Remembers Lew Coser
Rule, James B.
LEWIS COSER, who died July 8 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was one of the last of an intellectual generation. This is true in the literal sense that he, along with Irving Howe, Stanley Plastrik,...
...It was my extreme good fortune later to become his colleague in the sociology department at Stony Brook, from which he retired in 1987...
...I can't turn to him any more now, but the fact that I keep asking questions of this kind, I owe to him...
...And he was always supportive of efforts by people like me to find our own intellectual way...
...His father was a wealthy Jewish industrialist, his mother an upper-class Protestant...
...I do not think he would have traded these marginal identifications and their associated inner tensions for anything...
...Sociology was one particular mode of knowledge that supported those larger tasks...
...a leftist and a critic of the left...
...Escaping again from the Germans under the occupation, he made his way at the last possible moment to the United States, where he married Rose Laub, later also active with Dissent...
...or "What issues would Lew see at stake here...
...a defender of the underdog and something of an elite intellectual mandarin...
...He was elected president of the American Sociological Association in 1974, collecting many honors and distinctions before and after...
...As a teacher of sociology, Lew seemed to have something important to say about everything in the field— DISSENT / Fall 2003 n 93 IN MEMORIAM to have read every author worth reading, to have thought about every question worth considering, to have taken the exact measure of intellectual allies and antagonists, and to have his speech prepared in each case...
...a hardheaded social analyst, committed to rigorous honesty in judgment and deed, and a passionate advocate...
...He was Jewish and non-Jewish...
...These qualities made a deep impression on me when, as a disoriented Brandeis undergraduate newly arrived from California, I came under his spell...
...By his fifties, Lew had become—I think somewhat to his surprise—an eminent sociologist...
...In the fifties, he enrolled as a graduate student in sociology at Columbia University, taking his Ph.D...
...He had become what he remained: a socialist in economic matters, a defender of democratic principles in politics, an enemy of conservative and centrist complacency in the face of human suffering and of left-wing apologists for totalitarian practice...
...He was a deep, committed, sophisticated thinker, the best of friends, and a very classy guy...
...Like the magazine he helped found, he operated from a vision...
...More than anyone else, he was responsible for shaping my own mindset and career directions...
...Having grown up in the political wastelands of suburban California, during the McCarthy era when no one dared to breathe a political idea to a young person, I found in Lew's worldview everything that my own intellectual and cultural upbringing had lacked...
...He had equally vigorous and multifaceted views on aesthetics, literature, philosophy—and of course politics...
...He went to Paris, where he seems to have lived from hand to mouth, insecure economically yet immersed in the incredibly rich political and intellectual culture of the inter-war years...
...People in Berkeley had told me that he was someone I had to meet when I came to Brandeis, and his reputation was equally strong on that campus...
...It was this sense of being a whole thinker, a minister without portfolio, that distinguished him from academic writers who viewed themselves as expert practicioners of circumscribed specialties...
...These differences seemed to have produced a contentious family— and to have set the stage for a life in which conflict and ambivalence were a leitmotif...
...For ten years or so after coming to the United States in 1941, Lew once told me, he supported himself largely as a "left-wing journalist...
...More broadly, Lew was a preeminent representative of a social type that has since become something of an endangered species in America—a scholar who was also a public intellectual, a social commentator endowed with both enormous scholarly depth and authentic political passion...
...He was always ready to lay his own position on the line, yet he was not overbearing...
...But he always considered himself an intellectual first and a sociologist second...
...I think that Lewis Coser, for all his ultimate eminence, always felt himself a marginal man...
...Like the other founders of Dissent, he always remained a generalist...
...This is true in the literal sense that he, along with Irving Howe, Stanley Plastrik, and a small nucleus of others, invented this magazine and put out its first edition in the McCarthy-dominated-America of 1954...
...Lew upped the ante of contention by embracing radical politics—further roiling his relationship with his father, becoming something of a celebrity in left-wing circles in his early youth, and accordingly having to flee Germany in 1933 to escape the attentions of the Nazis...
...Often, in the years since he left Stony Brook for Cambridge, I have found myself asking "What would Lew think about this...
...at the age of forty-one...
...As he himself sometimes suggested, conflict, tension and ambivalence had been so much a part of his life that thriving on them became central to his identity...
...Lew was born in Berlin...
...Instead, he could speculate about the bases of his own views, and wonder out loud what it would have taken to move him in a different direction...
...His aim was always to make some sort of comprehensive sense of the human condition—a sense of the best that social life could offer and a hardheaded look at the worst things human beings could do to one another, a vision of possibilities of change for the better and an assessment of the forces weighing for and against those possibilities...
...By that time, he had already experienced at first hand some of the greatest extremes that twentiethcentury history had to offer, and none of that experience was lost on him...
...All of us who knew him, and everyone associated with Dissent at any stage, benefited from these qualities...
...But the kind of writing and thinking he did for Dissent was no less basic to his identity...
...He would willingly undertake work on a topic that he might never have written about before, but which he would invariably treat in the Dissent mode...
...JAMES B. RULE 94 n DISSENT/Fall 2003...
...But this overarching intellectual style didn't stop at the boundaries of the discipline...
...It was axiomatic to him that to be an intellectual meant developing and proceeding from a coherent worldview, which one would then apply, with imagination and flair, to virtually any subject matter...
...an American and a European...
...Like others of that first generation, he was always ready to "write on demand" for the journal...
...I remember his anecdotes of figures like Nicolai Bukharin and Arthur Koestler, Marcel Mauss, and many others...
...Perhaps it was this extended period of living through history and supporting himself by his freelance talents that forestalled Lew's becoming a conventional academic...
Vol. 50 • September 2003 • No. 4
