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.