The Life of Learning

THE LIFE OF L E A R N I N G

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THE CHARLES HOMER HASKINS LECTURES OF THE AMERICAN COUNCIL OF L E A R N E D SOCIETIES

THE LIFE OF LEARNING edited by

Douglas Greenberg Stanley N. Katz with the assistance of Candace Frede

ACLS New York

Oxford

Oxford University Press

1994

Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland Madrid and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4314 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Life of learning : Haskins lectures sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies / edited by Douglas Greenberg, Stanley N. Katz. p. cm. ISBN 0—19—508339—3 I. Greenberg, Douglas. II. Katz, Stanley Nider. III. American Council of Learned Societies. AC5.L7I8 1994 001.3—dc2O 93-37336

24689753 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

This book is published in honor of Frederick Burkhardt and dedicated to the memory of R. M. Lumiansky and John William Ward

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PREFACE

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) was founded in 1919 to support humanistic learning in the United States and to represent American scholarship abroad. Originally composed of twelve learned societies, ACLS now includes fifty-three member societies, a long list of college and university associate members, and a group of seven affiliates devoted to other areas of humanistic endeavor. Over the course of a distinguished history, the Council has supported the scholarship of thousands of researchers through its fellowship programs, thereby assisting in the publication of innumerable books and monographs, and participated effectively in virtually every aspect of teaching and learning in the humanities. When John William Ward became President of the ACLS in 1982, he concluded that the ACLS tradition of involvement in scholarship and teaching of the highest caliber should be commemorated through an annual lecture delivered by a distinguished humanist on the "life of learning." He further proposed that the lecture be named for Charles Homer Haskins, a scholar and teacher of great accomplishment, who was instrumental in the founding of ACLS and served as the first chairman of its board of directors. Ward's conception of the Haskins Lecture was that it should not be a work of scholarship in the usual sense, but should represent an opportunity for selfreflection by a senior humanist still active in his or her field. Such a scholar would be in a position to offer a meditation of sorts on the body of work he or she had thus far produced and the forces, personal as well as intellectual, that had shaped it. Thus, in his invitation to the first Haskins Lecturer, Maynard Mack, Ward wrote: Our intention is to ask each year's honoree to reflect on a lifetime of work as a scholar, on the motives, the chance determinations, the satisfactions (and the dissatisfactions) of the life of learning, to explore through one's own life the larger, institutional life of scholarship. We do not wish the speaker to present the products of one's own scholarly research, but rather to share with other scholars the personal process of a particular lifetime of learning.

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Bill Ward's formulation of his idea was so graceful that these words have appeared in every letter of invitation sent to Haskins Lecturers since 1983. The honor the Haskins Lectureship confers, as well as Ward's elegant description of it, have proved sufficiently attractive to ensure that, to date, only one person has declined the invitation to deliver the lecture. The difficult problem of choosing the annual Haskins Lecturer was given to the Executive Committee of the Delegates of the ACLS. The Delegates are the formal governing body of the Council, each representing one of the member societies. Annually, they choose from among their number an Executive Committee that serves as a committee on admissions for new members of the Council, advises the staff on the program of the Council's Annual Meeting, and selects the Haskins Lecturers. From year to year, the committee collects suggestions from members of the learned societies and each year, in a discussion that resembles an attempt to determine the relative merits of many great works of art, selects one scholar to be invited to deliver the next year's lecture. Indeed, a list of those scholars who have been considered for the lectureship, but have not yet been chosen, reads like a "Who's Who" of a very rarefied kind. In any case, once the decision is made, the President of ACLS dutifully dispatches to the honoree virtually the same letter that Bill Ward drafted in 1983. While the responses to the invitation have been invariably affirmative, their pungency may suggest the high seriousness with which the Haskins Lecturers have approached their task. Maynard Mack, who inaugurated the series, replied that although he was pleased to accept, "I now know what Kierkegaard meant by fear and trembling." Several weeks later, in the process of handling some logistical details with Ward, he wrote: "It gets scarier and scarier." Mack's superb lecture set the precedent for those who followed, and many of them have asked for copies of previous lectures as a guide. When Paul Oskar Kristeller accepted the invitation in 1988, he requested copies of all the previous lectures because, he said, "they may help me to understand and follow the format and content expected in these lectures." With characteristic propriety, he also wrote that he felt "greatly honored by this invitation and [I] gladly accept it. I hope that I shall be able to do justice to the task, in spite of my advancing age." When Milton Babbitt was invited to deliver the lecture, he also commented on the honor it represented, but he warned that "I charge extra to play cocktail piano at the reception." Milton Anastos was effusive in his acceptance, writing that "It carries me to the highest point in my career. . . ."Carl Schorske, who had previously served as a member of the Executive Commit-

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tee of the Delegates and so had reason to know what sort of competition he had bested, was blunt: "What a surprise your kind letter contained. Having thought about the assignment for the past forty-eight hours, I realize all too well some of its difficulties—much more vividly than when I was on the Council's Executive Committee weighing candidates. ... In any case, I shall do my best to do justice to so signal an honor from an organization that lies so close to my heart." All the responses reflected a modesty that the accomplishments of the invitees hardly seemed to require; some, however, confessed outright astonishment. Annemarie Schimmel wrote: "I was highly surprised when I read [the letter of invitation] and could not believe that you had chosen me to give the distinguished ACLS lecture. ... I am very very grateful to you although I feel somewhat hesitant to speak in the same series in which a number of great scholars have spoken until now. . . ." No Haskins lecturer put it better than Donald Meinig who, upon receiving the invitation, wrote: "Your astonishing letter arrived yesterday. I took it home to share it with my wife and to leave it on the table to see if it were there—and real—the next morning." The lectures themselves provide ample evidence of both the wisdom of the committee's choices and the gravity with which the lecturers have approached the task. Occasionally, ACLS had the opportunity to communicate with the lecturers after the lecture as well as before. Carl Schorske, on reading Donald Meinig's lecture, wrote to comment on its graceful prose and to observe that it had given him a new appreciation for Meinig's discipline of geography. Meinig himself confessed that "in the euphoria of having actually gotten through the Haskins Lecture" he thought he had failed to thank ACLS properly for the invitation. But John Hope Franklin described the experience in a way that perhaps all the Haskins Lecturers would have understood when he observed that he hoped "the Delegates, Board of Directors, and the audience . . . enjoyed the proceedings half as much as I did. Although I felt just a bit as if I were undressing in public, the talk gave me the opportunity to reflect on some aspects of my life. ... It was ... a memorable experience." The experience of hearing the lectures each year and then ushering them into print has also been memorable. As the collective wisdom and understanding that the lectures represents has accumulated over the years, Bill Ward's prediction that they would eventually make a splendid little book has proved only too true. Thus, the idea of publishing this volume originated in Ward's first

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plans for the lecture series. Those plans have been reinforced each year, however, as each lecturer has brought a new perspective to a consideration of the meaning of a life of learning. Those of us fortunate enough to hear these lectures when they are first presented recognize, moreover, that they provide not only perspectives on individual lives and careers, but also on the development of scholarship in the humanities in the broadest sense. Indeed, they are important primary sources for the writing of American intellectual history in the postwar period. And this has served only to strengthen our conviction that the entire series to date deserves publication. Although the temptation to a fuller analysis and commentary on these collected lectures is great, we have decided to foreswear an extended interpretative essay in the knowledge that one of the great pleasures in reading these texts is the surprises, great and small, that they contain. To introduce them too elaborately would be to reveal some of those surprises and thereby to reduce the great delight that awaits readers of this book. The Haskins Lectures appear here precisely as they were delivered, with the exception of the deletion of passing remarks specific to the occasion. The lecturers are identified, where appropriate, by the institution with which they were affiliated at the time of the lecture. The 1984 lecture, delivered by Mary Rosamond Haas, is not included in this volume. Professor Haas spoke from notes on the occasion itself and was not able subsequently to provide ACLS with a text for publication. We regret the absence of her lecture. The editors record their gratitude to each of the lecturers for their unfailing cooperation in bringing this book to publication so expeditiously. In addition, Barbara Henning has provided essential administrative support to the lecture series over the entire period of its history and under the direction of three ACLS presidents. The editors record their deepest gratitude to her for this support and her attention to the many other tasks essential to the operation of ACLS. Since 1987, Candace Frede, Managing Editor of ACLS Publications, has expertly supervised the production of our series of Occasional Papers and has guided the last seven Haskins Lectures through their original publication. We thank her for these and her continuing efforts on behalf of the ACLS publications program. The dedication of this book in honor of Frederick Burkhardt and to the memory of R. M. Lumiansky and John William Ward is an inadequate and belated gesture of gratitude to three men whose devotion to ACLS as the Council's President and, more important, to the support of many lives of

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learning was an anonymous gift to countless scholars for many years. Fred Burkhardt continues to inspire us with his devotion to the life of learning as the Editor of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin and as a person of uncommon wisdom and modesty whose occasional visits to the ACLS offices are eagerly anticipated by the editors of this volume, who revere him for his past accomplishments and admire him for what he continues to accomplish. Bob Lumiansky served ACLS for many years as the Chair of its Board of Directors and then as its President. Ward served the Council informally for almost three decades before becoming its President in 1982. Fittingly, when Ward's untimely death left the Council without a president, Lumiansky returned for a year as President pro tempore. No one who knows Fred Burkhardt or who knew Bob Lumiansky and Bill Ward would doubt that each of them belongs in this volume with the Haskins Lecturers, a trio of distinctive exemplars of the life of learning. New York September 1993

D. G. S. N. K.

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THE CHARLES HOMER HASKINS LECTURES OF THE AMERICAN COUNCIL OF LEARNED SOCIETIES

Charles Homer Haskins (1870-1937), for whom the ACLS lecture series is named, was the first Chairman of the American Council of Learned Societies, 1920-26. He began his teaching career at the Johns Hopkins University, where he received the BA. degree in 1887, and the Ph.D. in 1890. He later taught at the University of Wisconsin and at Harvard, where he was Henry Charles Lea Professor of Medieval History at the time of his retirement in 1931, and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences from 1908 to 1924. He served as President of the American Historical Association, 1922, and was a founder and the second President of the Medieval Academy of America, 1926. A great American teacher, Charles Homer Haskins also did much to establish the reputation of American scholarship abroad. His distinction was recognized in honorary degrees from Strasbourg, Padua, Manchester, Paris, Louvain, Caen, Harvard, Wisconsin, and Allegheny College, where in 1883 he had begun his higher education at the age of thirteen. In 1983, to recognize Haskins' signal contributions to the world of learning in the United States, the ACLS inaugurated a series of lectures entitled "The Life of Learning" in his honor. Designed to pay tribute to a life of scholarly achievement, the Haskins Lecture is delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Council by an eminent humanist. The lecturer is asked to reflect and to reminisce upon a lifetime of work as a scholar, on the motives, the chance determinations, the satisfactions and the dissatisfactions of the life of learning.

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CONTENTS

1983 / Maynard Mack

3

1985 / Lawrence Stone

17

1986 / Milton V. Anastos

37

1987 / Carl E. Schorske

53

1988 / John Hope Franklin 1989 / Judith N. Shklar

71 87

1990 / Paul Oskar Kristeller

105

1991 / Milton Babbitt

121

1992 / D. W. Meinig

141

1993 / Annemarie Schimmel

161

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THE LIFE OF L E A R N I N G

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1983 MAYNARD MACK Sterling Professor of English Tale University

I I am reminded by Professor [Georges] May's generous introduction of a story about Winston Churchill. After World War II and his stint as prime minister, he was invited back to his old school, Harrow, to give the commencement address and decided he ought probably to oblige. So he went, weathered an introduction almost as laudatory as the one you've just listened to (except in his case deserved) then got to his feet and said to the graduating class, "Nevah give up!" and sat down. I think you will agree that this is the most memorable commencement address you have ever heard as well as perhaps the wisest possible comment on the life that all of us here are engaged in fostering, and that I, alas, on grounds that will be no more apparent to you than they are to me, have been singled out ("fingered" is, I believe, the underworld term) to address: the life of learning. . . . Although I stand here before my betters, I do not stand here before very many of my elders. I have already drawn down from that mysterious fund with which we all begin three and a half years beyond my Biblical allowance, with the result that on any reasonably quiet afternoon I can hear my brain cells dying so fast they sound like popcorn. And that, I came to realize, is precisely what ACLS had in mind: they wanted to exhibit me, the way the Egyptians used to exhibit a skeleton at the beginning of their feasts. "Nothing like a mouldy old professor," I could hear the Executive Board whispering, "to energize an audience of other professors into taking thought—before they get to be like him." So do take thought, ladies and 3

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gentlemen, golden lads and girls; and as an old gravestone in Exeter churchyard says, "The faults you saw in me, Pray strive to shun; And look at home: There's something to be done." My instructions for this talk urged me to be somewhat personal, even to reminisce. And to tell you the unvarnished truth, I did sit down at first and produce a simply elegant piece of autobiography for this occasion. Very moving, I thought: parts of it would have brought tears to your eyes. But my wife refused to let me give it. She went over it very thoroughly, as she does everything I do. It took her a while, because she paused, dutifully, at all the places where I had written PAUSE FOR APPLAUSE. But when she was finished, she looked up and said, "It won't go down." "What won't go down?" I said, having a certain talent for repartee. "That part about your reading Charles Homer Haskins at 17," she said. "Nobody'll believe that. They'll think you laid it on just for this occasion." "But I did read Haskins at 17," I said. "I remember that book of his on the Renaissance of the twelfth century had just come out, and there was a copy of it lying around the house, and I read it—it was my last year in high school. And furthermore, two years later, I even got hold of his Rise of Universities and read that. If it hadn't been for those two books, I might not be in the profession I'm in." She was not convinced. "Just the same, they won't believe it," she said; "and, besides, I don't see the point of that long digression you've got here on deconstructive criticism and how much it has liberated you and how you owe it all to Swift. You know perfectly well it's nothing to do with Swift. How many times have you told me it all goes back to Saussure and Levi-Strauss!" "Oh but that's the theory," I said. "Swift was the first practitioner. . . . You remember the Three Brothers in his Tale of a Tub and how they handle their father's will? Well—they deconstruct it, and out of that very same text came the Roman Catholic, the Anglican, and the Evangelical churches. If that isn't liberating, I don't know what is." "OK," she said, with a withering glance, "but a lot of people are going to be shocked to find you've gone over to that side! Still, I suppose there's no fool like an old fool. Do as you like; but don't forget that what you've already got here is at least an hour and ten minutes too long." There, I had to admit, was a point. Maybe I should try for something a little more astringent, syncopated, compact. Something in couplets maybe, like those of Mr. Pope, of whom I am presently trying to write a biography. A sort of modern-day Dunciad perhaps. Alas, it was a dream of glory soon shattered. For almost immediately there leapt to my mind an experience I had had in the far past. I was a sophomore at Yale then, taking a course called English 25, and

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5

our instructor assigned us the task of writing a witty couplet in the manner of Mr. Pope, whose poems we were studying. "Just one couplet," he said, for he had given us a great deal of reading to do. "One couplet, and bring it to class next time." So I wrote my couplet and took it to class and showed it to him. He looked at it a very long time—sort of the way I imagine Balboa must have looked at the Pacific. "Well," I finally asked, getting nervous: "How is it?" He didn't answer right away, and when he did, his voice was all choked up. "It's great," he said; "it's absolutely great—if only you could get rid of those first two lines." At this point, I really began to panic. The 14th of April was closing in, and I had nothing in hand. "Now there's only one thing left you can do," I said to myself: "'Look in thy heart and write!'" I had always been a notable phrasemaker. "Yes," I said, "look in the place where all the ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart"'—coining another phrase. So in the wee small hours of yesterday morning, I had a look around down there, in the ragand-bone shop, I mean. Very depressing! All I could see was a lifetime's accumulation of cliches, stacked up like garment bags in an attic. I stared at them glumly. Of the three bags nearest me, one, I noticed, was exceptionally small and had a tag on it reading: HUMANITIES: PROSPECTS OF. The next bag was somewhat larger and its tag read: TEACHING: WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO IT? The third bag seemed to be made of some sort of latex. It could obviously expand or shrink. On its tag all I could find was a question mark followed by the words: THE ACADEMY : VERDICT NOT IN . "Well, if 11 all have to come from those three," I said to myself. "I haven't got time for any more. And even if they are cliches, maybe my audience will remember what an eminent living classicist once said: that it is in the very nature of cliches to be both profoundly true and perpetually forgotten, to the peril of everyone."

II So here is a sampling of the contents of those bags, just as they tumbled out. And, first, on the prospects of the humanities. Not reassuring, the bag said. . . . Still, it is incumbent on at least the humanists among us to take the long view. Have the prospects of the humanities ever been entirely reassuring? I suspect not. We all remember, I dare say, the schoolboy who was asked to write a theme on Socrates, whom many humanists of the past, at least, used to claim as the founder of their sect. (This was in the dear dead days when

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teachers still asked for themes and read them.) "Socrates was a Greek," the boy wrote. "He went around giving people advice. They poisoned him." From the Middle Ages comes a not much more sanguine report. That twelfthcentury John of Salisbury, on whom Charles Haskins has so many fascinating pages in the two books I have mentioned, found himself confronted in his own time by attitudes very like those voiced so vociferously during the 1960s and 1970s in this country, and now not so much voiced as practiced in the nationwide stampede to vocationalism. "What is the old fool after?" John imagines himself being asked by the vocationalists of bis day. "Why does he quote the sayings and doings of the ancients to us? We draw knowledge from ourselves. We, the young, do not recognize the ancients." It is positively uncanny how history repeats itself. Here is Jefferson writing in his older years to John Adams, former presidents both, in one of the great correspondences of all time: Our post-revolutionary youth are born under happier stars than you and I were. They acquire all learning in their mother's womb, and bring it into the world ready-made. The information of books is no longer necessary; and all knowledge which is not innate is in contempt, or neglect at least. . . . When sobered by experience, I hope our successors will turn their attention to the advantages of education. Nor is any of this altogether different from that battered sign James Reston once reported he found on the study door of a tired old professor at Coe College, Iowa: "We the willing, led by the unknown, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much for so long with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing." Obviously, then, we are not the first followers of the life of learning to feel unloved, or to have to realize that we live in a time and place that doesn't quite know what to make of us. Nor can I think that we will be the last. There is a fundamental ambiguity about the work of the humanities and social sciences that can easily persuade any society to regard them as a threat. Much of the time we appear to be harmless drudges, tunneling about in archives and libraries or among exotic cultures and landscapes on errands as alien to the interests of the corner pharmacist as the Beach Boys to James Watt. As such we are bound to be regarded by the doers and shakers of the nation with impatient forbearance or at best with affectionate contempt. It is an attitude I dare say many of you have met with in testifying before Congressional committees. Trouble is, however, that every now and then there

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7

comes fountaining up out of our tunnels and far voyages, not necessarily an Origin of Species or a Das Kapital or a Psychopathology of Everyday Life, but at least some significantly altered perspective, after which nothing ever looks quite the same. Blake, you will recall, registers one such shift unforgettably: What, it will be questioned, when the sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a guinea? O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the Heavenly Host crying, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty": I question not my corporeal or vegetative eye any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it and not with it.

As Blake's example suggests, disturbances of the status quo are by no means confined to the social sciences. Changes wrought by achievements in the humanities and arts may be more leisurely and indirect, but few, I think, would care to argue that the great geniuses in philosophy, history, literature, and in artistic endeavor generally have toiled in vain. They too clarify and challenge, inform and ask questions. And this double function of the disciplines we severally represent here tonight is surely our badge of honor, even if sometimes, when the chips are down, we have also to wear it as our badge— not, I hope, our red badge—of courage.

III

When I shook out the second bag entitled TEACHING: WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO IT? I had to be considerably more selective. It was full of little notes to myself; for the life of learning, in my case, has been largely synonymous with teaching. My father was a teacher, a teacher in Oberlin, where I grew up, and even a very great teacher, I was eventually forced to conclude, from the dozens upon dozens of former students who bothered to write notes of appreciation after his death. (Most of the rewards of the life of learning, I have noticed, come after death if they come at all.) I could not hope to match his magic, but I knew I had not taught for 42 years without learning something. What had I learned? One thing I remember learning very early, and sure enough it was recorded on the first three-by-five that fell out on my lap. "Never forget," it began—and instantly I realized I was simply confirming from my own experience what Leo Strauss used to tell every aspiring young teacher:

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Never forget that in your classroom there will always be at least one student altogether your superior both in mind and in heart. Never forget, either, that there is, or should be, in that classroom a second teacher far more important than you are: a great text. Try not to get in the way of that traffic. Remember Milton's admonition inAreopagitica: A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. Be careful not to say anything so egregiously silly as that a great artist—or a great historian or a great philosopher or any other creator of a great text—endured all that toil, and often all that suffering, to make a work that refers to nothing but itself, that is about itself and not about the follies, grandeurs, and miseries of the human lot. Be even more careful not to show off—either your learning, if you have any, or your latest critical panacea. Remember that the more luminous the work, the deeper the darkness an intervening opaque body casts. Try not to be that body. If you actually believe, cross your heart, that Proust's Remembrance of Things Past is really "about" metaphor and metonymy, or that Poe's "The Purloined Letter" celebrates a phallus, try to get off by yourself somewhere and lie down.

What else had I learned? Many things, of course, too obvious to be repeated were set down in those little three-by-five messages to myself, and some rather saddening to repeat. One of the latter is the remarkable shrinkage, as it seems to me, if not sometimes the total erosion, of the awe, reverence, wonder, and, yes, love with which the best teachers of my youth approached the books they taught. Doubtless they were less sophisticated than many of their successors. Certainly they were less sophistic. They would have laughed out loud at the idea that it was some kind of status symbol to be called a "research" or—even more ineptly—a "distinguished" professor, if it meant being without students to profess to, or teaching only when and what the whim moved. They would have laughed yet louder at the self-delusion of those who imagined they were "above" teaching undergraduates. "Be prepared for the coming of the Stranger," cries a voice in one of Eliot's choruses from The Rock. "Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions." In the life of learning—institutionalized learning, at any rate—it is the undergraduate who fills the role of the Stranger. It is he or she who will ask you, What good is this stuff anyway? or, Why is the king wearing no clothes? and who are all those people pretending they don't notice? Graduate students never ask such questions. They have already settled down in the village. All they want to know is where is the nearest photocopier or how much is the sewage tax. So I suppose it is fair to say that the teachers who taught my generation

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9

were unsophisticated. Yet they did have a firm hold on something that nowadays appears to be in short supply. One of my earliest memories is of my father coming out of his study, where he had been reading Wordsworth in preparation for a class, with tears in his eyes—a startling experience for a child. And I remember, later on, at Yale, how C. B. Tinker would bring very rare books or manuscripts from his own library to class, and urge us to touch them as if we were in a holy place—as indeed we were: the "holy Republic of Letters," as W. H. Auden would call it later on. And one thinks, too, of Keats discovering Chapman's translation of the Odyssey and feeling like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken; and of Pope at his friend Lord Bathurst's reading aloud in Greek the scene of Priam's meeting with Achilles, and being unable to go on; and of Flaubert writing to a friend: The most beautiful works ... are serene in aspect, unfathomable. . . . They are motionless as cliffs, green and murmurous as forests, forlorn as the desert, blue as the sky. . . . Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose sombre depths turn us faint. And yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness . . . like the smile of the sun. It is calm, calm and strong.

It is easy to make fun of the metaphors and manners of a former age. But I cannot help wondering if Flaubert's "extraordinary tenderness" and Pope's unsteadied voice and Keats's conquistadors staring at each other with a wild surmise, and C. B. Tinker's trembling fingers and my father's tears do not all add up to an openness, and a kind of humility, of mind and heart from which we could learn. How rarely now, at least in my discipline, are we willing to let the unfathomable come to us on its own terms. How busily we insist, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, on plucking out the heart of mysteries of which we cannot even finger the first stops. How often we seem to value the great works primarily as trapezes to show our agility on the upward swing to tenure. And how very often we reduce them to cadavers by our skills in anesthesia. A gifted poet of our day, himself a professor of literature, attended not long since a session of papers on Swift, delivered at a typical annual meeting of a typical professional association. After it, he wrote a poem. The commentaries it reacts to may have been good, bad, or indifferent—no matter. For the poet, mere had been something terribly missing in that room, which his poem undertakes to restore. Later, he sent the poem to a friend named Wayne Burns, also an English professor who had been at the meeting, inscribed in a collection of Swift's poems. It reads as follows:

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I promised once if I got hold of This book I'd send it on to you These are the songs that Roethke told of, The curious music loved by few. I think of lanes in Laracor Where Brinsley MacNamara wrote His lovely elegy, before The Yahoos got the Dean by rote. Only, when Swift-men are all gone Back to their chosen fields by train And the drunk Chairman snores alone, Swift is alive in secret, Wayne: Singing for Stella's happiest day, Charming a charming man, John Gay, And greeting, now their bones are lost, Pope's beautiful, electric ghost. Here are some songs he lived in, kept Secret from almost everyone And laid away, while Stella slept, Before he slept, and died, alone. Gendy, listen, the great shade passes, Magnificent, who still can bear, Beyond the range of horses' asses, Nobilities, light, light and air.

IV From the pathology of some—not all, but all too many—of our professional meetings, it is an easy step to the pathology of the academy as a whole. (I have reached Bag No. 3.) How long can we safely assume that Congresses, legislatures, foundations, and generous men and women generally will continue to support what we do? Into eternity, we like to think, or at least into its nuclear equivalent, whichever comes first. Yet surely the signs of trouble are multiplying, at least for the humanities and literature, and, so far as I am competent to judge, for some of the social sciences as well. When one reads thoughtfully in the works by Darwin, Marx, and Freud cited earlier, or any of their other works, what one finds most impressive is not the competence they show in the studies with which we associate them, though that is of course impressive, but the range of what they knew, the staggering breadth of the reading which they had made their own and without which, one comes to understand, they

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could never have achieved the insights in their own areas that we honor them for. Today, it seems to me, we are still moving mostly in the opposite direction, despite here and there a reassuring revolt. We are narrowing, not enlarging our horizons. We are shucking, not assuming our responsibilities. And we communicate with fewer and fewer because it is easier to jabber in a jargon than to explain a complicated matter in the real language of men. How long can a democratic nation afford to support a narcissistic minority so transfixed by its own image? A splendid report by John Gerber, published a few years back but as pertinent today as it was then, exposes this flank of our irresponsibility unforgettably. In the word "our" I include only his field and mine, English literature; but I have the strong impression that the shoe fits others too. Though some of you will have seen the essay, I hope you will forgive me if I summarize it briefly for the rest. This time an English professor encounters Socrates in a Greek pub and introduces himself. Socrates makes the predictable comment that now he'll have to watch his English grammar. The professor makes the predictable reply that English grammar is not his concern—he's a humanist, he says. "As a matter of fact," he adds, "we like to think of our English departments as bastions of the humanities." Upon that cue, Socrates begins. He inquires about the great religious thinkers. "Well, no. We don't teach them nowadays: the trustees might object." What about the great philosophers? "Alas, a little too hard for our students to follow." The rhetoricians then: Cicero, Longinus, Boileau, Burke? "No, the speech departments have them." The ancients? "No, Classics has them." What about the moderns—the Europeans, the Asians, the Africans? "To tell you the honest truth, Socrates, the people interested in those things have gone off and established departments of Comp. Lit." "You must have stoutly resisted that move," says Socrates innocently. "Not at all," says the professor, "we encouraged it. They wanted their students to read texts in the original!" "But surely," says Socrates, "you're interested in language: what do you do about linguistics?" "Not very much, I'm afraid. The study of language has got so scientific we don't understand it any more." After the conversation has run through several further areas of humanistic learning—all of which it turns out, those bastions of the humanities exclude— Socrates interrupts. SOCRATES: Do I understand that you English teachers, after giving up the great works of religion, philosophy, and rhetoric, after limiting your literary interests substantially to writings in English, and after jettisoning linguistics, com-

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parative literature, creative writing, speech, journalism, American Studies, the theatre, and oral performance—that after eliminating all these valuable studies from your English curriculum, you are now in the process of eliminating training in writing as well? PROFESSOR: You put it too sweepingly, Socrates, but I guess what you say is more or less true. SOCRATES: My only conclusion is that you English teachers have developed the most oversized death-wish that I have seen in the last twenty-four centuries!—Will you join me in a drink? PROFESSOR: Why, yes, Socrates. That's very nice of you. What shall we drink? SOCRATES: Hemlock.

Whatever qualifications we might wish to make in Gerber's account, and plainly we are entitled to make a few, his main thesis stands. During my lifetime, we have very considerably lowered our sights on what the life of learning in almost any field entails; and not only our sights but our standards. During the recent unpleasantness, we permitted, or abetted, on most campuses the dissolution of almost every aspect of educational structure—not only distributional requirements, but philosophical, historical, mathematical, scientific, and literary requirements as well—all the while pretending to ourselves and the public that this was some sort of triumph of academic statesmanship rather than the penalty of having so lost our own bearings that we could not agree on what a liberal education should contain. One can only remark with sorrow the similar paralysis in the current Rockefeller Report of the Commission on the Humanities. As the New York Times reviewer points out, nowhere in that report is it made clear what, exactly, the humanities are, or why, explicitly, they are worth pursuing; and though we all know that in a scattering of institutions some portion of this lost consensus is in process of being regained, much remains to do. We have likewise lost face, in my opinion, by fostering a vast deal of solemn nonsense about "published scholarship." To study, to keep learning, to read widely and reflectively: these pursuits are essential to our profession, it goes without saying. I believe, too, that it is crucial to one's intellectual vitality to try to write (when one has something to write worth writing), partly for the same reason that hard physical exercise is important for physical health, partly because there is truth in the old chestnut: how do I know what I mean till I see what I say? But the qualifying clause is essential: one is to write when one has something to write worth writing. As a contemporary poet once happily put it: "In poetry everything is permitted. With this one condition, of course: you have

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to improve on the blank page." For much too long, I think, we have committed the lives of our young people to an idol of our own manufacture which rewards those who can persuade themselves to go numbly or cynically through the humbug it requires; penalizes those, often our very best, who are unable or unwilling to measure out their minds in three-year book-length sections; and encourages even the most seasoned scholars to blow up into mediocre treatises what might have made acceptable essays. Meantime, how many of us take the pains to share our learning, and the delight and wonder of the work to which we devote our lives, with a wider public? Surely that is an activity that would peculiarly become us as "humanists?" And yet when we practice it, how many of our colleagues can be counted on not to turn up their noses at us for "popularizing?" I omit the extenuations for lack of time. Obviously, we are not the sole begetters of this unedifying scene. Administrators, legislators, students, the state of the economy, and a certain easy-going dislike of hard choices embedded deep in the American grain have all collaborated with us. So has a rancid fag end romanticism currently infecting our lives, which identifies the self with tender shapeless breathings from some sort of psychic flower within and so recoils from all tasks "not personally fulfilling"—a phrase which frequently turns out to mean any task that is hard. We are not notably to blame either, I think, for what in some ways may be the most ominous single feature of our present environments. I mean the mistrust of people by people that turns almost every aspect of decision-making—institutional, professional, even pedagogical—into an adversary situation. An educational world that for all its flaws was once intensely humanistic because it was intensely personal and interpersonal on the order of the family is in the process of being depersonalized and routinized, on the model of the corporation, into contract hours, grievance committees, employer regulations, union work rules, and systematic resort to litigation by teachers, students, and administrations alike. The old situation may have been patriarchal or matriarchal, and sometimes as in families, injustice was done. The new situation is an institutionalized cold war, in which mutual trust, without which no educational endeavor can thrive long, is already becoming on some campuses the first casualty. Though I would be the first to admit that there is no idyllic solution for the problem of governance in colleges and universities, as there is not for the governance of peoples, it cannot be beyond human ingenuity, one thinks, to moderate the confusions of authority into which, in the academy, we have allowed ourselves to drift since World War II.

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It is the habit of old men, as Horace says, to be praisers of time past: laudatores temporis acti. You will forgive that, I hope. It is similarly their habit to go about giving people advice. Still, I cannot help thinking that during the next ten years' all of us face a rather pressing agenda if we are to be again what we have always claimed to be and if we are to be perceived by either the public or the private sectors as worthy of the privileges we receive. Let me, in conclusion, put the points that I would place at the top of that agenda, if it were mine to make, in the form of three questions: 1. Can we not discover ways to communicate with a far larger public than most of us do now? I was gratified to discover in a current newsletter a plea from Professor Edmund Morgan, whose credentials as a scholar are impeccable, for his colleagues in history to give over addressing minute groups of their peers, while meantime there exists a huge American public that hungers and thirsts after, and buys, hundreds of books by the so-called "popular" historians, who may often be less well-informed but do know how to combine instruction with pleasure. "We have all but surrendered," Professor Morgan writes, "the custody of the past to outsiders" (a term I secretly wish he had forborne to use). "It is time now to take it back, to stop sneering at popular historians and become, like them, professional writers." This is, in my view, so important an objective for all our disciplines at this time that if I were a graduate dean I would insist that every student be able to produce not only a dissertation acceptable to his instructors but an essay on the same subject of sufficient popular interest to find its way into a journal of general circulation. And I would try to make an arrangement with the local radio or television station to carry one such half-hour, live, each week. This has been done by a few in our profession. It should be done by many. The Edmund Wilsons and Malcolm Cowleys of this world do not spring full-armed from the head of Zeus. It takes much harder work to write for the public than to write for one's colleagues. And it has a cleansing effect on one's vocabulary. Pompous gibberish rapidly disappears. 2. How can we best lend a hand to our fellow-workers in once the vineyard, now the ravaged landscape of the secondary school? They, as you don't need me to tell you, are in desperate straits. Even in abstract intellectual terms, the situation is bleak enough—I borrow now from the commission report mentioned earlier: "The rate of illiteracy in this age group has been estimated at over ten percent and as high as twenty." This is at the end of high school!

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Consider the social loss in those figures and the future costs. Consider also that the abler teachers, those who can leave, are leaving, leaving now in the hundreds, and if you wonder why, visit their turf, smell the fear in the washrooms, watch grown men and women look helplessly on as overgrown boys, having checked in for roll-call, spit on the teacher's desk and check out for the day. It is almost as if Yeats had an American inner-city high school in mind when he wrote The Second Coming. For there, indeed, in these fallen days, the falcon does not hear the falconer, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the ceremony of innocence is drowned, the best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity. About some of this there is nothing we can do except as private citizens. But as groups of faculty on our respective campuses, there is much we can do for local secondary-school morale and for the improvement at that crucial level of the subject-matters we teach, by creating opportunities for interchange. We need to provide occasions when those teachers can meet with us and we with them in a common intellectual setting for a common intellectual purpose. Though I don't wish to puff my own university, I do believe it is now supporting the best program I know of for accomplishing this end. It is called the Yale/New Haven Teachers Institute and has lately gained sufficient national attention to bring presidents, deans, and school superintendents to New Haven to learn about it. I won't bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that it annually attracts fifty to sixty-five teachers from the New Haven area, gives them the stimulus that comes from small-group and person-toperson discussion, and guides the development by each participant of a teaching "unit" of about a semester's length in his or her chosen field. The teachers choose the unit, choose with the help of an advisory group the professors with whom they wish to work, and the learning process, as I have been told by more than one participating faculty member, soon becomes a two-way street. An important dividend for the faculty participant has proved to be the necessity of thinking very hard about ways of treating a complex problem with clarity and force while avoiding vulgarization. An equally important dividend for the schoolteacher, if I may judge from those to whom I have talked, is a deep sense of renewal, partly from the intellectual excitement of wrestling with a professional problem in the company of other adults, partly from the reassurance that they and their work matter, that somebody cares about what they are trying to do. They are as proud of their stack-cards to Sterling Library as any young lawyer of the announcement that he has made the firm. 3. My third question, though brief, is the one that matters most, and, if answered with the self-knowledge and the generosity that we sometimes

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show elsewhere, would take care of all the rest. Can we not be less selfimportant? posture less? swagger less? strut less? Can we not recognize that the three most dangerous giants-in-residence in every scholar/teacher's House of Pride are the temptation to view a younger colleague's excellence as a threat, the temptation to feed on the adulation that attends a cult, and the temptation to prostitute one's independence to some Establishment, academic, governmental, corporate, or—and now I will use the word for the first and last time in my life—hermeneutical? Above all, can we not try harder to remember that what happens when we see that unmistakable moment of excited revelation in a pair of eyes in the classroom where we teach—the moment that makes hours of drudgery fall away like the Ancient Mariner's albatross—has only a very little to do with us. We are catalysts at best. We can sometimes help, with tact, to dissipate the clouds that obstruct a vision. But we do not make that vision. It conies from elsewhere—through the text, through the student's DNA perhaps, and perhaps through mysteries of which we still know little. On the morning when William Blake died, we know from a friend's testimony, "he composed songs to his Maker, so sweetly to the ear of his Catherine [that was his wife's name] that, when she stood to hear him, he, looking upon her most affectionately, said: 'My beloved! they are not mine. No! They are not mine.'" When we remember, as we often have reason to do, those wry amusing words on the professor's door at Coe College, must we not also be careful to remember these?

1985 LAWRENCE STONE Dodge Professor of History Princeton University

I am, as you may well imagine, extremely flattered to have been invited by the ACLS to give the third Charles Homer Haskins Lecture. I feel particularly honored—or I think I do—to find that I am the first of the three speakers so far to be a working scholar and teacher, and not already emeritus. Why the Board saw fit to invite a relative juvenile like myself for this occasion I do not know. Further consideration of this question tempers my feeling of pride at being chosen at so youthful an age. Since the topic for the evening was described to me by President Ward as "reflections and reminiscences on a lifetime of work as a scholar," his presumption presumably was that for me that life had come to an end—that I had run out of gas—which of course may well be the case. To prepare for this lecture I asked to read what my two predecessors had said on this occasion, and was sent the first by Professor Maynard Mack. As I read it, my heart sank. There was no way that I could be as wise and as witty, as erudite and as amusing, all at the same time. It just wasn't possible. At a later stage, after I had written a first draft, I was particularly upset by his report of the acerbic remarks of his wife when he showed her the first draft of his intellectual autobiography' "I suppose there is no fool like an old fool. Do as you like: but don't forget that what you've got here is at least an hour and ten minutes too long." I frantically counted the pages of my text, which came to 51. Reeling from this withering blast from Mrs. Mack, I very nearly threw in the sponge and told President Ward that I couldn't and wouldn't do it. But then I gritted my teeth and set to work, and here is the result. This is the story of my intellectual odyssey over the last fifty-some years through an ocean full of storms, whirlpools and hidden rocks. We can, I 17

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think, safely omit the first eight years of life, which are anyway only of interest to dedicated Freudians convinced that the personality is fixed in concrete at this period—and sexual concrete at that. All that might be significant during these years is that this is when I first became a fanatical collector—a collector of anything: postage stamps, butterflies, fossils, cigarette cards. There is obviously a relationship between this early but unfocused collecting instinct, and the adult pursuit by the scholar in libraries and archives of facts and yet more facts to buttress his hypotheses and illustrate and give plausibility—it would be impertinent to say proof-—to his arguments. At eight I went off to an English prep school and there began to serve what was to prove an eight-year term as a slave in the intellectual salt-mines of intensive training in the classics. As a form of instruction, what I got was whimsically known at the time as "a liberal education." In reality it was an intensely narrow program, a perverted derivative from the educational curriculum worked out 400 years earlier by Vives and Erasmus. By the 1930s it consisted of a mechanical and dreary memorization of the vocabulary and grammar of two long-dead languages. The pronunciation of one of them—Latin—was then taught in England in a manner altogether unintelligible either to the ancient Romans or to the twentieth century natives of any other country. Thus, whereas my French father-in-law when in a concentration camp during the Second World War found it possible to communicate in Latin with Hungarian aristocrats and Polish intellectuals, the Latin I learnt—the socalled "old pronunciation"—could have served no such practical purpose. What I did learn that was useful—though I learnt it the hard way, with blows as a punishment for error—were the rules of Latin grammar, which may perhaps have been helpful in improving my style in English later on. But I am even doubtful about that. Trained in this manner, it is easy to fall into the stately Ciceronian prose of rolling periods perfectly balanced one against the other. Much as I admire the prose of Gibbon and Lord Chesterfield, the style just does not suit me, for by nature I am most at ease in a free-wheeling atmosphere. Let me make the point by analogy. Once, at the age of twelve, I was thought to be a promising cricketer—a batsman. So my school hired a kindly but unimaginative elderly ex-professional cricketer to teach me to hold a straight bat. He succeeded only too well. My bat was forever straight but I never played a successful game again, for he had managed to kill my natural instinct to swipe the ball in a thoroughly unorthodox but effective manner. There is perhaps something to be learnt about teaching in general from this sad little story—a tragedy for me since I used to dream about playing for England one day.

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What I acquired—and let me stress that during those eight years from 8 to 16 I was taught little else—was a facility in translating a London Times editorial from English prose into Latin prose, from Latin prose into Latin verse, from Latin verse into Greek prose, and from Greek prose back into English prose. You will have guessed that I was not very good at it, partly from natural ineptitude, partly from lack of will. I could not for the life of me see the point of it at all, and I still don't. Even the Latin books we read were dull. Virgil and Livy were, to my perhaps philistine sensibility, a bore. We were never introduced to books that would both stimulate our interest and provide useful information about adult life, such as Tacitus on the court politics of tyranny, or Ovid on the art of heterosexual love. Like most people, I would imagine, I was eventually taught to love scholarship by a handful of gifted teachers. I will not dwell upon my experiences at an English public school—in my case Charterhouse—because this is a topic that novelists and autobiographers have already made something of a bore. If at the time I had known anything about social anthropology or the political theory of totalitarianism, I could have understood a great deal more. It would have helped, for example, if I had realized that what I was experiencing was merely an extended male puberty rite, very similar to those of many other, more primitive, societies in the world: total segregation from the other sex; regular beatings to be endured in stoical silence; humiliation rituals; a complex formal hierarchy symbolized by elaborate dress codes; inadequate food; sexual initiation by older males; and the learning of a secret language, in this case Latin. I obtained my freedom from enslavement to the classics thanks to the direct intervention of a new headmaster, Sir Robert Birley, who single-handedly changed my life. He took me under his personal tuition, and in one-and-a-half years of intensive coaching enabled me to obtain an open scholarship in history at Oxford. What made him so dazzlingly successful as a history teacher was his endless fund of enthusiasm for whatever topic happened to be uppermost in his mind. Birley did not merely pull off the remarkable coup of training me in 18 months to get a history scholarship to Oxford. He also changed the course of my intellectual development a second time: immediately after the examination, he dispatched me to Paris for six months' exposure to another European culture. There I first encountered (though not in the flesh) that remarkable phenomenon, the Paris mandarin intelligentsia, as well as the great Anncdes school of historians, then represented by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. It was the beginning of a lifelong admiring but critical relation-

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ship with French intellectual culture which has deeply influenced my life of learning. Let me return for a moment to Sir Robert Birley. He was an eccentric figure—half loyal member of England's ruling elite and of the Church of England, and half reforming rebel and idealistic visionary. As a young master at Eton, for example, he openly expressed his sympathy with the strikers during the General Strike of 1926, a position for which some people never forgave him. He was headmaster first of Charterhouse, then of Eton, sandwiching in between a stint as Educational Adviser to the Deputy Military Governor of the British Zone of Germany after the war. Later he was Professor of Education at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He was a conservative radical, whose nickname among the backwoods Etonian Tories was "Red Robert." He was not only a great teacher, but a great moral reformer. Before the war he had fought Nazism, and spent hours trying to argue me out of my incipient pacifist tendencies. After the war he worked to bring a new generation of liberal Germans back into a federation of Europe. Later still, in the 1960s, he fought to bring education to the blacks of South Africa, personally conducting classes in Soweto; and finally he did his best to humanize and civilize those great barbarian institutions, the English public schools of Charterhouse and Eton. If Sir Robert Birley provided the inspiration for my scholarly interests, and deeply affected my moral and political attitudes, the second great influence upon me was an Oxford medieval history tutor, John Prestwich by name. He was—indeed, still is—one of those all too common Oxford figures, with a towering local reputation but no international visibility for lack of publications. I studied the Third Crusade under him, as a special subject. At first, I would read my weekly essay, which he would then systematically demolish, leaving me with little but a pile of rubble. I finally decided that my only hope of self-defense was to overwhelm him with data. Since the prescribed texts were entirely taken from the writings of the Christian crusaders, I sought out little-known chronicles by Moslem Arabs, of which I found a fair number in French translation. Artfully, and with studied casualness, I inserted into my essays some recondite facts from these obscure and dubious sources, as a result of which I at least got Prestwich momentarily rattled. I never won the battle, my arguments were always effectively demolished, but even the minor victories improved my self-esteem. The experience taught me the importance of sheer factual information—erudition, if you like—in the cut-throat struggle for survival in the life of learning. I discovered that knowledge is power. It

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was the experience of that term with John Prestwich which made me decide to be an historian, and an archive-based historian at that. The third great influence upon my development as an historian was R. H. Tawney. Every one knows about Tawney, the Christian socialist, at once the eminence grise and the conscience of the English labor movement in the first half of the twentieth century, the eloquent preacher of equality, the stern denunciator of the evils of unbridled capitalism, the re-interpreter to the Anglo-Saxon world of Weber's ideas about the relation of Protestantism to Capitalism, and the great historian of "Tawney's Century," the period 15401640 in England. He was a saintly, if not altogether practical, figure, the only person I have ever met who had a genuine dislike of money. He simply hated the stuff, and tried, as far as humanly possible, to do without it. It was his impassioned book about the sufferings of the sixteenth century English peasantry from the enclosure of the land by ruthless capitalist landlords, and his equally impassioned denunciations of the evil and corrupt machinations of early modern merchants, entrepreneurs and money-lenders, which drew me to the sixteenth century, and stimulated two of my first forays into print. I first met Tawney during the war, and I eagerly cultivated his company whenever I came back to London on leave from my ship. Although I was only an ignorant undergraduate from Oxford, and a sailor, he nevertheless always greeted me warmly. By then he had been bombed out of his house and was living in indescribable squalor in a leaky mews in Bloomsbury, surrounded by a chaos of books, papers, cats and leftover plates of food. Draft blueprints for the Labor Party's program for a more egalitarian post-war Britain were jumbled up with notes on early seventeenth century English social history and tattered yellowing fragments of jottings about the Chinese peasantry. I had many long talks with Tawney, bundled up in overcoats in these unappetising surroundings, and I listened carefully to what he had to say, both about the state of the world and how it could be put right, and about seventeenth century England. Listening carefully, I should add, was not easy, since one had constantly to be on guard lest he set himself on fire. This often happened when the long stalks of wild herbs, which he stuffed loosely into his pipe, caught fire and fell out on to his jacket or trousers, which as a result were always full of black burn holes. What I learnt from Tawney was that the documents for early modern history were preserved in sufficient quantity to make it possible to enter into the very minds of the actors. This single fact converted me from a medievalist into an early modernist. Second, I learnt that in this period there had taken

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place in England nearly all the greatest transformations in the history of the West: the shifts from feudalism to capitalism, and from monolithic Catholicism to Christian pluralism, and later to secularism; the rise and fall of Puritanism; the aborted evolution of the all-powerful nation-state; the first radical revolution in Western history; the first large-scale establishment of a relatively liberal polity with diffused power, religious toleration, and a bill of rights; and the creation of a society ruled by a landed elite unique in Europe for its entrepreneurship, paternalism, and near-monopoly of political power. Finally I learnt from Tawney, as I had from Birley, that history can be a moral as well as a scholarly enterprise, and that it ought not, and indeed cannot, be disassociated from a vision of the contemporary world and how it should be ordered. The fourth important teacher to influence my thinking was yet another eccentric, Sir Keith Hancock, whom I did not meet until immediately after the war. It was his scholarly career and conversation that first proved to me that there was something to be said for an interdisciplinary and trans-cultural approach to history. For in his person and his writings he demonstrated that it was possible, and indeed fruitful, to know about such apparently diverse matters as land tenure in Tuscany, the career in South Africa of General Smuts, the economic development of Australia, and the history of modern warfare. I was very lucky to have been brought at an early stage into contact with four such remarkable men. As a result of them, I survive today as something of a dinosaur, the last of the Whigs, and in many ways still a child of the Enlightenment. I emerged from their tutelage with an abiding faith in reason, in the possibility of limited material and moral progress, in paternalist responsible leadership, and in the rule of laws, not men. It is a fading, tattered faith these days, a survival from that older liberal world of the Victorian professional class from which both Tawney and Birley sprang, and the ethos of which the Australian Hancock had absorbed during his long stay at All Souls College, Oxford. During World War II, I spent five years at sea with the Royal Navy. As anyone who has experienced it knows, war is 99.9% boredom and discomfort and 0.1% sheer terror. In my case the discomfort was substantially mitigated by occupation of a cabin—admittedly shared—and plentiful and regular supplies of food and, above all, alcohol. If there has ever been a just war in history, then this was it, and I do not regret my five-year diversion from the life of learning. In fact the diversion was not complete, for I wrote my first historical article

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while navigator of a destroyer patrolling the South Atlantic. I may not have been a very good navigator of that destroyer—I confess I ran it aground twice—but at least I began my life of learning while on board. The subject of the article was the shameful treatment by the government of the English sailors who had taken part in the Armada Campaign of 1588. The topic was obviously related to my immediate experience, but what is of more interest is whence I got my data. The answer is from that characteristic mid-Victorian institution, the London Library, which right through World War II cheerfully and efficiently dispatched rare and valuable research books to the furthest ends of the earth, which often arrived some three to six months after they had been ordered. The contribution of that private library to the life of learning in Britain, especially during the war, can hardly be overestimated. The end of the war found me attached to the American Seventh Fleet off Japan. Immediately after the armistice, I was flown home from the Pacific, since for some unknown bureaucratic reason top priority for demobilization in Britain had been decreed for three classes of persons: coalminers, clergymen—and students. The flight was one of my most dangerous experiences during the war, since the pilot was a psychological and physical wreck, with trembling hands, as a result of flying fifty missions over Germany. But it got me back to Oxford in early November 1945, just in time to enroll for the year, and so to take the final examination and graduate as a B.A. in June 1946. By paying an extra five pounds I also got an M.A. degree on the same occasion, so that I was a B.A. for only about ten minutes, just time to change my gown and hood. I submit that this may be something of a record. I must also be one of the few people alive today to have bought a degree from a major university for hard cash and no work at all. I did not proceed to embark on a doctoral dissertation, since in those days this was still something that a graduate of Oxford or Cambridge felt to be beneath his dignity—a peculiar academic rite depassage that foreigners went in for, like Germans, or French, or Americans. Instead, I settled down with a research grant, and began, all by myself, to write a book, quite unaware of any foolhardiness in so doing. It was, of course, a terrible mistake, for I badly needed the close discipline and advice that only a conscientious official supervisor can provide. As a result, I had to learn from my own mistakes—and I made plenty. I chose to write a biography of a late sixteenth-century entrepreneur, a financier of governments, an espionage agent, a diplomat engaged in the recruitment of mercenary armies, a world monopolist of alum (an essential raw material for the dyeing of cloth), and a business tycoon with a finger in

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many, usually unsavory, pies. This bizarre figure began life as a member of a distinguished Genoese merchant family and ended it as a Cambridgeshire country squire with a wealthy Dutch wife and an English knighthood conferred by Queen Elizabeth. Urbane and unscrupulous rogue that he was, in the end I found that I got to like him, although the book (An Elizabethan: Sir Horatio Palavicino) certainly served my original purpose of illuminating the seamier side of early international finance capitalism. My next topic was inspired by the seminal articles of R. H. Tawney about the rise of the gentry in the century before the English Civil War—a theory which, if stripped of its Marxist ideology about the rise of the bourgeoisie and some of its dubious statistical props, has in fact turned out to be largely true. My first preliminary foray into this area was a disaster. I published an article claiming that most of the late Elizabethan aristocracy were hovering on the verge of financial ruin. Unfortunately the data were badly handled by me. It was my tutor, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who had first drawn my attention to them, but without pointing out the problems inherent in their interpretation. This mistake of mine provided him with the opportunity for an article of vituperative denunciation which connoisseurs of intellectual terrorism still cherish to this day. What I learnt from this episode—learnt the hard way—is that before plunging into a public archive, it is first essential to discover just why and how the records were kept, and what they signified to the clerks who made the entries. Before describing how I reacted to this setback, I must pause to explain a peculiar intellectual diversion: in 1946 I also began work on a large textbook on medieval English sculpture in a classic art history series edited by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner. This implausible venture into the field of professional art history came about in the following archetypical English way. First, that passion for collecting everything and anything, to which I have already referred, had somehow driven me in my middle teens to assemble photographs of English Romanesque sculpture. Equipped with a car—which cost all of three pounds—and a Kodak Box Brownie camera—which cost five shillings but happened by some miracle to have a near-perfect lens—I roamed the countryside during the holidays between 1936 and 1939, taking photographs of Romanesque sculpture in English churches. In 1938 I made contact with Sir Thomas Kendrick of the British Museum. He was then engaged on a national survey of Anglo-Saxon sculpture, and in his generous way took me—then still a schoolboy and first-year undergraduate—on his photographic team for two summer expeditions in 1938 and 1939. After the war, in early 1946, Kendrick had been invited by Nikolaus

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Pevsner to write the volume on English Medieval Sculpture in his Pelican History of Art Series. He declined, perhaps because he already had hopes of becoming Director of the British Museum, as happened soon after. Asked who could do the job instead, Kendrick, who was not a cautious man, named me. I was at that moment a history undergraduate at Oxford; I had never taken a course in art history or written a line about it in my life; and I had only just come back from five years at sea. Trained in the professional German school of art history, Pevsner was understandably horrified by Kendrick's irresponsible suggestion. But he felt he had to give me a contract, for reasons which he explained to me very frankly when we met: "Tom Kendrick won't do it," he said, "and there appears to be no one else in the country in the least interested in the subject. Kendrick says that I should give you a contract. I don't trust you at all, for you have absolutely no credentials for the job, but I don't see what else I can do. I would like to see a draft chapter as soon as possible." On this rather menacing note our interview ended, and a few days later I happily signed the contract. Secretly, I was as uneasy as Pevsner himself about the capacity to pull it off of this ignorant, ill-educated, amateur ex-sailor and now undergraduate. This bizarre episode could only have happened in a society like England, which had remained as profoundly imbued with the cult of the amateur as it had been in the eighteenth century heydey of the virtuoso. The episode was also only possible in a society which still operated on the eighteenth century patronage network system, in which a tiny entrenched elite distributed jobs and favors to their clients, friends, and proteges. Before resuming the narrative, something should be said about the intellectual atmosphere at Oxford in those far-off days just after the Second World War. In the mode of teaching and in the prescribed curriculum for the examination in the School of Modern (as opposed to Ancient) History at Oxford, nothing much had changed since its foundation at the end of the nineteenth century. It was a curriculum stifling both in its national insularity and in its limited late Victorian conception of what subjects were embraced within the canon of historical scholarship. It was perfectly possible and indeed normal to graduate with first class honors without having studied the history of any continent save Europe and indeed with only minimal knowledge of any country but England—not even Scotland or hapless Ireland. It was also not unusual to have studied little or no social, economic, demographic, cultural, artistic, intellectual, educational or familial history, and to be wholly innocent of any contact with quantitative methodology or the history of the working class. The social sciences were unknown, or if known were cordially despised. On the other hand, under the guidance of gifted and dedicated tutors, the

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undergraduate education offered by Oxford was unsurpassed in its capacity to teach swift and clear writing, to encourage careful analysis of the evidence, and to produce a mind open to varying interpretations of a single event or set of events. I consider myself extremely lucky to have had that remarkable experience. In Britain, the post-war period was a time of boundless optimism and confidence—a fact which is hard to remember, much less to comprehend, in these depressed and disillusioned post-imperial times, when England has sunk to the level of a third-rate power in almost all fields of endeavor except those of the pure intellect. To us young men who returned from the war in 1945, the whole world seemed to be our oyster, and all problems of scholarship—to say nothing of those of suffering humanity—were thought to be soluble. Some of this confidence in the future may have been stimulated by close cohabitation with our American Allies during the war. At all events, this was an optimism shared by nuclear physicists, Oxford philosophers, social historians, and Keynesian economists, as well as politicians. I well remember a dinner conversation with Peter Strawson, today one of Oxford's most distinguished philosophers, during which he expressed his anxiety about what he would find to do in his late middle age, since it was clear from the way things were going that by then there would be no major philosophical problems left to solve. In history, some of us had much the same hubristic confidence in a wholly new approach. We were dedicated converts to theAnnales school of history based in Paris, and we were certain that the most intractable problems of history would soon fall to the assaults of quantitative social and economic investigation. The political narrative mode of our elders—"L'histoire historisante" as it was derogatively called—was beneath our contempt. In time, we believed, such hitherto unsolved problems as the causes of the English or the French Revolutions, or the origins of capitalism and the rise of the bourgeoisie, would be solved by our new tools and new approaches. Bliss it was to be alive and a radical social historian in 1945. We waited breathlessly for each new issue of Annales or the Economic History Review, every one of which seemed to contain an article which opened up great new vistas of historical exploration and interpretation. I stress this atmosphere of self-confidence and heady excitement, since nothing could be more different from the self-doubt, uncertainty, caution, and scepticism about the very existence of truth or about ways to get at it, which afflicts all branches of the humanities today in 1985. Inspired by the mood of optimism of the late 1940s about the possibilities of the new social history, and stung by Trevor-Roper's onslaught on my scholarly credentials, I decided to undertake a large-scale investigation into

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the economic resources and management, social status and military and political power, life-style, values, education, and family structure, of the English aristocracy in the century before the outbreak of the English Revolution. My initial assumption had been that the English aristocracy in that period was the epitome of an incompetent, frivolous, and decadent ruling class about to be set aside by a rising bourgoisie. Fifteen years of careful investigation, however, convinced me that this simplistic model failed to fit the facts. The Marxist interpretation of the role of the aristocracy in the English Revolution, with which I had set out, had been shattered by close contact with the empirical evidence. The solution to my dilemma came from my belated discovery of Max Weber, whose writings, as they slowly appeared in more or less intelligible English translations, have probably influenced me more than those of any other single scholar. Weber's subtle distinction between class and status, and his intense preoccupation with the relationship of ideas and ideology to social and political reality have guided my thinking and inspired my research from the mid-1950s to the present day. But the influence of neither Marx nor Weber explains why I have chosen to spend most of my life of learning studying the acts, behavior and thoughts of a ruling elite, rather than of the masses. One justification for such concentration upon so tiny a minority is that this is the only group whose lives and thoughts and passions are recorded in sufficient detail to make possible investigation in full social and psychological depth. Only this handful were fully literate, in the sense that they wrote continually to each other and about each other, and their writings have been preserved. If one wishes to discover the quirks and quiddities of personality, the intimacies of love and hate and lust, the revelations of financial speculation or rascality, the backstairs intrigues of power and status, one is inexorably forced to concentrate one's attention upon the elite, since the evidence about individuals in the past much below this high social level only rarely exists. Although I have relied heavily upon quantification—most of my books and articles contain graphs and tables—I have always been primarily concerned with people, following the maxim of Marc Bloch: "Ma proie, c'est 1'homme." In this pursuit I have been inexorably drawn to the elite. The other justification for concentration on the elite is that it was from this group that for centuries were drawn the political rulers of the country, and the patrons and principal consumers of its high culture. An Englishman, far more than the resident in any other Western country, does not have to read Pareto to learn about the dominance of elites. From his earliest childhood he is made

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acutely aware of the horizontal layering of the society in which he lives. This elaborate stratification is displayed even today at every moment by such external features as accent, vocabulary, clothes, table manners, and even physical size and shape. I have therefore spent the best part of my life following the trails left in the records by that English landed elite which for so many centuries largely monopolized so much of the three great Weberian entities of wealth, status, and power. As it happened, I could not have chosen a better moment than the late 1940s in which to plunge into the private archives of the English aristocracy, which for the first time had become accessible, thanks to the financial plight of their owners. For fifteen years I enjoyed the dizzy excitement of turning over and reading in archive rooms, cellars, and attics great masses of papers which no one had ever examined before. The most dramatic moment always came on first sight of a private archive, which could range from the supremely orderly to the supremely chaotic. At one great house, the late duke had spent a lifetime sorting, cataloguing, and filing his huge collection of family papers, and in his last illness was said to have asked to be taken down to the archive room and laid on the work table in order to die amid his beloved papers. His son was a playboy, too busy chasing girls to bother answering the importunate letters of scholars. But by sheer luck, a telephone call was answered by his aged nanny, who graciously agreed to let me into what turned out to be an amazing and amazingly well-ordered archive, filling several rooms. I believe I was the first person to sit at that table since the removal of the late duke's corpse. At another great seat I scribbled away in the depth of winter huddled up in an overcoat and blankets at one end of a long freezing room, while at the other end two aged servants sat beside a small flickering coal fire, leisurely polishing the seventeenth century armor for the benefit of next summer's tourists, and gossiping endlessly—and maliciously—about their master and mistress. When my fingers became too cold to hold the pen, I would join them round the fire for a few moments. It was a scene which could well have occurred in the seventeenth century. Another house had been gutted by a fire some thirty years earlier, but the contents of the archive room had been saved and thrown pell-mell into a room above the old stables, now the garage. Squeezing past his huge RollsRoyce, the owner led the way up the creaking stairs, turned the key in the rusty lock and pushed the door. Nothing happened. Further forceful pushing nudged it partly open, revealing a great sea of paper and parchment covering

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the whole floor to the height of one to three feet. The only way to enter was to step on this pile, and, as I trod gingerly, seals of all ages from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century cracked and crunched under my feet. Rarely have I felt so guilty, but the guilt was later assuaged by being instrumental in getting the great archive deposited in the local record office for safe-keeping and cataloguing. Occasionally the owner of the papers would invite me to lunch. The experience was nearly always the same: a spectacularly elegant dining-room with millions of dollars' worth of pictures on the wall; exquisite wine; execrable food, so unappetising that it was often very hard to swallow; and erratic service provided by a bedraggled and sometimes rather drunken butler. Such were the pleasures and pains of the life of learning, as I wrote my book on The Crisis of the Aristocracy. During the late 1950s the expansion of my interests, which first began with the discovery of Weber, was further stimulated by two events. The first was that in 1958 I joined the Editorial Board of Past and Present, which in my— admittedly prejudiced—opinion is one of the two best historical journals in the world (Annales: Economies, Civilisations, Societies being the other). At that time the Board was equally divided between Marxists (many of them longterm members of the Communist Party who had only recently resigned after the Russian invasion of Hungary), and liberals like myself. But although it is a very active and contentious board there has never been an occasion, so far as I can recall, in which the division of opinion has been on ideological lines of Marxists versus liberals. This is a small fact about English intellectual history, which is, I believe, worth recording, although I have no explanation to offer for it. The second event that turned out to have a major influence on my life as a scholar was the shift from Oxford to Princeton in 1963. This move—the most sensible thing I ever did in my life apart from getting married—was made partly as the result of push—I was tired of the insurmountable disciplinary ring-fence erected at Oxford around the core of English political and consitutional history, and also of the crushing burden of many hours of monotonous tutorial teaching; and partly as a result of pull—the open-mindedness to new ideas and new disciplines and new areas of the world which I had observed at Princeton on a visit two years before to the Institute for Advanced Study. At Princeton, I discovered two things. The first was a world of historical scholarship, embracing not only all of Europe, but also America (of whose history at the time of my arrival I knew nothing) as well as the Near East, and East Asia.

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One of the earliest results of this totally new world view was a joint article, written with my colleague and friend Marius Jansen, comparing education and the modernizing process in England and Japan. Another area of scholarship which for a few years in the 1960s greatly influenced my interpretation of historical development was the work then being done by American political theorists on the problems of "modernization" and revolution. In retrospect, I think that my enthusiasm for their model-building was probably exaggerated, but at least they provided me with two valuable tools with which to break open the tough nut of The Causes of the English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, a book I published in 1972. The first was the somewhat arbitrary but useful division of causes of such an explosion into long-term, medium-term, and short-term. The second was the concept of "relative deprivation" which allowed me to break free from the fallacious necessity of relating observed behavior to objective conditions of life. But in doing so, I fell into a small puddle of jargon, freely using words like "pre-conditions," "precipitants," "triggers," "multiple dysfunction," "J curve," and so on. All this and relative deprivation theory annoyed my English critics, who enjoyed themselves making a mockery of my enthusiasm for these new-fangled transatlantic words and concepts from the social sciences. If I had to write the book today, I would use jargon more discriminately. Another great discovery made at Princeton was the scope and range of computerized quantitative historical studies then in progress in the United States. In my enthusiasm for this brave new world, I first conceived and then obtained funds for a massive statistical investigation of social mobility in the higher reaches of English society from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The tasks of directing the researchers, encoding the data, negotiating with the computer programmer and making summary tables from vast stacks of green print-out were fortunately undertaken by my wife, who spent fifteen years working on this project. My own work was interrupted, for reasons I will explain in a moment, and the results were only published last year in our book An Open Elite? England 1540-1880. Political theory and computerized quantification are far from being the only novelties I found on arrival at Princeton. Another influence on my intellectual evolution at that time was the writings of the sociologist R. K. Merton, from whom I learnt, amongst other things, the importance of medium-range generalization. This search for the Aristotelian mean in terms of problems to be solved, is, in my view, the best safeguard against shipwreck on the Scylla of unverifiable global speculation, or the Charybdis of empirical research so narrow in scope and positivistic in attitude that it is of little

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concern to anyone except one or two fellow-specialists, as practiced by so many young scholars today. Although we were colleagues at Oxford, it was only after arrival at Princeton that I first discovered the work of the great anthropologist EvansPritchard, and more recently still that I came under the influence of the newer school of symbolic anthropologists whose most eminent and most elegant practitioner is my friend Clifford Geertz. Above all, the contribution of the anthropologists has been to alert historians to the power of "thick description"—that is, how a close and well-informed look at seemingly trivial acts, events, symbols, gestures, patterns of speech or behavior can be made to reveal whole systems of thought; and to draw our attention to problems of kinship, lineage, or community structures, whose significance would have eluded us without their guidance. Finally, interest in the history of the family and sexual relations inevitably drew me to psychology. Here I found Freud less than helpful, partly because his time-bound late nineteenth-century mid-European values cannot be projected back onto the past, and partly because of the fundamentally ahistorical cast of his thought which assumes that the human personality is more or less fixed for life in the first few months or years. The developmental models evolved by more recent ego-psychologists, such as Erik Erikson or Jerome Kagan, are much more useful to the working historian interested in the continuous interplay of nature and nurture, of innate drives and overriding cultural conditioning. Freud certainly admits to such cultural configurations in his Civilization and Its Discontents but only in a negative and pessimistic way. Before summing up. I must explain why it was that I interrupted my quantitative project on elite mobility for some five years to write a large book on Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800, It is a work based almost entirely on non-quantitative printed literary materials mainly from the elite class, and it lays as much stress on emotional as on structural developments. It came about this way. I had long been tinkering with a lecture on the family, when in 1973 I suffered a mild heart attack and was hospitalized for six weeks without telephone, visitors or other contacts with the outside world. I felt perfectly fit and, allowing eight hours a day for sleep, there stretched before me the prospect of being able to read without interruption by anyone for sixteen hours a day for forty-two days. If my mathematics are correct—which some think they rarely are—this adds up to a total of 672 hours of reading. I therefore instructed my wife to remove from the University library shelves all English collections of family letters, autobiographies, advice books, journals,

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etc. from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, and bring them to my bedside, along with a substantial supply of paper. Thus armed, I read and read and read, and emerged six weeks later with almost enough material to write a book. Hence the diversion from the computerized project on social mobility, to which I returned five years later in 1977. Throughout my time at Oxford and Princeton, I have never wavered in my (always qualified) admiration for theAnnales school of historians in Paris. But it is a reflection of the change of time and mood that today, while retaining my deep admiration for the Annales group as the most talented, innovative, and influential historians in the world, I nonetheless have developed certain reservations about their basic principles and methods, which were expressed in my notorious article on "The Revival of Narrative," published in 1979.I am unconvinced that their favorite methodological division between static "structure" and dynamic "conjuncture" is always the best approach. Even less do I accept their three-tiered model of causal factors in history, rising from the economic and demographic base through the middle layer of the social structure to the derivative superstructure of ideology, religion, political beliefs, and mentalite. This wedding-cake mode of analysis presupposes the predominance of material factors over cultural ones—which I reject—and also precludes the possibility, so well brought out by Max Weber, that the three levels are in a constant state of dynamic interaction, rather than in a hierarchy of domination and dependence. Finally, there is a strong positivist materialism behind the thirst of the Annales school for quantifiable data about the physical world, which even in the immediate post-war period I found impossible to accept without reservations. For example, despite its enormous length, the most brilliant pioneer work of this School, Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean in the Time of Philip II, barely mentions religion, either Christianity or Islam. My 1979 article on the revival of narrative was explicitly intended as a statement of observed fact about the way the profession of history was going, and not at all as a prescriptive signpost for the future. It was designed to bring out into the open a subterranean drift back to something I loosely—and I now think misleadingly—defined as "narrative." The paper was taken in many quarters, however, as a programmatic call to arms against social science quantification and analytical history. Agitated defenders, fearful for their turf and their grants, criticized my alleged betrayal of the good old cause in almost every journal in the profession. More in sorrow than in anger, my old friend Robert Fogel, in his Presidential address to the Social Science History Association, solemnly excommunicated me from that church. In some quarters I

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became an instant pariah. And yet in the subsequent few years my prophecy has, I believe, been fully vindicated. Except in economic history, where it still reigns supreme, old-style grandiose cliometric social science history now has its back to the wall. More humanistic and more narrative approaches to history are indeed growing, micro-history of a single individual or an event is becoming a fashionable genre, and a new kind of political history, now firmly anchored in the social and ideological matrix, is reviving. Even intellectual history—no longer that dreary "History of Ideas" paper-chase that always ended up with either Plato or Aristotle—has undergone an astonishing transformation and resurgence. All my work has been based on two fundamental hypotheses about how the historical process works. The first is that great events must have important causes, and not merely trivial ones. The second is that all great events must have multiple causes. This eclectic approach towards causation has given rise to a certain amount of negative criticism. Many scholars whose judgement I respect have described the assemblage of a multiplicity of causes for any given phenomenon as "a shopping list," the mere unweighted enumeration of a whole series of variables of widely different types and significance. This is true, but an argument for multiple causation can be made on the grounds used by Max Weber. They are convincing, provided that they form a set of "elective affinities," held together not by mere random chance but by a system of logical integration that points them all in the same direction and makes them mutually reinforcing. Despite the criticism, therefore, I still adhere to a feedback model of mutually reinforcing trends, rather than a linearly ordered hierarchy of causal factors. I do admit, however, that sometimes I have neglected to show just how this glue of "elective affinities" has in practice worked. Looking back on it, it is clear that what is peculiar about my intellectual career is that I have never stayed long in one place. Most historians select a single fairly narrow field as their own intellectual territory, and spend a lifetime cultivating that same ground with more and more tender loving care. The advantage of such a procedure is that one becomes the world expert on that patch of turf, building a framework of knowledge, expertise, and experience which is cumulative over a lifetime. I have deliberately followed a different course, preferring to roam unusually freely across the historical prairie, although I have confined myself to a single culture, namely that of England, and mostly to a single class, the landed elite. But first, I have ranged over time from the middle ages to the nineteenth century. Second, I have jumped from topic to topic, from biography to economic history to art history to social

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history to cultural history to educational history to family history. Third, conscious from an early age of the provisional nature of historical wisdom, I have moved in a restless quest for theories, concepts, approaches, and models more satisfying than the old, and in methodological inspiration from Marx to Weber to some of the modern American social scientists, first sociologists, then political theorists, and more recently anthropologists. This drift from century to century, this flitting from topic to topic, and these changes in inspiration have inevitably brought their dangers and defects. First, they have meant working very fast, a process which can lead to mistakes, often minor but sometimes serious. Second, the level of my scholarly expertise in any single topic in any single century in any part of England is inevitably less than that of one who has spent a lifetime tilling that particular field. Third, the desire to bring order and shape to a complex problem, such as the causes of the English Revolution or the evolution of the family, has inevitably given rise to over-schematization and generalizations which need more qualification. After all, there are no generalizations, in history or any other discipline, which do not need more qualification. And fourth, the fact that my range of expertise is primarily concentrated upon the elite at the top of the social pyramid has sometimes led to rash and ill-informed assertions about the behavior of the lower classes. These are the reasons why so many more cautious academic reviewers, on receiving a new book of mine, instinctively reach for their pens and write: "There he goes again." On the other hand, I have been saved—if saved is the right word—from Parsonian functionalism, French structuralism, and linguistic deconstruction, partly by my inability to understand what they are all about, but mainly by a gut feeling that they are too simplistic and must be wrong. I have always been concerned with public affairs, the effect of which upon the life of learning has taken two forms. First, I have tried to save myself from being trapped in an academic ivory tower by reaching out for a larger audience. This has meant reviewing—often rather critically—a wide range of books for journals with a large national readership. This is of course a highrisk policy that usually brings its punishment, for many of my victims sooner or later find their revenge by savaging a book of mine. In addition to reviewing in national journals, I have tried to make my books accessible to the general public, by following the production of a large-scale academic study in hardcovers with that of a cheap paperback abridged version. One result of this concern with the world outside academia has been more profound in its consequences. Although it was not clear to me at the time, it is obvious upon reflection that the subject matter of my historical interest in the

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past has tended to shift in reaction to current events and current values. My first article, on the life of seamen in the Elizabethan navy, was written in 1942 on board a destroyer in the South Atlantic Ocean. My next enterprise, a book about a crooked international financier, was largely written in the socialist euphoria of the early days of the first British Labor government after the war. The third, on the aristocracy of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, was researched at a time when that class was in full financial crisis, and when great country houses were being abandoned and allowed to tumble down by the score. My work on students and faculty at universities began in the 1960s during one of the eras of greatest expansion of, and of greatest optimism about, higher education that has ever existed. At that time, I was particularly intrigued by the causes of a similar educational boom between 1560 and 1680. My interest continued, in a more pessimistic vein, after the student troubles of 1968—70, and after the period of heady expansion and affluence had come to an abrupt end. My attention thereafter has been focused on the causes of the dramatic decline of enrollments in grammar schools, universities, and Inns of Court between 1680 and 1770. My book on the family, sexuality, and marriage was conceived and written in the 1970s, at a time of heightened anxiety about just these issues, provoked by rocketing divorce rates, sharply declining marital fertility, much greater sexual promiscuity, changes in sex-roles caused by the women's liberation movement, and the abrupt rise in the proportion of married women in the labor force. An Open Elite was written at a time when the demise of the great landed families, and their role in both the rise and the fall of British greatness was reaching a crescendo of public interest, for example in the phenomenal success of the television version of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited or of Mark Girouard's book, The English Country House. It was begun when the elite who lived in these houses was thought to be in its death-throes, and when critics were blaming English contemporary decline on the absorption of the sons of Victorian entrepreneurs into the idle life-style and amateurish value system of the entrenched landed elite. Although I was not aware of it at the time, I seem to have been constantly stimulated by current events into diving back into the past to discover whether similar trends and problems have occurred before, and if so how they were handled. Whether this makes for better or worse history, I do not know. A serious danger in such a present-minded inspiration for historical inquiry, however unconscious, is that the past will be seen through the perspective of the future and not in its own terms. There is a clear risk of Whiggish teleological distortion if the main question uppermost in the mind of the historian is

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how we got from there to here. On the other hand, it is just this explanation of the present that is the prime justification for an interest in history. The main safeguard from teleological distortion is to keep firmly in mind that people in the past were different from ourselves, and diat this difference must always be investigated and explicated. The further safeguard is always to bear in mind that there is a contingency factor in history, a recognition that at all times there were alternative possibilities open, which might have occurred but in fact did not: the Cleopatra's nose principle, if you will. This then, for the time being, is the end of my chequered odyssey through the life of learning. I have constantly been under attack from ogres, dragons, and sea-serpents; I have several times been seduced by attractive-seeming sirens; I have made mistakes of navigation, which at least once brought me close to shipwreck. Although I have survived and sailed on, I have not yet set eyes upon the shores of Ithaca. But the story is not, I hope, yet over.

1986 MILTON V. ANASTOS Professor Emeritus of Byzantine Greek and History University of California-., Los Angeles

I began my academic career most inauspiciously by being detained after school in the first grade. My offense was that, when called upon to read, I could never find the point at which my predecessor in the reading lesson had left off. Then I aggravated the situation by a similar failure after school. I do not now recall how many times I had to submit to this humiliation. Nor can I understand why I did not have the wit to point out in my defense that I had learned to read with ease long before entering the first grade. My trouble was that, as soon as the class started to read about the enthralling adventures of Jack and Jill, Fannie and her apple, the house that Jack built, and the rest, I raced on excitedly to the end of the tale, so as to discover for myself how these noble characters had made out in their perilous confrontation with the universe. Consequently, when my turn came to read, I was completely lost and had no idea of what part of the story had been left to me. As I ponder this lugubrious chapter in my history, I cannot remember how I explained my ignominy to my mother. She was a generous and kindly lady, who, however, was altogether intolerant of academic derelictions on the part of her offspring. Had she known of the undeserved suffering I had been undergoing, she would have stormed upon my schoolhouse and torn the place apart—brick by brick. So much, then, for my agonies in the first grade. But at least I was never left back in kindergarten. This ignominious fate, candor compels me to point out, overtook my dear wife, Rosemary Park, that peerless college president and vice-chancellor of UCLA. Despite her virtuosity in such kindergarten exercises as weaving—over one, under one; over two, under two, etc.—that poor girl got stuck in kindergarten for two years. Of course, she had an excellent 37

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excuse, as who does not? Her parents had decided that she should repeat kindergarten, so that she might watch over her brother and sister, who were too young to be trusted to make their way across the streets without guidance. So far, I have nothing to report that does me credit. Unfortunately, embarrassment continued to haunt me during my freshman year in high school. In the first place, since my friends had warned me that Latin was very difficult and should be avoided, I chose French as my only foreign language. In doing so, I violated strict orders from home that I was to take four years of Latin. When parental wrath descended upon me for this disobedience, I pleaded that it was too late to make any changes in my curriculum and that Latin would have to be sacrificed. My mother then threatened to go to school herself to straighten the matter out. Naturally, I fought bitterly against this pernicious suggestion. But, in the end, I lost, and had to submit to the excruciating pain of witnessing a maternal visit to my homeroom teacher, who, of course, readily consented to inflicting the study of Latin upon me. Somehow, I managed to survive this painful ordeal. Nevertheless, despite the most valiant efforts by my parents, who even sank so low as to offer me all manner of bribes, I could not be induced to pay serious attention to my studies. As a result, I finished my freshman year in high school with a dismal average in the middle eighties. I was somewhat discomfited by this melancholy performance, but not greatly concerned until I learned that a classmate for whose intellectual gifts I had scant respect had the highest ranking in the school. That was a shattering blow for me, and I spent a good part of the ensuing summer calculating how many subjects I needed and what grades I should have to make to catch up and take the lead myself. This in time I managed to do, and I must confess that the spirit of contrariety engendered by my resentment over my fellow student's success in getting higher grades than I, was, somewhat perversely, a major factor in shaping my career and convincing me that I actually enjoyed studying and was eager to strain myself in doing so. By the time I entered Harvard College in 1926,I had overcome my aversion to Latin and was easily persuaded by my freshman adviser to concentrate in classics. Here my experience differs from that of Professor Lawrence Stone, my illustrious predecessor as the Charles Homer Haskins Lecturer, who, you may recall, resented the time and energy he spent in mastering what are called the "dead" languages. For my part, I have now been studying and using Greek and Latin steadily in all my research for just about 60 years, and have never ceased to find that they demand my most strenuous efforts and are the source of my most abiding satisfaction.

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Though deeply devoted to the classics, I had long intended to study law, and entered the Harvard Law School with the class of 1935. I found the common law extremely congenial, but soon wearied of the callousness of many of my fellow students, who used to argue that, as prospective lawyers, we should concern ourselves, not with justice, but with nothing except the law. I am not certain whether they really believed this to be a sound rule of conduct or whether they argued this way out of sheer contrariety. Anyhow, I was annoyed by their attitude and I transferred to the Harvard Divinity School, not with the intention of entering the clergy, but seeking instruction in the theological sciences, especially in ecclesiastical history. It was at this juncture that I had the good fortune of becoming intimately acquainted with a number of brilliant personalities who exerted a profound influence upon my future. At the Divinity School, as in the Department of Classics, classes were in general very small, rarely exceeding fifteen or twenty students, so that we had the advantage of direct personal guidance from our instructors. I am gready indebted to a number of these altogether extraordinary scholars. In my earlier years as a graduate student, my chief friend and advocate was Harry Austryn Wolfson, Nathan Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy, and a prodigious worker of enormous learning, the author of many outstanding books. Uncle Harry, as I called him, entered Widener Library almost every morning with the cleaning staff at seven and stayed all day, except for brief interludes for his meals and an occasional foray to Boston to see a movie, preferably a double feature. He was never too busy to be consulted on any problem—imaginary, personal, or academic. Then there was Robert H. Pfeiffer, Hancock Professor of Hebrew Literature, the most amiable of men, whose Christmas parties for students and colleagues are legendary and still warmly remembered. He was the victim of a cruel injustice which for many years denied him the professorial rank he richly deserved. But eventually he prevailed, to the great joy of those of us who had fought for him, sometimes at great risk to ourselves and our careers. But in our personal devotion and feeling of gratitude to our instructors lurks a great danger which I mention now with some trepidation. Young students in their enthusiasm are often exploited by their seniors. I myself suffered two frustrating experiences, to which I must briefly allude. Both of the professors involved in these episodes are now dead, and I suppress their names in this chronicle. De mortuis nil nisi malum. For one of them I wrote a whole book, consisting of texts (which I either constituted myself or revised and re-edited) and translations. These were brought together in a large and

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impressive volume, in which I am mentioned briefly in the preface without any acknowledgment of the extent of my contribution. The alleged author took over my work in its entirety, "jazzed up" my translations (as he told me orally) (without reference to the original texts), added a few brief notes, and took the whole credit for the volume for himself. For the second of this pair of plagiarists I worked about four whole years collating and checking Greek manuscripts to establish a critical text, but got no word of recognition except for one brief sentence in the preface. Perhaps I may be forgiven if I remark that these few words, though gracious enough in themselves, were the very least reward that could have been offered for my long and selfless services, especially in view of the fact that many of our colleagues were aware of the extent of my efforts and had become restive about this kind of academic exploitation. These were my first publications, and I now list them in my bibliography as "works written in collaboration with other scholars." Indubitably I learned a great deal in carrying out these assignments, but at enormous cost. Many young scholars have had to contend with this problem. In some European centers of research whole edifices have been constructed for senior professors by their assistants, who received only the most meager compensation for what were truly monumental achievements. In the United States a notorious professor at a great university—not Harvard or UCLA— published under his own name an entire series of books which had been written by his doctoral candidates. One of these, now a colleague of mine at UCLA, got wind of what was being done with his dissertation and made a loud outcry until his name was added to the title page. I hope and believe that the present generation of students has been able to protect itself against plagiarism and outright theft of this kind. It was at the Divinity School that I decided I should devote my life to patristic studies and Byzantine intellectual history. The commitment was twofold. In the first place, it seemed to me that the Byzantine field had been less intensively cultivated than many others that I found appealing and therefore offered opportunity for original research. That was nearly fifty years ago; and the situation has changed radically since then, although, of course, a vast amount of work still remains to be done, especially in the editing and expounding of texts, a large number of which have never been published. In the patristic field, I felt that many topics had been dealt with improperly. For example, I was convinced that the theologian Nestorius had been unjustly condemned by the oecumenical councils. He was bishop of Constantinople (428—31) and had been attacked by Cyril, bishop of Alexandria (412—

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44), for dividing Jesus Christ into two persons, the man Jesus and the divine Logos, who was the Son of God. But Nestorius constantly insisted that he had never been guilty of so heinous an error, which would have amounted to introducing a fourth member into the Trinity. After reading his book, the so-called Bazaar of Herackides, in which he repeatedly defends himself against this charge, I concluded that he was the victim of both contrariety and personal animosity. Cyril was determined to denounce him as a heretic in order that Alexandria might prevail over Constantinople and took advantage of every opportunity to do so. Actually, both Cyril and Nestorius were guilty of ambiguity in the use of technical terms; and Nestorius, it must be conceded, was guilty of unconscionable prolixity and obscurity. But a review of the evidence in my opinion indicated that both theologians meant to be what we call orthodox and would have conceded that Jesus Christ, as the orthodox maintain, had two natures, one divine and one human, joined in indissoluble union in one person. In a lengthy article, I have, I believe, proved that Nestorius was as loyal to this principle as Cyril was; and, moreover, that he described the union of the two natures in one person in an exemplary orthodox fashion. For he says that the human Jesus "received hisprosopon [i.e., person] as something created in such wise as not originally to be man but at the same time Man—God by the incarnation [enanthropesis] of God" (Bazaar, I, I, 64, p. 60; cf. 92.If., 237). This is an extremely subtle description of the oneness of Jesus Christ, and shows that Nestorius conceived the Man-God to have been the divine Logos, plus what would have become the separate individual man Jesus, if the Logos had not been united with him from the moment of conception. For the child born of the Virgin was at no time, Nestorius states, a separate man but "at the same time Man-God." Many critics, at least, have found my analysis of Nestorius's Christology to be persuasive. But in discussing this question with me one day, the archbishop of Athens said with the utmost courtesy, "Professor, your argument is very learned and undoubtedly sound. But why, then, did the Holy Spirit anathematize Nestorius as a heretic?" To which I replied, "For a very simple reason. The Holy Spirit never read his book!" After getting the degree of S.T.B. from the Divinity School, I went on to a Ph.D. in history, engaging for my thesis in a truly delightful exercise in historical legerdemain, whereby I attempted to demonstrate not unsuccessfully, I believe, that the discovery of America by Columbus in 1492 was achieved indirectly in part by Columbus's reliance on certain texts of the geographer Strabo as excerpted and presented at the Council of Florence in

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1438-39 by George Gemistus Pletho, a learned Byzantine gentleman, who was widely recognized in western Europe to be the greatest scholar of his day. My doctorate was awarded in 1940, a year in which the academic market for Byzantine history proved to be dismal and hopeless. Then, most unexpectedly, the kind of cosmic savior I had been reading about in the later Greek philosophical texts loomed in the form of Dumbarton Oaks, a new research center devoted to Byzantine civilization which had been endowed by former Ambassador and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss. By great good fortune, it had been set up as a department of Harvard University, and my appointment as fellow and subsequently professor of Byzantine theology in this academic paradise was indubitably one of the major turning points in my career. Many have benefited from this extraordinarily munificent gift, but I doubt that anyone has been a greater beneficiary than I. The whole idea of the institution was made to order for me, and I am deeply obligated to it for the opportunity it gave me for nearly twenty years to do my research and writing without interference or interruption. At first, we had a library of less than 10,000 volumes, mostly concentrated in the arts. For many years, therefore, I spent over half of my time locating desiderata throughout the world and persuading the administrative authorities to acquire them. This bibliographical acquisitiveness of mine had a number of far-reaching consequences. In the first place, obsessed by my passion for books, I soon began to realize that it would be prudent for me to buy as many of the pertinent materials as I could afford myself. My idea was, and is, that Byzantine civilization can be traced back to Homer, and that the subject embraces every branch of learning—art, science, economics, history, literature, theology, political dieory, philosophy, law, magic, and so on. Acting on this theory, I have now amassed a personal library of some 50,000 volumes, which is esteemed by many to be one of the great such collections in the world. Secondly, I have been attempting to build up a complete bibliography of the entire Byzantine field. At present, I have approximately two or three hundred thousand bibliographical slips, suitably classified by subject. In earlier days, by the grace of God, the University of California, the work-study program, and a well-disposed vice-chancellor—not, I should add, my wife, who has always been a completely disinterested person—I have had the collaboration of as many as five, six, and more of my best students. Now, however, under the present economic and political conditions, I have been reduced to only the barest minimum of assistance. We desperately need funds to complete the bibliography, and computerize it so that it can be made available to scholars and institutions throughout the world.

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Furthermore, my conception of Byzantium has led me to prepare a largescale intellectual history of the Byzantine Empire in all of its aspects, which I call the Mind of Byzantium (MOB), and which in typescript some years ago was estimated by representatives of the University of California Press to amount to between four and five volumes. I have already published an abridged version of it in three substantial parts of the National History of Greece. This is in Greek, and I am resolved by the end of this calendar year to finish the first volume (in English) on the legal position of the Byzantine Emperor and his relation to the Church. In descanting so lengthily on Byzantium, I must not pass over the war. On the day of Pearl Harbor, I made an attempt to enlist in the Navy, and was unceremoniously rejected by a yeoman because my eyes failed to meet naval standards. Then, after some vicissitudes, I joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), hoping that my physical defects would be waived by this department of the armed services. After many delays, I finally was examined for a post as an intelligence officer in a parachute division. Then, as a crowning infamy, the examining physician said, "Boy, if we dropped you in a parachute, you would split! You can serve your country here in Washington." Then, I was taken on by SI (Special Intelligence) and, after a few months, transferred to R and A (Research and Analysis), headed by William Langer, a great master of many fields of learning, who exerted enormous influence over the entire operation. Here, I was put in charge of what was designated as the "Greek desk," and found that the organization was dominated by colleagues from the universities, a large number of whom were historians, economists, archaeologists, and philologists, whose specialized training in a great variety of fields fitted them uniquely to provide the kind of analysis and information that were desperately needed for the conduct and planning of the war. At one point, for example, when the Third Army of the United States was laying plans to cross the Rhine, I was asked to compile the available information on the Byzantine Emperor Julian IFs crossing of the Rhine in 359, when he was Caesar. This was easily done, and I have often wondered whether these data were made available to General George Patton in the vicinity of Oppenheim on the eve of March 23,1945, when he managed to slip across the Rhine, "without," as his aide announced at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), "benefit of airborne drop, without benefit of the United States Navy or the British Navy and not having laid down the greatest smokescreen in the history of modern war." This was one of the turning points of the final assault upon the Nazis, combined with the capture of the Ludendorff railway bridge at Remagen a

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few days earlier, on March 7, by the Ninth Armored Division of the First Army commanded by Courtney Hodges. Thus both the First Army of the United States and the Third succeeded in making their way across the Rhine before the British (who did not succeed in doing so until March 24), despite Churchill's erroneous statement in a prerecorded speech that the British had been the first to surmount this obstacle.l Many profited greatly intellectually and spiritually from their service in the war. I doubt, however, that I gained very much personally except that I was forced to devote attention to the Mediterranean area as a whole and to probe further into Greek history, politics, and philology. Moreover, I had an opportunity to observe at first hand how professors in a huge bureaucracy were able to serve the Muses and civilization at the same time. I must also have acquired some fluency in writing in the course of preparing innumerable reports and struggling to combine mountains of disparate facts into some kind of logical unity. On a somewhat different plane I learned in the interminable exchange of memoranda and critical reviews that it is actually possible to recognize personal differences of style. Many have been skeptical of this kind of criticism, which has long been a favorite tool in literary and historical analysis. But, on more than one occasion I saw empirical proof of its validity. After many interesting experiences in the OSS, when it became evident that the United States was not going to invade the Balkans, I was able to return to Dumbarton Oaks and Byzantium, though I continued to serve a few months longer as a consultant. At Dumbarton Oaks I had the great advantage of associating with a number of remarkable gentlemen. The most notable of these was Albert Mathias Friend, Jr., who had the unique position of being Director of Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, a department of Harvard University, at the same time that he was Marquand Professor of the History of Art at Princeton University. Friend was an unusually gifted Byzantinist and had a genius for stimulating research both at Dumbarton Oaks and at Princeton. He himself never published more than about five articles, but he inspired a large number of projects, primarily in the field of Byzantine art and archaeology. Although he never completed any part of the great work he had planned, he gave the 1

Omar N. Bradley and Clay Blair, A General's Life: An Autobiography by General Omar N. Bradley (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 404,4n, 413; Ralph Ingersoll, Top Secret (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1946), 312 f.; Charles B. MacDonald, The Last Offensive: The U.S. Army in World War II, The European Theater of Operations, 9 [Washington, D.C., 1973]), 213 ff., 267 ff., 303 ff'.

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impetus to others who carried out the schemes he had adumbrated. He had an encyclopaedic and unexcelled knowledge of just about all of the relevant monuments. But his skills lay in imparting ideas and providing trenchant criticism. He spent a great deal of time, at the expense of his own projects, in encouraging others. In any academic institution, especially in a relatively small and highly specialized one like Dumbarton Oaks, there are always sensitive prima donnas and bruised egos; and Friend regularly made the rounds among scholars and staff to buoy up their morale. As he said to me on one occasion, after a particularly heroic effort in patching up a wounded spirit, "You can't get milk except from contented cows." His greatest contribution was in persuading the Harvard Corporation to organize Dumbarton Oaks as a fullfledged department of the University with the regular professorial ranks, awarded on the usual basis. I owe a great debt to Friend, as well as to Carl Kraeling, Ernst Kitzinger, and John S. Thacher, all of whom played an important role in the direction of Dumbarton Oaks, the first three as Directors of Studies, the fourth as Administrative Director. At Dumbarton Oaks, having been released from the OSS, I now redoubled my efforts to make real headway withMOB. In addition to the incomparable privilege of my association with Dumbarton Oaks, I am greatly indebted for grants to the ACLS, the Guggenheim Foundation on two occasions, and the Fulbright fellowship program. By 1964 I had been a member of the Harvard community for thirty-eight rich and satisfying years, when, to my own surprise and that of my friends, I was persuaded to accept an invitation to UCLA. The University has provided admirable facilities for research and has enabled my colleague, Professor Speros Vryonis, and me to establish a flourishing school of Byzantinology, which has produced eight doctoral dissertations and played an important role in several more. Though delighted with California in every way, we remain deeply devoted to Harvard, to which we fondly refer as the UCLA of the East. In the remaining moments I should like to sketch briefly some of the major features of my concept of Byzantine civilization. One aspect of my work has been an attack on the paradoxographers. There is a type of scholar that delights in paradoxes born of little more than contrariness. Their method is very simple. In ancient and medieval history, for example, they accumulate and analyze all of the extant sources on a given problem or historical event, eliminate obvious errors and contradictions, and then summarize what seems to be a series of inevitable inferences based upon these data. One would think

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that historians could safely rely on these results. But the paradoxographers, either out of some hope of coming up with a more original solution, or out of sheer contrariety, from which who among us has not suffered, deny the validity of the seemingly logical conclusions and attempt to upset them with new and usually radical hypotheses. One of the most striking examples of how the paradoxographers work is the account of the Emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity as related by two contemporary historians, Eusebius (writing in Greek) and Lactantius (in Latin), both of whom were personally acquainted with Constantine. The former wrote a panegyrical biography (usually referred to as the Vita) of the Emperor, who himself supplied his biographer with many important details, most notably on his famous vision and dream. The latter was tutor of the Emperor's eldest son, Crispus. In the Vita- (I, 28) Constantine is said by Eusebius to have sworn that, about noon, he and his soldiers saw in the sky the trophy of a cross of light bearing the inscription tuto nika, "by this [sign] conquer." That night, in a dream (I, 29), Christ appeared to him with the same sign which he had seen in the sky during the day, and commanded him to make a replica of this cross for use in combat against his enemies. This Constantine did, making a banner in the shape of a cross (i.e. the labarum), and surmounting it with a symbol consisting of the initials of Christ, probably in the form . This is the socalled Christogram, which, Eusebius says, Constantine wore on his helmet and displayed on all of his battle flags (i, 3of.). Lactantius adds that this device was inscribed upon the shields of Constantine's troops (On the deaths of the persecutors, 44, 5). It occurs frequently on Christian coins and many other monuments. On the strength of these passages, especially the testimony of Eusebius, it had generally been assumed that Constantine had been converted to Christianity on that fateful night of October 28, 312. But the paradoxographers got to work on this incident, denied that Constantine had been coverted in the manner described by Eusebius, and invented the elaborate theory that the whole account of Constantine's conversion was interpolated into the text of Eusebius by pious historians in the early fifth century. They have no textual evidence to support this hypothesis, nor do they explain how or why both Eusebius and Lactantius should have been interpolated in more or less the same way. What is more, and this is the chief argument I would advance against the paradoxographers, there is substantial archaeological evidence which amounts to a complete vindication

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of the Eusebian and Lactantian texts as I have summarized them. This is to be found in a series of coins which were struck between the years 350 and 353.

The first group of these was issued by the usurper Magnentius (350-53) and his son (Decentius), who put out a number of coins showing the labarum bearing a Christogram. This iconography indicates their eagerness to conciliate the legitimate emperor, Constantius II, the son of the Emperor Constantine I, both of whom used the Christogram on their coins. Magnentius even went so far as to inscribe the name of Constantius on his coins to advertise widely that it was his ambition to be the latter's colleague on the throne rather than his rival. Later on, however, in 353, Magnentius adopted the large Christogram on the reverse of his coins, which was copied from a coin struck by Constantius, in order to indicate that it was he, Magnentius, not Constantius, who was the defender of orthodox Christianity as defined in 325 at the Council of Nicaea against his rival Constantius, who had espoused the cause of the Arian theologians opposed to the Creed of 325. But, most importantly, the use of the Christogram itself gives proof that Eusebius's description of Constantine's conversion was known in the Latin West in 350, only ten years after the historian's death, and was not, therefore, the invention of a pious Christian writer of the fifth century. This conclusion is reinforced by the coinage of the usurper Vetranio, who was Emperor from March i to December 25,350. The interesting point here is that Constantia, Constantine Fs daughter, fearful that the usurpation by Magnentius would imperil her brother Constantius's hold on the imperial power, persuaded Vetranio to assume the purple. At the time, her brother, the Emperor Constantius II, was occupied in fighting the Persians in the East and, under the circumstances, consented to Constantia's request that Vetranio be invested with the diadem. Here again the coins are of decisive significance. For some struck in 350 by Vetranio and Constantius II, as well as in 351 by Gallus (Constantine's nephew, who married Constantia), used as a reverse legend the words HOC SIGNO VICTOR ERIS ("by this sign you shall be the victor"), that is, the Latin translation of the original Greek, tuto nika, ("by this [sign] conquer"). What is most remarkable is that Vetranio, a simple soldier, who could neither read nor write, thus succinctly memorialized in his coinage the leading idea of Eusebius' chapters on Constantine's conversion. Obviously, Vetranio had not read Eusebius in the original Greek, nor in any Latin translation, if there had

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been one in his day. The obvious explanation is that he learned of this whole episode from Constantine's daughter, who undoubtedly had heard of her father's vision and dream from his own lips. In sum, far from being a fabrication of a theologian of the fifth century, the story of Constantine's conversion was a familiar one in the tatter's family. Thus the coins add a new dimension to one of the most memorable events in ancient history. Of course, this is not to say that Constantine had ever actually had this vision and dream. But he not only claimed that he had had it and was not reticent in discussing it with his relatives and friends but also heeded the advice he had been given in this supernatural way. On the other hand, given the fears and anxiety he must have felt in preparing to meet a mortal enemy in combat, there is every reason to believe that he really underwent the experiences Eusebius reports. A great deal of scholarly research indubitably comes about in this rather complicated way. One group of scholars, either out of sheer contrariety or even because they truly believe they have good reason to reject what they take to be the conventional and uncritical publications of their predecessors, sets out in search of more original results, which they present so provocatively as to stimulate the opposite reaction from the contrary-minded, who in turn attempt, with equal fervor, to reverse their immediate precursors and return to the status quo ante. The dispute about Constantine's conversion is a good example of this kind of contrariety. A similar one has developed over the famous Edict of Toleration promulgated in 313 by Constantine and Licinius. For generations historians had been content to accept this enactment at its face value. But then, in 1891, Otto Seeck published a paper entitled "Das sogenannte Edikt von Mailand" (Zeitschrift fur Kirchengeschichte, 12 [1891] 381-386) in which he argued that this document was not an edict, was not promulgated in Milan, and was not by Constantine. He was then joined by a multitude of other paradoxographers, who attacked the traditional view on all fronts, and have been seduced by the temptation of attempting to prove that, despite his friendly disposition towards the Christian church, Constantine did not issue the Edict of Milan in 313 but that Licinius, whom Eusebius condemns as a persecutor of the Christians (Ecclesiastical History, 10, 8, 8-19), did. This is a titillating conceit, heightened by the additional paradox that it is claimed that Constantine did not even participate in the Edict. I have devoted an article of thirty pages to this problem and can only touch upon a few major points this evening. My chief argument is derived from the two sources for this so-called Edict, which in its influence ranks with the

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Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. For in it the emperors, Constantinc I (306-37) and Licinius (308-24), who are specifically named as its authors, granted to the Christians and all others "the right to follow freely whatever religion they wished," so that, as they put it, "whatever divinity there is in heaven might be favorable and propitious to us and to all our subjects." This pronouncement occurs in virtually identical form in both Eusebius (Ecclesiastical History, 10, 5, 4) and Lactantius (On the deaths of the persecutors, 28, 2-12). Despite close agreement on all essential matters, there remain enough minor discrepancies between Eusebius' Greek and Lactantius' Latin to demonstrate that Eusebius' source could not have been the Edict as found in Lactantius or vice versa.. Hence, we have two independent witnesses that corroborate each other most impressively on all the principal points at issue, although neither was copied or transcribed from the other. The excerpts from Eusebius and Lactantius that I have summarized prove beyond doubt (a) that the Edict was issued by both Constantine and Licinius and (b) that their versions of it, as posted individually and separately by the two emperors in their respective jurisdictions, must have been identical or nearly so. Otherwise, Eusebius would not have included it in what he specifically designates as the laws of both Constantine and Licinius. Nor would both emperors have stated in so many words as they do ("I Constantine Augustus and I Licinius Augustus") that they had actively collaborated in the project. Thus, these passages from Eusebius and Lactantius make it altogether impossible to deny that Constantine was one of the authors of this ordinance, or that he had published it as a law for the portion of the empire over which he ruled. These conclusions follow inevitably from the opening sentences of the Edict (as I have quoted them). It is difficult to imagine how Constantine could have discussed religious freedom at Milan, as he says he had, and then drafted, or assented to, a law couched in the terms described, as both Eusebius and Lactantius agree that he did, without enacting it in his own name for his part of the empire. It is much more likely that Constantine arranged the conference at Milan, as well as the matrimonial alliance between his half-sister, (another) Constantia, and Licinius, at least in part so as to win over his imperial colleague to his own policy of religious toleration. Whether this was really his aim or not, it is inconceivable that Constantine, the first and greatest imperial benefactor of the Christian church and its most influential patron in the early centuries, apart from its Founder, could have failed in his own realm to promulgate this

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great charter of Christian liberty which explicitly and systematically enacted into law the principles of which he was the most notable imperial exponent. Finally, I should say, I am content to rest my case with what I take to be the incontrovertible fact that Constantine promulgated the Edict of Toleration in his own realm, and avoid going into other more technical details such as (a) whether this form of Constantine's legislation could be defined legally as an Edict, as I think it was, and (b) whether it was published by Constantine in Milan or elsewhere. But enough has been said, perhaps, to indicate what wide scope historical research offers for contrariety, which, however, in its final outcome, when carried through to the end, is constructive, and leads the way, despite some obfuscations and not a little irritation on both sides over what often seems to be perversity and wrongheadedness, to positive results. The major part of my work so far, aside from the considerable portions of MOB published in the National History of Greece, has been in longish articles and monographs devoted to solving what I have taken to be key problems of Byzantine intellectual history. In many ways the most significant of these was a paper devoted to the theologian Basil's treatise Against Eunomius. Basil, as you know (c. 330—79), was one of the leading orthodox champions against the heretical views of the Arians, who were condemned for their belief that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was not co-eternal with the Father but was subsequent to him. Basil has always been cited as one of the principal defenders of the orthodox doctrine of the co-eternity of the Father and the Son. Indeed, in his critique of Against Eunomius, he makes a special point of arguing that the "Son always existed, and never had a beginning of being" (C. Eunom., 2,12). In my analysis I carefully drew attention to Basil's oft-repeated denunciation of the Arian propositions and his vehement affirmation of the orthodox principles. But then, in the course of reading the proof, I discovered to my amazement and great chagrin that Basil had also in this same treatise maintained that the Son got the beginning of his being from the Father and was second to the Father. These texts are in flat contradiction to his previous statements and do not differ from the Arian position on this subject. In other words, this extraordinary inconsistency on Basil's part, discovered by chance in preparing a lecture for a symposium, compels a re-examination of his reputation as a leading exponent of Byzantine orthodoxy. Preoccupied quite properly as we are with the origin and production of learned tomes, we should not ignore what is in many ways the most essential of our scholarly tasks. That is, we are bound to keep in mind that our chief function is to disseminate the fruit of our research not only by original works of scholarship but also by instruction as presented to our students. Our

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lectures should in a real sense enlighten them by giving them more than mere facts and information. We must remember Thomas Jefferson's ideal of public education and seek in all of our teaching by form and manner, if not in actual words or precepts, to remind our students of the scope and ideals of the free society of which we are among the principal custodians. Permit me to illustrate this aspect of the pedagogical process by my lectures on the Roman law. In expounding the legal principle, Princeps legibus solutus est (as set forth in Dig. I. 3. 31 and elsewhere), I pointed out that the Roman and Byzantine emperors were exempt from the laws. But the President of the United States is not. I gave this course over a period of years and made the same comment on the meaning of the text each time, but with particular poignancy during the period of the Watergate scandal. Similarly, I have regularly reminded my classes that, despite the despotic and arbitrary power of the Byzantine emperors, who abused the rights and property of their subjects whenever they chose, it was Justinian's Digest in 533 that enunciated the cardinal principle of the sanctity of a man's home, which many have thought to be of English origin. The Digest (2. 4.18) quotes Gaius as saying that "the majority have thought that it is not lawful to summon a person [to appear in court] from his own home because 'a man's home is his most secure shelter and refuge' (domus tutissimum cuique refugium atque receptaculum), so that anyone who should cite him out of it is held to be using violence." An equally precious bulwark of freedom, the writ of habeas corpus, which has been described as "the most important single safeguard of personal liberty known to the Anglo-American law," is patterned upon the Roman "exhibitory interdict" (Dig. 43. 29. I pr. I) "de homine libero exhibendo," according to which, "quern liberum dolo malo retines exhibeas," i.e., "bring forth the freeman whom you are unjustly detaining." In Roman law this remedy applied to sons or slaves wrongfully held under restraint by unauthorized persons. In the common law, as further defined by numerous statutes and safeguarded by the constitutions of the federal government (I. 9. 2) and of the several states, the writ of habeas corpus enables a person held in prison by the police to demand that he be produced in court without delay, and that cause be shown for his detention. The same writ is used in cases involving custody of children and guardianship. Interesting as they are, however, these texts from the Roman law, I have pointed out, do not really mean that the Byzantine Empire in practice recognized what the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States describes as "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses,

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papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures." For in Roman law, the rulings I have quoted had reference to litigation between private citizens and not to criminal law. Actually, the Corpus Iuris did not concern itself with what we call civil liberty or civil rights, which are guaranteed by the common law, by Amendments I—10,13—15,19 and 24 of the U.S. Constitution and by a succession of decisions by the various U.S. courts that rank high among the glories of our civilization. In Byzantium, the emperor could, and often did, ignore the rights of his subjects, and was not bound to respect what we call "due process of law," which, by the common law, as confirmed by the Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, protects the life, liberty, and property of us all, and applies to every form of property and every personal, civil, and political right. To summarize, in conclusion, my ideal of scholarship as ultimately transcending all contrariety, let me say that true learning, however it is attained, illumines more than just the intellect. It has a moral, a political, and even, I should like to add, a democratic goal. Or, in the words of the poet of the Harvard Tercentenary in 1936: Light that is light lights not the mind alone, Light that is light . . . lights the whole man.

1987 CARL E. SCHORSKE Professor Emeritus of History Princeton University

My first encounter with the world of learning took place, if family account is to be believed, when I entered kindergarten in Scarsdale, New York. To break the ice among the little strangers, my teacher, Miss Howl, asked her pupils to volunteer a song. I gladly offered a German one, called "Morgenrot." It was a rather gloomy number that I had learned at home, about a soldier fatalistically contemplating his death in battle at dawn. The year was 1919, and America's hatred of the Hun still ran strong. Miss Howl was outraged at my performance. She took what she called her "little enemy" by the hand and marched him off to the principal's office. That wise administrator resolved in my interest the problems of politics and the academy. She promoted me at once to the first grade under Mrs. Beyer, a fine teacher who expected me to work but not to sing. Was this episode a portent of my life in the halls of learning? Hardly. But it was my unwitting introduction to the interaction of culture and politics, my later field of scholarly interest.

I When I taught European intellectual history at Berkeley in the early 1960s,1 devoted a portion of my course to the way in which the same cultural materials were put to different uses in different national societies. One day, I gave a lecture on William Morris and Richard Wagner. The intellectual journeys of these two quite dissimilar artist-thinkers involved stops at many of the same cultural stations. Morris began by using Arthurian legend to champion a S3

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religion of beauty, then became an enthusiast for Norse mythology and folk art, and ended a socialist. Wagner traversed much the same itinerary as Morris, but in the reverse direction, starting as a social radical, then reworking Nordic sagas, and ending, with the Arthurian hero Parsifal, in a pseudoreligion of art. In the midst of delivering my lecture, I suddenly saw before me a picture from my childhood that I thought to be by Morris. (The picture proved to be the work of George Frederick Watts, then close to the Pre-Raphaelites.) It was Sir Galahad, a painting that hung in color reproduction on the middle landing of the staircase in our family's house. Here was a beauteous knight in the best Pre-Raphaelite manner: a figure in burnished armour with a sensitive, androgynous face, mysteriously shrouded in misty bluish air. After the lecture, I recalled how my mother loved that picture, how indeed she loved Morris' Defense of Guenevere, and the literature of the Victorian medieval revival from Scott onward. Not so my father. He poured contempt on that feminine Sir Galahad. Now Wagner's Lohengrin or the Nibelungenlied,—that was a medievalism he could embrace. Father not only loved Wagner's music, he believed in Siegfried, the sturdy mythic socialist, as interpreted by G. B. Shaw in "The Perfect Wagnerite," and in the anti-feminist interpretation of Wagner of that curmudgeon radical, H. L. Mencken. Mother accorded a hard-won tolerance—no more—for the Teutonic longueurs of Wagner's operas, but none for the abrasive virility of Mencken or my father's Shaw. Recalling hot parental arguments on such matters, I suddenly realized that, in contraposing Morris and Wagner in my teaching, I had hardly left the family hearth. Freud would say that, here in the midst of my professional work as a historian, I was addressing in sublimated form a problem of the family scene. In any case, the episode brought home to me the power of my family in shaping the cultural interests and symbolic equipment with which I came to define my life. As far as I know, my parents had no deliberate idea of pushing me toward an academic career. Autodidacts both, they respected learning, but what they cultivated was not scholarship but a kind of natural intellectuality. The concerts, theaters, and museums that were their recreation became the children's education. They fostered our musical interests not just with private lessons but by taking us with them into their choral societies. On my father's twoweek vacations we went by rail and ship on intensive sightseeings trips: to New England historic sites such as Concord or the old ports of Maine; Civil War battlefields, where my grandfather had fought in a New York German

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regiment; the great cities of the East and Midwest from Philadelphia to St. Paul. Along with all the elite cultural equipment, my parents introduced us children, through their lives as well as by precept, to the realm of politics. My father, son of a German-born cigar-maker, inherited the radical propensities that went with that socially ambiguous trade. As a young New Yorker, father had campaigned for Henry George and Seth Low in their mayoral races, and followed the radical free-thinker Robert Ingersoll. World War I made father, despite his profession as banker, a lifelong socialist. His deep-seated hostility to America's entry into the war—both as an anti-imperialist and an ethnic German—gave his political orientation, though still progressive in substance, a bitter, alienated quality by the time I came along in his forty-fifth year. I inherited a marginal's sensibility from him as a German. When my mother, who, unlike my father, was Jewish, encountered unpleasant social prejudice during my high-school years, I acquired a second marginal identity. Perhaps this sense of marginality enhanced history's fascination for me and shaped my attitude toward it, at once wary and engage. For me, as for my parents, politics acquired particular importance, both as a major determining force in life and as an ethical responsibility.

II

In 1932 I entered Columbia College. From Seth Low Library the statue of Alma Mater looked upon a space that contained the principal tensions of the university's life: In the foreground was II6th Street, New York City's bisecting presence at the center of the campus. On the south side of the street stood the Sun Dial, a great sphere of granite, Columbia's Hyde Park Corner. Here were held the rallies for Norman Thomas, who swept the student presidential poll in 1932. Here I took the Oxford Oath, pledging never to support my government in any war it might undertake. Here too I watched in ambivalent confusion as anti-war sentiment slowly turned into its own opposite, militant anti-fascism, after Hitler occupied the Rhineland and Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. Political radicalism then bore no relation to university rebellion; it only invigorated the university's intellectual life. In Columbia's strongly defined academic culture, Clio still presided over much of the curriculum. It is hard for us to remember in our day of disciplinary differentiation and autonomy how much all subjects were then permeated with a historical perspective. Having deposed philosophy and become queen

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of the world of learning in the nineteenth century, Clio, though not as glamorous as she had been, still enjoyed pervasive influence. She dominated the only compulsory course for undergraduates, a two-year introduction, Contemporary Civilization in the West. It was designed in the spirit of the New History of the early twentieth century, that amalgam of pragmatism, democracy and social radicalism that James Harvey Robinson, Charles Beard, and John Dewey had injected into Columbia's university culture. The course presented us in the first year with three textbooks in modern European history: one economic, one social and political, and one intellectual. Our task was to generate out of these materials a synoptic vision of the European past, leading, in the sophomore year, to analysis of the American present. The structure of undergraduate major programs also reflected the primacy of history as a mode of understanding in contrast to the intradisciplinary analytic and theoretical concerns that tend to govern the program in most fields of the human sciences today. The programs in literature, philosophy, even economics, were saturated with the historical perspective on human affairs. I avoided a history major, which I felt would tie me down. Instead, I enrolled in Columbia's two-year humanities Colloquium, which allowed one to construct one's own program. Colloquium was centered in great books seminars conceived in a more classical spirit than usual in the university's prevailing pragmatist culture. The seminars were team-taught by truly outstanding young faculty members, such as Moses Hadas and Theodoric Westbrook, Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun. Watching their play of minds on the texts awoke in me for the first time a sense of the sheer intellectual delight of ideas. The thought of an academic vocation, however, was slow in coming. Actually, I aspired to a career in singing, which I had studied since high school days. By my junior year, the sad truth grew upon me that my voice simply had not the quality to support a career in Lieder and the kind of Mozart roles I dreamt of. In the same year, I enrolled in young Jacques Barzun's course in nineteenth-century intellectual history. Barzun simply overwhelmed his few students with the range of the subject and the brilliance of his exploration of it. At work on his biography of Hector Berlioz, Barzun injected much musical material into his course. While I shared with my classmates the exciting experience that this course turned out to be, I drew one rather personal conclusion from it: intellectual history was a field in which my two principal extra-academic interests—music and politics—could be studied not in their

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usual isolation, but in their relationship under the ordinance of time. I was ready to pursue it. Yet something held me back. I felt myself to be an intellectual, interested in ideas; but could I be a scholar? Oddly enough, my Columbia experience offered no basis for an answer. As an undergraduate, I had only once been asked to prepare a research paper. Written exercises took the form of essays, oriented toward appreciation and interpretation of an issue or a text, with no particular attention to the state of scholarship or to the marshalling of empirical material to sustain a point of view. I found scholarly works often uninteresting; and when they truly impressed or captivated me, I found them daunting, far beyond my powers to emulate. The hue of resolution thus sicklied o'er by the pale cast of doubt, I sought advice. It was arranged for me to see Charles Beard, who was attending the American Historical Association's 1935 convention in New York. Perched on the bed in his overheated room in the Hotel Pennsylvania, Beard poured forth his scorn for the pusillanimity and triviality of a historical scholarship that had lost all sense of its critical function in the civic realm. He gave me a formula for a fine scholarly career: "Choose a commodity, like tin, in some African colony. Write your first seminar paper on it. Write your thesis on it. Broaden it to another country or two and write a book on it. As you sink your mental life into it, your livelihood and an esteemed place in the halls of learning will be assured." The second counselor to whom I turned, Lionel Trilling, then in the fourth of his six years as an instructor in a still basically anti-Semitic Columbia University, almost exploded at me. What folly to embark, as a half-Jew, upon an academic career in the midst of depression! Thus both of my gloomy advisors spoke out of personal experiences that confirmed the gap between the high calling of learning and some seamier realities of the academy. Neither, however, could touch my central doubt, which was about my own fitness for scholarly research. There seemed no solution to that but to put it to the test. When I entered Harvard Graduate School in the fall of 1936, it was in a receptive spirit, but hardly with a strong vocation.

III

To pass from Columbia to Harvard was to enter another world—socially, 'politically and intellectually. My undergraduate stereotypes of the two institu-

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tions doubtless led me to exaggerate their differences. But stereotypes can have roots in realities. The very physical structure of Harvard seemed to express a conception of the relation between university and society different from that of Columbia. Harvard was in the city but not of it. Where Seth Low Library looked upon the city street, Widener Library faced the Yard, a greenspace walled off from the surrounding town. The Harvard houses, with their luxurious suites, dining halls with maid-servants, separate libraries and resident tutors, expressed a unity of wealth and learning in which each lent luster to the other. Whatever its social elitism, Harvard was, as Columbia was not, a citadel of learning seemingly impervious to political tensions. Harvard had no Sun Dial, no central space for student rallies. The students must have felt no need for one. If politics had a presence here, it did not meet the newcomer's eye. I was glad, given my self-doubts about a scholarly career, to take advantage of the opportunity that the University's calm environment offered for submersion in the work of learning. The form of instruction at Harvard differed even more strikingly from Columbia's than its architectural form. At Columbia, we thought of our instructors as teachers, guides in the exploration of texts to make us generate intellectual responses. At Harvard, the instructors were more like professors, learned authorities dispensing their organized knowledge in lectures. The prevailing nineteenth-century idea of history, with its strong architecture of development and narrative structure, reinforced the authoritative lecture mode. Thanks to the man who became my advisor and mentor, William L. Langer, I had no chance to follow the narrow road of Charles Beard's sardonic counsel about the strategy of the specialist. Langer urged me to take not just one seminar, but many, to gain experience in a variety of historical research techniques: economic, diplomatic, intellectual, and social. Seminar experience—especially with Langer—slowly dispelled my misgivings about a life of research, and gave me the much-needed intellectual discipline to pursue it. The greatest impact on my scholarly outlook and value system came not from the seminars in modern history, but from an intensive exploration of Greek history with William Scott Ferguson. Despite the fact that I was a modernist without usable Greek, Ferguson took me on for an in-depth tutorial. Each week I went to his house for a two-hour discussion of the books he had assigned, ranging from the anthropology of pre-political tribes to Aristotle's Athenian Constitution or the structure of Roman rule in Greece. For my general examination I prepared a special subject on Aristophanes under

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Ferguson's guidance—an exercise that enabled me for the first time to ground a whole literary oeuwe in a field of social power. Ferguson's critical tutelage really opened my eyes, as the field of classics has done for so many, to the possibilities of integrated cultural analysis. It also remained with me as a model of pedagogic generosity. The comparative quiet of Harvard's political scene that I found on my arrival in 1936 soon changed. After 1938, when America began to face the menacing international situation in earnest, political concern became more general and intense within the university—and in me. Divisions on the issue of intervention ran deep, and many of us, young and old, felt impelled to debate it publicly. When political passions run strong, the relation between one's obligations to the republic of letters and to the civic republic can become dangerously conflated. Two personal experiences at Harvard brought this problem home to me. The first occurred in 1940 in History I, the freshman course in which I served as a graduate teaching assistant. Its professor, Roger B. Merriman, a colorful, salty personality of the old school, passionately devoted to aristocratic Britain, believed, along with a few other staff members, that instructors had a public responsibility to get in there and tell the little gentlemen what the war was all about, to make them realize the importance of America's intervention. A few of us, across the often bitter barriers of political division, joined hands to resist the use of the classroom as an instrument of political indoctrination. My two partners in this effort were Barnaby C. Keeney, later the first director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Robert Lee Wolff, who became professor of Byzantine history at Harvard. Quite aside from the principle involved, the experience of History I taught me how shared academic values could sustain friendships that political differences might destroy. The second experience, of an intellectual nature, left a permanent mark on my consciousness as an historian. The graduate history club had organized a series of what were called, in jocular tribute to Communist terminology of the day, "cells," in which the student members prepared papers on problems that were not being dealt with in regular seminars. My cell took up the problem of contemporary historiography. We inquired into historical work in different countries as it evolved under the impact of recent history. I examined German historians under the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, not merely in terms of the political pressures upon them, but also in terms of the way in which specific cultural traditions in historiography, in confrontation with a new present, led to new visions of the past. I was astounded to discover that

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some of the most nationalist historians justified their doctrinaire nationalism by an explicit philosophic relativism. The value of this exercise in the sociology of knowledge was not only in understanding the work of historians of other nations. It also sensitized me and my fellow apprentices in history to the fact that we too live in the stream of history, a condition that can both enhance and impede the understanding of the past. Above all, it made us aware as our elders, in their positivistic faith in objectivity, were not, of distortions that can result from our positions in society.

IV

The Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services, which I joined a few months before Pearl Harbor, has been rightly known as a second graduate school. My own intellectual debt to my colleagues there—especially to the German emigres and to a stellar group of economists, some Keynesian, some Marxist—is not easy to calculate. The whole experience, however, taught me that, much as I enjoyed contemporary political research, I was not by temperament a policy-oriented scholar. When I was released from service in 1946—over thirty, the father of two children, without a Ph.D.—I found what proved to be an ideal teaching post at Wesleyan University. I was to stay for fourteen years. Of all my mature educational experiences, that of Wesleyan probably had the strongest impact on the substance of my intellectual life and my self-definition as an historian. Basic to both were the larger shifts in America's politics and academic culture in the late 1940s and 1950s.1 would have encountered them in any university. But only a small college could have provided the openness of discourse that made it possible to confront the cultural transformation across the borders of increasingly autonomous disciplines. At Wesleyan in particular, thanks to President Victor Butterfield's selection of imaginative faculty members at the war's end, an atmosphere of vital critical exploration prevailed. From my colleagues I received the multidisciplinary education for the kind of cultural history I soon felt drawn to pursue. In the first two years at Wesleyan, I had no sense of either the intellectual dilemmas about to appear or the new horizons that opened with them. Like most returning veterans, whether students or professors, I felt only a joyful sense of resuming academic life where I had left it five years before. The freshman Western Civilization course that I was asked to teach had just been introduced at Wesleyan by assistant professors fresh from Columbia. For me

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it was a throwback to my own freshman year fourteen years earlier. Teaching four sections, I had more than enough opportunity to explore the riches of the course. Once again I encountered there, in all its optimistic fullness, the premise that the progress of mind and the progress of state and society go hand in hand, however painful the tensions and interactions may sometimes be. In framing an advanced course in European nineteenth-century history, I also returned to a pre-war pattern to explore the relationship between domestic national histories and international development. Even my European intellectual history course, though fairly original in its comparative national approach to the social history of ideas, bore the stamp of the American neoEnlightenment in which I had been formed at home and at Columbia. Its central theme was the history of rationalism and its relation to political and social change. Viable enough for constructing an architecture of intellectual development before the mid-nineteenth century, the theme proved less and less useful as the twentieth century approached, when both rationalism and the historicist vision allied with it lost their binding power on the European cultural imagination. In the face of the fragmentation of modern thought and art, I fastened on Nietzsche as the principal intellectual herald of the modern condition. He stood at the threshold between the cultural cosmos in which I was reared and a post-Enlightenment mental world just then emergent in America—a world at once bewildering, almost threatening, in its conceptual multiplicity, yet enticing in its openness. After Nietzsche, whirl was king, and I felt rudderless. The conceptual crisis in my course set the broad question for my later research: the emergence of cultural modernism and its break from the historical consciousness. While in my teaching I tested the dark waters of modern culture, my research was still cast in terms set by my political experience and values from the years of the New Deal and the War. I could not bear, after five years of engagement with National Socialism in the OSS, to resume my dissertation on its intellectual origins, despite a substantial pre-war investment in the subject. Instead I turned to German Social Democracy as a thesis topic, and concurrently, to a more general study of the problem of modern Germany. Behind both lay a pressing concern with the direction of world politics. The two superpowers were in the process of creating through their occupation policies two Germanics in their own images: one socialist and antidemocratic, the other democratic and anti-socialist. Accordingly, the sawtoothed course of the divide between East and West in German politics ran

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between the two working-class parties, Communist and Social Democratic. Before World War I, these two groupings had been part of a single party committed to both socialism and democracy. Why had that unity failed to hold together? What was the historical dynamic that made democracy and socialism incompatible in Germany? Contemporary questions surely stimulated my historical research, though they did not, I hope, determine its results. I realize now that I was writing not only analytic history, but a kind of elegy for a once creative movement that history had destroyed. Parallel to the historical work on German Social Democracy, I explored directly the contemporary problem of Germany and American policy toward it for the Council on Foreign Relations. There I had an experience of the life of learning quite different from that of either government or academia. The members of the Council's German Study Group, headed by Allan Dulles, were intelligent, influential members of America's business and political elite. Most of them viewed German policy not as an area in which, as in Austria or Finland, some kind of accommodation was to be sought with the Soviet Union, but as a counter in the fundamental conflict between the two powers. I continued to believe in the goal of a unified but permanently neutralized Germany. That policy, which had been espoused by the OSS group with which I had worked, still seemed to me the only way of redeeming in some measure the damage of the Yalta accord and of preventing the permanent division of Europe. Although the Council generously published my analysis of the German problem, it rejected my policy recommendations. It was my last fling at influencing U.S. policy from within the establishment. The swift transformation of the East-West wartime alliance into the systemically structured antagonism of the Cold War had profound consequences for American culture, not the least for academic culture. It was not simply that the universities became a prey to outer forces that saw them as centers of Communist subversion. The breakup of the broad, rather fluid liberal-radical continuum of the New Deal into hostile camps of center and left deeply affected the whole intellectual community. The political climax of that division was Henry Wallace's presidential campaign in 1948, in which I myself was active. The bitter feelings it left in its wake only served to conceal a more general change in climate by which most intellectuals were affected, namely the revolution of falling expectations in the decade after 1947. The coming of the Cold War—and with it, McCarthyism—forced a shift in the optimistic social and philosophic outlook in which liberal and radical political positions alike had been embedded. Wesleyan was a wonderful prism through which these changes were re-

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fracted. Several liberal activists of the social science faculty, including nonreligious ones, turned to the neo-Orthodox Protestantism of Reinhold Niebuhr to refound their politics in a tragic vision. Young scholars in American studies transferred their allegiance from Parrington and his democratic culture of the open frontier to the tough moral realism of Perry Miller's Puritans. For undergraduates, a new set of cultural audiorities arose. Jacob Burckhardt, with his resigned patrician wisdom in approaching problems of power, and the paradoxical pessimism of Kierkegaard elicited more interest than John Stuart Mill's ethical rationalism or Marx's agonistic vision. Existentialism, a stoical form of liberalism, came into its own, with Camus attracting some, Sartre others, according to their political persuasion. Nothing made a greater impression on me in the midst of this transvaluation of cultural values than the sudden blaze of interest in Sigmund Freud. Scholars of the most diverse persuasions to whom my own ties were close brought the tendency home. Two of my teachers turned to Freud: the conservative William Langer used him to deepen his politics of interest, while the liberal Lionel Trilling, now battling the Marxists, espoused Freud to temper his humanistic rationalism with the acknowledgment of the power of instinct. Nor can I forget the day in 1952 when two of my radical friends, the Wesleyan classicist Norman O. Brown and the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, suddenly encountered each other on the road from Marx to Freud, from political to cultural radicalism. Truly the premises for understanding man and society seemed to be shifting from the social-historical to the psychological scene. All these tendencies pointed American intellectuals in a direction that Europeans, with the exception of the Marxists, had gone half a century before: a loss of faith in history as progress. At a less credal level, but one actually more important for the world of learning, history lost its attractiveness as a source of meaning. Formalism and abstraction, refined internal analysis, and a new primacy of the theoretical spread rapidly from one discipline to another as all turned away from the historical mode of understanding of their subjects. For intellectual history, this tendency had two consequences, one relating to its educational function, the other to its scholarly method. Students now came to intellectual history expecting consideration of thinkers no longer studied in the disciplines to which they belonged. Thus in philosophy, the rising Anglo-American analytic school denned questions in such a way that many previously significant philosophers lost their relevance and stature. The historian became a residuary legatee at the deathbed of the history of philosophy, inheriting responsibility for preserving the thought of such figures as Schopenhauer or Fichte from oblivion. In economic thought,

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a similar function passed to intellectual history as the economists abandoned their historical heritage of general social theory and even questions of social policy to pursue an exciting new affair with mathematics. An opportunity for intellectual historians, you say? Yes and no. We were simply not equipped to assume such responsibilities. At best we had paid little attention to the internal structure of the thought with which we dealt. We had a way of skimming the ideological cream off the intellectual milk, reducing complex works of art and intellect to mere illustrations of historical tendencies or movements. The new ways of analyzing cultural products developed by the several disciplines revealed such impressionistic procedures as woefully inadequate. The historian thus faced two challenges at once: to show the continued importance of history for understanding the branches of culture whose scholars were rejecting it; and to do this at a moment when the historian's own methods of analysis were being revealed as obsolete and shallow by the very ahistorical analytic methods against which he wished to defend his vision. For me, the issue first came to focus in dealing with literature. When I charged my Wesleyan friends in the New Criticism with depriving literary works of the historical context that conditioned their very existence, they accused me of destroying the nature of the text by my excess of relativization. One irritated colleague hurled at me the injunction of e. e. cummings: "let the poem be." But he taught me how to read literature anew, how the analysis of form could reveal meanings to the historian inaccessible if he stayed only on the level of ideas, of discursive content. Other colleagues in architecture, painting, theology, and so on, similarly taught me the rudiments of formal analysis so that I could utilize their specialized techniques to pursue historical analysis with greater conceptual rigor. By the 1950s, the problems I have thus far described—the blockage in my course after Nietzsche, the changes in politics with the external and internal Cold War, the dehistoricization of academic culture, and the need for higher precision in intellectual history—all converged to define my scholarly agenda. I resolved to explore the historical genesis of the modern cultural consciousness, with its deliberate rejection of history. Only in a circumscribed historical context, so it seemed to me, could a common social experience be assessed for its impact on cultural creativity. Hence, a city seemed the most promising unit of study. Like Goldilocks in the house of the three bears, I tried out several— Paris, Berlin, London, Vienna—in seminars with Wesleyan students. I chose Vienna as the one that was "just right." It was indisputably a generative center in many important branches of twentieth-century culture, with a close and

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well-defined intellectual elite that was yet open to the larger currents of European thought. Thanks to my Wesleyan colleagues, I had acquired enough intellectual foundation to embark upon a multidisciplinary study.

V

In 1959, when I was on leave at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, a Berkeley colleague asked me to take over his course in intellectual history for two weeks. The class, although over 300 strong, had a spirit of collective engagement and responsiveness that I simply had not encountered before. I was seized by the feeling that Berkeley, with its bracing intellectual atmosphere, was the place I had to be. Ironically enough, I had turned down an offer there only four years before without even visiting the Berkeley campus. Throwing shame and protocol to the winds, I called a friend in the history department to ask if the job were still open. Fortunately it was. To pass from Wesleyan to Berkeley in 1960 was surely to move from academic Gemeinschaft to academic Gesellschaft. Wesleyan, with its intimate and open interdisciplinary discourse, had helped me to redefine my purposes as a scholar. Berkeley influenced the direction of my historical work much less. But it forced me to think through issues that I had not considered since Harvard: the relation of the university to contemporary society, and my vocation as a teacher. The crisis of the 1960s presented them in depth and urgency. As a public university, Berkeley was, of course, especially vulnerable to the pressures of both state and society. When I arrived there in 1960, the shadow of the oath crisis of the 1950s and the McCarthy years still lay heavily upon the faculty. Moreover, loo-year-old regulations barring political and religious speakers and campus political organization were still in force. Devised to protect the university's immunity from outside pressures of state and church, these rules had become under current conditions nettlesome restrictions of academic freedom. Until 1964, however, it was not students but faculty members who took the lead in pressing the issue of free speech. My department, for example, unanimously agreed to make a test case of the restriction rules by inviting Herbert Aptheker, a self-proclaimed Communist historian with a Ph.D. and solid publications, to address its graduate colloquium. When the administration, as it had to do, refused permission for the speaker and denied the department the funds to pay him, we took the colloquium off campus and

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held it in a church hall to dramatize our point: that a responsible educational function had, in the University of California, to be conducted as an unauthorized off-campus activity. In another action, when a well-funded right-wing group conducted a statewide campaign of "education in communism" in the towns of California, the history department offered a public lecture series on comparative communism to counteract propagandists masking as scholars. Our historians, of widely different political persuasions and with varied regional expertise, demonstrated to a large public by their example how the university could serve society by intellectualizing in analysis and rational discussion its most burning public problems. With the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, American politics took a new turn, with profound consequences for the university. The pressure on it came not only from the right and the establishment, as in the 1950s, but from the left and those with social grievances as well. This led at Berkeley to a shift in university attention from academic freedom and autonomy—a primary concern of the faculty—to political rights and the freedom of university members to pursue on campus their causes as citizens—a primary concern of students. In a liberal society, academic freedom and civic freedom are interdependent, but they are not the same. The first relates to the universal republic of letters, the second to the limited body politic. The recognition each must pay the other produces a delicate balance, easily upset when contestants locked in political struggle begin to see the university as a weapon or an obstacle. This is what happened at Berkeley. Political rights having been too long denied in the name of academic immunity, academic autonomy began to be put at risk in the name of political rights. I became deeply involved as a minor actor in the ensuing crisis, serving first on the Emergency Executive Committee of the Academic Senate, then as Chancellor's Officer for Educational Development. Let me say only that I went through the same rhythm of anguish, illusion, hope and disabusement that is so often the lot of participants in intense social crises. I realize now, on reflecting back, that once again my outlook and actions were marked by a kind of basic archetypical mental disposition to synthesize or unify forces whose dynamics resist integration. An ironic thrust seems to have characterized my intellectual work: In my book on Social Democracy, I had tried to comprehend socialism and democracy in a single perspective. In my intellectual history of Vienna, I had sought to integrate politics and culture in substance, historical and formal analysis in method. Now, in the crisis of university and

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society, I tried to reconcile academic autonomy and anti-war activism; in educational policy, faculty authority and educational renewal. Those who experienced the university crisis will know how searing the sense of dissolution can be, even if tempered now and again by a sense of future promise. I certainly had hopes that a stronger university community would issue from the crisis, and drew strength from the fine group of collaborating colleagues who shared my convictions about both free speech and educational reform. But in the conflict-laden environment, two other, less homogeneous entities made the situation bearable: my department and my classes. The history department was deeply divided over the issues of university policy; more, it contributed articulate spokesmen to almost every shade of opinion in the Academic Senate. Yet when the department met on academic business, its divisions on personnel or curricular problems did not follow those in Senate meetings on university issues. I could expect to find in a colleague who had opposed me on the Senate floor a staunch ally on a department matter. Professional ethos and collegiality remained intact. How different it was in other departments, such as politics and sociology, where methodological divisions tended to coincide with and reinforce political faction! My classes, buoyant and intellectually engaged through all the troubles, also were a continuous source of stability. However, the pressures of the crisis caused me to rethink my teaching. Once, after a final lecture in intellectual history, I had an experience that gave me food for thought. My students gave me the customary found of yearend applause. After all the difficulties of that year, I floated out of the lecture room on cloud nine. Then, as I walked down the corridor, I heard a girl behind me say to her companion, in a voice heavy with disgust: "And they call that a dialogue!" The remark jerked me back to earth. Beneath it lay two problems: first, student hunger for closer relations with the instructor, always present to some degree, but intensified by the unrest into a widespread rejection of the lecture system as "impersonal." Second, the passage of the student revolt from politics to culture. The gap that had opened between generations in both moral and intellectual culture was real—and in fact, wider than that in politics. How to bridge that gap, and make it possible for the professor of one generation to deal with new questions arising in another: that was the problem my jaundiced critic raised for me. It crystallized my interest in new educational forms suited to the mass university. To bring my ideas of the intellectual tradition into a new relation to

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students' questions, I restructured my course on polycentric lines. While I continued to present my interpretation of intellectual history in the lectures, I displaced the locus of instruction into a series of satellite seminars. These were organized on topics defined not by me, but by graduate teaching assistants. I asked them to deal with the same thinkers as I presented in my lectures, but left each free to choose texts of those thinkers more suited to the particular theme each had selected. They came up with themes I could not have thought of at the time, such as "The Costs of Freedom," or "The Idea of the Feminine in European Thinking." The graduate T.A. thus became a mediator between my professional discipline and standards in which he had a vocational stake, and the concerns of the new generation of which he was a part. All gained by the enlargement of the T.A.'s authority. The satellite seminar not only helped satisfy the felt need for dialogue, which in fact any section system might provide; it also set up a healthy dialectic between the interpretive scheme of my lectures and the ideas and existential concerns of the students reflected in each seminar's special theme. As I followed the intellectual yield of the seminars, I was made aware of the deep truth of Nietzsche's observation that a new need in the present opens a new organ of understanding for the past. Many ideas that have become more widespread, such as Foucault's, first arose for me there. The satellite seminar system was adopted by a few others both in Berkeley and Princeton, and was effective for its time. In the mid-1970s, however, when deference to the canonical in matters intellectual and social quiescence returned, it lost its appeal for graduate assistants. Well suited to its time, its time soon passed. In education as in scholarship, one must live in the provisional, always ready to acknowledge obsolescence and to adapt the forms of instruction to changes in both culture and society.

VI

I went to Princeton in order to save, if possible, my scholarly work. It was not the fault of the University of California, which I dearly loved, that I invested so much psychic energy in institutional life and in my teaching. But, given a tendency to neglect research for the other claims on the academic man, I could not resist the temptation of an appointment at Princeton University coupled with a half-time fellowship for three years at the Institute for Advanced Study. At Wesleyan in the 1950s, in response to the impact of the rightward shift of post-war politics and the de-mstoricization of academic culture, I had re-

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defined my mission and method as an interdisciplinary intellectual historian. At Berkeley in the 1960s, a university under the double pressure of America's conservative establishment and a recrudescent youthful left, I grappled in thought and action with finding the right relation between university and society. Part of a strong group of intellectual historians at Berkeley within a department of great diversity, I felt I was doing the work of my guild when I tried to adapt my subject to the intellectual and existential needs of a new generation of students. At Princeton in the 1970s, the center of my vocation shifted somewhat, from inside the history department to the humanities as a whole. Here again, a change in academic culture led me to redefine my function. Fundamental to it was the polarization of the social sciences and the humanities from each other. That process, which had begun in earnest in the 1950s, now reached a new intensity. The concern with aggregate, depersonalized social behavior on the one side, and the concern with linguistic and structuralist textual analysis independent of any social context on the other did not simply diminish the relevance of history to both groups. Their mutually exclusive conceptual systems also penetrated the discipline of history itself. Social historians, seeking the "otherness" of past cultures or of classes neglected in previous historiography, became more interested in the static cross-section of culture in the manner of anthropologists than in the dynamics of continuous transformation. At the other end of the spectrum, among intellectual historians, Hayden White lifted intellectual history clear of its social matrix by analyzing historiography as a literary construct. Synchronic recovery of a static slice of the past at one end of the spectrum, humanistic theory of forms at the other: these recapitulated within history itself in the 1970s the loss of interest in process and transformation that had marked the new academic culture outside history in the 1950s. In my Princeton history department, the dominant orientation was toward the social sciences. I am no theorist and no methodologist. My way of addressing the problem of polarization in the sciences humaines and in history itself was through teaching—but this time not alone, and not purely within history. A small group of Princeton faculty from different departments joined me in devising an undergraduate interdisciplinary program called European Cultural Studies. Its regnant idea was to bring to bear on the same objects of study the separate lights of social scientists, historians included, and humanists—the groups that elsewhere were pulling so far apart. All courses in the program were taught in two-person teams—hopefully one social scientist and one humanist. Few social scientists other than social historians could be induced

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to join the program. But the seminars did establish a field of discourse relating the social and ideational worlds to each other, despite the autonomism of our academic culture. In a more personal sense, teaching over some years with scholars in philosophy, architecture, Russian, German, and French literature made of my last teaching decade a quite new learning experience. From one of the seminars, on Basel in the nineteenth century, issued a research project with my teaching partner, a study echoing the concern of my Berkeley years: the relation between university culture and social power. During much of my scholarly life, I worked to bring the arts into history as essential constituents of its processes. In the last years, I have reversed the effort, trying to project historical understanding into the world of the arts, through work with museums, architecture schools, and critical writing for the larger public. The venue may change; the forms of one's engagement alter as one grows older and the world changes. Preparing this account, however, has made me realize all too clearly that I have not moved very far from the issues that arose in my formative years, when the value claims of intellectual culture and the structure of social power first appeared in a complex interaction that has never ceased to engage me.

1988 JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of History Duke University

As I began the task of putting the pieces together that would describe how I moved from one stage of intellectual development to another, I was reminded of a remark that Eubie Blake made as he approached his ninety-ninth birthday. He said, "If I had known that I would live this long I would have taken better care of myself." To paraphrase him, if I had known that I would become an historian and the Haskins Lecturer for 1988 I would have kept better records of my own pilgrimage through life. I may be forgiven, therefore, if I report that the beginnings are a bit hazy, not only to me but to my parents as well. For example, they had no clear idea of when I learned to read and write. It was when I was about three or four, I am told. My mother, an elementary school teacher, introduced me to the world of learning when I was three years old. Since there were no day-care centers in the village where we lived, she had no alternative to taking me to school and seating me in the rear where she could keep an eye on me. I remained quiet but presumably I also remained attentive, for when I was about five my mother noticed that on the sheet of paper she gave me each morning, I was no longer making lines and sketching out some notable examples of abstract art. I was writing words, to be sure almost as abstract as my art, and making sentences. My mother later said that she was not surprised much less astonished at what some, not she, would have called my precocity. Her only reproach—to herself, not me—was that my penmanship was hopelessly flawed since she had not monitored my progress as she had done for her enrolled students. From that point on, I would endeavor to write and through the written word to communicate my thoughts to others. 71

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My interest in having some thoughts of my own to express was stimulated by my father who, among other tasks, practiced law by day and read and wrote by night. In the absence of any possible distractions in the tiny village, he would read or write something each evening. This was my earliest memory of him and, indeed, it was my last memory of him. Even after we moved to Tulsa, a real city, and after we entered the world of motion pictures, radio, and television, his study and writing habits remained unaffected. I grew up believing that in the evenings one either read or wrote. It was always easy to read something worthwhile, and if one worked at it hard enough he might even write something worthwhile. I continue to beleve that.

I Two factors always plagued my world of learning for all of my developing years. One was race, the other was financial distress, and each had a profound influence on every stage of my development. I was born in the all-Negro town of Rentiesville to which my parents went after my father had been expelled from court by a white judge who told him no black person could ever represent anyone in his court. My father resolved that he would resign from the world dominated by white people and try to make it among his own people. But Rentiesville's population of fewer than 200 people could not provide a poverty-free living even for one who was a lawyer, justice of the peace, postmaster, farmer, and president of the Rentiesville Trading Company, which, incidentally, was not even a member of the New York Stock Exchange. The quality of life in Rentiesville was as low as one can imagine. There was no electricity, running water, or inside plumbing. There was no entertainment or diversion of any kind—no parks, playgrounds, libraries, or newspapers. We subscribed to the Muskogee Daily Phoenix, which was delivered by the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad as it made its way southward through the state each morning. The days and nights were lonely and monotonous, and for a young lad with boundless energy there was nothing to do but read. My older sister and brother were away in private school in Tennessee, and one did not even have the pleasure of the company of older siblings. Now and then one went to Checotah, six miles away, to shop. That was not always pleasant, such as the time my mother, sister, and I were ejected from the train because my, mother refused to move from the coach designated for whites. It was the only coach we could reach before the train moved again, so my mother argued that she would not move because she was not to blame if

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the train's white coach was the only one available when the train came to a halt. Her argument was unsuccessful, and we had to trudge back to Rentiesville through the woods. There were the rare occasions when we journeyed to Eufala, the county seat, where I won the spelling bee for three consecutive years. There was Muskogee to the North, where I went at the age of five for my first pair of eyeglasses, the malady brought on, I was told, by reading by the dim light of a kerosene lamp. It was a combination of these personal and family experiences that forced my parents to the conclusion that Rentiesville was not a viable community. They resolved to move to Tulsa. First, my father would go, find a place, set himself up in the practice of law, and we would follow six months later, in June 1921, when my mother's school closed for the summer recess. That June, however, we received word that in Tulsa there was a race riot, whatever that was, and that the Negro section of that highly segregated community was in flames. At the age of six I sensed from my mother's reaction that my father was in danger. We were all relieved several days later, therefore, when a message arrived that he had suffered no bodily harm, but that the property he had contracted to purchase was destroyed by fire. He practiced law in a tent for several months, and our move to Tulsa was delayed by four years. In the month before I reached my eleventh birthday, we arrived in Tulsa. It was quite a new world, and although a city of less than moderate size at the time, it was to my inexperienced eyes perhaps the largest city in the country. I did not see much of it, however, for racial segregation was virtually complete. I thought that Booker T. Washington, the school where I enrolled in grade seven, was the biggest and best school until one day I saw Central High for whites. It was a massive, imposing structure covering a city block. I was later to learn that it had every conceivable facility such as a pipe orgaq and a theater-size stage, which we did not have. I also learned that it offered modem foreign languages and calculus, while our school offered automobile mechanics, home economics, typing, and shorthand. Our principal and our teachers constantly assured us that we need not apologize for our training, and they worked diligently to give us much of what was not even in the curriculum. Now that the family was together again I had the example and the encouragement of both of my parents. My mother no longer taught but she saw to it that my sister and I completed all of our home assignments, promptly. Quite often, moreover, she introduced us to some of the great writers, especially Negro authors, such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Weldon Johnson,

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who were not a part of our studies at school. She also told us about some of the world's great music such as Handels' oratorio, Esther, in which she had sung in college. While the music at school was interesting and lively, especially after I achieved the position of first trumpet in the band and orchestra, there was no Handel or Mozart or Beethoven. We had a full fare of Victor Herbert and John Philip Sousa, and operettas, in more than one of which I sang the leading role. Often after school I would go to my father's office. By the time I was in high school, the depression had yielded few clients but ample time which he spent with me. It was he who introduced me to ancient Greece and Rome, and he delighted in quoting Plato, Socrates, and Pericles. We would then walk home together, and after dinner he went to his books and I went to mine. Under the circumstances, there could hardly have been a better way of life, since I had every intention after completing law school of some day becoming his partner. It was in secondary school that I had a new and wonderful experience which my parents did not share. It was the series of concerts and recitals at Convention Hall, perhaps even larger than the theater at Central High School which I never saw. As in the other few instances where whites and blacks were under the same roof, segregation was strict, but I very much wanted to go with some of my teachers who always held season tickets. My parents would never voluntarily accept segregation; consequently, the concerts were something they could forgo. Even at court my father refused to accept segregation. Whenever I accompanied him, which was as often as I could, he would send me to the jury box when it was empty, or when there was a jury trial, have me sit at the bench with him. They took the position, however, that if I could bear the humiliation of segregation, I could go to the concerts. Thus, with the money I earned as a paper boy, I could purchase my own tickets. To be more accurate, I was not the paper boy but the assistant to a white man who had the paper route in the black neighborhood. It was at one of these concerts that I heard Paul Whiteman present Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue while on a nationwide tour in 1927. I also attended the annual performances of the Chicago Civic Opera Company, which brought such stellar singers as Rosa Raisa, Tito Schipa, and Richard Bonelli to Tulsa. I am not altogether proud of going to Convention Hall, and there are times, even now, while enjoying a symphony or an opera, when I reproach myself for having yielded to the indignity of racial segregation. I can only say that in the long run it was my parents who knew best, though later I made a conscious effort to regain my self-respect.

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II

There were many sobering experiences at Fisk University, which I entered on a tuition scholarship in 1931. The first was my encounter with at least two dozen valedictorians and salutatorians from some of the best high schools in the United States. The fact that I had finished first in my high school class did not seem nearly as important in Nashville as it had in Tulsa. Imagine my chagrin when a whiz kid from Dayton made all A's in the first quarter while I made two B's and a C +. My rather poor grades were somewhat mitigated by my having to hold three jobs in order to pay my living expenses. I was also absolutely certain that the C + resulted from whimsical grading by the teaching assistants in a course called Contemporary Civilization. As I think of it now I still become infuriated, and if there was anyone to listen to my case today, I would insist that my examinations be reevaluated and my grade raised accordingly! I was consoled by my salutatorian girlfriend, now my wife of forty-seven years, who over the years has lent a sympathetic ear to my rantings about the injustices in that course. She could afford to be charitable. She received a grade of B +. Another sobering experience was my first racial encounter in Nashville. In a downtown streetcar ticket window, I gave the man the only money I possessed, which was a $20 bill. I apologized and explained that it was all I had and he could give me any kind of bills he wished. In an outburst of abusive language in which he used vile racial epithets, he told me that no nigger could tell him how to make change. After a few more similar statements he proceeded to give me $19.75 in dimes and quarters. From that day until I graduated, I very seldom went to Nashville and when I did I never went alone. It was about as much as a sixteen-year-old could stand. I thought of that encounter some three years later and felt almost as helpless when a gang of white hoodlums took a young black man from a Fisk-owned house on the edge of the campus and lynched him. As president of student government I made loud noises and protests to the mayor, the governor, and even President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but nothing could relieve our pain and anguish or bring Cordie Cheek back. Incidentally, the heinous crime he committed was that while riding his bicycle he struck a white child who was only slightly injured. Still another sobering, even shattering, experience was my discovery at the end of my freshman year that my parents had lost our home and had moved into a four-family apartment building which they had built. I knew that the country was experiencing an economic depression of gigantic proportions,

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that unemployment had reached staggering figures, and that my father's law practice had declined significantly. I was not prepared for the personal embarrassment that the depression created for me and my family, and frankly I never fully recovered from it. The liquidation of all debts became an obsession with me, and because of that experience my determination to live on a pay-as-yougo basis is as great today as it was when it was not at all possible to live that way. Despite these experiences, my years in college were pleasant if hectic, rewarding if tedious, happy if austere. Most classes were rigorous, and everyone was proud of the fact that the institution enjoyed an A rating by the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. The faculty was, on the whole, first-rate, and they took pride in their scholarly output as well as their teaching. While the student body was all black, with the exception of the occasional white exchange student or special student, the faculty was fairly evenly divided between white and black. It was an indication of the lack of interest in the subject that we never thought in terms of what proportion of the faculty was white and what proportion was black. Because I was merely passing through college en route to law school, I had little interest in an undergraduate concentration. I thought of English, but the chairman, from whom I took freshman English, discouraged me on the ground that I would never be able to command the English language. (Incidentally, he was a distinguished authority in American literature and specialized in the traditions of the Gullah-speaking people of the Sea Islands. I was vindicated some years later when he chaired the committee that awarded me the Bancroft Prize for the best article in the Journal of Negro History.) My decision to major in history was almost accidental. The chairman of that department, Theodore S. Currier, who was white, had come into that ill-fated course in Contemporary Civilization and had delivered the most exciting lectures I had ever heard. I decided to see and hear more of him. During my sophomore year I took two courses with Professor Currier, and my deep interest in historical problems and the historical process and what he had to say was apparently noted by him. Soon we developed a close personal relationship that developed into a deep friendship. Soon, moreover, I made the fateful decision to give up my plan to study and practice law and to replace it with a plan to study, write, and teach history. My desire to learn more about the field resulted in his offering new courses, including seminars, largely for my benefit. He already entertained the hope that I would go to Harvard, where he had done his own graduate work. I had similar hopes, but in the mid-ipgos with the depression wreaking its havoc, it was unrealistic to enter-

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tain such hopes. With a respectable grade point average (that C+ prevented my graduating summa cum laude), and strong supporting letters from my professors, I applied for admission to the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Harvard required that I take an aptitude test that must have been the forerunner to the Graduate Records Examination. It was administered at Vanderbilt University, just across town but on whose grounds I had never been. When I arrived at the appointed place and took my seat, the person in charge, presumably a professor, threw the examination at me, a gesture hardly calculated to give me a feeling of welcome or confidence. I took the examination but cannot imagine that my score was high. As I left the room a Negro custodian walked up to me and told me that in his many years of working there I was the only black person he had ever seen sitting in a room with white people. The record that Fisk made that year was more important. The Association of American Universities placed Fisk University on its approved list. On the basis of this new recognition of my alma mater, Harvard admitted me unconditionally. Apparently this was the first time it had given a student from an historically black institution an opportunity to pursue graduate studies without doing some undergraduate work at Harvard. The university declined, however, to risk a scholarship on me. Admission to Harvard was one thing; getting there was quite another. My parents were unable to give me more than a very small amount of money and wish me well. I was able to make it back to Nashville, where Ted Currier told me that money alone would not keep me out of Harvard. He went to a Nashville bank, borrowed $500, and sent me on my way. Shortly after my arrival in Cambridge in September 1935, I felt secure academically, financially, and socially. At Fisk I had even taken two modern foreign languages in order to meet Harvard's requirement, and in Currier's seminars I had learned how to write a research paper. Since I was secretary to the librarian at Fisk for four years, I had learned how to make the best use of reference materials, bibliographical aids, and manuscripts. Even when I met my advisor, Professor A. M. Schlesinger, Sr., I did not feel intimidated, and I was very much at ease with him while discussing my schedule and my plans. After I got a job washing dishes for my evening meal and another typing dissertations and lectures, a feeling of long-range solvency settled over me. Although I had a room with a Negro family that had taken in black students since the time of Charles Houston and Robert Weaver, I had extensive contact with white students who never showed the slightest condescension toward me. I set my own priorities, however, realizing that I had the burden of

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academic deficiencies dating back to secondary school. I had to prove to myself and to my professors that the Association of American Universities was justified in placing Fisk University on its approved list. I received the M.A. degree in nine months and won fellowships with which I completed the Ph.D. requirements. There were few blacks at Harvard in those days. One was completing his work in French history as I entered. As in Noah's Ark, there were two in the law school, two in zoology, and two in the College. There was one in English, one in comparative literature, none in the Medical School, and none in the Business School. The most traumatic social experience I had there was not racist but antiSemitic. I was quite active in the Henry Adams Club, made up of graduate students in United States history. I was appointed to serve on the committee to nominate officers for the coming year which, if one wanted to be hypersensitive, was a way of making certain that I would not be an officer. When I suggested the most acitve, brightest graduate student for president, the objection to him was diat although he did not have some of the more reprehensible Jewish traits, he was still a Jew. I had never heard any person speak of another in such terms, and I lost respect not only for the person who made the statement but for the entire group that even tolerated such views. Most of the members of the club never received their degrees. The Jewish member became one of the most distinguished persons to get a degree in United States history from Harvard in the last half-century. The course of study was satisfactory but far from extraordinary. Mark Hopkins was seldom on the other end of the log, and one had to fend for himself as best he could. I had no difficulty with such a regimen, although I felt that some of my fellow students needed more guidance than the university provided. In my presence, at the beginning of my second year, one of the department's outstanding professors verbally abused a student, visiting from anodier institution, and dismissed him from his office because the student's question was awkwardly phrased the first time around. Another professor confessed to me that a doctoral committee had failed a candidate because he did not look like a Harvard Ph.D. When the committee told him that he would have to study four more years before applying for reconsideration, the student was in the library the following morning to begin his four-year sentence. At that point, the chairman of the committee was compelled to inform the student that under no circumstances would he be permitted to continue his graduate studies there.

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III

When I left Harvard in the spring of 1939 I knew that I did not wish to be in Cambridge another day. I had no desire to offend my advisor or the other members of my doctoral committee. I therefore respectfully declined suggestions that I seek further financial aid. It was time, I thought, to seek a teaching position and complete my dissertation in absentia. I had taught one year at Fisk following my first year at Harvard. With five preparations in widely disparate fields and with more than two hundred students, I learned more history than I had learned at Fisk and Harvard. I early discovered that teaching had its own very satisfying rewards. For some fifty-two years, there have been many reasons to confirm the conclusions I reached at Fisk, St. Augustine's, North Carolina College at Durham, Howard, Brooklyn, Chicago, Duke, and short stints in many institutions here and abroad. After I committed myself to the study, teaching, and writing of history, I was so preoccupied with my craft that I gave no attention to possible career alternatives. Less than ten years into my career, however, when I was working on my second book, the president of a small but quite respectable historically black liberal arts college invited me to become dean of his institution. It was at that point that I made a response that was doubtless already in my mind but which I had not ever articulated. I thanked him and respectfully declined the invitation on the grounds that my work in the field of history precluded my moving into college administration. When the president received my letter, he sent me a telegram informing me that he was arriving the following day to explain his offer. During the three hours of conversation with him I had ample opportunity to state and restate my determination to remain a teacher and writer of history. Each time I did so I became more unequivocal in my resistance to any change in my career objectives. I believe that he finally became convinced that he was indeed wrong in offering me the deanship in the first place. From that day onward, I had no difficulty in saying to anyone who raised the matter that I was not interested in deanships, university presidencies, or ambassadorships. And I never regretted die decision to remain a student and teacher of history. There is nothing more stimulating or satisfying than teaching bright, inquisitive undergraduates. It was puzzling if dismaying when a student complained, as one did at Howard, that my lengthy assignments did not take into account the fact that his people were only eighty-five years removed from slavery. It was sobering but challenging when an undergraduate asked, as one

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did at Brooklyn, if I would suggest additional readings since he had already read everything in the syllabus that I distributed on the first day of class. It was reassuring to find that some students, such as those at Chicago, came to class on a legal holiday because I neglected to take note of the holiday in my class assignments. It was refreshing, even amusing, when students requested, as some did at Duke, that the date for the working dinner at my home be changed because it conflicted with a Duke-Virginia basketball game. As Harry Golden would say, only in America could one find undergraduates with so much chutzpah. There came a time in my own teaching career when I realized that with all my frantic efforts at research and writing I would never be able to write on all the subjects in which I was deeply interested. If I only had graduate students who would take up some of the problems regarding slavery, free blacks, the Reconstruction era and its overthrow, it would extend my own sense of accomplishment immeasurably. That was a major consideration in my move in 1964 from Brooklyn College to the University of Chicago, where for the next eighteen years I supervised some thirty dissertations of students who subsequently have published more than a dozen books. In view of Chicago's free-wheeling attitude toward the time for fulfilling degree requirements, there is a possibility that eight years after retirement, I might have more doctoral students who complete their work and write more books. Meanwhile, I continue to revel in the excitement of teaching in still another type of institution, the Law School at Duke University.

IV I could not have avoided being a social activist even if I had wanted to. I had been barred from entering the University of Oklahoma to pursue graduate studies, and when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People asked me to be the expert witness for Lyman Johnson, who sought admission to the graduate program in history at the University of Kentucky, I was honored to do so. After all, it was easy to establish the fact that Johnson could not get the same training at the inferior Kentucky State College for Negroes that he could get at the University of Kentucky. Johnson was admitted forthwith. To me it was one more blow against segregation in Oklahoma as well as Kentucky. The defense argument collapsed when the University of Kentucky placed one of its history professors on the stand and asked him

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about teaching Negroes. He replied soberly that he did not teach Negroes, he taught history, which he was pleased to do! Then, Thurgood Marashall asked me to serve on his non-legal research staff when the NAACP Legal Defense Fund sought to eliminate segregation in the public schools. Each week in the late summer and fall of 1953 I journeyed from Washington to New York, where I worked from Thursday afternoon to Sunday afternoon. I wrote historical essays, coordinated the work of some other researchers, and participated in the seminars that the lawyers held regularly, and provided the historical setting for the questions with which they were wrestling. I had little time for relaxing at my home away from home, the Algonquin Hotel, but each time I entered this establishment, I made eye contact with an imaginary Tallulah Bankhead, Agnes DeMille, or Noel Coward, who were among the more famous habitues of its lobby. The historian, of all people, must not make more of his own role in events, however significant, even if it is tempting to do so. It would be easy to claim that I was one of the 250,000 at the March on Washington in 1963.I was not there, and perhaps the truth is even more appealing. Because I was serving as Pitt Professor at the University of Cambridge that year, I was something of a resource person for the BBC-TV. On Richard Dimbleby's popular television program, Panorama., I tried to explain to the British viewers what transpired when James Meredith sought to enter the University of Mississippi. I suspect there was a bit of advocacy even in the tone of my voice. In the summer of 1963 I took British viewers through what the BBC called "A Guide to the March on Washington." Here again, with film clips on Malcolm X, James Baldwin, A. Philip Randolph, and others, I explained why the March was a very positive development in the history of American race relations. Finally, in 1965,1 was actually on the Selma March. No, I did not march with Martin, as some imaginative writers have claimed. I doubt that Martin ever knew that I was there, far back in the ranks as I was. I was not at Pettus Bridge in Dallas County, but joined the March at the City of St. Jude on the outskirts of Montgomery. I took pride in marching with more than thirty historians who came from all parts of the country to register their objection to racial bigotry in the United States. And I want to make it clear that I was afraid, yes, frightened out of my wits by the hate-filled eyes that stared at us from the sidewalks, windows, businesses, and the like. It was much more than I had bargained for. One must be prepared for any eventuality when he makes any effort to promote legislation or to shape the direction of public policy or to affect the

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choice of those in the public service. This came to me quite forcefully in 1987 when I joined with others from many areas of activity in opposing the Senate confirmation of Robert H. Bork as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. In what I thought was a sober and reasoned statement, I told the Judiciary Committee of the United States Senate that there was "no indication—in his writings, his teaching, or his rulings—that this nominee has any deeply held commitment to the eradication of the problem of race or even of its mitigation." It came as a shock, therefore, to hear the president of the United States declare that the opponents of the confirmation of Judge Bork constituted a "lynch mob." This was a wholly unanticipated tirade against those activists who had merely expressed views on a subject in which all citizens had an interest.

V

It was necessary, as a black historian, to have a personal agenda, as well as one dealing with more general matters, that involved a type of activism. I discovered this in the spring of 1939 when I arrived in Raleigh, North Carolina, to do research in the state archives, only to be informed by the director that in planning the building the architects did not anticipate that any AfroAmericans would be doing research there. Perhaps it was the astonishment that the director, a Yale Ph.D. in history, saw in my face that prompted him to make a proposition. If I would wait a week he would make some arrangements. When I remained silent, registering a profound disbelief, he cut the time in half. I waited from Monday to Thursday, and upon my return to the archives I was escorted to a small room outfitted with a table and chair which was to be my private office for the next four years. (I hasten to explain that it did not take four years to complete my dissertation. I completed it the following year, but continued to do research there as long as I was teaching at St. Augustine's College.) The director also presented me with keys to the manuscript collection to avoid requiring the white assistants to deliver manuscripts to me. That arrangement lasted only two weeks, when the white researchers, protesting discrimination, demanded keys to the manuscript collection for themselves. Rather than comply with their demands, the director relieved me of my keys and ordered the assistants to serve me. Nothing illustrated the vagaries of policies and practices of racial segregation better than libraries and archives. In Raleigh alone, there were three different policies: the state library had two tables in the stacks set aside for the

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regular use of Negro readers; the state supreme court library had no segregation; while, as we have seen, the archives faced the matter as it arose. In Alabama and Tennessee, the state archives did not segregate readers, while Louisiana had a strict policy of excluding would-be Negro readers altogether. In the summer of 1945 I was permitted by the Louisiana director of archives to use the manuscript collection since the library was closed in observance of the victory of the United States over governmental tyranny and racial bigotry in Germany and Japan. As I have said elsewhere, pursuing Southern history was for me a strange career. While World War II interrupted the careers of many young scholars, I experienced no such delay. At the same time, it raised in my mind the most profound questions about the sincerity of my country in fighting bigotry and tyranny abroad. And the answers to my questions shook my faith in the integrity of our country and its leaders. Being loath to fight with guns and grenades, in any case, I sought opportunities to serve in places where my training and skills could be utilized. When the United States entered the war in 1941 I had already received my doctorate. Because I knew that several whites who had not been able to obtain their advanced degrees had signed on as historians in the War Department, I made application there. I was literally rebuffed without the department giving me any serious consideration. In Raleigh, where I was living at the time, the Navy sent out a desperate appeal for men to do office work, and the successful ones would be given the rank of petty officer. When I answered the appeal, the recruiter told me that I had all of the qualifications except color. I concluded that there was no emergency and told the recruiter how I felt. When my draft board ordered me to go to its staff physician for a blood test, I was not permitted to enter his office and was told to wait on a bench in the hall. When I refused and insisted to the draft board clerk that I receive decent treatment, she in turn insisted that the doctor see me forthwith, which he did. By this time, I concluded that the United States did not need me and did not deserve me. I spent the remainder of the war successfully outwitting my draft board, including taking a position at North Carolina College for Negroes, whose president was on the draft appeal board. Each time I think of these incidents, even now I feel nothing but shame for my country not merely for what it did to me, but for what it did to the million black men and women who served in the armed forces under conditions of segregation and discrimination. One had always to be mindful, moreover, that being a black scholar did not exempt one from the humiliations and indignities that a society with more than its share of bigots can heap upon a black person regardless of education

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or even station in life. This became painfully clear when I went to Brooklyn College in 1956 as chairman of a department of fifty-two white historians. There was much fanfare accompanying my appointment, including a frontpage story with picture in The New York Times. When I sought to purchase a home, however, not one of the thirty-odd realtors offering homes in the vicinity of Brooklyn College would show their properties. Consequently, I had to seek showings by owners who themselves offered their homes for sale. I got a few showings including one that we very much liked, but I did not have sufficient funds to make the purchase. My insurance company had proudly advertised that it had $50 million to lend to its policyholders who aspired to home ownership. My broker told me that the company would not make a loan to me because the house I wanted was several blocks beyond where blacks should live. I cancelled my insurance and, with the help of my lawyer, who was white, tried to obtain a bank loan. I was turned down by every New York bank except the one in Brooklyn where my attorney's father had connections. As we finally moved in after the hassles of more than a year, I estimated that I could have written a long article, perhaps even a small book, in the time expended on the search for housing. The high cost of racial discrimination is not merely a claim of the so-called radical left. It is as real as the rebuffs, the indignities, or the discriminations that many black people suffer.

VI

Many years ago, when I was a fledgling historian, I decided that one way to make certain that the learning process would continue was to write different kinds of history, even as one remained in the same field. It was my opinion that one should write a monograph, a general work, a biography, a period piece, and edit some primary source and some work or works, perhaps by other authors, to promote an understanding of the field. I made no systematic effort to touch all the bases, as it were, but with the recent publication of my biography of George Washington Williams, I believe that I have touched them all. More recently, I have started the process all over again by doing research for a monograph on runaway slaves. Another decision I made quite early was to explore new areas or fields, whenever possible, in order to maintain a lively, fresh approach to the teaching and writing of history. That is how I happened to get into Afro-American history, in which I never had a formal course, and which attracted a growing

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number of students of my generation and many more in later generations. It is remarkable how moving or even drifting into a field can affect one's entire life. More recently, I have become interested in women's history, and during the past winter I prepared and delivered three lectures under the general title of "Women, Blacks, and Equality, 1820-1988." I need not dwell on the fact that for me it was a very significant learning experience. Nor should it be necessary for me to assure you that despite the fact that I have learned much, I do not seek immortality by writing landmark essays and books in the field of women's history. I have learned much from my colleagues both at home and abroad. The historical associations and other learned societies have instructed me at great length at their annual meetings, and five of them have given me an opportunity to teach and to lead by electing me as their president. Their journals have provided me with the most recent findings of scholars and they have graciously published some pieces of my own. Very early I learned that scholarship knows no national boundaries, and I have sought the friendship and collaboration of historians and scholars in many parts of the world. From the time that I taught at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies in 1951,1 have been a student and an advocate of the view that the exchange of ideas is more healthy and constructive than the exchange of bullets. This was especially true during my tenure on the Fulbright Board, as a member for seven years and as the chairman for three years. In such experiences one learns much about the common ground that the peoples of the world share. When we also learn that this country and the western world have no monopoly of goodness and truth or of skills and scholarship, we begin to appreciate the ingredients that are indispensable to making a better world. In a life of learning that is, perhaps, the greatest lesson of all.

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19A89 JUDITH N. SHKLAR John Cowles Professor of Government Harvard University

I am a bookworm. Since the age of eleven I have read and read, and enjoyed almost every moment of it. Yet I was very slow to learn how to read at all, and I hated school, avoiding it as long and as often as I could, without being an actual dropout. It was certainly not in the various schools that I attended so unwillingly that I learned to read or to write. In fact, my exasperated parents had to hire a tutor to get me started. Nor were my first encounters with literature always happy, though they certainly made a deep impression upon me. The first book I ever read through by myself was a German translation of David Copperfteld. I read it over and over again and I still love it. The second book was a children's novel about two boys in the Thirty Years War, which led me to look it up in a wonderful illustrated world history in many volumes in my parents' library. I was hooked for life on fiction and history. It was not, however, all pleasure. One day I picked up the first volume of Shakespeare in the Schlegel-Tieck translation. The first play was Titus Andronicus, and I read it all. To this day I can still feel the fear and horror it inspired. I was so afraid and confused that I could not even bring myself to tell anyone what was bothering me. Finally I managed to spill it out to my oldest sister. As soon as I told her I, of course, felt infinitely relieved, especially as she assured me that these things did not really happen. The trouble was that both she and I knew that far worse was going on all around us. By 1939 I already understood that books, even scary ones, would be my best refuge from a world that was far more terrible than anything they might reveal. And that is how I became a bookworm. It was also the end of my childhood. Biography, novels, and plays are the delight of young readers, and they 87

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certainly were mine. But I also very early on began to read about current events and political history. The reason for this precocious taste was obvious enough, just as there was nothing random about my later professional interests. Politics completely dominated our lives. My parents had had a hard time getting out of Russia, where the First World War had stranded them, after the Revolution, but they did manage to return home, to Riga, which was now a Latvian city. At first they prospered, but soon it too became a very hostile place. We were essentially German Jews, which meant that almost everyone around us wanted us to be somewhere else at best, or to kill us at worst. My parents were well-educated, well-to-do, and liberal people, and in a wholly unobtrusive way they were completely unconventional. They had an absolute confidence in the moral and intellectual abilities of their children and treated us accordingly, which made the extreme contrast between a family with high personal standards and an utterly depraved external world inescapable. And this induced a certain wariness, if not outright cynicism, in all of us. My father had wanted to leave Europe for many years, but we had many family ties binding us to Riga, and my mother, who was a pediatrician, ran a slum clinic which she could not easily abandon. In the event, just before the Russians arrived, my uncle put us on a plane to Sweden, where we remained for too long, until well after the German invasion of Norway. By then there was only one route out of Europe, the Trans-Siberian railroad, which slowly took us to Japan. It was not an easy trip, but miraculously we escaped. In Japan we were able to buy, in effect, a visa to Canada, which had, as is now common knowledge, a less than generous immigration policy. Not long before Pearl Harbor we took a boat to Seattle where we were locked up for several surrealistic weeks in a detention jail for illegal Oriental immigrants. If I were asked what effect all these adventures had on my character, I would say that they left me with an abiding taste for black humor. When my father was at last able to settle his financial affairs, we finally went to Montreal. It was not a city one could easily like. It was politically held together by an equilibrium of ethnic and religious resentments and distrust. And in retrospect, it is not surprising that this political edifice eventually collapsed with extraordinary speed. The girls school that I attended there for some three years was dreadful. In all that time I was taught as much Latin as one can pick up in less than a term at college. I also learned some geometry, and one English teacher taught us how to compose precis, which is a very useful skill. The rest of the teachers just stood in front of us and read the textbook out loud. What I really learned was the meaning of boredom, and I learned that so well that I have never been bored since then. I report without

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comment that this was thought to be an excellent school. I dare say that there were better ones around, but I remain unconvinced by those who respond with vast nostalgia to the manifest inadequacies of high school education today. I do not look back fondly to my college days at McGill University either. That may have something to do with the then prevailing entrance rules: 750 points for Jews and 600 for everyone else. Nor was it an intellectually exciting institution, but at least when I arrived there, just before my seventeenth birthday, I was lucky to be in the same class as many ex-servicemen, whose presence made for an unusually mature and serious student body. And compared to school it was heaven. Moreover, it all worked out surprisingly well for me. I met my future husband and was married at the end of my junior year, by far the smartest thing I ever did. And I found my vocation. Originally I had planned to major in a mixture of philosophy and economics, the rigor of which attracted me instantly. But when I was required to take a course in money and banking it became absolutely obvious to me that I was not going to be a professional economist. Philosophy was, moreover, mainly taught by a dim gentleman who took to it because he had lost his religious faith. I have known many confused people since I encountered this poor man, but nobody quite as utterly unfit to teach Plato or Descartes. Fortunately for me, I was also obliged to take a course in the history of political theory taught by an American, Frederick Watkins. After two weeks of listening to this truly gifted teacher I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. If there was any way of making sense of my experiences and that of my particular world, this was it. Watkins was a remarkable man, as the many students whom he was to teach at Yale can testify. He was an exceptionally versatile and cultivated man and a more than talented teacher. He not only made the history of ideas fascinating in his lectures, but he also somehow conveyed the sense that nothing could be more important. I also found him very reassuring. For in many ways, direct and indirect, he let me know that the things I had been brought up to care for—classical music, pictures, literature—were indeed worthwhile, and not my personal eccentricities. His example, more than anything overtly said, gave me a great deal of self-confidence, and I would have remembered him gratefully, even if he had not encouraged me to go on to graduate school, to apply to Harvard, and then to continue to take a friendly interest in my education and career. It is a great stroke of luck to discover one's calling in one's late teens, and not everyone has the good fortune to meet the right teacher at the right time in her life, but I did, and I

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have continued to be thankful for the education that he offered me so many years ago. From the day that I arrived at Harvard I loved the place, and I still do. By that I do not mean that it was perfect. Far from it. In fact, I think it is a far better university now than it was when I got there. But whatever its flaws, I found the education there I had always longed for. The government department was then as now very eclectic, which suited me well, and I learned a lot of political science, mostly from the junior faculty. My mentor was a famous academic figure, Carl Joachim Friedrich. And he taught me how to behave, how to be professional, how to give and prepare lectures, how to deal with colleagues and how to act in public, as well as a general idea of what I would have to know. And though he was not given to praise, he did not seem to doubt that I would manage to get ahead somehow. In fact I can recall only one nice comment he ever made to me. After my final thesis exam he said, "Well, this isn't the usual thesis, but then I did not expect it to be." Eventually I realized that he hoped that I would be his successor, as I indeed did, after many ups and downs. In retrospect it seems to me that the best thing he did for me was to let me go my own way as a student and then as a young teacher. Like many ambitious young people, I was inordinately concerned about what other people thought of me, but having seen a good many graduate students since then, I realize