Table Of ContentPreferred Citation: Berger, Bennett M., editor Authors of Their Own Lives:
Intellectual Autobiographies by Twenty American Sociologists. Berkeley: University
of California Press, c1990 1990. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft067nb02h/
Authors of Their Own Lives
Intellectual Autobiographies by Twenty American
Sociologists
Edited and with an Introduction by
Bennett M. Berger
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford
© 1990 The Regents of the University of California
For Donald R. Cressey
and for Barbara Rosenblum,
neither of whom lived to see
this book in print. I doubt
that they ever met, but I think
they would have liked each other.
They were both tough and tender;
hard heads, soft hearts.
Preferred Citation: Berger, Bennett M., editor Authors of Their Own Lives:
Intellectual Autobiographies by Twenty American Sociologists. Berkeley: University
of California Press, c1990 1990. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft067nb02h/
For Donald R. Cressey
and for Barbara Rosenblum,
neither of whom lived to see
this book in print. I doubt
that they ever met, but I think
they would have liked each other.
They were both tough and tender;
hard heads, soft hearts.
CONTRIBUTORS
Reinhard Bendix (1916–) is a former president of the American Sociological
Association and emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley,
where he served the departments of sociology and political science. Among
his many books are Work and Authority in Industry, Max Weber: An
Intellectual Portrait, Embattled Reason , and Kings or People .
Bennett M. Berger (1926–) is professor of sociology at the University
of California, San Diego, and the author of Working-Class Suburb, Looking
for America, and The Survival of a Counterculture .
Jessie Bernard (1903–) says she does not mind being called the
doyenne of American sociology. She is the author or editor of literally scores
of books on women, marriage, the family, and other subjects. Retired from
her professorship but still as active as many sociologists half her age, she
has had many honors bestowed on her. She lives in Washington, D.C.
James S. Coleman (1926–) is University Professor of Sociology at the
University of Chicago. He has done distinguished work in a wide variety of
sociological fields, from mathematical methods to rational choice theory. His
many works include The Adolescent Society, Union Democracy, Community
Conflict, Introduction to Mathematical Sociology, and Longitudinal Data
Analysis .
Donald R. Cressey (1919–1987) was professor of sociology at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, and the first dean of its College of
― x ―
Letters and Science. The most important of his many studies in criminology
are Other People's Money and Theft of the Nation: The Structure and
Operations of Organized Crime in America .
Cynthia Fuchs Epstein (1933–) is professor of sociology at the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a former president of
the Eastern Sociological Society. Her research on women in the professions,
business, and politics has produced such books asWomen in Law, Access to
Power, Woman's Place, and most recently Deceptive Distinctions .
John Gagnon (1931–) was the first sociologist on the staff of the Kinsey
Institute for Sex Research, and he is presently professor of sociology at the
State University of New York, Stony Brook. He has written extensively on sex
(much of it with William Simon) in books likeSexual Deviance, Sexual
Conduct, and Human Sexualities .
Herbert J. Gans (1927–) is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at
Columbia University and a former president of the American Sociological
Association. Trained both as a sociologist and a planner, his research
interests include urban studies, ethnicity, and mass communications. He is
the author of seven books, the most recent of which is Middle American
Individualism: The Future of Liberal Democracy .
Nathan Glazer (1923–) is professor of education and sociology at
Harvard University. He made his mark early as a co-author (with David
Riesman and Reuel Denney) of The Lonely Crowd, and (with Daniel P.
Moynihan) Beyond the Melting Pot . Among his other books areAmerican
Judaism, The Social Basis of Communism, Remembering the Answers,
Affirmative Discrimination, and Ethnic Dilemmas .
Andrew M. Greeley (1928–) is professor of sociology at the University
of Arizona, a research associate at the National Opinion Research Center, a
priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago, and an author of best-selling novels.
The most recent of his many sociological works is Religious Indicators, and
among his many works of fiction are God Game, The Final Planet, Angel
Fire, and Love Song .
Joseph Gusfield (1923–) is professor of sociology at the University of
California, San Diego, and a former president of the Pacific Sociological
Association and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. He has worked
most extensively in the fields of alcohol studies and social movements. His
first book, Symbolic Crusade, has become a classic. His most
― xi ―
recent books are The Culture of Public Problems and (in The Heritage of
Sociology series) Kenneth Burke on Symbols and Society .
Dean MacCannell (1940–) is professor of applied behavioral sciences at
the University of California, Davis, and co-editor of The American Journal of
Semiotics . He is the author of The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure
Class and (with Juliet Flower MacCannell) The Time of the Sign .
Gary T. Marx (1938–) is professor of sociology at MIT in the
Departments of Urban Studies and Humanities. Protest and Prejudice was his
first book. His most recent is Undercover: Police Surveillance in America . In
between, he has edited or co-edited several books and writes for a wide
variety of scholarly journals and popular media. In 1989 he was named the
American Sociological Association's Jensen Lecturer and he kayaked Idaho's
River of No Return. He has returned.
David Riesman (1909–) is retired from the Henry Ford II professorship
of the social sciences at Harvard University. Trained as a lawyer, he became
a sociologist at the University of Chicago, where he taught for many years.
He is the senior author of The Lonely Crowd and many other books on the
sociology of education and on the character and culture of Americans.
Barbara Rosenblum (1943–1988) taught at Stanford University and in
Vermont College's graduate program. She was the author ofPhotographers at
Work: A Sociology of Photographic Styles . Before her untimely death she
was working with a colleague on a book to be called Cancer in Two Voices .
Alice S. Rossi (1922–) is Harriet Martineau Professor of Sociology at the
University of Massachusetts (Amherst) and former president of both the
American Sociological Association and the Eastern Sociological Society. Her
primary fields of study are family and kinship, sex and gender, and biosocial
science. Among her major works are Parenting and Offspring Development,
Gender and the Life Course, Feminists in Politics, and Academic Women on
the Move .
Guenther Roth (1931–) is professor of sociology at Columbia
University. He has written The Social Democrats in Imperial
Germany andMax Weber's Vision of History (with Wolfgang Schluchter) and is
editor and translator (with Klaus Wittich) of the three-volume Economy and
― xii ―
Society by Max Weber. He recently contributed a long introduction to a new
edition of Marianne Weber's biography of Max Weber.
Pepper Schwartz (1945–) is professor of sociology and adjunct
professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of
Washington, Seattle. Her writings include American Couples (with Philip
Blumstein), Women at Yale (with Janet Lever), Sexual Scripts (with Judith
Long Laws), and Gender in Intimate Relationships (with Barbara J. Risman).
Pierre L. van den Berghe (1933–) is professor of sociology and
anthropology at the University of Washington, Seattle. His work on race,
ethnicity, and sociobiology has taken him to Africa and Latin America. Among
his many books are South Africa: A Study in Conflict, Age and Sex in Human
Societies, Human Family Systems, and The Ethnic Phenomenon .
Dennis Wrong (1923–) is professor of sociology at New York University.
He writes regularly for many general intellectual magazines and is the author
of Population and Society, Skeptical Sociology, and Power: Its Forms, Bases,
and Uses .
― xiii ―
INTRODUCTION
It seems apt to preface what I have to say about autobiography and
sociology by noting that my career as a sociologist can be understood as a
series of misinterpretations. When I published my first book, Working-Class
Suburb, I was quickly identified as an urban sociologist, invited to
conferences on urban sociology, and often asked to contribute to symposia
on it—although I had never had a course on the subject and although the
book, and the research on which it was based, came out of my interest not in
cities but in stereotypes of suburbia by intellectuals.
When my research interest turned toward youth and adolescence, some
thought of me as a sociologist of education because the major institutional
setting of youth was high schools and colleges. I was invited to speak to
parent-teacher associations, provide advice to parents of troubled teenagers,
and serve as a pundit on student rebellion by publications like the New York
Times Magazine —although I had never had a course on the sociology of
education and although my interest in youth had been stimulated by
comparative and historical reading on age grading and by the popularity of
the generation concept, also promoted by intellectuals and which I had first
encountered in Karl Mannheim and José Ortega y Gasset.
When I began to study hippie communes and communal child-rearing, I
found myself identified as a family sociologist. Although my attention to
communes came out of my interest in deviant youth and the history of
countercultures, I was invited to speak at the Groves Confer-
― xiv ―
ence and other national organizations of family scholars. My work was
represented in some of the standard texts and anthologies of family studies—
although I had never had a course on the family and did not know its
literature at all thoroughly.
Now, engaged for the past few years in a project to collect a group of
essays in intellectual autobiography, I have noticed a tendency to impute to
me a methodological interest in the use of life history data—an approach that
goes back to the early days of Chicago sociology. Just recently I was asked
by one of the editors of Theory and Society to contribute a piece on the use
of life histories to the twentieth anniversary issue of that journal. I
respectfully declined, informing him that my interest in autobiography had in
fact partly developed out of my efforts to cope with some problems of bias in
interpretive sociology, but mostly out of my efforts to teach graduate
students how to read sociological theory to get a sense of the presence of the
theorist in the text, learn to read between the lines, and hence more fully
appreciate the meanings projected in them.
A series of misinterpretations, then. It has taken me far too many years
to understand that what I have always been interested in was the culture of
the groups to which I was attracted and the ways in which that culture was
generated, sustained, and changed by the material circumstances of its
group settings, the structure of whose accessible resources functioned as
constraints and incentives on actors called on to justify or defend their efforts
to do things to (or with) other actors in ways that usually produced palpable
consequences, intended and not. I am, in short, an unrepentant generalist.
Even when I passed fifty, to those who asked what kind of sociologist I was, I
was still in the habit of replying frivolously that I was too young to specialize.
Now I have unambiguously arrived at the irreversible status of senior
sociologist. One of the privileges of that arrival is to turn my attention to the
group among whom I have spent my adult life as a professional; and in order
to say something about the culture of sociology, studying the lives of
sociologists (or what they say about their lives—which is not the same thing)
seems a good place to start. When I became editor of Contemporary
Sociology, I persuaded the university administration to fund two graduate
students as half-time assistants for the journal. The pedagogic justification I
offered was that over and above what they learned in classes or at the
library, the students would learn as much sociology (if not more) just sitting
around the office listening to my colleagues and me discuss which books
were (and were not) worth
― xv ―
reviewing or featuring, and which reviewers to select (and not to select) for
which books. Sociological theory teaches that to learn about the culture of
something is to learn about the thing itself.
All this, I admit, sounds rather defensive, and defensiveness is a quality
not much admired in sociological writing—or any writing. Still, I hope I will be
forgiven a certain defensiveness in introducing this book. It was obvious to
me that asking sociologists to write about their lives constituted a substantial
departure from the standard practices of academic writing, which constrain
sociologists to keep themselves as decently or discreetly invisible as possible.
Outside the entertainment pages, narcissism does not have good press,
particularly in those fields whose "discipline" recognizes the logical
irrelevance of the personal qualities of the author to the objective qualities of
the work, and a radical separation between them.
One of the aims of this book is to narrow that gap—not to eliminate it
entirely; the distinction, after all, is a sound and important one. That aim is
to render the presence of the person in the work, the author in the authored,
to the extent that the subject is capable of revealing it. I know that not
everyone agrees about the wholesomeness of such a project. Different (and
opposing) views about the autonomy of the text have been put forward, in
the humanities, by the New Critics more than a generation ago and by the
poststructuralists in the 1970s and 1980s, and in the social sciences by those
committed to the propriety of impersonality in the genres of the monograph
and the social-science journal article. Such views have always seemed to me
of considerable interest in determining what is or is not appropriate, formally
and aesthetically, to a given genre, but they should alert the skepticism of
those of us who want to avoid the analytic dangers (there are several) of
reifying cultural forms or taking them for granted. One good way of flexing
the muscles of that skepticism is by inquiring into the conditions that
generate, sustain, and transform those genres.
How, for example, did this book get off the ground? I was writing a long
essay on the history of the relations between political and cultural radicalism
when I got stuck and reread what I had written. I was appalled by how easily
I could see through my own biases. Expecting that others would see through
them as easily, I adopted the routine defense of responding to anticipated
criticism. (Goffman and Bourdieu are masters of this device.) I started
writing what I conceived as a preface to the main work, intending to cue my
imagined readers to my own biases, their probable sources, and how I
attempted to control or otherwise
― xvi ―
cope with them. Soon I had the makings of a short autobiographical essay
about my own intellectual development.
It was only then that the first glimmering of the idea for this book came
to me—that a collection of such essays by a variety of sociologists might be a
valuable enterprise. Valuable how? For one thing it might help students to
become sophisticated readers more quickly. As a teacher I had been
recurrently frustrated by how long that process normally takes. I could
remember, in my own student days, how easily I was persuaded by nearly
every theorist I read, regardless of whether I was told that I could not be a
Durkheimian and a Weberian at the same time, or a Tocquevillian and a
Marxist. Read in isolation and without background, each important writer
makes a persuasive case to an innocent student. Under normal conditions of
study it can take years, even decades, to become attuned to the hidden
agendas, the strategic omissions, the invisible antagonists, the metaphysical
pathos (to use Gouldner's phrase, borrowed from Alfred Lovejoy) in a piece
of sociological prose. Hence it can take years to become a critical reader,
attentive not only to the objective historical contexts in which a writer writes
but also to what Pierre Bourdieu calls the habitus: the experienced milieu
whose more or less unreflectively internalized culture shapes the sensibility
evident to a close reader in a piece of prose, and familiarity with which
enables us to say of its author that we know, metaphorically speaking, where
she's coming from, if not quite where she's going to.
But in addition, biographical information may tell us literally where a
writer is coming from and thereby supply an added dimension for
understanding texts. Raymond Aron comments that Comte did not think it
necessary to leave his apartment during the revolution of 1848, so confident
was he that his theorizing had predicted the important events occurring in
the street. Frank Manuel's account of the lives of Saint-Simon and Comte
(both of them textbook cases of deviance) made reading them a richer
experience for me and humanizes them for students easily intimidated by the
prospect of reading "classics" written by historically hallowed figures not
easily imagined as flawed human beings. Weber asserts his "ethic of
responsibility" with almost enough passion to make it an ethic of ultimate
ends; the paradox of his passion fordetachment is made salient and
intriguing by that mysterious neurosis that interrupted his teaching career.
These days many undergraduates have to be told that the rhetoric of
Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class is ironic; if they knew something of his
life, or of Edwardian literary style, it would be easier for them to pick up on
his ironies.
― xvii ―
On the whole (despite some recent evidence to the contrary), contemporary
sociologists are not very viable commercially as subjects for biographers. But
autobiography, even allowing for some inevitable selectivity, distortions of
retrospective reconstruction, posturing, and simple (or not so simple)
misremembering of events, provides evidence of an author's self-image,
which is seldom irrelevant to the sensibility evident in the text. This
constitutes a response, if not exactly a solution, to the problem posed by
Pierre Bourdieu who, by titling an essay of his "L'Illusion biographique"
(1985), intended to suggest that life is messy but autobiography is linear and
orderly, with a coherence imposed less by the facts of life than by the
autobiographer's need to make sense of them. "Ideologists of their own
lives" is Bourdieu's phrase describing what autobiographers do. (The phrase
also provided the seed from which the title of this book grew.) Sociologists
and their readers, however, often have especially good antennae for
detecting ideology and are not easily deceived by it. Indeed, several of the
autobiographers represented here are well aware of the problem and attempt
to be reflexive about it.
Moreover, it is often possible for a careful reader to see meanings in
events, accounts, and other information on a life course that the author who
provides them may not see. Let me cite just two examples from the many in
the essays contained here. Pierre van den Berghe describes at some length
the generations of physicians and biologists in his family—particularly the
influence of one of his grandfathers. But he never quite makes an explicit
connection between his own mid-career turn toward sociobiology and his
family's tradition, against which he regards himself as somewhat rebellious.
David Riesman, from a patrician Philadelphia family, describes his mother's
severe distinction between the "first rate" (great artists and perhaps a few
great scientists) and the "second rate" and her aesthetic disdain for even
those prestigious professionals who do the practical work of the world. But he
does not explicitly connect this maternal aristocratism to his choice to devote
the bulk of his teaching career to the general education of talented
undergraduates at two elite universities rather than to the professional
training of workaday attorneys as a professor of law, in which capacity he
began his teaching career and which is usually regarded as more prestigious
than teaching undergraduates.
Most sociologists, in fact, do not work in Thomas Kuhn's "normal
science" style, immersed in the search for solutions to curious puzzles that
the accumulating corpus of knowledge has left unsolved. Most of
― xviii ―
us pursue our ideas, formulate our hypotheses, and do our research in ways,
and from sources, connected to what we care about and are moved by—
which of course does not render the work any less objective. That is what
Weber meant by value relevance , and what I mean by saying that most of
us do not do alienated work—at least not most of the time. I hope that
students will read this book because it provides access to contexts that can
enhance their understanding of texts and their authors, and that journeymen
academic sociologists themselves will encourage students to read it because
professors have a stake in the early sophistication of their students as
readers.
But imagine the worst. Suppose that the interest of readers turns out to
be at least partly prurient; suppose that they have merely a gossipy interest
in what eminent professor so-and-so "is really like"; suppose they are only
looking for the inside dope to penetrate the passive voice and other façades
of impersonality that dominate the prose of academics. Do these attitudes
weaken the serious intent of the book? I think not. Perhaps a prurient
interest is better than none. Gossip, after all, is talk (even malicious talk)
about persons rather than issues, problems, or structures. To "bring man
back in," as George Homans urged many years ago, may risk bringing gossip
back in; and it is perhaps not inadvertent that Homans has published a full-
length autobiography. To want to know, then, what professor so-and-so is
really like may not be as banal as it seems at first. Knowing what he is really
like can palpably affect a student's future. One of the major contributions of
Jim Coleman's brilliant essay on his graduate-student days is his evocation of
Paul Lazarsfeld, who was usually so full of ideas that he could not possibly
pursue all of them systematically and was hence continually on the lookout to
recruit or co-opt promising students and junior colleagues as collaborators.
The relevance of gossip and other inside dope is transparent in the spate
of autobiography and memoir, especially, for example, among former
presidential staff members, who recount private conversations and other
events that take place in insulated offices and other inaccessible places and
regarding which public records are not usually left—or if left, are marked
"classified" and sometimes destroyed. Such information increases in
importance as the discrepancies widen between what actually happens, what
we know, what we may be officially informed of, and what we are free to say
publicly. Of course we all know less than we need to know. But as
receptacles of privileged information we also know more than the legitimate
ways of expressing what we know can
― xix ―
contain. And as scholars, I presume, we all have interests in seeing an
increase in the number and variety of containers. Autobiography may be one
of them.
But in addition to my hopes that this book will help create sophisticated
readers more quickly and demonstrate the contextual relevance of
autobiographical data to texts and careers, I hope that it will have influence
on the future practice of sociologists. I do not mean merely the cliché of
strengthening humanist (as against positivist) sociology; neither term is a
favorite of mine. In my lexicon humanist refers to a certain moral and
aesthetic quality of mind, whereas positivist refers to a particular
epistemology (and perhaps its associated research methods). Whatever the
tensions between them, I have never been persuaded that it was necessary
to give up one for the other. Most sociologists will at least pay lip service to
the idea that they are in fact part of the social reality they describe and
analyze. When pressed, they will even admit that they may contribute to the
construction of the realities their methods assume already exist "out there."
But most do not write as if that were the case, except occasionally in
prefaces, appendixes, or postscripts. In my last book I made some halting
use of the autobiographical mode throughout the text—in effect attempting
to take readers by the hand and bring them along with me to share some of
the experience of doing field research. I told stories about what happened to
me; about getting access to sites and data; about the interpersonal
complexities that sometimes develop in long-term participant observation,
and personal ambivalence about what to do next; about coping with
resistance by respondents; and about thinking through the unanticipated
problems of interpretation, then rethinking them as the research went along,
all the while letting the reader in on the interior dialogues.
That more sociologists do not write candidly or well about their lives,
work, and working lives is partly an expression of the hegemony that the
rhetoric of impersonality exercises. It begins so early that most of my first-
year graduate students in sociological theory have great difficulty complying
with my request that before they undertake serious formal analysis they
write five- or six-page weekly papers recording their immediate responses,
associations, likes, dislikes, and so on, vis-à-vis the assigned reading. They
simply do not believe me when I tell them that I want them to write on
contemporary theory in their own natural voices (which I do to help them
absorb serious theorizing into their own routine modes of thinking) rather
than ape the language of the professional journals—thus requiring a cognitive
blip in order to shift between
― xx ―
spontaneous thinking and seminar talk or journal talk. The rhetoric of
impersonality, I think, has been successful less for the bulk of reliable
knowledge of social structure it has accumulated than for the powerful claim
it in principle staked for sociology to the status of science, and hence to
institutionalization in universities, and the considerable professional benefits
that status carries with it.
Universities generally have difficulty accommodating in their academic
curricula subject matters not clearly categorizable as arts or sciences, with
their own accumulated "literatures." Journalism is a perennially disdained
stepchild, often segregated in professional schools. The humanities are
recurrently buffeted in one or the other direction. When the direction is
toward arts, defenses of the humanities as the moral and aesthetic antennae
of the nation become routine parts of the lecture repertoire of their senior
spokespersons. When the direction is toward science, language, philosophy,
