A Tribute to J. Salwyn Schapiro
FEUER, LEWIS S.
GUEST COLUMN By Lewis S. Feuer A Tribute to J. Salwyn Schapiro A MAN OF WISDOM is rare in this age of anxiety, anomie and analysis. My teacher, J. Salwyn Schapiro. is such a man. He is now...
...The great pre-war debates of Socialism and the labor movement turned Schapiro's research to more contemporary problems...
...The ensuing years of devoted labor have made Schapiro America's most distinguished historian of liberalism, the interpreter of Condorcet and John Stuart Mill, No writer has been more sensitive to the different meanings of liberalism—religious, intellectual, political and economic, because they have all been moments in Schapiro's own intellectual evolution...
...Above all, Schapiro was free from the sin of professional pride, the anxiety for universal knowledge which peculiarly beset City College students and teachers...
...Few of us at City College knew the intense personal drama which was behind the books and lectures of our professor...
...Schapiro's first work, a pathfinding study on the Reformation, sought out the economic issues which breathed struggle into religious differences...
...the "god-centered man" was too often the surface for intolerant ego-centeredness...
...One of them, the janitor's son...
...Besides, he never liked Martin Luther...
...His first job was as an elevator boy in a coffin factory...
...Schapiro has achieved the rare upon of kindliness and insight...
...His discerning essay on Mill gave the definitive answer to those who have charged that liberalism is solely an ideology of the middle class...
...In those days, Felix Adler was something of a prophet to East-Side boys, a Moses from the West side, who replaced the eroding Sinaitic tablets with sermons on Kant's categorical imperative...
...Paul Klapper...
...ed Schapiro to take the entrance examination at City College and tutored him himself...
...Schapiro would state his doubts and uncertainties plainly...
...He went from job to job, earning his bread...
...Liberalism has been the theme of Schapiro's life-work...
...He had to fend for himself alone in New York from the time he was 15 years old...
...Schapiro used to live through the tedious weekdays for the liberation of those Sunday lectures...
...Also he had learned from his favorite novelist, Anatole France, how the spirit of fanaticism could transfer itself easily from religion to politics...
...His former students will especially cherish what they learned from a teacher whose classes had a spirit that withstood the storms of dogma, and whose words grow in meaning with the years...
...Two generations of college students have read his Modern and Contemporary European History, which with its sale in several hundred thousand copies, has been the leading textbook of the new history in American colleges and universities...
...He learned his craft as a historian from the father of the "new history," James Harvey Robinson...
...Many people profess liberalism intellectually but never feel at one with it emotionally...
...persuadLewis S. FEUER, who studied under Professor Schapiro at City College, is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of California...
...The writings of John Morley led Schapiro to read the French philosophes...
...Not so Schapiro...
...It began with the religious liberalism of the Ethical Movement and moved on to social and economic liberalism...
...He began to spend his spare hours at the University Settlement House, where he met a remarkable group of youngsters—Henry Moskowitz...
...Schapiro is of that pioneer group, the children of poor Jewish immigrants, who first made the leap from a pre-feudal, tribal culture to the world of liberal ideas...
...Brilliance, in its quest for the piercing remark, is too often associated with aggression toward others...
...His achievement is abiding...
...I remember how our class in social history was taken aback when he said some of us might become like his student, Lewis Mumford, lecturers and writers...
...To subway undergraduates from the Lower East Side and the Bronx, it was a new experience to be addressed as equals in a creative intellectual undertaking...
...He is now entering his 80th year, but he finds the same joy in his work as he did 30 years ago when we used to see him at the New York Public Library, working indefatigably in the evenings on his book on Condorcet...
...Paul Abelson, Jacob Shufro, Jacob Epstein...
...He treats men as equals spontaneously...
...He traced its transformation from its bourgeois origin into a universal classless aspiration, the ingredient which preserves democracy from its degradation into an ideology of the least common denominator...
Vol. 42 • March 1959 • No. 9
