The Last Page
Wiener, Jon
WHEN BARRINGTON MOORE, JR., died October 16 at age ninety-two, I remembered the mandatory meetings for coffee he scheduled with students at the place he called "the greasy spoon down the...
...His theme was, "What questions are worth asking...
...He said we needed to read Karl Marx, but also Max Weber...
...He wanted us to weigh that potential against the often-forgotten everyday violence of the status quo...
...At the time-1966 and 1967—I had enrolled in his graduate seminars in the Harvard Government Department...
...That was a full-time job, and it would take everything we had...
...He was tall and gaunt, and looked stern and humorless...
...At a time when we were obsessed with the necessity for action, he shamelessly advocated the life of the mind...
...JON WIENER 112 DISSENT / Winter 2006...
...He wanted us to consider the potential of violence to bring about an increase in freedom...
...He was explicit about this, openly defying Marx's dictum in the famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: the task, Moore told us, was "to understand the world...
...For young Harvard New Leftists, nothing could have been more intellectually thrilling...
...I had never heard of Alta, but he said the snow was driest there, and he liked the way everybody ate dinner at one big communal table, including Robert McNamara and his kids...
...We learned he was best friends with Herbert Marcuse—an odd couple if ever there was one...
...In his seminars, he wanted us to think and write about the possibilities and limits of revolution and democracy...
...we were all deeply intimidated by his knowledge of the history of pretty much everything...
...He seemed to personify the life of the mind...
...We noticed that it didn't seem to occur to him that he should be organizing against the war doortodoor in East Cambridge over the summer...
...I still have notes from a lecture he gave in the social studies program in 1967...
...And so we stayed up late studying the revolutions of seventeenth-century England, eighteenthcentury France, and twentieth-century Russia and China...
...He told us he went skiing every winter at Alta...
...What a fantastic thing to think about in 1967, as a student—or now, as a teacher...
...We learned that Moore sailed his own boat all summer off the coast of Maine with his wife and a big pile of books...
...WHEN BARRINGTON MOORE, JR., died October 16 at age ninety-two, I remembered the mandatory meetings for coffee he scheduled with students at the place he called "the greasy spoon down the block" in Harvard Square...
...And, with him, we tried to figure out what kind of transformation was possible, and what was impossible, in 1960s America...
...So he invited us to have coffee with him after class...
...But the spirit of the sixties had somehow reached him, and he wanted to know more about what his students were thinking and doing...
...We shouldn't have been surprised when he sided with the university during the 1969 student strike...
...We needed to learn about the roots of fascism...
...We were divided into small groups and assigned different days—by his secretary, Rose deBenedetto—and we understood that attendance was required...
...Open inquiry, he said, was a prerequisite for a free and rational society--that was the way he talked—and Harvard, despite its failings, was committed— at least in principle—to open inquiry...
...His new book, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, dealt with the histories of the United States, England, France, Russia, China, and India—displaying a breadth and depth that inspired awe...
...Around the table at the University Restaurant, our goal was to find out more about this austere figure...
...Clearly, he led an old-fashioned, upper-class WASP kind of life—except for the thinking and the writing...
Vol. 53 • January 2006 • No. 1
