Remember Bernard Rosenberg: Always "In Opposition"
Hausknecht, Murray
When I heard the sad news, two memories came to mind. I met Bernie in September 1950. I had just finished my graduate course work and been lucky enough to get my first teaching job as an adjunct...
...I was assigned to its Bronx campus (now Lehman College) where Bernie was the sole full-time representative of its sociology department...
...None of us was happy about Kennedy—I think we all had cast our usual vote for Norman Thomas— and Bernie was on one of his characteristic and inimitable riffs: trenchant social analysis laced with caustic wit—this time about Kennedy's politics and admirers...
...His cordiality at our first encounter was not due to the brilliance of my criticism of my professor but to the fact that Bernie perceived me as someone who was also "in opposition...
...That, at least, was one fate he escaped...
...To be "in opposition," however, has obvious disadvantages: one is an outsider without access to power or influence...
...A group of us were talking about the elections—it must have been during an editorial meeting break or at a Dissent conference...
...It was one of Bernie's major complaints about mass culture: "Never before," he wrote in the introduction to Mass Culture, "have the sacred and the profane, the genuine and the specious, the exalted and the debased, been so thoroughly mixed that they are all but indistinguishable...
...Bernie drove the idea home by also quoting Sorel's more epigrammatic version: "It is necessary to be outside to see inside...
...One of us, I think it was Manny Geltman, managed to interrupt the flow to ask Bernie what he would do if suddenly, through some miracle, socialists came to power—a socialist president and Congress...
...He was destined to be an editor of a magazine called Dissent...
...The stranger is an outsider, and Bernie quoted the American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley, who wrote that the person thoroughly submerged in his culture "can never truly see it, simply because he has no external point of view from which to look at it...
...Today, the outsider's perspective is always in danger of becoming grist for Charlie Rose's mill...
...Veblen believed, Bernie wrote, that the "social situation" of the Jews accounted for their achievements...
...If he could never wholly conquer the torments of bodily pain, Bernie was always successfully "in opposition...
...By the end of the century, however, it is harder to maintain that "external point" that allows the intellectual to "see inside" with the objectivity of Simmel's ideal stranger...
...They are part of his legacy to us...
...There can be little doubt that Bernie was embracing an ideal and thinking of his own "social situation...
...Outsiders gain a perspective that, in Bernie's words, "may increase their acuity, heighten their perceptions, and multiply their insights...
...The second memory is of a conversation around the time of the election of John F. 140 • DISSENT In Memoriam Kennedy, who entranced not only liberals but many socialists...
...We could always count on him to give us the benefits of the increased acuity, the heightened perception, and the multiplicity of insights that are now embedded in his books, essays, and remembered conversations...
...Like most of his graduate students, I had fallen under his spell, but, as I told Bernie, I had some serious reservations about his work...
...I had just finished my graduate course work and been lucky enough to get my first teaching job as an adjunct at Hunter College...
...As soon as I said this I sensed a change in the atmosphere— from wary neutrality to warmth...
...We had lunch together that first day, and at one point he asked about one of my graduate school teachers, a well-known and influential sociologist...
...The other part of Bernie's legacy is our memory of a determined outsider relentlessly looking in, and it will serve as a continual reminder that being "in opposition" can produce a rich heritage for those we leave behind...
...He once wrote that Thorstein Veblen's essay on the intellectual preeminence of Jews gives "us a sharper characterization of himself than any biographer would be able to provide" and this is also true of Bernie's book The Values of Veblen...
...Still, what Bernie knew, and built his intellectual life on, was that there were also advantages to being an outsider...
...Without a moment's hesitation, Bernie replied, "I would go into opposition immediately...
...The Jew was like Georg Simmel's Stranger, who, in Bernie's summary, "stands apart from the thoughtways that permeate his society...
...At the turn of the century a Veblen could easily remain marginal, as his checkered academic career demonstrated...
...But Bernie was always "in opposition...
...FALL • 1996 • 141...
Vol. 43 • September 1996 • No. 4
