Rose Laub Coser remembered
Wrong, Dennis
In September 1945 Rose Coser and I were new graduate students in the Department of Sociology at Columbia. She was from the beginning a vivid and forceful presence who used to sit in the front of...
...Rose possessed a salutary toughness of mind...
...By contrast, the other young woman, with her permanent and her elegantly fashionable dress, seemed a product of a protected, even spoiled, affluent American background...
...I rather doubt, however, that Rose would have approved of the version of socialism that Fromm advanced in several of his later books, in which he affirmed the superiority of small cooperative communities against the fragmented and impersonal conditions of modern life...
...Rose was no sentimental celebrant of tightly knit "organic communities" or mourner for a lost Gemeinschaft: her last book was In Defense of Modernity: Role Complexity and Individual Autonomy, a title that virtually speaks for itself in grounding individual freedom and variety in the mosaic of modern life...
...This sounds innocuous enough today, but it was intended to signal our rejection of Stalinism, although only a few of us, of whom Rose was much the most politically sophisticated, were anti-Stalinists...
...I remember what Rose was saying: she compared Freud and Erich Fromm, contending that Freud had too dark and pessimistic a view of human nature whereas it was possible to think of Fromm as a socialist...
...110 • DISSENT...
...Though still in her twenties, she was a few years older than most of us and inevitably assumed something of a leadership role...
...I looked at Rose talking vigorously with her short hair, bright eyes, no makeup, and plain clothes and saw her as the embodiment of European socialist womanhood, easily to be imagined marching with banners in a demonstration against fascism and social injustice...
...Her voice will be missed...
...Rose and I and a young woman with whom I had a date for the evening were traveling downtown on the subway after Merton's class, straphanging in the center of the car—in those days the cars WINTER • 1995 • 109 In Memoriam actually had leather straps attached to a central beam...
...She was from the beginning a vivid and forceful presence who used to sit in the front of Robert K. Merton's classes and ask probing questions in her soft but firm German-accented voice...
...Professor Robert S. Lynd encouraged some of us to organize a Socialist Club—this was a time of great political hope with the war having just ended...
...I recall her listening at an American Sociological Association meeting to a graduate student whine about having to acquire quantitative skills and telling him "Look, there are just some things you have to learn, like driving a car...
...One memory of that time conveys something of the impression Rose gave, at least to me as an innocent and idealistic youth...
...Rose and I and several others drew up a statement of principles, including the assertion that we were "opposed to all forms of totalitarianism...
...Lewis Coser did not become a student in the department until a few years later...
...She combined a thoroughgoing realism about the world with a firmly principled assessment of its failings, a dual capacity that is not so common these days...
...Our intention was understood, however, and we had trouble obtaining the signatures of second-year students needed to certify the club as a Columbia student organization, although eventually we did so...
Vol. 42 • January 1995 • No. 1
