topic was to assign to me Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money (1900). Very few students knew anything about critical theory, and even in the institute library the journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung from the years 1932 to 1942 was not in general circulation. Since the Nazi regime had disrupted the continuity of German social science, I had to go back to the sociology of the 1920s to pick up the strands. I read Hans Freyer's Introduction to Sociology (1931), Karl Mannheim's Contemporary Tasks of Sociology (1932), Karl Jasper's Man in the Modern Age (1931), and Max Scheler's Bildung und Wissen (1925). I also read Alfred Weber's Farewell to European History (1946) but not a line by his brother. The temperamental octogenarian from Heidelberg was a familiar political figure to me, thundering on the rostrum against the bureaucratic symbolism of the brand-new United

Nations office building on New York's East River and exchanging broadsides with the so-called architect of the German economic miracle, Ludwig Erhard.

Almost all my teachers were emigrants or well-known antifascists—not a typical situation at the German universities. Their small number was reinforced by a stream of American visitors, some emigrants too, some not. Thus I took a seminar, "Marriage in Law and in Reality," from Max Rheinstein and Everett C. Hughes from the law school and sociology department, respectively, of the University of Chicago. In 1952 I met Kurt H. Wolff, a refugee from my hometown, visiting at the institute. He was intensely interested in some of the same moral and political issues that had preoccupied me since the war.^[12] Some of his closest family had been deported and murdered. He invited me to work with him at Ohio State University, in Columbus, for a year on a study of nationalist and Nazi attitudes and the rise and fall of denazification.

I desperately wanted to go to the United States to study. My motives were thoroughly mixed. Most basic was the excitement of the country to somebody who had grown up as I had. My life appeared incomplete without seeing the Empire State Building and the Golden Gate Bridge. (Most personal was a romantic attachment to a Viennese refugee.) The academic benefits of study in the United States appeared obvious. At the institute we read only English literature in the area of empirical social research, especially survey methods and social psychology. Adorno was eager for me to pick up more survey skills. But Horkheimer, distressed by the rise of McCarthyism, asked me skeptically, "Why do you want to go in this political situation?" The McCarran-Walter Act had just been passed and made entry more difficult: as chairman of the largest SDS club at a German university, I was no longer sure to be welcome.

Besides the pull of the country, there was also a push. My strenuous participation in the campaign against German rearmament was obviously doomed by 1953. From the right Adenauer moved ahead with his plans, with full American support; from the left the Communists did their usual best to infiltrate and undermine the peace movement of the early 1950s. My naive pro-Americanism during the early postwar period was badly shaken. I had lost many illusions about both countries but gained some political realism. Going to the United States, then, was a move away from political activism and toward the study of political reality.^[13]

I believed that I was coming to the United States for a limited time and did not know that I was in fact emigrating. At least I came over the

old way. The Anna Salen, a converted British aircraft carrier from the days of the convoys running the German gauntlet to Murmansk, was now an immigrant boat laden with thirteen hundred East Europeans and Germans, many with labor contracts. It was not some fancy Italian ship for Fulbright scholars, and commercial jet planes had not yet made the passenger ship obsolete. On September 22, 1953, I left Bremerhaven. The fall storms were terrible. Like almost everybody else, I was seasick. The ship's propellers often emerged out of the water, shaking the whole hull. Water swept through my cabin. After an eleven-day journey the Anna Salen safely reached her destination, Quebec; her sister ship was shortly to sink in a Pacific storm. On October 3, I crossed the border at Buffalo on my way to the heartland of America.

1953–1984

More than thirty years after arriving in this country I have been asked to write about my formative experiences and the direction of my work. I am very conscious of the anniversary and welcome the opportunity. For many years I had planned to put down my memories of the war and its aftermath. But each year I had forgotten a bit more and felt less inclination to write. Now that I have recalled some memories from my formative years in Europe, I would like to look back at my scholarly development, its genesis and setting. The danger here is not so much inaccuracy of fact and faulty memory as the temptation to read more sense and consistency into the accidents and vagaries of my career than are warranted. For a career, the opportunities and restraints are as important as the inclinations and aspirations.

The question about the impact of formative experiences requires that I characterize my work, if only in the most sketchy and superficial of terms. My kind of sociology has been historical and political. Substantively sociology has always meant for me the evolutionary and developmental theory of modern society; methodologically it has meant a set of generalizations embodying historical experience. I arrived in the United States with a conviction already formed that a science of society in the positivist (and Marxist diamat ) sense of invariant laws is not possible, and if it were, it would not help us understand the distinctiveness of modern society. If I learned this from critical theory, it was also the main postulate of German Historismus . Thus I have advocated a historically oriented grasp of the nature of modern society. My work has been political not only because I have dealt with political phenomena but also

because of its pedagogical animus. I have tried to help students understand the moral value and historical uniqueness of constitutional government, impersonal administration, and the imperatives of large-scale organization—what Benjamin Nelson came to call the social reality principle. Since dictatorships of various hues distort the historical truth and control the flow of information, I remain convinced that sociology has a moral obligation to assure its own preconditions.

I began my American journey with such views, which I sometimes expressed rather dogmatically, but I lacked solid historical knowledge and methodological comprehension. Working at Ohio State University on the history of American denazification gave me an opportunity to study seriously the decision-making processes in wartime and postwar Washington, clarify the distinction between a political purge and moral retribution, and assess the causes and consequences of the failure of denazification. The outcome was my first English monograph, which Kurt Wolff edited and rendered into intelligible English. In many respects a rough apprentice piece, it had something to offer as "an historical survey and appraisal" (its subtitle). At the same time my disciplinary training did not make much headway. In fact I was not studying for a degree and contemplating an American career. Since I had come on an exchange-visitor visa, not a student visa, I was required to have a research appointment at all times. I could not just study on some fellowship, as many foreign students did. This delayed my Americanization and socialization into the discipline of sociology. I missed out on the good and bad aspects of an American college education and graduate-school program, and did not acquire an M.A. Coursework remained secondary to research. Moreover, I was, in a manner of speaking, suspended between two worlds. I made a living looking backward to Europe rather than looking for America. Although I explored American everyday life with curiosity, including the new medium of television, and found the great distances and landmarks such as the Empire State Building stupendous, I perceived much of what I saw through a filter of political and intellectual abstractions, which came naturally to a young European, who took it for granted that the Midwest was a cultural wasteland. During the first year my mind also remained relatively closed to American intellectual influences. In fact, to Adorno's dismay, I spent much of my spare time not on learning survey techniques but on poring over issues of Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung from beginning to end and scrutinizing Herbert Marcuse's Reason and Revolution (1942) as well as Max Horkheimer's Eclipse of Reason (1947), two rarely read books.

At Ohio State nobody but Wolff understood anything about critical theory.

A year at the New School for Social Research in 1954–55 was not as much of a step backward as it appeared to some who worried that I was not having an "American" experience. It gave me a chance to meet a number of scholars who had been productive in the Weimar Republic; some had been politically active. It is true that I lived in the émigré community. But by learning more about the diversities of exiled German social science I gained a much-needed broader perspective. I argued with Alfred Schutz and Albert Salomon about the Frankfurt school, discussed denazification with Otto Kirchheimer, and met Herbert Marcuse again when he was writing Eros and Civilization (1955). My exaggerated views of the Frankfurt Institute and of critical theory were deflated, sometimes subtly, sometimes bluntly, by the redoutable Siegfried Kracauer and the encyclopedic Arkadius Gurland, who had an inexhaustible store of information on revolutionaries and émigrés. From the American side the social psychologist Solomon Asch and the psychoanalyst Helen B. Lewis attacked the psychological and methodological assumptions of Adorno et al.'s The Authoritarian Personality, further increasing my doubts from having read, in Columbus, a critical volume about it.^[14] I became increasingly disenchanted with the feasibility of using personality theory to explain political events and groped my way toward an institutional approach.

Thus I moved away from critical theory, which in those years had a heavy psychological bent. Moreover, I began to understand that holistic approaches—assertions about the totality of culture, civilization, or personality—could not be subject to empirical analysis and that the notion of a self-correcting, reflexive critical theory was a rhetoric that could give no practical political guidance. In this regard I was subject to an authentic American influence through the last major figure of pragmatism, Horace M. Kallen, who attacked the German philosophical tradition and championed a pragmatist, instead of a critical, integration of the social sciences.

I was ready to move on intellectually when Reinhard Bendix, with whose pamphlet "Social Science and the Distrust of Reason" (1951) I was familiar, invited me in the fall of 1955 to work full-time at the Institute of Industrial Relations at the University of California, Berkeley, for the Interuniversity Project on Labor and Economic Development. I was hired to work on labor problems in Imperial Germany. The simple fact of knowing German made me useful for such research

in a situation in which most native graduate students merely went through the motions of learning a little French and German (before the pretense was abolished altogether). There was, however, a matching of opportunity and inclination of which probably neither Bendix nor I was fully aware. At the institute I could continue to combine history and sociology. From my preoccupation with Nazism and its aftermath I now moved further back into German history in search of the causes of "the German catastrophe." With a brief career in the German SDS behind me, I was especially interested in the failure of the German revolution of 1918–19 and the role played by the split Social Democratic labor movement. I had opinions, but little knowledge, about the labor movement in Imperial Germany. My only concrete relationship to it had been the (slightly ridiculous) moment at the founding of the Fifth Socialist International in Frankfurt, in 1951, when I held the funeral flag of Ferdinand Lassalle, the founder of the Social Democratic labor movement, behind the rostrum on which appeared socialist leaders from many countries. Skillful at discreet indirection, Bendix asked me essentially one big question, out of which The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany was to emerge (first in 1960 as a dissertation and then in 1963 as a book): "What was the meaning of the labor movement to the workers?" I buried myself in the splendid Berkeley library, trying to make myself spiritually at home in Imperial Germany. But that was only the historical side of the project, congenial to my political and cultural proclivities. The other side was sociological—American modernization theory, which postulated that economic progress in "newly developing" countries would favor democratic pluralism rather than Communist dictatorship. This thesis became the substantive core of the "newly developing" fields of political sociology and comparative politics, which Seymour Martin Lipset was spearheading at the institute.

But what were the lessons of the European experience? Bendix provided some major answers in Work and Authority (1956), which was also an early critique of modernization theory. I tried to supply a lesson from Imperial Germany. There the potential of industrialization for creating revolutionary conflict was contained by an authoritarian political system that permitted a hostile mass movement to exist legally but prevented it from gaining access to the power center. This historical conclusion could, however, also be couched in terms of a sociohistorical model, a sociological theory of negative integration, that was applicable to similar cases in other places at other times, for instance, the French

and Italian Communist parties under parliamentary regimes. In a postscript, which Bendix suggested to me, I spelled out some of the personal lessons I drew:

The facts of Nazism provide a powerful moral perspective for German history, but it is neither fair to past generations nor analytically adequate to view this history with the questionable wisdom of hindsight. When I began my research, my own perspective of the history of the German labor movement was strongly affected by German self-recrimination and conventional American perspectives. But gradually I came to change my views. I tried to arrive at a more balanced and detached view, influenced by the positivistic injunctions of an American graduate education and perhaps by the soothing atmosphere of the Pacific Coast, far removed from Germany in time and space. Looking over the completed study, I find myself more sympathetic to the right and the center of the Social Democratic movement than to the left. . . . I have endeavored to preserve a sense for the capacity of individuals and groups to change some parts of their lives as well as for the fateful persistence of social structures and the unpredictable uniqueness of historical events.^[15]

By the time I reached this personal conclusion, I had given up my political ambitions in a faraway land and come to accept the role of the observer over that of the actor. I had become serious about the possibility of an American career. Yet writing a dissertation on Imperial Germany was then still unconventional in American sociology. Here I benefited from the intellectual climate of Berkeley. For many assistants at the Institute of Industrial Relations, then directed by Clark Kerr, the apprenticeship nature of research was more important than disciplinary study. We—Robert Alford, Bennett Berger, Robert Blauner, Amitai Etzioni, Juan Linz, Gayl Ness, Charles Perrow, and Arthur Stinchcombe—learned by looking over the shoulders of our masters. While I was a full-time researcher, I was also a part-time graduate student in the Department of Sociology, which Herbert Blumer was bent on making the best in the world, as he repeated at the beginning of each academic year. When I tried to take the qualifying examinations after only six months, I was flunked and sent back to read the seventy-five books—a totally eclectic list—that everybody had to read on pain of failing. Having to study books with a variety of different orientations that I had disdained or disregarded before broadened my horizon in a most salutory manner.

After 1960 I taught the new fields of industrial sociology and complex organization as well as the traditional subjects of sociological theory and social change, from which I branched out into political sociology and social and economic development, another set of new

teaching fields. These subjects were inherently interdisciplinary, but I also taught in the formally interdisciplinary Social Science Integrated Course directed by Lewis Feuer at Berkeley (1958–60) and the Western civilization program directed by Benjamin Nelson in the earliest days of the Stony Brook campus of the State University of New York (1963–65). My background qualified me for such programs, but at the same time my inclinations held me back from becoming a mainline American social scientist. I did not turn myself into a survey researcher—the usual option at the time—or an organization theorist, another new and attractive possibility realized by several members of my American cohort. The gradual opening of American social science toward the world in the aftermath of World War II, an opening furthered by many émigré scholars, combined in the early 1960s with the stormy expansion of the universities and created considerable intellectual leeway for the pursuit of diverse interests. This latitude enabled me to move closer again to some of my intellectual roots and return to my old interests in world history in the guise of Weberian scholarship. I discovered Max Weber's work only at Berkeley, watching Reinhard Bendix compose his intellectual portrait and writing with him an essay on Weber's growing influence in the United States.^[16] After Bendix had laid out the world-historical scope and the comparative logic of Weber's empirical studies, it became highly desirable to have Economy and Society (Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft ) available in its totality to counteract the piecemeal and haphazard nature of the Weber reception. With the encouragement of Hans Zetterberg, I began to put together a variorum edition, not knowing that it would take six years even with the help of my Darmstadt classical schoolmate and New York City neighbor Claus Wittich. The complexity of translating and editing was wearisome, the tedium at times crushing, but both of us welcomed the chance to roam through world history in Weber's texts and our background reading and get away from the routines of economics and sociology.

Economy and Society appeared in 1968 at the height of the student rebellion, when Weber, of all people, was regarded as a patron saint of conformist American positivism and its vaunted value-neutrality. My past caught up with me at the Free University of Berlin in 1967–68 and in the civil-war days in Berkeley in 1969–70, where I held visiting appointments. With my memories of Nazi Germany, I could not sympathize with the moral outrage of a younger generation that equated the Federal Republic and the United States, two of the most viable constitutional democracies, with fascism, and Lyndon Johnson with Adolf Hit-

ler.^[17] With a generation of émigré scholars as my teachers, I knew what the dangers to scholarship would be if the university, a precarious institution at the best of times, were radically politicized. I was infuriated by the way German students singled out the few Jewish refugee scholars who had returned and were still teaching—Adorno, Ernst Fraenkel, Richard Loewenthal—as special targets of their "antiauthoritarian" and "antifascist" campaign. When the Bonn Bundestag debated the national emergency legislation that had become necessary because of a new treaty with the former occupation powers, student protest climaxed under the leadership of an SDS that was radically different from the SDS of my time. I simply could not forget my early Nazi memories, when I watched from close up as Rudi Dutschke waited for the most propitious moment to make his triumphant entry at a mass rally, which he then pushed into frenzy with a barrage of shouted slogans. At another occasion, when asked to "show my colors" as a university teacher, I professed my conviction, before hundreds of howling students, that the Federal Republic was the best and most democratic regime Germany had ever had and that it was the civic duty of the younger generation to accept its legitimacy. I ended up fleeing the Institute of Sociology, grabbing my American passport and my introduction to Economy and Society, never to return. In Berkeley I struggled to teach Weber's sociology of domination surrounded by strikers and demonstrators, sheriffs and national guardsmen. Both groups came close to shutting down the university not only physically but also intellectually. In a situation in which it was well-nigh impossible to go on teaching, I insisted that the university require and demand the separation of scholarship and partisanship. The sudden popularity of the Frankfurt school's critical theory appeared to me in some respects another eclipse of reason. The counterculture's drive to unite theory and practice, if not to replace the former by the latter and thought by emotion, negated the school's rationalist commitments and embittered the last days of Adorno and Horkheimer.

My political combativeness was reawakened by the challenge of a younger generation that knew nothing of war and fascism. My response took the form of a partisan defense of scholarship. Since the 1960s about half of my writings have addressed such topical themes as political critiques of Max Weber, his own generational rebellion and maturation, his relationship to contemporary Marxism, value neutrality in Germany and the United States, the counterculture's charismatic virtuosi and charismatic communities, and the relations between religion and revolutionary beliefs. The other half has dealt with core themes of

sociology proper—rationalization and industrialization, authority and legitimation, personal and impersonal rulership, and the developmental history of the West in comparison with other parts of the world.

What can I say finally about the impact of formative experience on life patterns? Have I always been an exemplar of that hoary archetype of American sociology, the marginal man? To be sure, I was a political outsider in Nazi Germany, watching a tremendous catastrophe sweep over Europe. I found myself a political outsider in Adenauer's conservative republic. I was a foreign student in the United States, again a marginal person with little cultural preparation and no political rights. I finally became an American citizen and found a niche in the American academy but soon saw myself outnumbered in the campus rebellion. At the same time, however, I have never lacked the support of significant others, from the community in my wartime basement to our group in the classical school, from my German political friendships to the émigré scholars who were so generous to me, and from my Berkeley friendships to a network of cosmopolitans scattered around the world. In the end, of course, I cannot deny that culturally I have remained a hyphenated scholar, no matter how much I cringe at being sometimes labeled a German-American sociologist. The story I have told here may convince readers (and ultimately myself) that this is, after all, an accurate designation.

Looking back, I tend to believe that the most formative influence on my career has indeed been the stark lesson of my early years, the experience of the mortal dangers of political conflict. Hence my motivating conviction that power struggles must be contained by constitutional restraint, that universities must be institutionally protected to further rational comprehension and reasonable action, and that sociology must address the big political, cultural, and social issues of modernity.

Chapter Eighteen—
From the Popocatepetl to the Limpopo

Pierre L. van den Berghe

This essay is an attempt at intellectual autobiography. Why did I become an academic and a social scientist? How has my thinking evolved, and in response to which events? How have my politics influenced my scholarship? In sociological jargon, the dependent variable is myself as a thinking animal; the independent variables can perhaps be broken down into two sets: general conditions of the social milieu and my place in it, and specific influences of individuals. I will interweave these two themes into a loose chronological account.

A confession of class origins is probably the first order of business in a sociological autobiography. They range, in my case, from rich peasants to the nobility, if I trace back four or more generations, but my grandparents and parents had comfortably settled into what might be called the intellectual and professional bourgeoisie. On my father's side all the males for three generations were physicians. My paternal grandfather was a general practitioner in the large provincial city of Ghent, Belgium, and married the rather homely daughter of a Flemish country doctor. He inherited his practice from his father, and thanks to the considerable amount of wealth brought by my grandmother's dowry and inheritance (she came from a rather rustic but rich peasant family with sizable land holdings), he enjoyed the comfortable life of a provincial bourgeois. After World War I the two horses, the carriages, and the coachmen were replaced by a custom-made Panhard automobile, but the live-in cook and maid, who had been with them for half a century,

were permanent fixtures of the family scene, a provincial version of "Upstairs, Downstairs."

Staunchly conservative in politics, conventional in religion, puritanical in sex, and austere in life-style (except for culinary indulgence), my grandparents, Roman Catholics, were a living refutation of the Protestant ethic. From my paternal grandmother, a rather uncultured but strong-willed and highly intelligent woman, I learned the virtues of amoral familism. Fiercely defensive of her brood and her assets, she idolized my father in smotheringly Jewish mother–style, and she spoiled me shamelessly. From my grandfather I learned the meaning of fanatical zeal. He was a homeopath, and his medical sectarianism dominated his existence much more than his religion, which was a matter of social convention rather than conviction. The outside world to him was a vast conspiracy of allopaths against homeopathic physicians and pharmacists.

My father rebelled against his social milieu. He studied medicine to appease my grandfather but quickly turned to medical research (in tropical parasitology), moved to Brussels to escape the stifling adulation of his mother, and became a cosmopolite. He married a Frenchwoman, a somewhat eccentric choice from the perspective of his parents; went to the United States on a postdoctoral fellowship; did research in the then Belgian Congo (where I was born on January 30, 1933, the day the little Austrian lance corporal became Reich chancellor, an early lesson about the difference between correlation and causality); taught tropical medicine at Antwerp; founded and directed a research institute in the Congo; and retired as a gentleman farmer in Kenya. He was an egotistical and unstable person of many talents and great personal charm. I idolized him during my childhood, hated him during my adolescence, and ignored him in adulthood. His influence on me was considerable: I found his elitism, his contempt of authority and convention, his religious agnosticism, and his amiable cynicism engaging, although I resented his chaotic, undisciplined, self-indulgent life as a philandering husband and episodic father. My parents were divorced, after twenty years of marriage and five or six years of stormy conflict, when I was eighteen, my brother thirteen, and my sister six.

The maternal side of my family was anchored in Paris, where my grandfather, Maurice Caullery, an eminent biologist, taught at the Sorbonne and was president of the French Academy of Sciences as well as a fellow of the British Royal Society. He married a woman of striking

beauty, great aristocratic pedigree, and artistic temperament but moderate intelligence. A more mismatched couple is difficult to conceive: she, the tall, slender, artistically sensitive, flighty, elegant socialite; he, the short, ill-dressed, curt, reclusive, absent-minded professor. They seemed to play in a respectable, high-society version of The Blue Angel . Henpecked at home, my grandfather withdrew into his scientific shell, taking refuge in his study, where a cloud of acrid smoke from Gauloise cigarettes kept my grandmother at bay. My grandmother exposed me to a strong dose of social snobbery and introduced me to a gallery of her colorful ancestors, including a cavalry general who took part in Napoleon III's Mexican misadventure in support of Maximilian, a bohemian painter who supported the 1871 Paris Commune (and was thus the red sheep in the family), and a pride of nine brothers who cracked the whip over their slaves in Haiti and were all killed the same day in the revolution of 1791.

My maternal grandfather, whom I am told I resemble in character, was a major influence. A stern, emotionally reticent and distant figure, he inspired instant respect in his intimates and sheer terror in his students. Impatient of anything but excellence, he exacted optimal performance (as, for instance, when he taught me to read Greek, expecting me by the end of summer vacation to translate Xenophon on sight). He punished shortcomings by disdainful withdrawal of interest in one's fate. All four of his children (my mother, her brother, and her two sisters) suffered from living in the shadow of his imposing intellect; but, perhaps sensing our affinities, he was fond of me in his gruff way, and I worshipped him. I particularly enjoyed his biting anticlericalism, a wonderful counterpoint to my Jesuit education, and his intellectual disdain for the merely rich and powerful. Few of his contemporaries found grace in his eyes. Most, including the leading political figures of the day, elicited his peremptory judgment, "C'est un imbécile ." The epitome of the rationalist, and a positivist in the grand nineteenth-century style, my grandfather initiated me into biology and taught me what science was all about. That this austere, shabby, physically unprepossessing, soft-spoken, unsociable, taciturn figure could so dominate his world by sheer strength of intellect was an early lesson in the superiority of mind over matter.

My mother (who is still alive) combined the physical beauty and artistic sensibilities of my grandmother and many of the moral qualities of my grandfather; I owe her much in the field of art appreciation (especially painting). What she also taught me was internal discipline.

My whole family expected me to excel, especially in school. But it was my mother who, by monitoring my homework, scrutinizing my report cards, supervising my reading, and taking me to museums actually saw to it that I did. My father and maternal grandfather, each in his own way, provided models; my mother gave me the drive.

In that endeavor she was firmly supported by the Jesuit fathers, who inflicted on me seven years of grueling intellectual discipline. Of my Jesuit secondary education I can only say that I hated almost every minute of it and that I shall be eternally grateful for the experience. Jesuits are famous for producing well-trained intellectual mavericks. The contradiction of the Jesuit system is that its casuistry encourages critical, disciplined thinking but that its theology expects blind faith. Like many, I took in the training and rejected its moral and religious content. By age twelve I was an atheist and a communist, having stumbled onto a secular theology similar in its dialectic to that of the good fathers. Two of my teachers were particularly influential, one a jovial, rotund bon vivant and superb pedagogue, Father Bribosia; the other a dry, austere martinet, but with a razor-sharp mind and a superlative maître à penser , Father De Wolf (I never knew their first names).

Three formative experiences in my upbringing remain to be mentioned because collectively they greatly influenced my choice of academic specialty. They are the so-called language problem of Belgium, World War II and life under Nazi occupation, and my colonial experience in the Congo. The Belgian language problem was my first exposure to ethnicity as well as class conflict; the two are intertwined in Belgium and were even more so in my youth than they are now. Inevitably French was our exclusive home language, first, because my mother was Parisian and did not speak a word of Dutch, and second, because my father, although raised in a Flemish city and entirely of Flemish descent, belonged to a bourgeois family that had become gallicized in the nineteenth century. Increasingly since the early nineteenth century the bourgeoisie of Flanders came to use French as a prestige language (much as the Russian aristocracy had before the Bolshevik revolution) and thus created a language barrier between itself and the lower classes. Language use thus became a marker of class snobbery and a continual source of conflict and humiliation. I learned early that language was not only a means of communication but also an idiom of exclusion and domination.

In Brussels that fact was not so obvious since French dominated the public life of the capital. Even there, however, there were French- and

Dutch-medium schools, which roughly corresponded to bourgeois and working-class schools. Even within the French-medium schools (which, naturally, I attended), it was clear that the best pupils also spoke the best French and the worst Dutch, so much so that having low marks in the compulsory Dutch course was a badge of high class status.

In a Flemish city like Ghent the invidiousness of language use was even more glaring. There every bourgeois household exhibited linguistic schizophrenia: French was spoken in the living room, Flemish in the kitchen—a vertical microcosm of the country at large. My grandparents, for example, were bilingual but never spoke Flemish with each other, with any member of the family, or with their class equals. Flemish was the language they spoke to menials—servants, tenant farmers, tradesmen, craftsmen, the vast assemblage they collectively called "les gens du peuple ." Since I belonged to the privileged group, I readily adopted the linguistic snobbery of the francophone, all the more so as these attitudes were strongly reinforced by those on the maternal side of my family, who indeed looked down on all Belgians as denizens of a petit pays , not of a grande nation . Flemish was considered an earthy, peasant dialect, well suited to the telling of scatological jokes (my grandmother's favorites, much as she was shocked by sexual jokes); but culture could only be carried through the vehicle of French.

World War II was perhaps my first lesson in cultural relativism. The ethnic table was turned on me. I was seven years old when "our war" first started, that is, when the Wehrmacht invaded the Low Countries and France on May 10, 1940. For me, the war began as a lark. Woken at 6 A.M. by the bombs of the Luftwaffe over Brussels, our family piled into our 1938 Chevrolet and headed south. We stopped at my grandparents' in Paris, then near Bordeaux, and finally had to turn back at the Spanish border, which we were unable to cross. The exodus, as we called it, meant school vacation two months ahead of schedule and a lot of excitement and adventure, like sleeping in barn lofts and playing paratrooper in vineyards.

Soon, however, our return to Brussels made it clear that we were a conquered people. That meant little to eat; a curfew; censored school books; newspapers full of lies; no gasoline (we kept our car hidden in our garage for fear it would be requisitioned); slow travel in overcrowded trains; an occasional bombing; and the presence of foreign troops, even in our homes. (We were forced to billet German officers, but I was strictly forbidden by my parents to fraternize with the enemy, despite an occasional tantalizing offer of chocolate from a homesick

young father.) We were told that Paris, far from being the heart of Western civilization, was the rotten core of a decadent society, and that the Flemish, though one notch below the Herrenvolk, were far closer to the Aryan ideal than the effete Walloons or French.

We had several brushes with real physical danger, as when we sheltered a Hungarian Jewish colleague of my father; when my maternal grandfather was arrested and detained as a hostage, subject to execution in reprisal against resistance killings of Germans (the price of prominence); and when my father discovered that his laboratory in Antwerp had been converted by his assistant into an underground arsenal. The assistant, one of those psychopaths turned into heroes by the war, particularly relished telling me stories of his favorite wartime assignment—slitting the throats of prostitutes suspected of being Gestapo informers. I am sure that but for an accident of birth he would have worked just as enthusiastically for the other side.

Although my family was solidly anti-German and freely exchanged the latest anti-Nazi jokes, heroism was not in the family style. In fact it was regarded with some suspicion and distaste. The nearest thing to a hero my family produced was a third cousin who later volunteered in the Belgian paratrooper battalion during the Korean War and returned much decorated for bravery. He became a plantation overseer in the Congo, where he was tried for shooting workers in the legs with a .22-caliber rifle to encourage productivity; he briefly followed his true vocation when he rose to be chief of police for Moise Tshombe during the Katanga secession episode, meeting an untimely and undoubtedly disagreeable death at the hands of his Congolese captors. My almost exact contemporary, he was always presented to me as a negative role model, "un gosse qui a mal tourné parce que sa mère ne s'est pas assez occupée de lui" ("a kid who turned out badly because his mother neglected him").

That story brings me to my colonial experience in the then Belgian Congo. Although I was born there, I was brought to Europe as a ten-month-old infant, and I only returned in 1948, at age fifteen, to spend my last two years of high school. It is difficult to convey the excitement of an African adventure for an adolescent. Undoubtedly those two years were among the most formative of my life and played a determining role in my vocation as a social scientist. I was privileged, through my father's institute (IRSAC, Institut pour la Recherche Scientifique en Afrique Centrale), to see anthropologists like Jacques Maquet at work among the Tuzi of Rwanda, to follow ethologists on the tracks of mountain

gorillas on the shores of Lake Kivu, to visit national parks a quarter century before the onslaught of mass tourism, to experience human cultural diversity in its most contrasting forms, and, especially, to be a participant observer in a colonial system of naked domination and exploitation, which was already doomed but did not yet know it. In 1950, just ten years before Zaire's independence, colonialism still seemed an unshakable system destined to last at least another century. The lessons of India, Indonesia, and Indochina had not even begun to sink in.

As I am trying to recapture my reactions to colonialism, I realize that colonial Congolese society was a considerable intellectual stimulant. Unlike many colonials, I was not taken in by the paternalistic ideology of the mission civilisatrice, nor did I share racial stereotypes of black inferiority. In the intellectual climate of IRSAC liberalism and cultural relativism were de rigueur and criticism of the colonial regime was a constant theme of conversation. That the regime rested on naked coercion was also glaringly obvious (this undoubtedly reinforced my anarchistic conviction that all governments were coercive). Blacks never seemed dumb or lazy to me. Indeed I was quick to observe how cunning they were in using the tactics of the weak (which were also the tactics I was using against teachers and other "hostile" adults and which I was later to use to good effect while a private in the army): passive resistance, evasion, sabotage, deception, malingering, deliberate misunderstandings, and the like. Colonialism (slavery, imprisonment, the military, and other social systems where the ideological veneer is thin) vividly exposes social structure and is thus an excellent training ground for social scientists. Tyrannical societies often produce first-class social scientists and social novelists: South Africa, Poland, and Russia come to mind.

At the same time as the sinews of Congolese society lay bare to my view, I was leading a comfortable and very pleasant existence based on unearned privilege. I would be less than candid if I said that it bothered me (as it would a decade later when I spent two years doing research on race relations in South Africa). If anything, I found racial prejudice an amusing form of mental aberration. I still remember how my brother came home from school one day having to copy a hundred times, as punishment for slackness, "If I have white skin, I must work, otherwise I am a white nigger." This motto reflected the mentality of the Catholic clergy, supposedly one of the liberal sectors of colonial opinion. (Naturally we attended a European school. There was a storm of protest when the Jesuits belatedly decided to start admitting "mulattoes" who had been legally recognized by their white fathers.)

After I finished high school in the Congo, my father thought it would be a good idea to send me to the United States for university studies, and he picked Stanford University. He also took the opportunity to dump my mother and sister in California in anticipation of divorce. Stanford in the early 1950s was not a major university; "the farm," as it was affectionately (not derisively) called, deserved its nickname. It was a dude ranch for the anti-intellectual brats of the West Coast plutocracy. After a Jesuit education Stanford was an academically undemanding Garden of Eden. I happily went horseback riding, swimming, and girl chasing (a result of my first unhindered access to the opposite sex after years in all-male schools) and breezed through a bachelor's degree in political science in two years, graduating in 1952.

For lack of better things to do, and to postpone my being drafted into the United States Army, I stayed at Stanford another year, receiving a master's degree in sociology. By that time I had decided that I wanted to become a social scientist. Political science (my first choice because I briefly thought of a diplomatic career) bored me, and I most enjoyed my sociology and anthropology courses, especially those of Richard La Piere and George Spindler. The joint Department of Sociology and Anthropology was minuscule (six or seven faculty members) and did not offer a serious graduate program, so my master's degree was another intellectual promenade, pleasant but unchallenging.

During my Stanford years, I spent a summer, in 1951, studying in Mexico City—the start of a lifelong love affair with Mexico. It was my first exposure to Latin America, and I immediately took to it as I never could to the United States. Mexico had the same wide open spaces that I had learned to appreciate in North America, but it also had a historical depth, cultural richness, and human density that I so badly missed in the United States. Most refreshingly, it seemed free of racial prejudices, which I found so suffocating in the United States. To be sure, Mexico was highly class-stratified, but in a way so similar to that which I had experienced in Europe that I felt culturally very much at home. In any case, I learned Spanish and equipped myself for later fieldwork in Latin America (Chiapas, Mexico, 1959; Guatemala, 1966; Peru, 1972–73).

With a worthless M.A. in my pocket and the United States and Belgian armies breathing down my neck (I was still a Belgian national, but as a permanent resident in the United States, Uncle Sam also considered me a prime candidate), I took a chance on starting a Ph.D. program at Harvard University. My luck soon ran out, but my one-year stint at Harvard was a revelation: I had my first exposure to a real university

just as I was beginning to doubt any existed in the United States. In fact, with the arrogant self-confidence of youth, I did not bother to apply to another graduate school besides Harvard.

Harvard was great. I discovered on arrival that the guru of structural functionalism was away that year, but Gordon Allport, George Homans, Clyde Kluckhohn, Barrington Moore, Frederick Mosteller, Pitirim Sorokin, and Samuel Stouffer handsomely made up for Talcott Parsons's absence. I arrived during the formative period of the Department of Social Relations, or Soc Rel (and I was to finish my degree during its heyday in 1960). The holy trinity of Allport, Kluckhohn, and Parsons seemed to present a breathtaking synthesis of the social world, having grandly asserted the unity of psychology, sociology, and anthropology. La Piere had turned me against Freud and Durkheim (a lasting influence, I might add), and he had convinced me that social structures were nothing but people acting. I now found Homans reinforcing those views. As for the distinction between sociology and anthropology, it had never made sense to me. It seemed that the skin color of those studied did not justify the disciplinary boundary. Happily, I found everyone at Harvard in agreement on this point.

Although the holy trinity constituted the ruling triumvirate at Soc Rel, I was perhaps most attracted by the terrible three (my term): Homans, Moore, and Sorokin. Cranky, sarcastic, and arrogant, they terrorized most students, which left an empty niche to be filled. I found all three relatively approachable (after the initial protective rebuff) precisely because so few students dared come near them. Homans and Moore were both on my Ph.D. general examination committee, and most of my peers thought I was courting disaster. Indeed I was. Moore behaved true to form. He asked me in the oral exam to contrast industrial and preindustrial societies. I fell into the trap of answering in Parsonian platitudes unlikely to endear me to either Moore or Homans: on the spur of the moment the "pattern variables" seemed a convenient coat hanger for that kind of question. After an interminable five minutes or so, Moore interrupted with a devastating question: "But Mr. van den Berghe, what have you told me that I could not have found out by reading the New York Times? " It was Homans who came to my rescue. In his stentorian voice he interjected, "But Barrington, you haven't asked anything which could not be answered in those terms."

But I am running ahead of the story; Uncle Sam caught up with me long before I could take my generals. I was drafted in September 1954, after the Korean armistice but before the official end of hostilities, and

spent two years in the Army Medical Corps, rising to the lofty rank of private first class. The move from a graduate dormitory at Harvard to a basic-training barrack at Fort Ord, California, was probably the most traumatic in my life. Yet it too was intellectually formative. Military life gave me a firsthand understanding of total institutions and, by extension, colonial systems, slavery, concentration camps, and other situations that were to exert a lifelong fascination on me.

I did not rebel against the military; I withdrew in amused cynicism, ridiculing and sabotaging the system and exercising my creativity by surreptitiously shirking my responsibilities without attracting punishment. I pursued my education by reading a substantial pocketbook library in latrines during extended coffee breaks and other disappearing acts. I successfully reduced an executive officer's authority by threatening to prefer charges of incompetence against him. (He had been responsible for burning six men on maneuvers, mistaking white phosphorus grenades for smoke grenades. They both came in olive-drab canisters, and he had not bothered to read the label.)

Above all, I became a barracks lawyer, mastering the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which I had discovered to be an intimidating weapon against illiterate noncommissioned officers and semiliterate officers. My worst punishment was one week's confinement to barracks, which I spent mostly listening to Mozart and Beethoven in the music room of the military hospital (the existence of which was only known to a half-dozen aficionados).

Luckily, after basic training among the rattlesnakes of California and Texas I was sent to defend the American empire on the Rhine. That assignment gave me the opportunity to renew contact with both the Belgian and the French sides of my family, and it was in Germany that I met my future wife, Irmgard Niehuis, in the dental chair of a military hospital where she was a dental assistant. To my father-in-law, a senior civil servant in Bad Kreuznach, I owe a keen appreciation of Rhine, Mosel, and Nahe wines; his job as head of the land-surveying office in the region gave him unmatched access to, and expertise in, the best vineyards. After a long military inquisition during which my fiancée was asked (supposedly for my protection) whether she had ever had venereal diseases or intended to emigrate to the United States to engage in prostitution, we were married by a Southern Baptist military chaplain in January 1956. That was also the period when I acquired United States citizenship, more as a matter of convenience than of conviction. My wife's nationality and her religion (Protestant) were matters of concern

to some members of my family, but their misgivings were quickly allayed on acquaintance. Our differences in religious background were resolved through mutual agnosticism and indifference to religious matters, and we raised three sons, Eric (born in 1961), Oliver (born in 1962), and Marc (born in 1975) in a secular home, drawing eclectically from several religious traditions without affiliating with any. Nonetheless, my wife is not above reproaching me for my Jesuitical turn of mind whenever she loses an argument.

Released at last from the talons of the bald eagle, my wife and I spent an extraordinarily stimulating year in Paris (1956–57) courtesy of the GI bill. Our monthly stipend of $135 only sustained a Spartan standard of living, but the reduced-rate student restaurants, theaters, and concerts and the tuition-free university allowed a rich cultural and intellectual diet on a modest budget. That was the year I decided I would make Africa my main area of research, and Paris was a superb training ground. Georges Balandier, Paul Mercier, and Germaine Dieterlen were my main teachers in the African area. Roger Bastide initiated me to the African diaspora in Brazil; Claude Lévi-Strauss kindled my interest in the arcane field of kinship analysis; I listened to Raymond Aron talk about Weber, and Georges Gurvitch about Durkheim. Among my contemporaries and fellow students in and around the Sixth Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Études, in the cavernous old Sorbonne building, were Claude Meillassoux and Rodolfo Stavenhagen.

The great political issues of the day were the war in Algeria and the Suez intervention, prompting routinized shouting matches around Saturday noon in the main courtyard of the Sorbonne. Rival student groups shouted at each other, "Algérie française " and "Le fascisme ne passera pas ." Dark blue trucks loaded with gardes mobiles stood by just outside but seldom had to intervene. It was then that I first became aware of the imminence and irreversibility of political change on the African continent and decided that I wanted to go back there soon. Both my political sympathies and my contacts were overwhelmingly with the left, at least on the issues of decolonization, but I also discovered in Paris that the right was not necessarily stupid (an impression readily gained from Republican politics in the United States).

The Parisian interlude was followed by reentry into the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, where I got my Ph.D. in January 1960. During those two and a half years I associated most closely with Gordon Allport and Talcott Parsons, who cochaired my dissertation committee. I was writing on South African race relations, and Allport was just

back from South Africa with his student Thomas Pettigrew. He was thus a natural choice to chair my committee, and I have the fondest memory of his warm, avuncular interest in my budding career. He took great pains to expurgate my English prose of which es, and along with Bill Gum (at John Wiley, Basic Books, and later Elsevier) was the best editor I ever had.

My relationship with Parsons was more ambivalent. It was close, since I was both his research assistant and teaching assistant for two years, and he was quite pleasant with me, but I never felt at ease with his thinking. In fact the choice of South Africa as my dissertation topic quickly turned into a refutation of Parsonian consensus assumptions about the basis of social order. When I confronted him with the issue, his response was characteristically mild but unsatisfying. He suggested that either consensus was there but I had not looked for it deeply enough below all the surface noise, or perhaps South Africa was not really a society after all. It took me some five or six years to shed the Parsonian influence altogether. Eventually I came to resent the time spent trying to understand him when I belatedly discovered that the emperor had no clothes. But of course graduate students, even cheeky ones like me, dare not come to such conclusions.

In the summer of 1959 I got my feet wet doing anthropological fieldwork in Chiapas, Mexico, collaborating with Benjamin (Nick) Colby, the start of a long-standing friendship and a clear ethnographic vocation. Colby and I were in the first generation of students in the ongoing Harvard Chiapas Project directed by Evon Vogt, who was most helpful to me in the field. I also had the opportunity to establish contact with the Mexican school of anthropology, especially Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, Julio de la Fuente, and Alfonso Villa Rojas, and amicably to cross pens with my former Paris classmate Rodolfo Stavenhagen. At that time I looked at Chiapas as a training ground for the fieldwork I was planning in South Africa, but in the end I was to devote practically half of my research activities to Latin America.

A Ford Foundation Foreign Area Fellowship made it possible for my wife and me to go to South Africa in February 1960, and the next twenty-two months left an indelible imprint both intellectually and politically. My stay there coincided with the meteoric collapse of European colonialism in most of the rest of the continent and with an abortive revolution (Sharpeville and its aftermath) in South Africa itself: I had picked the right time to return to Africa. I also met more people of extraordinary stature and courage in South Africa than in any other

period of my life, notably Albert Luthuli, Alan Paton, and among my university colleagues Leo and Hilda Kuper and Fatima Meer. I forged lasting friendships through my work in South Africa, especially with the Kupers and Hamish Dickie-Clark (then my colleagues at the University of Natal in Durban), Edna Bonacich (then Edna Miller, my first research assistant), and later Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley (then a student of mine).

As a lecturer in the department headed by Leo Kuper at the University of Natal, I was both in one of the three main fermenting vats of South African social science and in the maelstrom of South African antiapartheid politics. I have related elsewhere my experiences there (in Ethics, Politics and Social Research , ed. Gideon Sjoberg [Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1967]) and need not repeat myself. If my South African stay left one indelible imprint, it is the firm conviction that any attention paid to race, whatever the stated intention, is noxious. This conviction later formed the basis of my vocal opposition to policies of race-based affirmative action in the United States and got me into considerable hot water. In South Africa, it was always touch and go whether I could finish my research before being expelled, but I finally left of my own accord in December 1961. Another event of my Durban stay was the birth of our eldest son, Eric, the first second-generation African in the family.

On the way back from South Africa we stopped over in Europe for six months, mostly in Paris. I renewed my 1956–57 contacts and taught at the Sorbonne. Our second son, Oliver, was born in Germany in 1962. The war in Algeria was now noisily winding down, and Paris was, as always, an exciting political and intellectual arena. Our stay was punctuated by OAS (Organisation de l'Armee Secrète, the underground of the right-wing French settlers in Algeria) plastic bombs, one within a hundred meters of my grandparents' flat.

The following three years marked our return to the United States and the start of my regular teaching career, first as an assistant professor at Wesleyan University (for a miserly annual salary of $7,200), then for two years at the State University of New York, Buffalo. At Wesleyan we found the combination of provincialism, mediocrity, and pretentiousness hard to take. Between the rowdiness of the fraternities, the chronic inebriation of the senior faculty, and the stench of the nearby rubber tire plant, we fled to Buffalo within a few months of arrival. Buffalo was not much of an improvement. The climate was rotten, the city grimy, and the university a shambles, but at least the salary was decent (twelve

thousand dollars in 1963 went a long way). The State University of New York was then making its big push toward academic respectability, so the money spigots flowed generously. But the buildings of the old private university were bursting at the seams, the library kept books in crates for lack of shelf space, and the lectures were barely audible over the constant cacophony of the expanding university: bulldozers, pneumatic drills, and hammers successfully competed with professors. Politically those two years had their moments of excitement: the Kennedy assassination, the incipient protest against the Vietnam War, and, locally, opposition to a New York State loyalty oath.

When the University of Washington made me an offer in 1965, accepting was one of the easiest decisions of my life. Seattle, even on a drizzly winter day, as when I first saw it, beat Buffalo at its best, not to mention the blizzard I had just left. The university was distinguished in the life sciences and respectable in other fields; the sociology department was solid in a rather naively positivist, outhouse-empiricist way, but there was hope for it; the city, a bit like San Francisco but twenty years behind it, was trembling on the threshold of urbanity; the hinterland was gorgeous. That Seattle's attractive location would in later years cost me many thousands of dollars in rejected offers was far from my thoughts. Little did I know that at age thirty-two I had reached the apex of my purchasing power with a 1965 salary of fifteen thousand dollars!

No sooner had I arrived than the old guard of the department discovered in me more of a maverick and less of a positivist than they had bargained for. They tried to block my promotion to full professor two years later by claiming, with considerable justification, that I rejected the pretensions of sociology to being scientific and that I was really an anthropologist in sociological disguise. I counterattacked in the College Council, arguing that I was being subjected to a heresy trial, and won an unprecedented reversal of a departmental denial of promotion. From the late 1960s on, the department became more intellectually diverse and sophisticated, reaching its apogee in the early 1970s. In the late 1970s a succession of devastating budget cuts sent it, and indeed the entire university, into a tailspin, from which we are only now beginning to recover.

My tenure in Seattle was interrupted by several lengthy absences on overseas research. In 1966 I went to Guatemala to resume my collaboration with Nick Colby and to work among the Ixil, who have since been massacred in the thousands by the government and relocated in Vietnam-

style "strategic hamlets." In 1967–68 the Rockefeller Foundation sent me to Kenya for a year to establish a sociology department at the University of Nairobi, and in 1968–69 I went to the University of Ibadan in Nigeria to develop a graduate program. Those were also the years when I had the satisfaction of seeing my sister Gwendoline turn into a professional anthropologist, first studying as an undergraduate at Berkeley and then continuing on to the Sorbonne for her doctorate.

Our second two-year stay in Africa was filled with excitement and proved a tremendous experience for our boys. Kenya, though officially at peace (except for frontier skirmishes with Somalis in the north), was in fact politically almost as oppressive as South Africa. Endowed with the kind of government Stanislav Andreski aptly called a kleptocracy, Kenya was a hotbed of conflicts, and the university was infested with police informers. I clashed with the principal and the authorities on several issues involving academic freedom and the intimidation of students, thereby making myself persona non grata with another African government. Nonetheless, extensive travel in Uganda (before it was gutted by Idi Amin), Tanzania, and Kenya, through the world's greatest game reserves and most spectacular scenery, made us forget the tensions of Nairobi.

Between Nairobi and Ibadan my wife and I took an extended anthropological excursion through Ethiopia (during the waning days of the Conquering Lion of Judah, Haile Selassie), India, Iran, and Lebanon. At least three of these societies have changed beyond recognition since, and hardly for the better. Ethiopia, even before the great famine of the 1970s and the ravages of war in the Ogaden and Erythrea, already qualified as one of the poorest, most depleted, most overpopulated countries in Africa, but its destitution barely affected its beauty. India, unlike Africa, exposed us to the problem, not of underdevelopment, but of overdevelopment: an overcrowded subcontinent whose resources had been depleted by five millennia of overexploitation under an advanced agrarian civilization. Nowhere else is the contrast between the splendor of the past and the squalor of the present so evident. Of all the African countries, Egypt and Ethiopia probably come the closest, but the sheer size and density of the Indian population magnify its problems and supply an even more nightmarish vision of the future of humanity.

Iran seemed oppressive enough in 1968, but, obviously, it had not yet reached bottom. As for Lebanon, it then seemed the model of consociational democracy; it was hailed as the Switzerland of the Middle East, the paradise of mercantile capitalism, the temple of religious toler-

ance! We had a most delightful week in Beirut, Baalbek, Tyre, and Sidon, another vacation taken just in time.

Our impending stay in Nigeria left us full of apprehension. It turned out that our fears were greatly exaggerated. Despite a raging civil war estimated to have killed between five hundred thousand and one million people, the Ibadan campus was an oasis of peace and intellectual freedom. I felt much more at ease in Yoruba culture than I had in East Africa. Nigerians were refreshingly free of racial consciousness and inferiority complexes vis-à-vis the outside world. There was almost no sign that they had ever been colonized, except for the social snobbery of the Western-educated elite. Most engaging, perhaps, was the sophistication of Nigerian political intrigues and the disarming charm and candor with which nepotism, favoritism, clientelism, and corruption suffused the social fabric. The whole society was a tissue of nepotism and amoral familism, stripped of hypocrisy and moralism, its structures laid bare by the transparency of its superstructures. In retrospect it was my Nigerian experience that later predisposed me to apply the sociobiological paradigm to human behavior. I always recall with amusement the clinching argument of Nigerians seeking to convince one of their truthfulness: "Why should I tell a lie?" by which they mean that in this particular instance they have no interest in deceiving.

The return to the United States brought, as usual, culture shock. Most disturbing was what I saw as a reversal of the integrationist strategies of the civil-rights movement and a revival of racial thinking and categorization first brought about by the black-power movement and further abetted by the institutional responses of affirmative action, quota systems, racial double standards, racial busing, and other forms of race-based, race-conscious discrimination. I opposed similar moves in the American Sociological Association and felt obliged to resign from some of its committees for the same reasons.

It was only a matter of time before the issue came to a head on my own campus. Double racial standards of admission at the University of Washington necessarily raised the problem of double standards of evaluation of students in classes. I refused to take a racial census of my classes, as the Black Studies Program demanded of me, and I refused to yield to intimidation on the issue of double standards of evaluation. The crisis was further complicated when I caught five black students in a crude attempt at tampering with a grade sheet. Groups of shouting, abusive students confronted me inside and outside my office, uttering verbal threats. A chorus of minority organizations, led by the vice presi-

dent for minority affairs (a retired army colonel without academic credentials hired to keep black students under control), demanded that I be sacked as a racist. For a fortnight I made both local newspapers and at least one of the three television news programs almost daily. With the outstanding exception of my department chairman, Frank Miyamoto, who courageously came to my defense, the university administration, with characteristic cowardice and expediency, played possum. When I tried to elicit from the provost a statement of university policy on the fundamental issues of principle I was raising, he lamely replied that the vice president of minority affairs and I were each entitled to our private views as to whether racial discrimination should be entrenched in academic life.

A field trip to Peru (1972–73) under the auspices of the National Institute of Mental Health soon delivered me from all that nonsense. The exhilaration of eighteen months in one of the world's most spectacular areas (the Andes and the jungles of southern Peru and Bolivia) and most fascinating situations of ethnic relations was a welcome change from the dissipation of intellectual energy in sterile political fights. I am frequently asked why I never did research in the United States. I suppose it is because I suffer the anthropological malady diagnosed by Lévi-Strauss in Tristes tropiques: I find it much more difficult to suspend value judgments about the society in which I normally reside than I do abroad. It takes physical and cultural distance to gain moral detachment and political noncommitment. Relativism implies a solid measure of indifference.

For all its beauty and fascination, I did not take to Peru as I did to Mexico. I met stimulating colleagues like José Matos Mar, Fernando Fuenzalida, and Jorge Flores Ochoa, and I made friends like Ben Orlove, but I found Andean culture to be dour, hostile, and seemingly devoid of joie de vivre. The music is hauntingly melodic but melancholy; even during fiestas people are unsmiling; their sense of humor seems limited to the misfortune of others; sexuality is repressed, and women under their bulging multiple dresses exude the pungent sensuality of giant peripatetic onions; even drunkenness seems to bring out depression rather than release inhibitions. As Alfred Métraux had warned me ten years earlier, "Les Andes sont sinistres ." I attributed his statement to his own melancholy temperament (he took his own life soon afterward), but my experience confirmed his judgment. In Brazil, especially in Rio de Janeiro and even more so in Bahia, I encountered exuberant joy, sensuality, and hedonism in a harmonious cultural blend of Latin Eu-

rope and West Africa. Lusotropicalism in all its flamboyant glory was a far cry from the tristes tropiques of the sertao described by Lévi-Strauss.

My return to Seattle marked rapid growth in a new interest, which had long been dormant but now would not leave me in peace. It simply had to be pursued. I am referring, of course, to what is now called sociobiology . There are few topics on which social scientists exhibit such a devastating blend of abysmal ignorance and unshakable irrationality. Not surprisingly, my alleged conversion had been variously seen as a profound departure from my previous work, a belated showing of my true reactionary colors, an act of treachery, or a case of creeping senility. Having experienced most of my colleagues' imperviousness to rational discourse on this score, I have few illusions that anything I say here will disabuse them. But the quixotic strain in my temperament impels me to try anyway.

For several years I had been reading extensively in ethology, especially primate and human ethology, and though I sensed much of interest there, I was also unsatisfied. Much of the work in human ethology was trivial: the underlying evolutionary thinking was sloppily group-selectionist; there seemed to be no overarching theoretical framework to a largely descriptive natural history; and cross-species comparisons were mainly piecemeal and at the level of loose analogies. At the same time it was becoming increasingly clear to me that the social-science orthodoxy of the past half century was now bankrupt and obsolete. The dogma that Homo sapiens was so unique an animal as to bear no comparison with other species; the continuous exclusion of human behavior from the process of evolution by natural selection; the treatment of human culture and social structure as phenomena entirely sui generis; causality defined in terms of an opposition of nature versus nurture, heredity versus the environment—all these notions seemed overdue for the intellectual junk heap. Too much evidence simply did not fit.

However, several approaches in the social sciences that had always made sense to me and that, together, exhausted social-science claims to at least quasi-scientific status all seemed to converge on a few simple assumptions about human behavior. Behaviorism, game theory, classical economics, Marxism, exchange theory, and rational-choice theory all appeared to be based on simple utilitarian, materialistic premises that humans were maximizers acting in seeming rationality in the pursuit of self-interest. These social-science models are in fact quite close to those used by population ecologists and other evolutionary biologists, and tantalizing vistas for the reincorporation of the social sciences into

the mainstream of neo-Darwinian synthesis opened up. Indeed many of the glaring limitations in these fields seemed to disappear when problems were rethought in evolutionary terms. The charge of ahistoricism justifiably leveled at much would-be theoretical social science would lose its validity if the linkage with biology could be made. For example, classical behaviorism dealt with the ontogeny of behavior; it could only gain by linking up with the phylogenetic approach of ethology.

Edward Wilson's 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis suddenly seemed to point the way, not only to a brand of theoretical biology that revolutionized Lorenzian ethology, but also to a synthesis much more germane to a number of existing social-science traditions. I soon discovered that the pieces of the puzzle, which Wilson had conveniently assembled, had all been around for over a decade, in the works of Ernst Mayr, George Williams, William Hamilton, John Maynard-Smith, Richard Alexander, and others. Wilson was not so much the innovator as the synthesizer.

Why people keep wondering at how much I changed puzzles me; I see my interest in sociobiology as flowing logically from my lifelong insistence on the comparative approach. Much as I could never envisage a sociology that did not take in the entire range of human experience (and thus the field customarily reserved for anthropology), I now could not see why we should suspend our comparative perspective at the boundaries of our species. How can we define the parameters of human nature except by comparison with the nonhuman? Certainly we are unique, but we are not unique in being unique. Every species is unique and evolved its uniqueness in adaptation to its environment. Culture is the uniquely human way of adapting, but culture, too, evolved biologically. Culture does have some emergent properties, but it cannot be dissociated from biological evolution and continues to be intricately and integrally connected with it. The feedback loops are multiple and reciprocal. To determine the causal pathways and specify the proximate mechanisms that link genes, mind, and culture (to paraphrase Charles Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson) is the great intellectual challenge of late twentieth-century social science. The human mind is not a tabula rasa; it channels cultural development in recognizably human ways.

In 1976–77, I took the first sabbatical of my career, largely to retool as a sociobiologist studying humans. My previous junkets had found outside sponsors, but the halcyon days of academe were over. I collaborated with David Barash at the University of Washington, and met Richard Alexander, Richard Dawkins, William Hamilton, John Maynard-Smith,

Robert Trivers, Edward Wilson—indeed most of the leading lights in the field. I also took a fascinating trip to Israel, invited by the University of Haifa. There I renewed my friendship with Sammy Smooha, who proved a marvelous guide to an incredibly complex society, and met Joseph Shepher, who introduced me to his kibbutz and rekindled my long-standing interest in human incest avoidance.

Apart from my academic interest in race relations, Israel could not leave me unmoved. Old Jerusalem, that great rendezvous of monotheism, is perhaps the most gripping and haunting piece of real estate on earth, even for an agnostic like me. In 1976 there seemed to be a glimmer of hope that some solution to the regional conflict might be found, but rampant Israeli imperialism under Begin and the rape of Lebanon destroyed any prospects of peace. If the ultimate justification for the State of Israel is the Nazi Holocaust, as the Yad Vashem Memorial suggests, I always wondered why Israel was created at the expense of the Arabs. Would it not have made more sense to establish it in, say, East Prussia?

Meanwhile, back in Seattle another bit of excitement was awaiting me. In April 1978 I achieved instant world notoriety as the sociologist who spent one hundred thousand dollars to find his way to a brothel. Senator William Proxmire had awarded NIMH and me his monthly Golden Fleece Award, for extravagant government spending, allegedly for having wasted my Peruvian research money (ninety-seven thousand dollars of it) on interviewing twenty-one prostitutes in a Cuzco brothel. The story was of course a natural for the media, which got into the act with great alacrity, from the Washington Post, Le Monde, the London Sunday Times, and the Wall Street Journal to the National Enquirer, Playboy, Penthouse, and "The Dick Cavett Show." Friends started mailing me newspaper clippings from London, Paris, Djakarta, and Nairobi.

The sober truth of the matter was that my student and assistant, George Primov, had, with my knowledge and consent, independently conducted a little study of a brothel, on his own time, at the cost of perhaps fifty dollars of grant resources. The research was perfectly legitimate and related to the main project (ethnic and class relations in Cuzco). I felt I owed no one any apologies, and I counterattacked, calling Proxmire a clownish reincarnation of Senator Joseph McCarthy. In fact I felt flattered by the award. If an anti-intellectual politico like Proxmire found my research a waste of money, his attack must be a vindication of its merit. I soon discovered that I was indeed in distinguished company, including, amusingly, Edward O. Wilson. It also

turned out that my colleagues Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz were the first runners-up for the award, for the study published as American Couples .

The last few years have been a bit of an anticlimax, fortunately punctuated by several pleasant trips to Mexico, the Caribbean, Morocco, India, and Europe, a Fulbright lecture tour of Australia in 1982, visiting professorships in Strasbourg in 1983, Tübingen (1986), and Tel Aviv (1988), and a 1984–85 fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

My unease with United States society has mounted, and the last few years of Reaganism (that coalition of millionaires, gun nuts, Bible Belt fundamentalists, and political idiots who vote against their interests) have only reinforced my distaste for the cult of mediocrity that suffuses American society, including, sadly, its system of education. The entire American educational system has been buffeted by successive waves of anti-intellectualism of the right and the left and has consequently spawned the first generation of functional illiterates ever produced by an advanced industrial society. The teaching profession, itself a bastion of mediocrity, has been in the forefront of this assault against intellectual quality and discipline.

The university has not been spared. In contrast to the British model of the university as an independent community of scholars ruled by a collective of professors and engaged in the diffusion and extension of knowledge, the American university is subservient to capitalist donors, football-crazed alumni, backwoods state legislators, Bible-brandishing synods, and missile-wielding warlords and run by supine, opportunistic administrators. Professors are tolerated court jesters, irrelevant eccentrics paid to keep the youth amused and off the streets and labor markets for a few years.

My intellectual elitism and political anarchism have won me few friends and allies on campus, and my peripheralness to sociology has scared away most graduate students. Not that I mind being an isolate, and my experience with the dozen students who have stuck with me to the doctorate has been most rewarding and broadening: they have ranged from historical macrosociologists to structural anthropologists and human sociobiologists. Most of my intellectual associates over the last ten years have come from outside of sociology—primarily anthropology but also psychology, zoology, history, and other fields.

In fact I have largely given up on sociology as a viable discipline. Fixated on methodology (and a very limiting brand of methodology at

that), sociologists are increasingly bereft of substantive knowledge and have failed to produce a truly significant idea in the last fifty years. The golden age of sociology was during the first three decades of the century. Hiding its intellectual bankruptcy behind a shaky numerical façade, sociology has managed to get the worst of both C. P. Snow's two cultures: it is too philistine to qualify as a humanity and too antireductionist to become a science. Thus it richly deserves the low esteem in which it is held.

Indeed sociology seems to have missed every intellectually promising boat in the last half century. It lost its panhuman vision when it let anthropology preempt three-fourths of the world. It lost its historical vision when it turned its back on both evolutionism and "mere" historicism and became bad ethnography of contemporary industrial societies. It lost any chance of becoming a science when it rejected the relevance of biology and started treating human behavior as disembodied social structures and values. It retained the outward mark of a scientific discipline: quantification, or, better, as Sorokin put it, "quantophrenia." As with all disciplines in the process of becoming sterile scholastic traditions, sociology becomes increasingly ingrown. Henri Poincaré was indeed prophetic when, in 1909, he declared sociology the discipline most concerned with methodology and most bereft of substance.

Chapter Nineteen—
Relativism, Equality, and Popular Culture

Herbert J. Gans

To understand society, we study people's relationships, but we also study their lives. If we want to understand sociology's place in society, we must look at ourselves in the same way—and precisely because we are supposed to be detached social scientists. Sociologists are also people, and when we try to be value-free, knowledge about the values from which we are seeking to free ourselves becomes absolutely necessary.

Although I wish this were a volume of biographical studies, I suspect that no one is yet ready to pay for biographical research among sociologists; autobiographical accounts are therefore a useful precursor. Having myself been trained in the era of detached social science and impersonal scientists, I found it difficult at first to write about myself and could only begin by turning the assignment into a research project, a self-study. This essay attempts to determine how and why I got interested in the analysis of American popular culture and, since I am also a policy-oriented researcher, why I developed the cultural policies I have advocated. My data are largely based on recall, although having kept almost all my student term papers, I was able to refer to them, including a brief autobiographical report I had to write at age twenty, in 1947.

In my 1974 book Popular Culture and High Culture I argued that people's artistic and entertainment activities and preferences are sufficiently influenced by class that they can be analyzed as if they were aspects of class cultures, which I called taste cultures but which have long been known as brow levels in the vernacular. To this basically empirical theme I added a critical analysis that proposed that the expert

practitioners of high culture seek to make the aesthetic standards of their own culture universal. In so doing, they condemn competing cultures, notably commercial popular culture, as emotionally and otherwise harmful and, without any convincing evidence, argue either that high culture is beneficial or popular culture dangerous. Moreover, they want people to convert to high-culture standards without supplying them with the income and educational prerequisites already obtained by the present high-culture audience.

My analysis reflected at least three value and policy positions—all of them essentially "populist." One is cultural relativism, that all taste cultures are equally valid as long as people choose the cultural activities and artifacts they think good. A second is equality, that all people are entitled to the same freedom of cultural choice. The third might be labeled antiexpert, insofar as I am critical of professionals and scholars who use their expertise—as well as their credibility and prestige as experts—in behalf of value judgments that overtly or covertly further their own interests. Although the book was published in 1974, I had prepared article-length versions earlier, and several of its basic ideas, including the ones summarized here, had already appeared in preliminary form in a paper written in 1950 for David Riesman's graduate seminar in popular culture at the University of Chicago. By focusing mainly, but not completely, on that paper, I can limit the length of this autobiographical account to my first twenty-three years.

I began my self-study with two hypotheses, which I will discuss further at the end of the essay. One is that having been born in Germany, my interest in American popular culture may have been in part a function of my own acculturation as a first-generation ethnic of Jewish origin; the other is that my espousal of cultural relativism and equality—as well as my interest in using social-science research for developing policy—was connected to changes and inconsistencies in class and status that came with my being an immigrant. I used these hypotheses mostly to help me structure my recall and to put boundaries on my self-study. This procedure can be questioned on methodological grounds, but autobiography cannot be science. I should add two other initial hypotheses: one, that more basic marginalities unrelated to ethnicity or class encouraged me to become an observer of society and a sociologist, and two, that being better at writing than talking about my ideas helped make me a writer of sociological studies. The latter two hypotheses are probably virtual axioms that are true for many sociologists, especially those who do qualitative analysis.

I

I was born in 1927 as the first child of a bourgeois Jewish family in Cologne, Germany. We were comfortable but not rich. My father ran a small family business that had been founded by his father, who had moved to the city from Herlinghausen, a Westphalian village, and from a centuries-old family cattle dealership. My mother came from a family of affluent small-town merchants and bankers in the Hanover area, though her father had been an eye doctor. Both my parents were Gymnasium graduates, and my mother had a year of junior college; my father had hoped to attend the university in Cologne but had to join the family firm instead. My mother's ancestors had broken with Orthodoxy earlier than my father's, but both my parents were nonreligious, acculturated, and unconnected to the formal and informal Jewish communities in Cologne.

My parents' social life was limited to a handful of relatives and family friends, and my own therefore almost entirely to their children. Athletically inept and shy, I soon found myself more comfortable with books than with these children or school friends. When I was old enough to read books, I spent a lot of spare time in my parents' library and now remember most vividly that I enjoyed reading both fiction and adventure (including James Fenimore Cooper, in German translation) and nonfiction (for example, books by archaeologists excavating in Egypt and especially the books of Sven Hedin, the first Westerner to explore Tibet). I think that by age nine or ten I wanted to be an explorer. I was too young for, and my parents were not much interested in, German high culture, and German popular culture was sparse. The creative output of the Weimar era was banned in 1933, and when German filmmakers began to make mostly Nazi propaganda films, we no longer went to the movies. Beyond that, I recall only the brothers Grimm and the "Max and Moritz" cartoons, which described how the minor mischiefs of young boys and girls inevitably ended in death, loss of limbs, or other forms of mutilation. Tibet was both less dangerous and more interesting.

By 1937 my parents had decided to leave Germany and applied for an American visa, but the number of applicants was huge and the quota small. Early in 1939 we therefore went to England, where my uncle and his mother had moved in the mid-1930s. Because one of my mother's aunts was a close friend of a high-ranking Sears Roebuck executive in Chicago, the latter gave us an affidavit, a crucial prerequisite to the visa,

which enabled us to enter the United States, still visaless but under a special wartime exemption from the immigration law.^[1] In September 1940 we arrived in Chicago, moving into a rooming house in Woodlawn, then a predominantly Irish low-rent area.

America was still in the throes of the Depression, and although our life in Nazi Germany and wartime England had already been austere, it now became even more so; my father worked as a Fuller Brush salesman, my mother as a domestic. Our downward mobility was surely harder on them than on me, although we were so happy to have escaped from Germany—even before we knew of the Holocaust—that our economic problems were bearable. Besides, the drive to regain bourgeois status began at once. I am not even sure that I even felt a decline in fortune. Compared to my mostly working-class fellow students, I was so well educated in English and already sufficiently interested in writing that a few weeks after I was enrolled in the eighth grade of the neighborhood school, I was made editor of the school newspaper.

My parents wanted nothing more to do with Germany or things German, and we spoke English at home. I knew precious little German culture anyway, but now I also discovered American popular culture. I still remember spending a lot of time in the basement of our rooming house reading a year's worth of Sunday Chicago Tribune comics in newspapers that had been stored there by a frugal landlady.

I must have been starved for adventurous and humorous popular culture because I also became a fan of radio serials like "Captain Midnight" and "Jack Armstrong" and of comedians like Jack Benny. When I had the money, I spent Saturdays at the local triple-feature movie theater, where I caught up on American Westerns. In addition I became a sports fan and especially admired athletes whose prowess was said to be based on brains, such as Chicago Bears quarterback Sid Luckman, and Ted Lyons, the aging knuckleball pitcher of the Chicago White Sox.

My unqualified enthusiasm for popular culture seems not to have lasted very long because in 1942, as a sophomore at Hyde Park High School, I was writing long essays, some of which were critical of the mass media. Later I submitted short features on the same theme to the high-school newspaper. I also wrote a couple of pretentious pieces urging my fellow students to enjoy the good music I was learning about in music appreciation class, by Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov in particular. I was also still a sports fan, became sports editor of the high-school newspaper in my junior year, and contributed to a Chicago Daily News readers' column on the sports pages.

Meanwhile, both my parents had obtained easier, better-paying, and more secure jobs as their spoken English and the Chicago economy improved. We moved into our own apartment, first in a basement that flooded with every storm and then into a much better one in South-moor, a small buffer area between poor Woodlawn and middle-class South Shore. And I gave up an afternoon newspaper route for a better job as a bookrunner in the University of Chicago library stacks.

Although I was as shy as ever, I was now on the margins of a clique, mostly the ambitious children of Jewish shopkeepers in the area. I paid little attention to my poor fellow students unless they were varsity athletes but was conscious of the affluent Jewish youngsters from Hyde Park and South Shore who dominated student life. While my clique wrote the school publications, the affluent students were active in fraternities and sororities, organizing Saturday-night dances for which they were able to hire nationally known bands. I imagine some of my cultural criticism was directed against them, although I do not remember any strong feelings of resentment.

In 1944, my senior year, I edited the high-school newspaper and began to think seriously about becoming a journalist, although my father thought I should play it safe and learn business skills and my mother was sure I would become a teacher. Lloyd Lewis, a Daily News editor, persuaded me to study liberal arts instead of journalism. Unable to afford Oberlin, then an "in" college for Chicagoans with writing ambitions, I applied to the University of Chicago. With the help of a half scholarship I had enough money the first year, which having begun in January I had to finish in record time because in August 1945 I was drafted. After fourteen months in the Army of the United States, first as a typist, then as an editor of an army base newspaper, I returned to the university in the fall of 1946. Thanks to the GI bill, some scholarship aid, and part-time work, I was able to stay until I received my M.A. in June 1950.

My socialization in the German and American class structures was accompanied by a very different set of experiences in the Jewish community. My parents had not wanted me to go to a Jewish school, but in 1933, when I started school, Nazi law required it, and I spent my first years in a secular Jewish public school. In 1937 my parents sent me to a strictly Orthodox Gymnasium because it taught English. This it did superbly, but I bitterly disliked the religious classes and teachers. However, in England I suddenly turned to prayer for a while, perhaps as a way of coping with that immigration. By the fall of 1939 World War II

had begun, and all German-Jewish men, including my father, were interned by the British, who suspected that the Nazis had hidden spies among the refugees. Moreover, my fellow students could not distinguish between German Jews and Nazis, beating me up a couple of times. My religiosity ended after we arrived in America, but I was also back in a predominantly Jewish milieu, for Hyde Park High School was in effect another secular Jewish school.

In the summer of 1943, needing to earn some money, I went to a Jewish summer work camp which provided wartime "stoop labor" to Chicago-area truck farmers. There I met a young and immensely charismatic Jewish youth worker, Samuel Kaminker, who believed in reading Hebrew and American poetry rather than prayers at Sabbath services. I was sufficiently interested in his essentially nontheistic conception of Judaism, radical at the time, to take some courses later at the College of Jewish Studies, searching for what I described in my 1947 autobiographical paper as "a rational Jewish religion for myself."

Kaminker was also an admirer of the Israeli kibbutz, ran the camp on a modified kibbutz basis, and started me thinking about spending my life in an egalitarian community of farm workers in which no one had to struggle to make a living. That vision stayed with me for the rest of my student days, and just before I received my M.A. I joined a small group of budding sociologists who planned to go to Israel and carry out participant-observation research at a kibbutz—as a way, I think, of trying to see whether we wanted to become permanent members of a collective. Even so, my interest in equality extended beyond the kibbutz because, after reading R. H. Tawney in social-science courses and hearing him lecture at Chicago in 1948, I seriously considered studying with him at the London School of Economics. However, I never made it to Israel as a researcher or to London as a student.

II

My arrival at the University of Chicago in January 1945 produced a new set of marginalities, which had little to do with class, ethnicity, or religion but were more traumatic. One was the normal undergraduate experience of discovering my naïveté. Although I had been a top student at a top Chicago high school, where I had hung out with a quasi-intellectual clique, I was an utter provincial. My new fellow students were smarter and more sophisticated; many were combat veterans, four to five years older than I and many more years wiser in the ways of the

world. I thought they were wiser in all respects, proper students with their own apartments, whereas I was socially immature, had to live at home and commute, and worked on the side to help pay the rent. Whatever inferiority feelings I had in high school were now magnified.

A second trauma was intellectual. In the 1940s the high-school curriculum did not include any social sciences or humanities, and even social studies had not yet been invented. There was only civics and American history, which was just more civics but about the past. All course materials at the university except in the natural sciences were brand new to me, and I had never even heard of Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Hume, or Karl Marx. Old assumptions and certainties were therefore shattered quickly and often.

A third and related trauma was political. Once the war veterans arrived, the campus was rife with political discussion and action, involving groups and ideas of which I had never heard. I was wooed by Socialists, Stalinists, Trotskyites, and others who stimulated my interest in politics but also overwhelmed me, so I joined nothing. By the 1948 presidential election I had begun to make up my mind, however, for I said no to the Progressive party and worked for Socialist party candidates Norman Thomas and Maynard Krueger.

The one early source of certainty at Chicago was my field of studies. Having spent the first college year in survey courses in the natural sciences, the humanities, philosophy, and the social sciences and having taken a graduate social-science course in my second year, I knew where I wanted to spend the three years of study toward the M.A. In my 1947 autobiographical term paper, written in the first semester of graduate school, I reported that I was majoring in social science "but confused by too many interests: writing, sociological research, teaching, educational administration, social work (youth groups) and . . . Jewish religion and community life."^[2]

Sociology was already my favorite subject because it seemed closest to some of what I had already been writing about America and to the kind of feature journalism that interested me. It was also sometimes less abstract than the other social sciences. Although I did my share of reading—and even tried to write—abstract theory, I was always more comfortable with what later became known as grounded and middle-range theory, one reason to gravitate toward fieldwork. However, I also read some John Dewey and believed in the unity of the social sciences. In addition, I did not like some of the required first courses in sociology

and therefore entered the divisional master's program in the social sciences, headed by Earl Johnson, a sociologist who advocated many of Dewey's values. Johnson's program gave me the chance to take graduate work in all the social sciences, which provided a fine background for my electives, almost all of which were in sociology.

Earl Johnson also taught that the social sciences existed to help improve society, and thus he supported and strengthened my predispositions toward what is today called social policy.^[3] Still, those feelings were not strong enough to get in the way of what I was learning elsewhere about the virtues of detached research and how to do it. In any case, the relative ease with which I settled on my fields of interest reduced my earlier intellectual flounderings. Another source of reduced uncertainty was my discovery of cultural relativism. Because all beginning students in the social sciences were required to take two survey courses (which covered sociology, anthropology, social psychology, and "human development"), I heard lectures from all the Chicago social anthropologists and read the other major American and British ones. More important, I discovered Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia, and was very excited by his concept of relationism as well as his emphasis on the idea that all knowledge was a function of the knower's perspective. Most of my papers that year were Mannheimian in one or another way, and his relationism provided a criterion by which to compare diverse ideas—or cultures—without having to choose between them. Later, when I began to do fieldwork in Park Forest, Illinois, Mannheim's notion of perspective proved useful, although I was surprised by how many perspectives toward the same event were possible even in a small, fairly homogeneous community. However, I also learned that for some issues, including high culture and popular culture, it is not always necessary to elevate one perspective above all others.

Two other authors helped me to develop my relationist position. One was W. Lloyd Warner, also one of my teachers, whose lectures and Yankee City books made the notion of class more meaningful to me at the time than readings in Marx, Weber, and even the Lynds. Warner also started me thinking about class and the mass media, and then about class culture, because of his lectures on what he called symbol systems. Since he taught that different classes looked at society from different perspectives, a culturally relativist approach to class made sense to me, although Warner himself clearly preferred the higher classes. The other author was Robert K. Merton, whose essay "Manifest and Latent Func-

tions," which I first read in early 1950, made an enormous impression because, among other things, it enabled me to see that cultural patterns disliked by one group can be functional for another.^[4]

My preoccupation with cultural relativism and relationism also helped, I now suspect, to nurture what I earlier called my antiexpert position. Although I was trying to become an expert myself and was spending most of my time listening to or reading experts, I had always disliked those whose expertise manifested itself in the exercise of absolute and autocratic authority. My early rebelliousness against Orthodox Jewish teachers in the Cologne Gymnasium was followed by similar reactions in Chicago to a number of rabbis I met during my activities in the organized Jewish community. As the editor of the school newspaper at Hyde Park High School, I had bitter but unsuccessful struggles with the supervising teacher and the principal, who censored every criticism of the school and the school system. Later I waged a less vocal campaign against Aristotle and Plato, who were the much-assigned experts in every college course at Chicago while Robert Maynard Hutchins was chancellor.^[5]

In graduate courses at Chicago from 1947 to 1949 I studied other subjects as well. I learned to become a novice fieldworker in Everett Hughes's course, and took Louis Wirth's course on the sociology of knowledge only to discover that by then he was much less interested in teaching relationism than in improving race relations. I learned economic history—and I think a good deal of what is now called social history too—from Sylvia Thrupp, and was taught content analysis and communication theory by Barney Berelson and Douglas Waples. In fact I took as many communications courses as possible in the social sciences because, whenever possible, I was trying to connect sociology with communications and the mass media. In Avery Leiserson's course on public opinion and in other political-science courses I tried to figure out how the governed communicate with the governors, a subject that continues to fascinate me today but then helped lead to my M.A. thesis on political participation and to an interest in audience-feedback processes in mass-media organizations.^[6] For Sylvia Thrupp I wrote a paper on the merchant writers of early seventeenth-century England, part of a larger and convoluted attempt to determine the functions of writers and symbol systems in social change. At one point I even studied the invention of the typewriter, and one of my early topics for the master's thesis was acculturation in the Yiddish theater.^[7]

At that time I was not formally interested in popular culture—I am

not sure I even knew the term. I tried to keep up with movies, best-selling books, and "Hit Parade" songs, but my interest was not scholarly and, besides, my own tastes were changing. I had been persuaded somehow that a successful graduate student had to be able to play tennis, which I could never master, and to appreciate chamber music, especially the Beethoven quartets, which was far easier for me and much more enjoyable. I also shifted from Hollywood movies to foreign "art" films and went to some of the Broadway plays that toured in Chicago.

If my interest in popular culture was latent, it quickly turned manifest in 1949, for two reasons. One was the appearance of an article in the February 1949 issue of Harper's Magazine by Russell Lynes, entitled "Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow," a light but comprehensive survey of four "brow levels" and their cultural preferences and peccadilloes. Lynes described these levels with an implicit class terminology, although he was concurrently arguing that stratification by taste was replacing that based on wealth and education.^[8] Lynes's analysis was often acute, but he was more interested in expressing his low opinion of all brow levels. However, the article crystallized a lot of disconnected thinking I had done about culture, class, and symbol systems, and I had no difficulty in jettisoning Lynes's tone and values and adapting the brow levels to Warnerian class culture.^[9]

The other reason for thinking about popular culture was David Riesman's return to campus from Yale University, where he had been working on The Lonely Crowd . I had already corresponded with him about my plans for studying political participation for my M.A. thesis, and in the process he sent draft chapters of the book to me for comment, chapters which were filled with observations about popular culture. Dave was then, as now, one of the few professors I have ever met who treats students with intellectual respect, and once he arrived in Chicago, we engaged in frequent discussions about popular culture. Partly because he lacked time and, I think, inclination to keep up systematically with the mass media himself, he often interviewed his students about popular novels, movies, radio programs, and popular culture in general, and I learned an immense amount by keeping Dave au courant . His other important contribution was his insistence that studying popular culture was not only a legitimate but also a highly desirable scholarly endeavor. In those days American sociology was still close to its Germanic and American-Protestant origins, even at the University of Chicago, and popular culture was simply not a fit topic for study before Riesman returned from Yale.

One of Riesman's first graduate courses at Chicago was his seminar on popular culture. I took it in the spring of 1950, writing a paper called "The Metaphysics of Popular Culture." Of metaphysics there was nary a word, but in it I began to translate Lynes's approach into a more sociological one, developing the notion of leisure cultures and discussing how to assign people to them. I was apparently a total relativist then, for I suggested that the several cultures were functional for the creators and audiences in each and proposed the "complete equality [of cultures] from the point of view of social science research."

I also commented critically and at length about the different value judgments of some seminar members, who used the study of popular culture as a way of scorning disliked or less prestigious cultures and people. Above all I came out against an anonymous member of an unspecified elite I called the literary critic, who represented past aristocracies and the present humanities in advocating high culture and attacking popular culture. Although I observed that high culture was equivalent to the German Kultur, the literary critics I had in mind were writers like José Ortega y Gasset, Russell Kirk, and socialist Dwight Macdonald. I was then already bothered that some socialists were culturally as elitist as the conservatives—and later I said so in the second paper I ever published on popular culture.^[10] My literary-critic figure was the autocratic expert who defended universal standards that fed particularist self-interests, resembling in some ways the high-school officials, rabbis, and student Stalinists I had encountered in earlier years.

III

The study design for my research on political participation called for a community with clearly visible boundaries, and Riesman suggested I speak with Martin Meyerson, a member of the University of Chicago's planning faculty, who was also involved, with his wife Margy, in community research related to the Lonely Crowd study. Meyerson told me about Park Forest, a new town south of Chicago, which proved a fine site for my thesis fieldwork. He also got me interested in urban sociology and city-planning issues. Although I still wanted to write, I had by then decided that I preferred writing as a sociologist to writing as a journalist. At that point I had neither the money nor the inclination to study for a Ph.D., however, and after I received my M.A. in June 1950 I worked first for Margy Meyerson and then for Martin, obtaining a marvelous basic education in city planning from them in the process.

By 1953 Martin Meyerson was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, and he invited me to work on a study applying social-science ideas and analyses in planning and at the same time enroll for a Ph.D. in city planning.^[11] Because of my interest in popular culture, my part of the research was a study of leisure behavior and recreation planning, which became my dissertation and in the process enabled me to keep my intellectual fingers involved in popular culture. In 1957, the summer after I finished my Ph.D. and before I took a job on the project studying the West End of Boston, I researched the popularity of American movies in Britain. This study turned into an opportunity to test empirically my ideas about popular culture and class. I discovered that British movies were then made by Oxbridge graduates mainly for the upper middle-class audience, and that the other 80 percent of the country's inhabitants, who were still working-class, went to imported American movies, which seemed virtually classless to them and in effect upheld many working-class values.^[12]

In 1959, I began to develop the paper I had written for the Riesman seminar, and in the several longer versions that culminated in the 1974 book I began with a fuller historical critique in which the original literary critic was replaced by names both on the right and the left.^[13] I also elaborated the idea of leisure cultures, later called taste cultures, and attempted to describe the cultural preferences and aesthetic standards shared by each culture. Moreover, I began to move from value judgments and general policy ideas to more concrete policy proposals, which I labeled subcultural programming and which essentially involved government aid to cultures that could not make it on their own in the marketplace, particularly those of the poor, folk, and ethnic and racial groups, but also high culture.

In the first longer version, written as I was studying the Levittowners and working on the first draft of The Urban Villagers, I drew on my fieldwork among working-class Italian-Americans to qualify my original relativism. Although I defended people's right to choose the culture they thought good, I also began to realize that being richer and better educated, upper middle-class people had a better life—and surely more cultural choice—than poor and working-class people. Consequently, I wrote diffidently that "it seems likely that the so-called 'higher' [leisure cultures] are, in the long run, more satisfying and desirable for their publics than the 'lower' ones for theirs."^[14] I added emphatically, however, that the first step in readying people for the higher cultures had to be more income and education. My paper for the Riesman seminar had

been apolitical, like its writer, but my stay in the West End had politicized me, first about urban renewal but then about other issues too.

By 1972, when I was writing Popular Culture and High Culture, I had played some minor roles in the War on Poverty, had written a good deal about poverty and antipoverty planning, and had just prepared for publication a collection of my essays about equality. As a result of the events of the 1960s and my own writing, I began to suggest that economic and political equality were far more important than culture, arguing that "a good life can be lived at all levels of taste and that overall taste level of a society is not as significant a criterion for the goodness of that society as the welfare of its members."^[15] I was still being indirect and overly polite, but then as now, I think policies to reduce unemployment and poverty are absolutely essential, and until effective ones have been implemented, cultural policies are of minor importance.

Just as ideas and observations from my Boston and Levittown studies crept into the book on popular culture, themes from that work have also appeared in my other books. The literary experts whose judgments feathered their own nests I encountered again among the planners who decided that low-rent neighborhoods were harmful slums that needed to be torn down and replaced by middle-class housing, and among "poverticians" who decided that the poor suffered from a malady called the culture of poverty, which required behavioral therapies administered by other poverticians rather than jobs and income grants for the poor themselves.^[16] I found another breed of the selfsame experts in my study of Levittown, for the critics who accused the Levittowners and other lower middle-class suburbanites of conformity, homogeneity, and various other alleged pathologies were blaming them for failing to support the higher taste cultures that were then exclusively urban.^[17] The suburban critique also condemned the residential and other communal preferences of the lower taste cultures, once more using quasi-medical terms to legitimize the cultural attack. A somewhat later version of the same critique was employed against television entertainment, particularly violent programming, and although serious moral objections can be raised about television violence, I am not yet convinced by the now voluminous research literature that it is a significant cause of violence in the real world, even among children.^[18]

Taste culture also plays a role in how people use the news media and what kind of news media and news they select as well as prefer, just as their position in American society influences the extent to which they find

national news necessary or useful. I did not pursue this analysis in my book on the national news media because it was mainly a study of news organizations and because I could not find the audience data to back up my hunches. Even so, having retained my old interest in how the governed communicate with the governors, I devoted a chapter of the book to how national news organizations deal with audience feedback.^[19]

The mostly indirect relationship of journalists to the news audience, and my fieldwork at the national news organizations, later made me start to think about how Americans connect themselves to their national society. That question then turned into a study of American individualism and society, on which I worked for several years until its completion in 1987 and publication in 1988. The study also tried to make explicit some populist ideas I had first begun to think about in graduate school, and to figure out whether a populist sociology is desirable and possible.^[20] In my research I encountered latter-day versions of my 1950 literary critic because some current writers about individualism, for example those who charge young people with being a me-generation or diagnose them as suffering from narcissism, are offering new versions of some of the old charges of the high-culture critics.^[21] These writers are unhappy with the "lower orders" for seeking the material comforts and self-realization that affluent income groups and the higher-taste cultures with which the critics are affiliated have already achieved. Once again, people are being attacked with medical terminology for not living like the critics or following their cultural prescriptions.

IV

In summary, I want to suggest which background and other factors seem to have influenced my work on popular culture and my advocacy of cultural relativism and equality. I began with two hypotheses, one relating to ethnicity and religion, the other to class, but both are limited in what they explain.

That I was born in Germany and am technically a first-generation ethnic undergoing acculturation and assimilation may help to explain why almost all my empirical work has been involved in trying to figure out what has been happening in America, and why I have done virtually no research in or about other societies. Perhaps being an immigrant encouraged my specific interest in American popular culture, but so did the sparsity and harshness of German popular culture for children, made sparser yet by my growing up under the Nazis. In fact I did not

arrive in the United States with much of an old-country culture. German culture had no prescriptions or leads for being an adolescent, and there were few German or German-Jewish cultural patterns that my parents wanted me to retain. They did not always understand or like the American teenage ways I developed, but given our poverty, wartime conditions, and my shyness, I did not develop many. Further, we did not belong to an ethnic community that sought to uphold old-country ways; the small German-Jewish refugee community in Chicago interested neither my parents nor me. I think the only host society to which I ever wanted to acculturate and into which I wanted to assimilate was neither society nor host, but sociology—that is, what we still call the discipline . (This I think I have done, although only to the Everett Hughes–David Riesman branch of "Chicago Sociology." I continue to be a participant-observer and essayist in a discipline whose dominant research tradition is highly quantitative. Once more I am a member of a minority, albeit by choice.)

The critique of Kultur that was part of my earliest writing on popular culture was not a rejection of my German origins, for, as I noted earlier, the major targets of the critique were Wasps. Moreover, many of the leading figures in German high culture were themselves Jews, almost all of whom also became American immigrants.^[22] Perhaps my unhappiness with autocratic authority and later with self-interested expertise was a reaction against Germany and my conventionally strict German upbringing. However, my identification of the literary critic as the enemy in my 1950 term paper may have been connected to the fact that when I was a graduate student the kind of sociological analysis in which I was most interested was being done by essayists, novelists, and scholars from literature and the humanities. They still dominated American intellectual life, saw no need for sociology, and did not want to lose their virtual monopoly on writing about America, particularly for the general reader. They also dominated the serious general magazines for which I most wanted to write. Coming from the humanities, they were expected to express feelings and judgments about society—and no one cared if these also served their own interests.

If ethnicity is a major variable in my background, religion is surely more important, for being a Jew and a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany had to shape my ideas even if I was fortunate not to suffer personally in significant ways at the hands of the Nazis. Most of the relatives I lost in the Holocaust were old people I had never met or had met once as a small child, and by the time the full scope of the Holocaust began to

be revealed, in the late 1940s, I was so American that I reacted no differently from most other American Jews at the time. My brief period of religiosity when I was about twelve years old may not have had an effect, but something kept me tied to, and in conflict with, the Jewish religious community all through my adolescence. I do not remember now what I was looking for in my rational Judaism, but perhaps it was a forerunner of my later interest in social policy and equality. For a while, and from a distance, the kibbutz may have been the manifestation of my rational religion, but I soon realized that what made me want to be a sociologist and writer would probably make me a poor kibbutznik . Further, I was too much of an American and too little a Zionist to want to live in Israel.

My involvement with Judaism as a religion was eventually sublimated and ended by research, for I think now that I undertook a study of the Jews of Park Forest in 1949 partly to demonstrate the obtuseness and shortsightedness of the Jewish experts who did not want to understand the Jews who moved to the suburbs, and who thought that sermons against acculturation and heavier doses of traditional Jewish education would bring back their own good old days.^[23] However, the ingenious ways in which the young Jewish couples I studied in Park Forest, and later in Levittown, organized their communities sans experts were also fascinating to watch—and since the arguments about what was to be done were always held in public, fieldwork in the Jewish community was always far more lively than elsewhere.^[24]

The roles that class and status changes and inconsistencies played in my early life and work are the most difficult to untangle. I would have to begin, of course, with my family's indirect tie to a high Sears Roebuck executive, without which there would have been no affidavit and no chance to come to America. I cannot imagine that I could have been an academic sociologist in England even if I had been pulled in the same career directions there. I suppose that coming to America without any money but with a good education, and arriving at a time when my own and my family's desire was to be upwardly mobile and pursue an American version of our past bourgeois life, evoked my interest in studying class, although I think Lloyd Warner's analyses of and anecdotes about Newburyport were also persuasive.

If my encounters with the American class and status hierarchies of the 1940s encouraged my endorsement of cultural relativism and my interest in equality, I cannot now picture the process by which that happened. Other advocates of cultural relativism and equality have been upwardly

mobile, of course, but upwardly mobile people have also looked down on and oppressed poor people who were not mobile. My early interest in the kibbutz as a place where job security was guaranteed and materialism appeared to be absent may have been a response to my parents' initial occupational hardships and a just-reviving consumer culture in America that seemed strange to a European and wrong in wartime.

I do not remember feeling any kinship with, and sympathy for, the underdog in those early years, either among the poor whites of Woodlawn who were our neighbors or among the much poorer blacks my father's employer was exploiting. Nor did the social science I learned at Chicago encourage such empathy, for it was largely apolitical and often indirectly supportive of the status quo. The realities of poverty and racial segregation really only hit home in the fall of 1957, when I began to live in the West End of Boston, met some of the poor residents of that working-class area, and saw how urban renewal would force additional West Enders into poverty or deprive them in other ways. I am still surprised, however, how unaware I remained earlier of the poor whites with whom I lived in Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood, even as I was reading and admiring the egalitarian writings of R. H. Tawney and advocates of the kibbutz.

I imagine that my interest in equality and relativism was also a way of coming to terms with the feelings of marginality and inferiority that I experienced in high school and college and with the shyness that had already placed me on the social margins in Cologne. Surely yet other factors are relevant that a psychoanalyst can best fathom. I must add one more consideration: my two marriages have both been to women who were more emphatically and actively egalitarian than I. Since 1967 I have been married to Louise Gruner, a Legal Services lawyer who was helping poor people directly while I was lecturing and writing.^[25]

Ultimately the personal needs and inclinations with which one enters a scholarly discipline are impulses that must be brought out and developed by the intellectual training one receives. Thus I must implicate and credit the people with whom I studied, especially at the universities of Chicago and Pennsylvania. The teachers (and authors) who are most responsible are mentioned by name in the text and notes of this essay, but many others are not named, some of them fellow students rather than faculty.^[26] Then there are those people whom I did not even know but who helped to shape the intellectually and otherwise stimulating period from 1945 to 1950 at the University of Chicago. Surely I am also explained as a product of those particular 1940s.

Chapter Twenty—
How I Became an American Sociologist

Reinhard Bendix

. . . and how I came to write about it. There is an autobiographical side to the writing of autobiography. Sociologists, with their claim to detachment, ought to practice what they teach their students. The present essay originated in my two-year tour of duty as director of the Education Abroad Program (EAP) in Göttingen, West Germany, 1968–70. I had been teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1947, and the director of the university's EAP approached me about the Göttingen position in 1967. At the time my children were eighteen, seventeen, and twelve, conditions in the Berkeley schools as well as at the university were unsettling, and the position was financially attractive: it seemed a welcome change of pace in my academic career.

My wife and I found ourselves in the role of surrogate parents to a good portion of the eighty or so students who attended the Göttingen program in each of the two years. Having to manage in a foreign language in the classroom and a new environment and being away from their real parents, often for the first time, many of these juniors welcomed a bit of parenting when it was done unobtrusively. They knew we were there and willing to help when they needed us. In each of the two years I organized an orientation meeting with all the students soon after their arrival, but on both occasions I used the opportunity to speak a bit about myself. I thought they had a right to know that I had been born and raised in Berlin, had emigrated to the United States because of the Nazi regime when I was twenty-two, in 1938, and had had my university education at the University of Chicago. My purpose was not only to

show that I was open about myself and personally accessible. It was also to announce that I would organize a retreat during the year at which we would talk about the country in which they were about to spend their junior year. As it worked out, both retreats were attended by more than half the students (it was voluntary, of course, and free of charge). The program consisted of three speakers, a film on the Nazi period, and plenty of time for informal talk and recreation. At both retreats the Göttingen historian Rudolf von Thadden talked about German history, the Mannheim sociologist Rainer Lepsius talked about German society, and I elaborated on my personal experience not only in Germany but also as an emigrant to the United States. The three of us had the idea of putting out a small volume incorporating an expanded version of those talks. Nothing came of the plan, but in the course of our correspondence I began to put together an early version of this essay.

It did not stop there. Some two years later my two sons let me know that they wished I would tell them what had happened to me, particularly in the 1930s. Then, after our return to Berkeley, a student in an honors seminar said, "You know, we really don't know anything about you." She seemed to speak not only for herself. Years earlier I had often encouraged students to ask members of the faculty for their intellectual autobiography, and I had volunteered to meet with them for that purpose. Along the way I published a short "Memoir of My Father," which drew a heartening personal response from a number of colleagues whose judgment I valued. Eventually I wrote a full-scale biography of my father and an autobiographical sketch of my relations with him; both include intellectual portraits, such as I had written earlier about my teacher Louis Wirth and the sociological work of Max Weber. Intellectual biography has been one of my recurrent interests.

The reasons for that interest are rooted in my experience. My father, who had been a lawyer in Berlin until 1933, had written extensively about the personal side of judicial decision making, and he had influenced me in my early years. My own work had been shaped by my German background and emigration to the United States. In my relations with American students I had found that their best work depended on becoming absorbed in what they were doing. The first problem of teaching was somehow to make them feel that their particular subject really mattered to them. To acknowledge the "value relevance" of academic work actually helps to authenticate it and make it persuasive. The reflexive subjectivity of scholarly work has become a token of its objectivity in the eyes of many observers. But I have lingered over the preliminaries.

It is already more than fifty years since Hitler came to power in Germany. At the time I was seventeen. It always takes a little effort for me to realize that events of half a century ago mean nothing to the many students I have taught in the United States since 1943. My first students had been about eight years old when events occurred that had marked my life ten years earlier and have influenced my thinking ever since. That "recent" history of 1943 has now become "ancient" history for my students, though not for me.

My father was born in 1877 in a little village near Dortmund, part of the Ruhr district in Westphalia. His father had been the young Hebrew teacher of the Jewish children in that village. Earlier, Gumpert Bendix married my grandmother, who had had five children by a previous marriage; my father and his two sisters resulted from the new marriage. Soon the Hebrew teacher became an insurance agent to support his growing family, and in 1892 they moved to Berlin, then the capital of Imperial Germany. In the process my grandfather changed his Jewish name to Gustav, though he continued as an observant Jew and gave his children a Jewish education. In the case of my father that education did not have the desired effect. He was fifteen in 1892, and in the following years he came under the cosmopolitan influence of Berlin, which contrasted sharply with the village environment of his youth. He was especially attracted by the assimilated culture of many Berlin Jews. His main teacher in the Gymnasium (high school), though born of Jewish parents, had been baptized as a child, and his two best friends at school were Protestant, one of them the son of a Protestant minister. In the year my father graduated from the Gymnasium his mother died, and he wrote my grandfather that he would discontinue Jewish observances from then on. With his two school friends he began his university studies. Eventually he opened a law office in Berlin in 1907. Three years later he married my mother, who came from a middle-class Jewish family in Hamburg, had had a successful career as an actress, and seems to have been as detached from the Jewish tradition as my father wanted to be.

Later I came to see the large difference in outlook and temperament that bound my parents together but also divided them. After marriage my mother devoted all her artistic sensibility to raising my sister (born in 1913) and myself (born in 1916) and creating a beautiful home. Only my father put a limit on her efforts. From the beginning of his career, in addition to his law practice he devoted substantial time to the publication of legal writings. Personal inclination and this intellectual preoccupation made him easy-going and careless in his personal habits, a

neverending source of irritation to my mother. However my parents coped with this difference, it made me side with my father when I became old enough to take an interest. What age is old enough? My father thought fifteen, and in 1931 he told me to start reading serious books. He was very nearsighted and liked to have books read to him. The first book he chose for me was Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia . We did not make much progress, as I recall, but he had the patience to explain to me all those strange words. He was my university for some two years. Then Hitler changed our lives.

The Weimar Republic had a stormy history, which did not leave us children untouched. At thirteen I had had to ask my father which religious instruction I should take: the Weimar compromise among contending religions was to offer Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish instruction in the schools. He suggested that I try all three in succession, with the result that I remained uneducated in all three and acquired a youthful religious indifference. Some other influences were more positive. Discussions at the dinner table frequently concerned the political events of the day but also more theoretical questions since my father was an anti-Marxist Social Democrat who liked to challenge whatever abstract notions we picked up at school or from our peers. Even when we were unable to answer his questions (what is class? what do you mean by socialism?), they still helped to sensitize us toward the exploration of ideas; the political agitation of those years did so as well. After a quiet and sheltered youth, adolescence propelled me into social and political concerns, in part because the general agitation reached down into the high schools and in part because my father's preoccupations led me to imitate and challenge him. He was a militant humanitarian in his legal work, which to me meant instant identification with the weak and the afflicted. I understood from his psychological analysis of judicial decision making that ideas were important, as was the individual—an early form of the linkage that has led to these reflections.

Political agitation together with the importance of ideas led me straightaway to the study of Marxism. It seemed urgent to clarify theoretical questions because right action could follow only if the right answers were found. Some such notion was the kind of sediment that filtered down to us from the long tradition of theoretical Marxism cultivated by the Social Democratic party. This early intellectual excitation is also responsible for my lifelong interest in ideas. Given my secular upbringing, I had at most an indirect connection with Jewish traditions through the early experiences of my father, about which I knew

nothing. That theoretical concern with Marxism had nothing to do with the labor movement I discovered rather quickly when for a short time I joined the Socialist Labor Youth (Sozialistische Arbeiterjugend) in 1932 and found myself out of place among my peers from working-class families.

Hitler's rise to power in 1933 changed this dabbling in theory and radicalism. In that year my father was disbarred by the Berlin Bar Association and arrested for the first time; I was dismissed by the Gymnasium for refusing to salute Hitler; former friends withdrew, and former clients tried to blackmail my father to get his fees back. Within three or four months the family was faced with the collapse of its accustomed way of life. The trauma of that experience was a major formative influence on me.

A mere enumeration of those formative experiences will have to do. I joined an illegal organization, Neu Beginnen, in which we tried to cope intellectually and politically with the phenomenon of fascism; hence my first political experience was in the underground. In 1934, out of school and with nothing to do, I pestered my father enough after his release from prison to find me an apprenticeship on an English farm, where I wanted to prove to myself that Jews could work with their hands, that Nazi propaganda about Jews as conniving bloodsuckers of honest working folk was a lie. If I had not been so ignorant about Jews or so unsure of myself, I might never have found out that I could do manual work, that I was not as inept as my father and yet not cut out to be a farmer. On returning to Germany because my father wanted to remain as a legal consultant (Nazis or no Nazis he was German, and members of minorities, he said, did not leave just because they were discriminated against) I worked for several years in a Jewish firm that exported textiles. My father was arrested again in 1935. During the next two years I studied on my own at night, reading philosophy and psychology, an isolated personal defense against the ever-more-threatening Nazi world around me. A full-time job; help around the house and, in his absence, with my father's dwindling affairs; study at night; and, also important, joining a Zionist youth group (Hashomer Hatzair) to find out for myself about Jews and Zionism, from which my parents had sheltered me carefully in the preceding years—after two years of this hectic life I was a nervous wreck at twenty-one. In 1937 we managed to get my father released from Dachau on the condition that my parents emigrate to a non-European country within two weeks. They went to Palestine because that was the only place to which we could get entry visas for them. In

1938 I emigrated to America, and a year later my sister followed. My father's long-distance contacts with former associates on our behalf were successful. All the relatives we left behind in Germany perished.

My parents were not Zionists and did not urge us to follow them to Palestine. Nevertheless, I might have gone there to assist them. But I had not become a Zionist either, and when friends of my father's obtained not only the needed affidavit for a United States visa but also a scholarship to the University of Chicago, no further decision was required. My father had induced academic interests in me strong enough that my nights were spent struggling with the writings of Kant, Marx, and Freud, so the opportunity to study free of other worries made emigration to America almost a foregone conclusion. Had I gone to Israel, I would have had no comparable opportunity and motivation.

Thus far I have said nothing about my childhood and adolescence, with the one exception of seeking some balance between the opposing tendencies of my parents. The trauma of the Hitler regime nearly obliterated my memory. I can recall many physical details of my childhood. My mother fussed over us and made us feel loved, and I have strong recollections about a little vacation home outside Berlin where we spent many summers. Of the class pictures I still have I can remember all the faces, but among some forty boys only a few names. I have not met a classmate of my youth since 1933. I enjoyed sports, especially track, and was fairly good at it. The friends I had at school (in the German system one stayed with the same group of students throughout Gymnasium) were not so close that I remember them as persons, but I was popular enough to be elected class representative. The only other thing worth mentioning is one basic fact. As a boy I had been rambunctious, but in adolescence I became very shy, especially with girls. As I grew up, romantic imaginings and sexual fantasies were strong in me, but self-doubt was stronger. My father was a physically impressive man, over six feet tall and heavyset with strong wrists and large, thick fingers. In comparison to him I was, and felt, puny. That feeling was reinforced by my tall sister, who was two-and-a-half years older; I remember quarrelling with her a lot. My self-doubt was physical: in my room I had a square coal stove made of tiles, and since I had no idea how broad my shoulders were, I remember leaning against that stove one summer day to measure myself, though that did not really help. My strong intellectual bent at a precocious age had much to do with trying to stand well in my father's eyes just because I could not match him physically, though he would have been the last person to notice that his stature by itself had a

psychological effect on me. Eventually, though, I acquired a reputation in my family as the diplomat, which probably reflected my efforts to get around the poor self-image I had developed. It also had to do with my reactions against the exaggerated domesticity of my mother and the physical clumsiness of my father. I suspect my reluctance to take extreme positions was acquired at an early age.

I entered the University of Chicago as an aging freshman of twenty-two. Though the intimate intellectual contact with my father had lasted only two years, he had set my interests in motion. Probably his failing career, his imprisonment, and the family's misfortune even increased the importance intellectual pursuits acquired for me when I was working in Berlin and struggling to keep myself together emotionally in a rapidly deteriorating situation. Some account of these early autodidactic efforts seems necessary because I had become an academic before I became a freshman.

When my father was twenty, he not only discontinued Jewish observances but also made a formal declaration of his beliefs. That statement had been solicited by his principal teacher in the Gymnasium: in it my father declared his strong interest in critical self-examination and his belief in the personal values of people in all walks of life. These notions were a legacy of the German ideal of self-cultivation (Bildung ) such that each individual might bring to fruition all the capacities within him or her. Unlike others, my father did not take a detached or ironic view of this ideal. His liberalism was bound up with a basic respect for, and interest in, the other person, whatever his or her station in life. Eventually this outlook had a major influence on his writings, in which he analyzed in ever-new ways how the formalities of the law and the personal disposition of the judges led to inadvertent abuses of the legal system to the detriment of the people coming before the courts. This approach was indebted to Marx's emphasis on the role power plays in every legal system and Nietzsche's emphasis on knowledge as a means to exert power rather than seek truth. Hence the reasons given for any action, including judicial decisions and the search for knowledge, tended to be rationalizations and needed to be uncovered as such. I suppose that this message got through to me even at fifteen or sixteen, though I was too young to take in the deep pessimism of the approach. What struck me more forcefully was my father's positive concern for the individual. After all, uncovering the truth behind every deception, including one's self-deceptions, was a passionate effort to give each his or her due and thus achieve truth and justice.

As a lawyer my father could use his analytical skills for the benefit of his clients, but that way was not open to me. I was not a lawyer, and conditions in Germany militated against an interest in law. Instead I sought peace of mind by means of study after my father was imprisoned for a second time. The kinds of questions that came to concern me in this private pursuit show some impatience with my father's ideas, however much I was influenced by them. His emphasis on human irrationality operated with a commonsense psychology that was probably sufficient for his purposes. But some reading of Freud revealed to me that simple words like envy, hatred , or malice were commonsense expressions that, like the phrase irrational forces , did not clarify matters. Further, in the society around me larger forces seemed to be at work under Hitler than could be comprehended by an analysis geared to legal disputes or psychotherapy. Such reflections brought me back to Marx and Mannheim and my father's skepticism toward the conditioning of ideas by class interest. That skepticism had made me cautious in ways he probably did not foresee. I wanted to understand what was meant by ideas or prejudices before I attempted to relate them to a person's position in society. Paradoxical as it may seem today, that is how I came to study for a year or so Kant's Critique of Pure Reason , by which I thought I could learn about ideas. I had no background for this task, and the lonely struggle with Kant's abstractions isolated me even more since contact with others obviously distracted me from what at the time seemed so important. After a while a philosopher gave a course on the book in classes arranged by the Judische Kulturbund in Berlin, and I discovered how little I had understood—a discouraging experience but oddly liberating as well. Gradually I had grown dissatisfied with mere categories of thought when I had set out to learn about interests and passions—the drives that presumably linked such terms as group interest and social class to the formulation of ideas.

My next step was to get at the connections between ideas and interests or emotional drives. That objective pointed toward readings in social psychology. I remember reading Charlotte Buhler's work on the life cycle and studies by a number of her students who examined the careers of people in different life situations. In that context I also discovered the work of Karl Buhler on the theory of language. The structure of language seemed especially important because language was a medium through which the conditions of life could have a formative influence on the individual. For the same reason I read books on child psychology as well as John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct . This was my first

English book in philosophical social psychology, a field entirely new to me, but also a testing ground for my growing command of English. My readings gradually led me to the study of what is now called socialization. (Since World War II that word has become the German Sozialisation , which did not exist in the 1930s.) I can still remember the relief with which I turned from philosophical abstractions to these more empirical studies.

Today the atmosphere of my life in Berlin from 1933 to 1938 seems very remote. Poor memory and orderly exposition foreshorten the twists and turns of that experience. My preoccupations of that time owed a great deal to the cultured middle-class setting in which I had grown up, to the charged atmosphere of Weimar politics, and to my father's work, which led to the stimulation of ideas at an early age. I could not say, as my father did, that mere theory left me cold. After all, he built on his experience with specific disputes his critique of judicial decision making; in that way he satisfied himself that he contributed to the reconstruction of society. By contrast, I derived the impetus for learning from the Marxist belief that an accurate understanding of social forces would help bring about desired changes—one factor among many, and not the most important, but a factor nonetheless. By the 1930s little moral fervor was left in the Marxist tradition. As I watched my father, though, it was easy to see that ideas and passions were closely linked. But whereas his passion for justice imparted moral fervor to ideas, I tended to derive that fervor from the power attributed to ideas when access to ideas is the only thing left available. I knew that a gulf divided what was happening in the streets of Berlin (some of them only a few blocks from where I lived) and my struggles with ideas in my self-imposed studies. Hence my eager participation in Neu Beginnen, where we analyzed the prehistory and structure of fascism. Isolated as these illegal discussions were, I was left with the belief that a correct analysis of fascism could somehow be instrumental in defeating that political monster. For the time being I believed it because I wanted to believe it. But by then I had acquired the lasting interest in ideas with which I arrived in 1938 at the University of Chicago.

I turn now to my efforts at coping in 1939 and 1940 with the intellectual challenges in the Department of Sociology at Chicago. It did not take me long to find out that two schools of thought were in contention. One position was represented by Robert Park, a former student of Georg Simmel who early on had had a career as an investigative reporter. Beyond the Atlantic Simmel's sociology had become under

Park's leadership an empirical investigation of life histories, occupations and ways of life, and ethnic or residential neighborhoods. Titles like The School Teacher, The Ghetto , and The Gold-Coast and the Slums gave an impression of that literature. When I arrived in 1938, those interests of the 1920s were already abating. A second position was becoming dominant, consisting of demography and the study of public opinion with a heavy emphasis on research methods. Spokesmen claimed their respective positions to be scientific, but there was little agreement between them. The study of attitudes appeared to the first group as removed from experience with "real life" and hence of little sociological interest. Life histories and studies of subcultures appeared to the second group as sociological impressionism lacking in methodological rigor. This contrast points to the heart of the matter, though there were many qualifications in both camps.

The atmosphere created by this argument influenced me. Every investigation should follow the positivist program at least to some extent. What do I want to know? What kind of evidence is suitable to prove a point? How can it be assembled? Are there good reasons for assuming that certain facts can either prove or disprove the original contention? One will not find answers if one does not specify what one wants to know. In that way I felt receptive toward a positivist approach, unfamiliar as it was to me and contrary to the scholarly inclinations of my father. But my attitude was also influenced by contemporary political events. I am reporting on my first academic experience from 1938 to 1941. All my American teachers insisted on the strict separation between scholarship and partisanship. Their approach was bound to impress me, who had seen so much partisanship in the preceding years under the Nazis. To achieve dispassion and nonpartisanship meant a great deal to me, and so did the demand for reliable proof. After all, I had just come from a country in which racism had been broadcast with all the pretense of science and none of the substance.

Although answers are impossible as long as questions are unclear—a basic positivist claim I accepted—one had to know something of substance before one could pose clear and interesting questions. I was not convinced that the positivist approach gave attention to the preliminary inquiries that must precede questions that are worth asking, and I resisted the idea that such inquiries are not a part of science. Yet the positivists among my teachers restricted the realm of science to the logic of proof. By neglecting the "logic of discovery," which was not very logical really and could not be taught easily, they seemed to support the

view that unproved, and ultimately unprovable, assertions had no place in science. That conclusion did not make sense if a science without presuppositions was a utopian idea. During my first years of study at Chicago I often heard social scientists mocked as people who knew more and more about less and less—a saying that had its reason in the emphasis on method at the expense of substance. It seemed to me at the time that the logic of discovery had to be brought into some appropriate relation to the logic of proof. In struggling with this question, I became preoccupied with the ideal of science as a problem in its own right.

Naturally students were affected by the arguments among the faculty, and I was no exception. Although we had to be familiar with both kinds of sociological study—the methodological and the contextual—we typically opted for one or the other in our dissertations. Yet what had this whole controversy to do with the main experience of my life? My family had been almost destroyed. I had been uprooted from the society into which I was born and wanted to understand the reasons for the German catastrophe that had led to our personal disaster. How could I make this large, amorphous concern researchable in the framework of American sociology as offered at the University of Chicago?

Eventually I was allowed to go ahead with a study of German sociology, even though it was hardly researchable in the terms then in vogue at Chicago. This decision speaks for the broadmindedness of my mentors, especially Louis Wirth, who sympathized with my moral and political concerns, as of course did others. But how was I to adhere to the requirements of empirical proof when my question was how to come to terms intellectually (and no doubt emotionally) with the reasons for the German catastrophe? The demand for rigor had to be balanced somehow against the interest in what is worth knowing and with what degree of accuracy. In the end I decided on a master's thesis that would examine historically this very question, namely, the social and scientific standing of a social science. What were the conditions under which scholars were permitted or encouraged to apply standards of scholarly investigation to the society that supported them to investigate it? I chose German sociology because that topic would also allow me to continue my inquiries into the German problem.

The title of my master's thesis was "The Rise and Acceptance of German Sociology" (1943); it was never published, so a brief description is in order. As an academic discipline sociology was older in the United States than in Germany. At the University of Chicago the department dated back to 1892, and the American Journal of Sociology was

first published in 1895. By contrast, the first chairs of sociology at German universities were established in 1919. In America the field had developed out of a private and religious concern with social welfare. Many early American sociologists had begun their studies in theology and had subsequently turned to sociology as a properly academic approach to welfare. German sociology, however, had developed from the preoccupation of civil servants with welfare policies; a modern social-security system was developed in the 1880s under Bismarck. In this German tradition the monarch was responsible for the welfare of the population, hence the study of welfare measures was closely related to public administration and law. Accordingly, when German sociology was accepted academically, it was heavily influenced by ideas about the relation of state and society. The term sociology was used long before the discipline received academic recognition. Men like Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel, who today are regarded as founders of the discipline, published much of their work before sociology was taught at the universities.

Actually I never got to the topic I had meant to study because documentation on the acceptance of sociology as an academic discipline was only available in German archives and inaccessible in wartime. But it is also true that I became preoccupied with the preliminaries of my inquiry. How had the study of society become a focus of academic interest in Germany? There had to be some agreement that sociology represented a legitimate field of research, and such agreement seemed to exist. In Wilhelmine Germany government officials, ministers of the church, and professors of law and political science (Staatswissenschaft ) had made many detailed studies that were continued during the Weimar Republic. The publications of the Association for Social Policy (Verein für Sozialpolitik) testify to this public concern with social problems: some 180 volumes of research studies were published before the association was dissolved by the Nazis in 1933. The fact that much of the initiative for these studies originated with the government probably contributed to the controversy over sociology as an academic discipline. Why was it needed when studies of society were under way already? What was its academic rationale apart from the study of law and government? Conservatives suspected that under the guise of a newfangled discipline advocates of sociology wanted to introduce socialist ideas into the university curriculum. Thus arguments over the academic recognition of sociology turned into political arguments.

The very word society , or gesellschaft , was more controversial in Ger-

many than in the United States. The German word is not simply synonymous with an aggregate of social groups, as society tends to be in English. Gesellschaft is often used to describe the grasping selfishness of the marketplace and the social isolation of the individual in a large city. By contrast, the word Staat connotes not only government and authority but also the moral values attributed to those in positions of public responsibility. The invidious contrast between a moral state and an immoral society had many ramifications, which became the main theme of my master's thesis. In any case, many prominent German scholars doubted that society could be studied dispassionately when the word itself could not be used without arousing moral indignation. Implicitly I compared this approach with the American acceptance of sociology. The whole topic was already far from my earlier interest in socialization.

In working on my thesis I learned a good bit of German intellectual history, but I became increasingly unhappy with my own bookishness. The United States joined the European war in December 1941, when I was beginning my graduate work at Chicago. To retain a valid passport, I had to submit it to the German embassy that had extended it, but only after affixing a big red J for Jew in accordance with latest Nazi regulations. I remained a German citizen as long as my application for American citizenship was pending; hence I was also required by law to register as an enemy alien after the United States entered the war against Germany. As a citizen I was in transit, stigmatized in one country and distrusted in another.

My feelings were ambivalent in a different sense. While others went to war against Germany or Japan, I sat on the sidelines, made thoroughly restless by my nonparticipation. I wanted to fight against Hitler. Then in 1943 I was naturalized at the same time as I got my master's degree in sociology. My exclusion from the draft ended, but I found myself rejected on grounds of health. When it was clear that I would not be drafted, I was offered an instructorship in the College at the University of Chicago, and I began work on my Ph.D. degree. It was back to the books after all. My academic career in the United States was beginning in earnest now that I participated as a teacher of undergraduates in the social-sciences survey course, which I had taken as a student only a few years before.

However, the problem remained how I could make questions posed by the contrast between Germany and the United States researchable in the Chicago sense. I had escaped from the Holocaust, but millions of others had perished—victims not only of personal tyranny but also of a

system organized for destruction. Perhaps if I examined that aspect of the German catastrophe, I would come closer to an understanding of its causes. Hundreds of thousands had done the bidding of one man's commands, millions had followed suit, and in the process they had created a bastion of barbarism in the center of Europe. In this setting, why had government officials become willing tools in the destruction of civilization? In the Germany I had known, especially through my father, officials had made a public display of their impartiality and legal rectitude. Yet under Hitler they had gone beyond mere compliance in their eagerness to follow the dictates of a criminal regime. By contrast, American civil servants at the federal level made few claims and were accorded little public recognition. But despite the tradition of the spoils system and the many loopholes of the civil service, those officials appeared on the whole to act responsibly under the law.

Again, the contrast was too diffuse to fit within the empirical framework required for a Ph.D. dissertation. Therefore I attempted to meet the demand for empirical verification at least halfway while still adhering to my own inclination to see the problem of bureaucracy in a larger context. By larger context I mean that exploratory effort that is somewhat like throwing a pebble into a pool of water to set ripples radiating out in all directions from the point of impact.

My intention in the dissertation, which was published several years later under the title Higher Civil Servants in American Society (1949), was to focus entirely on an American problem. But once more my initial impulse came from my continuing concern with Germany. In a study published in 1915, I found that more than 50 percent of Prussia's higher civil servants were themselves the sons of officials. As they grew up, unquestioning submission to higher commands must have been identified with the ideal of legality. If half of Prussia's officials had originated in families of civil servants, then such a milieu probably had a massive effect on the conduct of affairs. My father's lifelong experience with German officials and their subversion of the Weimar Republic helped to sustain these inferences.

The German example seemed to me to justify an inquiry into the social origins and careers of a sample of higher civil servants in America. Those officials were indeed distinct from their German counterparts. They came from all strata of the society except the lowest; few were children of civil servants. They had a wide range of educational experience in contrast with the emphasis on legal training in Germany. American federal administrators had often changed from private to public

employment and back again. Moreover, within the civil service many of them had changed jobs from one agency to another rather than advancing through the ranks within the same agency. These external indicators showed marked occupational mobility and to that extent considerable independence within the hierarchy of government. In my oral dissertation defense my Chicago professors grilled me hard on the facts I had ascertained. They paid no attention to the more discursive, exploratory parts of my dissertation. By modern standards the study was not methodologically sophisticated. But I remember my caution concerning the inferences that could be drawn from the statistics I had gathered as well as my argument that more detailed and comprehensive data might not be worthwhile.

I had supplemented the data on civil-service careers by a broader discussion of administrative behavior. Two inferences emerged from that discussion. First, higher civil servants represented a highly educated group with professional degrees in some field. That information, supplemented by job histories and interviews, suggested that many of them did not consider their public service a lifetime commitment. By alternating between public and private employment and maintaining their professional interests, they showed a degree of independence, which could possibly be a foundation for noncompliance if necessary. With their experience in the private sector they had the possibility of an alternative career, which German civil servants typically did not have. Further, their professional commitment frequently led them to judge government work in terms of the competence with which it was performed and not only in terms of its legal attributes, as their German colleagues tended to do.

The second inference concerned the attitudes of American administrators toward the public. Testimony before congressional committees showed that in their view a government agency served the public directly and hence was entitled to inquire into what the people desired. Those administrators considered themselves part of the people they served rather than bearers of a higher status and authority. This interpretation of government agencies as representative institutions was strongly contested by congressmen who claimed the representative role for themselves as elected, rather than appointed, officials. Those were my observations on the bureaucratic culture pattern in the United States. They seemed to me at least as worthy of attention as the statistical data that could be gathered on career patterns. However uneasily the two parts of the dissertation held together, they reflected my adaptation to American thought as well as my continued preoccupation with German affairs.

Many American sociologists did not seem to be concerned with the intellectual implications of their own scientific, or rather scientistic, bent, although my teacher, Louis Wirth, used to say that any fact, no matter how firmly established on methodological ground, was controversial from someone's point of view. This saying may resemble the Marxist contention that in a class society everybody is partisan. But that was not Wirth's meaning. He wanted to characterize the disputed position of the social sciences. For my part I could not understand how someone could claim to be scientific and partisan at the same time. Yet the truth claims of classical Marxism were of just that kind: history is only a history of class struggles, and hence truth can only be a by-product of class interest. Wirth maintained instead that the social origin of a statement tells us nothing about its validity. In his course on the sociology of intellectual life he expounded the view that facts are established (or statements agreed on) by means of scholarly criteria that distinguish true from false statements. That is a logically circular statement: truth becomes the by-product of criteria worked out among scholars. But the circularity of a truth defined by the truth-confirming criteria of scholars is not self-defeating, for among themselves scholars rely on an ever-provisional process of truth finding, which is under constant scrutiny and can be corrected and improved. The fact is that scholars form groups of their own, dedicated to maintaining the impartiality of their work. That point, made by Karl Popper, does not fit in with Marxism, which regards all intellectuals as unwitting or conscious spokesmen of the classes arising from the organization of production, including the working class (whose truth, of course, is in the interests of all).

What were the intellectual antecedents of this controversy over the scientific status of sociological and historical inquiry? I had begun my serious reading in sociology with Karl Mannheim's book and was excited when I found the same ideas taken up in the seminal work of Hans Barth, Wahrheit und Ideologie (1945). (The book was published in an English translation, as Truth and Ideology , by the University of California Press in 1976.) Basing my arguments on Barth's work, I published an essay in 1951, Social Science and the Distrust of Reason , which became the first step of my subsequent contributions to American sociology. I found the other basis for these contributions in the work of Max Weber. The link between my 1951 essay and my subsequent work on Weber and comparative historical sociology is far from obvious, so this relation of ideas is worth spelling out as a basic aspect of my intellectual

autobiography. Both Mannheim and Hans Barth refer to the fact that the development of modern science had been accompanied from its beginning by the analysis of error. Scholars make mistakes unwittingly and become entrapped in false judgments of their own devising. Further, both referred to Francis Bacon's typology of idols.

In Novum Organum (1625) Bacon pointed out that men are easily misled by wishful thinking, the influences of their education, the distortions arising from their use of words, and changing fashion in systems of thought. He called these four sources of error idols of the mind. This typology of error was to free science from the religious obscurantism of theologians. Bacon believed that God had endowed man with a mind capable of investigating nature. In the name of true faith he wrote against men of little faith, pleading for support from men of affairs.

A century and a half later science no longer needed a propagandist like Bacon; it had had its Sir Isaac Newton, who died in 1727. The great French Encyclopédie (twenty-eight volumes of text and illustrations in some editions) had been launched in 1751 to summarize and disseminate all human knowledge. But some obstacles to human advance remained, the church and its control over education foremost among them. Some French philosophers sought to emancipate education from the baleful influence of the church by developing a science of ideas, or ideology . They resolutely based their efforts on a physiological theory of perception that would enable them to remove prejudices from the human mind. Since Bacon's day the scene had shifted; not human error, but institutions interested in error, stood in the way of truth and reform.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the scene had shifted again. The advance of science aided by technology seemed to promise an era of plenty for all. Yet poverty prevailed among the many, while riches accumulated in the hands of the few. Neither the advance of science nor the struggle against institutional prejudice had been enough to put an end to the class struggles perpetuated by ideologies, which unwittingly served the interests of the ruling class. Those interests remained as the principal obstacles to human advance. In Marx's view only a revolution by the working classes of the world could destroy, once and for all, this last barrier against a society of plenty. Only then would truth prevail because ideologies would no longer be needed to help suppress the many in the interests of the few.

Nor did Marx have the last word. Nietzsche claimed that the whole quest for knowledge was an illusion pursued by men who needed it in their struggle for survival. In turn, Freud had examined the search for

knowledge in terms of the unconscious drives sublimated by it, though he hoped for therapeutic effects from the often painful uncovering of those drives. Social Science and the Distrust of Reason traced these changing concerns with the sources of error from Bacon to Freud. It seemed that in this field the development of thought had consisted to a considerable extent in an increased understanding of human fallibility. And as new and more deep-seated sources of error were discovered, from Bacon's idols of the mind through prejudices and class interests to the struggle for survival and the hidden drives of the libido, the remedies needed to correct or prevent error became ever more drastic, from persuasion and educational reform to revolution and psychotherapy.

What can efforts to correct error and control bias accomplish in the face of this record? We can only believe, we cannot prove, that further reflections as well as improvements in methods can correct errors and bring the desired reduction of bias. This seems a reasonable faith to me because no one knows what cannot be known; but it remains an act of faith. At the time I pursued these questions, my concern with faith as the basis of a belief in reason and with the hazards of communication was not only theoretical. I well remembered the public burning of books the Nazis had staged at the beginning of their regime. In addition my father's books had been confiscated by the police after he had been ousted by the bar association and singled out as a recalcitrant opponent of the regime. In 1949, in an ironic twist of fortune, my own first book encountered a similar fate; Higher Civil Servants in American Society had been published by the University of Colorado Press that July. Perhaps a year after publication some inquiries made me aware that the book was already out of print. That seemed odd, and I asked some friends to inquire. They were told space had been needed for the secretaries to have their afternoon coffee. The press had written to some fifty authors on their list, offering them their own books for discount purchase; but only a few had replied, and subsequently the books had been burned. I had not been among those notified, and my book, which had just been published, had been destroyed along with the rest. The episode was a vivid reminder that books and communication are perishable, by negligence or inadvertence as well as by a policy of destruction. (The book was republished twenty-five years later by the Greenwood Press.)

Accordingly, the control of bias and of the hazards to which books and communication are exposed have a larger context, both past and present. Though I might be unable to cope with the social and political hazards, I had control over my own scholarly work. My conclusion was

that along with the refinement of methods there should be (and I should practice) tolerance for more intuitive approaches to knowledge, which would fall short on verification but might more simply show the assets of experienced judgment. Perhaps there is such a thing as too much methodological concern with bias. "Any performance," Kenneth Burke wrote in 1936, "is discussable either from the standpoint of what it attains or what it misses . Comprehensiveness can be discussed as superficiality, intensiveness as stricture, tolerance as uncertainty—and the poor pedestrian abilities of a fish are clearly explainable in terms of his excellence as a swimmer . A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing" (Permanence and Change [New York: New Republic Press, 1936], p. 70). If we refuse all trust in a capacity for judgment, then we unwittingly undermine the basis of communication among scholars, which ultimately rests on an assumption of good will as well as on reasoning and demonstration. We make this assumption in the use of language itself. For science, like language, cannot prosper where we have grounds to believe that the other person is systematically engaged in the destruction of meaningful communication.

All this does not seem to have anything to do with political sociology and Max Weber, the two foci of my work since the late 1940s. But there is a close relation, and I would like to spell it out at this point, where the question of how I became an American sociologist verges on the question of what kinds of impulses I may have imparted to American sociology.

Trust in reasoned judgment as the shared value of communication and the pursuit of knowledge is the starting point to keep in mind. That trust is presupposed by any more specific purpose for which we seek knowledge. Without such trust institutions of learning are not viable. If that trust is unwarranted, then language, learning, and knowledge become impossible. In all of his work Weber was concerned with the chances of individualism and rational choice in a world (of power struggles, bureaucratic organizations, and capitalist enterprises) that militates against these chances. But as I look back, I am most impressed by his anti-utopian approach. It is best not to put a party label on this way of looking at the modern world and instead think of Weber's work in more abstract terms. Not the least of the many Weberian paradoxes seems to be that by his whole manner Weber resembled the Puritan divines or even the Old Testament prophets, who were surely utopians, whereas his work tends in an anti-utopian direction. I want to formulate this "message" of Weber's work as I came to perceive it in working my way through his writings.

The personal sense of one's own action is a force in society however it may be caused. Social scientists who neglect this part of the evidence abandon the legacies of the Enlightenment, as do those followers of Marx and Freud who fail to distinguish between caused and unavoidable behavior. Contemporary evidence as well as considerations of intellectual strategy support the old-fashioned view that studies of social determinants must not neglect individual differences. The numerous and often unknown dissenters in fascist Germany who defied that regime were such individualists. When writers and scientists in the Soviet Union prove themselves capable of challenging not only supreme power but also the apparent consensus of the entire population, it seems wrongheaded that some theorists in the West make social forces appear overwhelming. It seems just as wrongheaded for men and women of ideas to minimize the individual's capacity for innovation when a full acceptance of that view would destroy the importance these same men and women attribute to science. I could not be content with these contradictions or with a history of social theory that consists of mutually exclusive emphases on society and the individual, like a pendulum whose every swing in one direction necessitates an opposite swing of equal amplitude.

Ultimately these intellectual impulses led me to my interpretation of Weber's work. It seems to me that Weber promises an end to that swing of the pendulum. He offers an anti-utopian view of the social world that is nevertheless open to its possibilities of development. Karl Loewith put it admirably when he wrote some two generations ago, "Even the extreme casuistry of [Weber's] conceptual definitions in Economy and Society has not only the meaning to capture and determine reality in definitions, but, at the same time and above all, the opposite meaning of an open system of possibilities" ("Marx and Weber," in Gesammelte Abhandlungen [Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1968], p. 66). Weber's approach does not lead to a benign view of the human condition, nor does he have all the answers. But his definitions of human action encompass with equal emphasis our quest for subjective meaning and our compliance with the expectations of others. His definitions of class and status group do the same for our acquisitiveness and our quest for honor and power over others. His definitions of morality do the same for actions guided by a sense of responsibility for the outcome and those guided by a surpassing conviction that disregards all questions of consequences. Indeed his writings reveal polarities of this kind so repeatedly that I have come to think of them as the theoretical core of his work. This concep-

tual device is ancient and not confined to the Western tradition. But in Weber's hands it acquires two meanings that have been of special importance to me.

One of these meanings consists in a comparative historical perspective not only as a methodological device but also as a view of the individual and society. Every human achievement, every social fact or historical situation, allows a conceptual formulation only by emphasizing certain attributes while neglecting or excluding others. Hence every formulation bears within it the seeds of its own destruction—a phrase I borrow from Marx and apply at the conceptual level, a practice he would not have condoned. Accordingly, the study of the individual and society cannot rest content with the observation of any one set of facts without at least noting their cultural, chronological, and other limitations. Sooner or later such limitations will provoke contrary tendencies, what has been conceptually excluded will reassert itself, and new constellations will become the focus of attention.

What I have said here of conceptual formulations applies to intellectual positions more generally. I think Weber might have agreed, but I just do not know. Every intellectual position exacts a price that must be paid; for every insight gained certain other insights are foregone, left out, or underemphasized. Something like that is at work in Weber's casuistry, his anti-utopian position, and his use of comparative historical materials in preserving a sense of the indeterminacy of the human condition. (In other contexts I have called this indeterminacy the fallacy of retrospective determinism, which underscores that any outcome is caused but that we know the cause even approximately only by hindsight.) The price Weber paid for his indeterminacy—his openness to human possibilities revealed by his casuistry and by his comparative panorama of man in history—is that his scholarly work is a rather poor guide to positive ideals of political structure: note his emphasis that to him political questions are problems of institutional technique. Note also his comment that no sociological definition of the state can be substantive (he says the definition must be formulated in terms of administrative organization) because such a definition would imply specific policies, whereas history shows that states have pursued all kinds of policies, including the most contradictory ones.

But if Weber was a poor guide, then this limitation is also associated with one of his great strengths—the dialectic character of his types of domination, as of the paired concepts mentioned earlier. What has been said earlier is an interpretation of bureaucracy that shows how this

concept can be specifically suited to the comparative studies that are central to Weber's work.

Weber points out that he has the specifically modern form of administration in mind. Consequently bureaucracy is initially limited to Western Europe and particularly to Prussia, all the more so as he understands this kind of administration as the executive organ of legal authority. The purpose of this historically limited concept is to contrast it with other forms of administration, such as Weber described in his analysis of Chinese bureaucracy. However, Weber's definition of bureaucracy appears in categorical form, which seems to suggest its general applicability. How can this general claim be reconciled with the historical limitation of the concept? I maintain that Weber's concept (the general claim) also contains a dialectical element (the historical dimension).

The well-known formulation seems to present bureaucracy as an "iron cage." Each administrative position is precisely circumscribed by its official duties, a position in a hierarchy, a salary fixed by contract, full-time employment, and so forth. All functions of bureaucratic work seem to be fixed, and yet Weber allows an element of uncertainty to enter into even this cage. That element is the technical qualification of the official. Technical and bureaucratic qualifications mean that one has to rely on the experience and good judgment of the qualified official—despite the many examinations and controls. The same is true of experts in any other context. The sense of specialized qualification lies in the expertise the layman can use to his benefit only through consultation or employment of a certified professional. Weber stresses the discrepancy between expert officials and political laymen. He also points out that technically qualified officials can make a secret out of their knowledge to avoid unpleasant or inappropriate controls. Technical qualification means not only technical know-how but also knowledge of official forms, procedures, appeal channels, and precedents—all things to which the official has ready access and which can easily degenerate into a special technique of bureaucratic abuse. Thus at the center of Weber's concept of bureaucracy lies an element of uncertainty, which lends itself to specific investigation, as that is the only way we can come to grips with the different meanings of the concept even within the European cultural sphere, let alone outside the Western orbit.

Having examined the dialectical use of a key concept in Weber's work, I want to comment on its anti-utopian orientation. Fascism and communism are two versions of the utopian mentality. However dissimilar in ideology, both assume that men and society are subject to total

manipulation. If either racial identity or the organization of production is the ultimate determinant of history, then whoever controls those factors is capable of directing history. In both cases the consequences of utopia have been so abhorrent that I, for one, have come away with a fundamental distrust of utopianism. To my mind, Weber's conceptual polarities provide a block against utopian tendencies without downgrading the consideration of alternatives. Such considerations are essential, for this world is obviously not the best of all possible worlds, but neither is it the worst. Differences between democracy and a one-party dictatorship, between a technology used for benign or malignant ends, make a fundamental difference in our lives, even though many defects remain associated both with democracy and benign technology. But there is a genuine choice between a careful consideration of those differences, on one hand, and a summation of all real defects into one apocalyptic vision, on the other. Utopians set so high a goal for the future that nothing present is worth preserving, and it is this all-or-nothing posture that Weber's approach condemns as self-defeating. For if every human condition has limits and invites or provokes countervailing tendencies, then a utopian society is one with limits and hence without alternatives. Weber's whole work shows (though not in so many words) that a society without limits is not a possible human achievement, though he himself notes that aiming for the impossible is sometimes needed to achieve the possible. The point is that utopians militate against the possible by demanding the impossible as the only rational course in a totally irrational world. Weber's work means to me that it is more human and more predictable to continue to struggle with the imperfections of rationality, that this attitude keeps open more chances for individual choice compared with the prospects of unremitting manipulation. It is, for all that, a sober view of the human condition, one that anticipates adversity, and Weber would not have it otherwise. Sixty-five years after his death, who can honestly say that he was mistaken?

Yet in stating what Weber's work has meant to me and that it has been my inspiration for books like Work and Authority in Industry (1956), Nation-Building and Citizenship (1964), and Kings or People (1978), I have perhaps lost sight of my theme. For while I have traced how I became an American sociologist, I cannot be sure of how American a sociologist I have become. But then American sociology is a capacious mansion, and a hospitable one at that. In external terms my question does not make good sense. I have had a creative career at the universities of Chicago and California (not counting brief interludes

elsewhere), and my published work has received its fair share of critical and appreciative appraisal. In earlier years I served on the Council of the American Sociological Association, was elected its vice president and then its president, and have served in various other capacities connected with the profession. Yet these are not the only terms in which that question can be asked, nor is it likely that I am a good judge in these matters. It would be inconsistent with the self-scrutiny I consider essential were I to omit the question, however vague and unanswerable it may be.

The year 1984 was not only the year of Orwell's famous book; it was also the three hundredth anniversary of the Mennonite emigration from Krefeld, Germany, to Pennsylvania. On that occasion I participated in three meetings devoted to a study of German emigration to North America. Even after a forty-five-year residence in this country of immigrants, I was (and am) still conscious in many ways of being an immigrant myself. When I began my studies at the University of Chicago, I was old enough to make use of what I found stimulating in the history of German thought, and although these interests have broadened in the interim, they have remained an active ingredient in my work. A whole industry of Weber interpreters has developed in the United States since I published my book on Weber more than twenty-five years ago; other German immigrants have taken a hand in making his oeuvre accessible to American readers after Frank Knight and Talcott Parsons did their pioneering work almost two generations ago. And there are now a good many American sociologists who have taken their inspiration from Weber's writings in one way or another. Perhaps I have helped alter the intellectual climate of sociology in this country, but that change might have come about in any case. The United States as a conscious world power is more hospitable to a comparative study of societies than the United States of the immediate post-Depression years when I arrived here. But whatever my contribution or influence may have been in the eyes of American scholars, the one thing I know is that European scholars look at my writings, including my book on Weber, as the work of an American sociologist. I am content to live with such ambiguities.