Ben Seligman

...At the same time, he indulged his healthy appetite for good fiddle playing, good fiction, good friends, good food...

...Determined not to be hampered by a heart that would not beat in rhythm with his high ambitions, he drove himself to produce a stream of books and essays on economic problems...

...What a good man we have lost...

...Not so Ben...

...If it was old-fashioned to fight for his favorite old Budapest recordings in preference to the newfangled Juilliard interpretations, or to haunt the bookshops for expensive old books which he might have borrowed or bought in paperback, so be it...

...In choosing to do neither, he chose to remain an open-minded socialist...

...Until the last five years of his life he was not granted the leisure of the academic who does his work in three- and four-day weeks and long summer holidays...

...And he was incredibly generous, without any consciousness of how unusual it is to be always thinking of your friends and how you might be belpful...

...What is perhaps less known, although cherished by friends, relatives, and comrades, is his success in maintaining an equipoise between foolish optimism and easy despair, between blind faith in the new generation of radicals and paralysis before the totalitarian abyss...

...But he could laugh at that and even-rare gift!mock his own mannerisms...

...Employed full-time at a series of research, administrative, and organizing jobs situated mostly around the labor movement, he had to work nights and weekends, reading hard and writing fast, to commit to paper the insights that grew bolder, sharper, and more pungent as he himself grew older...

...The world is full of "old-fashioned intellectuals" for whom the concept of socialist fraternity has long since lost whatever value it might once have had...

...His last boast was not of his own work, published or forthcoming, but of his success in recruiting able people to the university community in which he was functioning with such admirable productivity when he was cut down...

...And it reverberates to the cries of "socialist intellectuals" who brutalize the notion of brotherhood by limiting it to this elite or that...

...HARVEY SWADOS...

...He could have gone whoring after the young, or he could have hectored them for their ignorant abuse of values already abandoned by others of his own generation...

...He was hardly a saintly man-he hated too hard and scorned too fiercely for that, and the thespian aspirations of his adolescence often reasserted themselves in, theatrical forms of address...

...Many of us are tolerably aware of Ben's accomplishments in his chosen field...