Publications by Author: Lambert, Craig

IN THE SPRING OF 2012, Brown University hosted an extraordinary academic conference. “Being Nobody?” honored the thirtieth anniversary of the publication ofSlavery and Social Death Orlando Patterson, Harvard’s Cowles professor of sociology. Giving a birthday party for a scholarly book is a rarity in itself. Even more unusual, the symposium’s 11 presenters were not sociologists. They were classicists and historians who gave papers on slavery in ancient Rome, the neo-Assyrian empire, the Ottoman Middle East, the early Han empire, West Africa in the nineteenth century, medieval Europe, and eighteenth-century Brazil, among other topics. “I’m not aware of another academic conference held by historians to celebrate the influence of a seminal work by a social scientist writing for a different discipline,” says John Bodel, professor of classics and history at Brown, one of the organizers.

But Patterson is no ordinary academician. “Orlando is one of a kind—the sheer scope and ambition of his work set him apart from 99 percent of social scientists,” says Loic Wacquant, JF ’94, professor of sociology at Berkeley. “In an era when social scientists specialize in ever-smaller objects, he is a Renaissance scholar who takes the time to tackle huge questions across multiple continents and multiple centuries. There was another scholar like this in the early twentieth century, named Max Weber. Orlando is in that category.”

PATTERSON IS a historical-comparative sociologist who has written extensively on race relations and, especially, slavery and freedom. Slavery and Social Deathis “a landmark study that has had very broad and deep impact,” says Goelet professor of medieval history Michael McCormick, who participated in the “Being Nobody?” conference (see “The New Histories,” page 52). Patterson’s Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, a kind of obverse to Slavery and Social Death, won the 1991 National Book Award for nonfiction. Like his mentors, Harvard sociologists David Riesman and Seymour Martin Lipset, “Orlando tries to speak to a broader audience,” says Diker-Tishman professor of sociology Christopher Winship. “In many ways, he ranks among Harvard sociology’s last big thinkers—David Riesman, Daniel Bell, Talcott Parsons.”

The study of culture—of values, established ideas, traditions, language, customs, learned behaviors, symbolic materials, including the arts, and other nonbiological inheritances—has been central to Patterson’s work. Sociologists often contrast culture with structure: the “hard” variables that include prevailing institutions, distribution of wealth, education, housing, jobs, and other “physical-world” factors. For decades, researchers have debated whether culture informs structure, or vice versa.

Many scholars oversimplify culture by equating it simply with values, Patterson says. This can lead to paradoxes like citing the same cultural complex as the cause of opposite results. “Confucianism was used in the past to explain backwardness in China, before it became successful. The Confucian ethic was supposedly inconsistent with capitalism,” he explains. “Then China becomes economically successful, and suddenly it is the Confucian ethic that explains its success. The same cultural values can move in either direction. So you need a dynamic approach that shows how culture interacts with structure.

“Culture is a very tricky concept,” he continues. “It’s like Typhoid Mary—you’ve got to be very careful with it! Most conservatives tend to use the concept in a simplistic way. Liberals are wary of it—there is guilt by association.” That association has roots in the 1966 book La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty by anthropologist Oscar Lewis, which gave an in-depth portrait of a former prostitute living with her sixth husband. Liberal critics attacked Lewis’s “culture of poverty” concept as one that “blamed the victims” for holding values that perpetuated their state: he suggested in La Vida and other work that the poor could pass down poverty-related beliefs for generations, and that such values might persist even after people had achieved better circumstances.

“No one talked about culture for a long time,” Patterson says. “Now it is back, but still wishy-washy as a causal explanation. It’s fine now to use culture like [anthropologist] Clifford Geertz does, as an interpretive, symbolic vehicle [in a classic essay on Balinese cockfighting, Geertz interpreted the cocks as symbols of important men in the village], but not as having a causal role in social structures.”

The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth, edited and to a large degree written by Patterson (with Harvard graduate student Ethan Fosse as co-editor), to be published by Harvard University Press in January, breaks with that convention. “Orlando is first and foremost an iconoclast,” says Winship, and the new book, about impoverished young blacks in American cities, does challenge some received wisdom. It shows not only how much culture matters to these young people, but also their disproportionately large impact on mainstream culture. In October 2003, for example, a turning point in the history of American popular culture occurred when “all of the top 10 positions on Billboard’s pop chart were filled by black artists, nine of them in the inner-city-created rap genre,” Patterson writes in the new book. “It is hardly to be wondered that the typical Euro-American imagines the African-American population to be somewhere between 23 and 30 percent of the U.S. population, over twice its actual size.”

The Cultural Matrix (with chapters by Winship and by Robert Sampson, Ford professor of the social sciences) may also enlighten some readers by demonstrating black youths’ “deep commitment to some of the most fundamental values of the mainstream—its individualism, materialism, admiration for the military, and insistence on taking near complete responsibility for their own failures and successes,” Patterson writes. The young African Americans are surprisingly self-critical, he notes. For example, he writes that “92 percent of black youth aged 18 to 24 say ‘young black men not taking their education seriously enough,’ is a ‘big problem,’ while 88 percent declare likewise on ‘not being responsible fathers.’” Patterson adds, in an interview, “They are more American than Americans.”

Responsible fatherhood is a particularly sticky issue, one that Patterson has often addressed in his studies of African-American history and culture. Slavery in the American South, he says, left no legacy more damaging than the destruction of the black family—the relations between husband and wife, parent and child. Marriage among slaves was illegal, and slaveholders brutally broke slave families apart by selling off children or parents to other masters. “It is true that many slaves were involved in social units that looked like nuclear families, but these were largely reproductive associations based on fragile male-female relationships,” Patterson says. “In many cases the ‘husbands’ lived on other plantations and needed permission to visit their ‘wives,’ and parents had no custodial claims on their children, who at any time could be sold away from them. To call these units ‘families,’ as revisionist historians have done, is a historical and sociological travesty.”

In his 1965 The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (the “Moynihan Report”), Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had taught government at Harvard and was then assistant secretary of labor under President Lyndon Johnson, argued that the relative absence of nuclear families among black Americans, and the relatively large numbers of families headed by single mothers—both traceable to slavery and Jim Crow segregation—were a root cause of African-American poverty. Black leaders attacked the report, accusing it of stereotyping black Americans (particularly men), perpetuating cultural bias, and setting back the civil-rights movement. “Moynihan became the bête noire of sociology. He took a terrible beating from academics,” Patterson says. “It was so unfair. He was an architect of the War on Poverty—the most radical national agenda for black people in American history. The critics all admit that slavery was horrible, but balk at the idea that the destructive impact has consequences today. Yet you cannot neglect slavery’s effects on the black family as a critical component of African-American life.”

Patterson and Moynihan befriended each other as Harvard colleagues, and when the University awarded Moynihan, by then retired from the U.S. Senate, an honorary degree in 2002, Patterson served as his escort at Commencement. Five years later, the American Academy of Political and Social Science and Harvard’s sociology department and Du Bois Institute (now part of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research) co-sponsored a conference of sociologists and economists, “The Moynihan Report Revisited.” “The conclusion they had come around to,” Patterson says, “was that he was right.”

SLAVERY IS a crucial part of Patterson’s cultural heritage. He grew up in Jamaica, a country that endured almost two centuries of ruthless slavery under British rule. He wanted to understand how “the horrendous colonial past of slavery, and then a pretty oppressive post-emancipation era of 124 years, shape the present in terms of poverty and underdevelopment. In the Caribbean, that is a very radical position: it’s part of the neo-Marxian analysis of the plantation system. One of the great ironies of my life is that when I raise the same questions in the American context, because of the complexities of race here, people see it as conservative: ‘You’re blaming the victim! We don’t want to hear about the past—we want to hear about how present-day economic inequalities explain the plight of African Americans.’ But where I come from—both the British New Left and the Caribbean neo-Marxists—history is critical.”

History rolls though every page of Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death.“Slavery has existed all over the world,” he says, even if many Americans imagine it was unique to the antebellum South. “I asked if there were any common attributes to slavery that differentiate it from other forms of oppression, like serfdom,” he says. “What I came up with is that the fundamental feature of being a slave is that slaves are socially dead—both metaphorically and literally. They have no recognized legal existence in the society. They do not belong to the community, because they belong only to the master, and exist only through the master. I use the concept of natal alienation: they have no rights at birth. This doesn’t mean slaves don’t have communities of their own—they did have a slave life, a slave village. But in the eyes of non-slaves they do not belong, they are non-citizens. So after the United States abolished slavery, one of the first things they had to do was to amend the Constitution to make slaves citizens!

“The idea of social death became very powerful, very useful, especially in explaining what happens after slavery is formally ended,” he continues. “For example, Southern Americans, and Americans generally, found it so hard to accept black Americans after slavery was abolished. The culture of slavery still persisted, which is the idea that ‘you do not belong.’ They were nobodies; people were horrified at the idea that they could vote, like citizens. It even lingers to this day. What is the thing people who don’t like Obama say? They try to make out that he doesn’t have a birth certificate—that he doesn’t belong. Even a black president does not belong!”

AN UNEXPECTED OUTGROWTH of Patterson’s study of the socio-historical significance of slavery was his shift to the study of freedom. “I had gone in search of a man-killing wolf called slavery; to my dismay I kept finding the tracks of a lamb called freedom,” he writes in the preface to Freedom in the Making of Western Culture. “A lamb that stared back at me, on our first furtive encounters in the foothills of the Western past, with strange, uninnocent eyes. Was I to believe that slavery was a lamb in wolf’s clothing? Not with my past. And so I changed my quarry.” Patterson’s iconoclasm also informs this work. “The idea of freedom is seen as ‘inherent’—so there is nothing to explain,” he says. “[The idea is that] ‘Everybody wants to be free because it is part of the human condition.’ That’s nonsense. Freedom as a value, as a cherished part of one’s culture, as something to strive for and die for, is unusual in human history. You can’t just take it for granted. So the question turns into, how did freedom become important? My explanation is that freedom emerged as the antithesis to the social death of slavery.”

Under slavery, he explains, there were three groups of people: masters, slaves, and non-slaves. “All three come to discover this thing we call freedom through their relationships. For the master, freedom is being able to do what you please with another person: freedom as power. For the slave—well, what does a slave yearn for? To be emancipated, to get rid of the social death that is slavery. Masters encouragethis notion of freedom, too, as the hope of manumission is one of the most powerful ways to get a slave to work. The third group, the non-slaves or freemen, look at the slaves and say, ‘We are not them. We are born free.’ Suddenly, being born free becomes important, in a way it never could be for slaves. Freemen have a different status in society, one that does not depend on their socioeconomic class.

“If you go deep into Indo-European languages, the linguistic evidence is fascinating,” he continues. “The most ancient root of freedom is a word that means beloved orbelonging. The people who first celebrated freedom were non-slaves who recognized the virtue of being born free, and belonging to a community of free people—the beloved. These three forms of freedom lie at the roots of democracy, and the first place it emerged was from the slave culture of ancient Greece.”

BORN IN JAMAICA in 1940, Patterson is the son of Charles and Almina Patterson, a police detective and a seamstress. His parents separated for several years, but eventually reunited. Patterson spent much of his boyhood in the small rural town of May Pen, which, like Jamaica generally, had an almost entirely black population. One day when he was about eight or nine, a one-room library opened under a pavilion in the town park, and the boy was astonished to learn that you could borrow books there. “Borrow books?” he recalled asking the librarian, in a 2013 interview insmall axe, a Caribbean journal of criticism “So I found myself going to this place with the smell of brand-new books, and I could take any book I wanted. It was amazing! I used to go there, and read and read and read….That was atransformativeexperience. I just read. Instead of shooting birds or swimming in the Rio Minho river, I’d go to the library.”

He rose to the top of his classes. Patterson’s mother was a strong-willed, intelligent woman who emphasized education; she made her son her “project.” He won a scholarship to the University College of the West Indies in Kingston, then an overseas college of London University, hoping to study history, but was involuntarily funneled into the new economics program. In 1965, he earned his Ph.D. in sociology at the London School of Economics (LSE), and married Nerys Thomas, Ph.D. ’81, a Welsh scholar of Celtic literature. (The couple divorced many years ago and Thomas has since died. They had two daughters, Rhiannon and Barbara.) Patterson cut quite a figure on the London literary scene, publishing three novels, the first when he was 23, as well as essays in the Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, and New Left Review, serving on its editorial board. The LSE appointed him to its faculty.

The early 1960s gave the young sociologist a golden opportunity to witness cultural change close-up. When he arrived in Britain in 1962, ”It was still a gray, staid, uptight country,” he recalls. “It was pre-Beatles. You didn’t think of popular culture or fashion when you thought of Britain—they were just imperialists who played cricket. Then, overnight, there was a cultural revolution, and not just music—also theater, and fashion, with Mary Quant. Suddenly it exploded, right in front of our eyes. It showed how important culture is, and how it can change radically, and very quickly. When I hear sociologists talking about culture being slow, thick, and hard to change, I want to say, ‘What are you talking about? You should have lived in Britain in the Sixties!’ ”

Patterson’s first academic book, The Sociology of Slavery,(1967), gave an historical account and analysis of Jamaican slavery across three centuries and was very well received. But his career in fiction started just as strongly. Two novels set in Jamaica,The Children of Sisyphus andAn Absence of Ruins, appeared in England between 1964 and 1967. (Both have been recently reissued.) A third, Die the Long Day, set in Jamaican slave society, was published in 1972.

As its title implies, Sisyphus took inspiration, in part, from Camus: set amid the extreme poverty of the “Dungle,” an urban shantytown in Kingston, it stands as a fair argument for the hopelessness of the human condition. The novel contains one of the first portrayals of the Rastafari, the religious cult made world-famous by reggae superstar Bob Marley, and about which, Patterson says, there has been “a lot of romanticizing. I thought Rastafarianism was their attempt at making symbolic sense of their condition. They thought [Ethiopian emperor Haile] Selassie was God. In reality, Selassie was an authoritarian who was eventually deposed.” ThroughoutSisyphus, Patterson’s dialogue flawlessly renders the Jamaican patois, as in this street encounter with a middle-class woman, related by a Dungle laundress:

“Me see you a’ready,” she say, “is wha’ yu doin’ in dis part o’ Kingston?, so me ask her if is any o’ her business an’ same time she say, “Ah ’member whe’ ah see you now, you come from de Dungle, you is a Dungle pickney, ah can smell it ’pon you, wha’ yu ah do in good people place?”

The Daily Telegraph headline on Sisyphus called Patterson the “Caribbean Zola.” With talent in both sociology and fiction, he had to make a choice. The turning point came when he went to tea at the home of George Lamming, an award-winning Barbadian novelist who had published several books and lectured widely. Lamming owned no car. Patterson had to change trains three times to get to Lamming’s home in “the wilds” of North London. He found the address, and it was a neat cottage, “a pleasant house,” he thought. But Lamming, it turned out, resided in a bedsitter (a one-room studio) above the cottage. On leaving, Patterson thought, “Well, this is not the life for me.” He had his parents to look after, and didn’t feel he could gamble on the literary life. There was a secure career available in the academy.

PATTERSON WAS IN ENGLAND during the watershed moment in 1962 when Jamaica achieved full independence by leaving the Federation of the West Indies. A few years later, despite his successful life in London, he felt a pull to return home. In 1967 he resigned from the LSE to take up an appointment at the University of the West Indies, and built a house in Jamaica. Then, while guest-teaching at Roosevelt University in Chicago in the summer of 1969, he got an unexpected phone call from Harvard’s Talcott Parsons, a high-level theorist and one of the most prominent sociologists alive. Parsons offered Patterson a visiting professorship in African-American studies and sociology. He accepted, and soon gravitated toward the latter.

As a Jamaican who grew up as part of a racial majority, Patterson had not been socialized to feel like part of a minority group. Without a personal history of racial discrimination by a majority group, he hadn’t experienced the slights and affronts that assail Americans of color daily. “I never felt awkward here,” he says of the United States. “Not having been raised in a predominantly white society, you don’t see racism, even when it is all around you.” Furthermore, in Jamaica, the focus was on Oxford, Cambridge, and the LSE, not the Ivy League. “So being the second black professor at Harvard [after Martin Kilson, now Thomson professor of government emeritus] was no big deal to me, though it seemed to be for others,” he recalls. “I came from the British system where there was no affirmative action, no pressure to appoint blacks, so I took it all in stride.” He has remained at Harvard ever since, and now lives near the Square with his second wife, Anita (Goldman) Patterson ’83, Ph.D. ’92, a Boston University professor of English whom he married in 1995, and their 10-year-old daughter, Kaia.

But his Jamaican ties remain strong. Patterson met Michael Manley when the trade-union leader visited the University of the West Indies when Patterson was a prominent, politically active senior—one of the “young Turks” who were the first generation of Caribbean students to study social science. The two men hit it off.

When Manley won the Jamaican prime ministry in 1972, he appointed Patterson as his special adviser, and the scholar began living two lives. For four to five months annually until 1980, during summers and at Christmas, he changed his clothes to tropical fabrics and departed the academic calm of Widener for the political turbulence of Kingston, where he wrote reports, did a major study on the living conditions of the poor of Kingston, and fed Manley ideas for helping his new leftist government implement a democratic socialist revolution.

It was hardly easy. Manley (who served as prime minister until 1980, and again from 1989 to 1992) “drove Jimmy Carter crazy,” Patterson says, and at one point “the CIA came after us.” (After Manley was photographed embracing Fidel Castro on a 1975 visit to Havana, “there were strong suspicions that the CIA was trying to destabilize the Manley government,” Patterson explains.) The left wing of Manley’s party, which had little actual power but did include bona fide communist D.K. Duncan, who held a minor ministry in the government, was “scaring the hell out of the middle class,” which fled the island; at one point Jamaica was down to two dentists and not many more doctors. In such a transition, “you need managers more than ever,” Patterson says. “You can’t implement things with hotheads who couldn’t run a chicken coop.”

Instead of demolishing tenements to build high-rise public housing “for the 5 percent, while kicking the other 95 percent out to another slum,” Patterson advocated “urban upgrading,” bringing in services like water, electricity, daycare, health centers. “It will still look like a slum, but it is a more livable slum,” he says. “The minister of housing hated my plan.” Patterson did put into place a program that sold 12 essential items to the poor at highly subsidized prices. “It was one of the worthiest things I’ve ever done,” he says. “It meant that thousands went to bed each night, not starving.” Eventually, though, he decided, “I am willing to be a public intellectual, but not a politician or revolutionary. Scholarship is what I wanted to do.”

Alongside his scholarship, Patterson has also taught sociology, emphasizing culture, and has earned a national presence as a public intellectual in the United States. As a teacher, “I try to get my students to be open to different approaches, and not to latch onto the latest bandwagon,” he says. “David Riesman and Marty Lipset always encouraged me to stay a little on the ‘outside.’ ” Consequently, Patterson is very critical of “people who try to set ‘agendas’ as a way of making a name for themselves. They love to call their agenda a ‘new paradigm,’ and promote it as an agenda for the discipline. That usually leads to dogma, and I am hostile to dogma.”

He has skewered dogmas in numerous op-ed essays in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, and Newsweek, and has appeared on the PBS News Hourand Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC. “I always just write what I think,” he says of his op-eds. “I don’t consider the political or social repercussions.” Though his credentials as a political progressive are unimpeachable, his freethinking essays often upend the settled pieties of academic culture.

In the aftermath of the dramatic 1991 Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate, for example, Patterson’s New York Times op-ed "Race, Gender, and Liberal Fallacies” insisted that readers face “certain stark sociological realities,” however disconcerting. One such reality related to the allegation of sexual harassment Anita Hill made about Thomas’s behavior when she was his subordinate at work. Though Patterson found Thomas’s legal credentials inadequate for the Supreme Court, and identified himself as a feminist, he went on to assert: “Now to most American feminists, and to politicians manipulating the nation’s lingering Puritan ideals, an obscenity is always an obscenity, an absolute offense against God and the moral order; to everyone else, including all professional social linguists and qualitative sociologists, an obscene expression, whether in Chaucerian Britain or the American South, has to be understood in context.” For Hill to raise Thomas’s bawdy remarks 10 years later was “unfair and disingenuous,” he wrote, the latter because she “has lifted a verbal style that carries only minor sanction in one subcultural context and thrown it in the overheated cultural arena of mainstream, neo-Puritan America, where it incurs professional extinction.” This essay cost Patterson friendships. Yet, some years later, Anita Hill invited him to contribute to a book she was editing, and he happily did so. His philosophy is that “what we do as public sociologists must inform our discipline, too.”

THAT DISCIPLINE ITSELF can be revolutionary, as sociological analysis of the past can clarify the roots of present conditions. For example, Patterson’s first book, on Jamaican slavery, remains the benchmark work on the subject. “Jamaica was the largest and most productive of the British colonies. There was lots of money made from the sugar and coffee plantations,” he explains. “It was like an oil field, or a gold mine—in fact, sugar used to be called ‘brown gold.’ But the British in Jamaica made a harsh decision. Though some slave children did survive, there were high rates of infant mortality. So plantation owners focused on buying their Jamaican slaves from Africa as young adults, then literally worked them to death in eight years or so. Then they’d just buy another slave as a replacement. The demand for slaves in Jamaica far outran the supply from local births; astonishingly, the small island of Jamaica imported more slaves than the United States. Yet by the 1820s—even though the slave trade was abolished in Great Britain and the United States in 1807—the United States had far more slaves than Jamaica, because American masters encouraged reproduction and their slaves could be more cheaply provisioned.

“The money made in Jamaica did not stay there but went back to the owners in Britain,” he continues. “Those great English mansions were built on the backs of Jamaican slaves. The owners were not present on the plantations exercising any proprietary self-interest in their slaves. Instead, they left running the estate to overseers and slave drivers—people with no interest in preserving the slave stock. So they worked them as hard as possible. There were many slave revolts. Jamaica had the harshest system of slavery in world history.”

This sets the stage, he says, for understanding modern Jamaica, an economically underdeveloped and politically disorganized country relative to many of its Caribbean neighbors. Though many social scientists seem obsessed with change, “it is also important to explain continuity and persistence, which is one of the themes that has stayed with me,” Patterson notes. “The problem of persistence has finally emerged as an important one for economic historians. It takes the form of the role of institutions and institutional persistence.”

A lively debate now roils economic history regarding which is more important in determining prosperity: good policies or good institutions. MIT economist Daron Acemoglu (who has collaborated with Florence professor of government James Robinson; see “Why Nations Fail,” July-August 2012, page 9) argues that institutions—such as respect for private property and strong schools—are decisive. The “policy” advocates admit that although institutions are important, enlightened social and economic policies will give rise to good institutions. Both camps recognize, of course, that both policies and institutions are crucial; they disagree only over priority.

In Turnaround (2013), Jamaican economist Peter Blair Henry, dean of New York University’s Stern School of Business, argued the “policies” position by comparing Barbados and Jamaica: two black Caribbean societies that took their institutions from their British colonial rulers and became independent in the early 1960s. “Fast forward half a century, and Barbados has been very successful, while Jamaica is having problems,” Patterson says. “So, Henry says, it couldn’t be the institutions, which are similar—it must be the policies in Barbados that made the difference.”

Patterson is joining the debate with a long paper on the subject. “If you look at history, you find something else,” he says. “It is not just institutions, but playing the institutional game the right way. A lot of African countries had great institutions set up: Zimbabwe is theoretically a democracy, but does Robert Mugabe actually get elected democratically? And factories are fine, but they are useless if you don’t have the know-how to run a factory.

“In Barbados, the colonial elite was ruthlessly efficient and brutal, but at all levels of society, they used black citizens—who thereby acquired the institutional knowledge,” he continues. “There were black policemen, black artisans, black bureaucrats—they got hired even at the expense of poor whites. Right after slavery ended, Barbados abolished the militia, which had been composed of poor whites. They instead created a police force and gave those jobs to blacks, as the elite had decided that the local poor whites were a degenerate, incompetent group. When independence came in 1966, they were already way ahead of the game: they knew what they were doing. They knew how to run a democracy and a court system. They did a much better job educating black citizens. In 1946 Barbadian blacks already had a literacy rate of more than 90 percent; at independence it was close to 100 percent, and today UNESCO ranks the island as one of the five most literate countries in the world.

“The history in Jamaica was very different,” he continues. “Yes, Jamaica did have black civil servants and a colored middle class, but that was far more the case in Barbados. Schools were much more efficient in Barbados. Jamaica had an Afro-Jamaican culture where the peasants were involved: that’s where reggae came from, and it’s a big reason for the cultural vitality of Jamaica. There was not the same degree of acculturation to British ways. Today, Jamaica has a democracy, too, but a very shaky one: hundreds of people die at elections—there’s endemic violence, class conflict, and corruption, and it will have to solve those problems before it can move forward. No one dies during elections in Barbados; Freedom House considers it one of the most democratic countries.”

This is the power of cultural and historical analysis, as practiced by Harvard’s answer to Max Weber, or its Caribbean Zola. Yes, structure, policies, and institutions matter. And another thing that matters a great deal is culture, the legacy that history leaves.

In Vichy France, there were few diversions; among them were Hollywood musicals and comedies, such as those starring Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby, which helped lift the spirits of French audiences. One great success was Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the story of a decent, average citizen who unexpectedly finds himself in the U.S. Senate, where he stubbornly persists in his ultimately victorious fight against a corrupt group in power. Although they controlled much of daily life, the German occupiers could not stop the French audiences from identifying with James Stewart as Mr. Smith. “They came to applaud,” says Stanley Hoffmann, who as a young boy was among those applauding.

Now 78 years old, Hoffmann has been, since 1997, Buttenwieser University Professor; he ranks as one of the world’s preeminent authorities on international relations, with specialties in French politics and history and American foreign policy. He has written 18 books and countless articles, including, since 1978, regular essays in the New York Review of Books. Having taught at Harvard since 1955, Hoffmann also founded what is now the University’s Gunzburg Center for European Studies (where his recorded voice greets callers) and was among those who created the social-studies concentration in the College. “He probably holds the record for the greatest number of different courses taught in Harvard’s Core curriculum,” says Bass professor of government Michael Sandel, who has known Hoffmann for more than 30 years, taught a course on globalization with him, and calls him a “towering figure. Stanley has voracious intellectual interests and a range of knowledge of politics, history, and culture that is unrivaled in the academic world, as far as I know.”

Rarely does a scholar’s life show such an intimate connection between personal experiences and academic pursuits as Hoffmann’s does. “It wasn’t I who chose to study world politics,” he wrote in a memoir published in a 1993 festschrift, Ideas and Ideals: Essays on Politics in Honor of Stanley Hoffmann.“World politics forced themselves on me at a very early age.”

Born in Vienna in 1928, he grew up in the early 1930s in Nice, France, with his Austrian mother (his distant American father returned to the States and had scant contact with his son thereafter). “Nice was filled with foreigners,” he recalls. “Russian émigrés, people from Central Europe who had retired to the Riviera.” In 1936 Hoffmann mère et fils moved to Paris. “My mother thought the schools would be tougher there,” Hoffmann says. “She was right. For me, it was like moving from paradise to purgatory: the sky was gray, there was no sea, and Hitler was beginning to spread his wings.” On May 10, 1940, acute appendicitis afflicted the boy just as the radio reported the German attack on Belgium, Holland, and France. “I was under the knife in between air raid sirens,” he wrote.

Hoffmann was baptized at birth as a Protestant, but his anti-clerical mother’s family fit the Nazi racial definition of Jews, and so the two of them, essentially stateless people, fled Paris. “My mother and I were two small dots in that incredible and mindless mass of ten million people clogging the roads of France,” he wrote. They finally reached Lamalou-les-bains, a tiny spa in Languedoc—and then, as the school year began, they returned to Nice, by then part of Vichy France. Once they left Paris, “my fate had become inseparable from that of the French,” Hoffmann wrote. “It wasn’t simply the discovery of the way in which public affairs take over private lives, in which individual fates are blown around like leaves in a storm once History strikes, that had marked me forever. It was also a purely personal sense of solidarity with the other victims of History and Hitler with whom we had shared this primal experience of free fall.”

In Nice, after the Germans occupied the city in September 1942, the Gestapo were around every corner. “It was three months of waiting for the bell to ring at 3 a.m.,” he recalls. “Fear never left us.” And the little family had almost no resources; Hoffmann’s mother sold her jewels and borrowed from a friend, though in the empty markets there wasn’t much to eat anyway. Although they remained without citizenship through the war, “I had one great advantage: I was a very good student,” he says. “The French were willing to forgive anybody anything if one was a good student and spoke good French.” But excursions to enjoy the music, films, and walks that the studious Hoffmann loved were made hazardous by the sudden rafles, police and Gestapo round-ups such as the one in which his only close friend, the French-born son of Hungarian Jewish émigré's, disappeared, with his mother, forever.

Carrying French documents that his history teacher had forged for them, Hoffmann and his mother returned to Lamalou-les-bains on a blacked-out night train. There, they found that 1,000 young German soldiers had encamped in the village of 800. The two groups didn’t speak to each other, but there was no Gestapo, it was perfectly safe, and there was no more fear. The villagers somehow found places for them to stay, even if it meant frequent moves as the Germans kept occupying hotels. “There was a basic decency in those French people,” he says, adding a quote from The Plague by Camus, “There is more in man to be admired than condemned.”

Throughout their ordeal, the kindness and protectiveness of so many French countrymen and teachers made an indelible impression and stamped Hoffmann as irretrievably French. The voices of the Free French and General de Gaulle on the BBC helped sustain the hope “that kept one’s soul from freezing,” he wrote. But it was not until 1972, in a review of The Sorrow and the Pity, the Marcel Ophuls film on the Occupation, that Hoffmann spoke publicly of his wartime experiences; he ended the review by recalling the compassionate history teacher who had helped their flight from Nice: “He and his wife were not Resistance heroes, but if there is an average Frenchman, it was this man who was representative of his nation; for that, France and the French will always deserve our tribute, and have my love.”

In 1944, the Lamalou-les-bains villagers flocked to see the first newsreels of the liberation of Paris. Hoffmann, who got his first look at the “tall and imperturbable” de Gaulle, has never forgotten the exhilaration of that moment. The “euphoria of a national general will was palpable,” he wrote, adding, “For the rest of my life, I was going to be stirred by the drama of peoples rising for their freedom, or breaking their chains, more deeply than by any other public emotion and by most private ones.”

Despite his prodigious scholarly output, it is difficult to categorize Hoffmann’s approach to international relations. “There is no ‘school of Hoffmann’—he doesn’t have doctrinal disciples,” says Michael J. Smith ’73, Ph.D. ’82, Sorensen professor of political and social thought at the University of Virginia, who studied with Hoffmann and later co-taught a course with him. “Stanley has a horror of mimesis; he doesn’t want you to ape what he thinks—his students are the polar opposite of ‘dittoheads.’ They aren’t people who share a set of conclusions; they share a mode of inquiry, and come to their own conclusions using the best available arguments.”

 

Hoffmann also is hostile to radical cures, allergic to communism and Marxism, and in fact profoundly “suspicious of anything that smacks of utopia and ideology, of a grand vision for the People with a capital P, or any millennial movement,” says his student Ellen Frost ’66, Ph.D. ’72, an international-relations scholar and former U.S. government official. (Hoffmann himself cites the French philosopher and political scientist Raymond Aron, a critic of French leftists, as a mentor, and calls him “a great anti-utopian.” Hoffmann writes that, like Aron, he naturally tends to “think against,” noting that he has had the “intellectual romps of a fox, and the convictions of a hedgehog.”)

Furthermore, Hoffmann has never been tempted by government service, either as a policy adviser or bureaucrat, explaining that he is temperamentally unsuited for such work and values his independence too highly. “When I’m in Washington, I want to take the next plane out of there,” he says. “People who come back from this Washington world take a good time to become normal again.” He observes that he has remained “too French to be a convincing American policymaker,” adding, with characteristic wit, that his Harvard contemporaries Henry Kissinger ’50, Ph.D. ’54, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Ph.D. ’53, didn’t have this problem. And unlike those two, “[M]y reaction to power is more dread than desire,” Hoffmann writes. “I study power so as to understand the enemy, not so as better to be able to exert it.”

Hoffmann’s analysis of American politics may be “more influential overseas than it is here,” says Louise Richardson, Ph.D. ’89, executive dean of the Radcliffe Institute, a former Hoffmann student who studies terrorism. “He is humanistic, and he brings history into the equation and focuses on the importance of individual leaders.” (De Gaulle is his personal hero.) This approach, which eschews the quantitative data and theoretical models now fashionable in international relations, nonetheless, in Hoffmann’s hands, produces astonishingly insightful analyses. “He has an old-fashioned approach to the study of politics that emphasizes history, diplomacy, and political philosophy,” says Sandel. “Some might accuse Stanley of being a dinosaur, but if that’s true, then more of us should aspire to be dinosaurs.”

“He’s been prescient—and right—on all the major issues of the postwar period,” says Smith. Hoffmann opposed the French war in Algeria and supported de Gaulle’s efforts to extricate the French from their colonial past there. In 1963, when John F. Kennedy was commander-in-chief, Hoffmann predicted that the Vietnam War would prove an exercise in futility (and in his memoirs, Pentagon Papers source Daniel Ellsberg ’52, JF ’59, Ph.D. ’63, credits Hoffmann with changing his mind on Vietnam—the two debated at Radcliffe in 1965). In 1975, Hoffmann wrote an article recommending a new foreign policy for Israel to advance the cause of peace there, an essay that he says he could republish today without changing a single word (“At least half” of terrorism would disappear, he believes, if the Israel/Palestine conflict were resolved). And in March 2003, Hoffmann wrote an essay in the Boston Globe on the eve of the invasion of Iraq; all of its gloomy predictions have since come true. In 2004 he advocated a phased military withdrawal from Iraq, an idea that seemed outré at the time but that has since been backed by a majority in Congress.

Experience and learning have combined in Hoffmann to produce a singular outlook on world politics. Start with a brilliant intellect: he graduated at the top of his class at the Institut d’Études Politiques (“Sciences Po”) in 1948 and received tenure at Harvard in 1959, only four years after joining the faculty. And in the life of the mind, powerful ideas often come from those who reside both inside and outside some discipline or community; they combine the fresh eyes of the outsider with the deep knowledge of a participant.

Hoffmann considers himself someone whose nature, choices, and fate have made him “marginal in almost every way.” Having spent his formative years in France, he has now lived in the United States for twice as long as he did there, and has been a citizen of both countries since 1960. His writings, while often critical of American foreign policy, also aim to support the United States in living with greater security and respect in the world. He often provides perspectives that are unavailable to those (there are many) who lack his worldliness and deep historical knowledge.

Take, for example, McGeorge Bundy, JF ’48, LL.D. ’61, a former dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and an admired friend, who Hoffmann says “shared the belief of all who have been in the U.S. foreign policy establishment: that America could do practically anything it wanted, because of its combination of force and wisdom.” When Bundy, as national security adviser in the Kennedy administration, was helping to mount the Vietnam War, he had a correspondence with Hoffmann in which the latter questioned whether the United States could succeed in this venture, arguing in part from the French experience in the region. Bundy replied, “We are not the French—we are coming as liberators, not colonialists.” “The only problem,” Hoffmann says, “was the Vietnamese.” He adds that American foreign policy tends to commit “the sin of excessive benevolence: we will make people happy whether they want it or not.”

Americans, he feels, “have to understand the foreignness of foreigners, instead of believing that they are simply misguided Americans or not well-guided Americans.” Even Zbigniew Brzezinski, he notes, “still has this conception that the United States can make decisions for everybody.” Recently, at a Faculty of Arts and Sciences meeting on general education, a young economist rose to declare that people everywhere are pretty much the same and want the same things, so the one course that all undergraduates ought to take is economics. “I exploded,” Hoffmann recalls, “and said, ‘This is why we have been so successful in Vietnam and Iraq.’ The assumption that ‘people everywhere are all alike’ is something you have to get out of your system. In old age, I am more and more convinced that people are intensely different from country to country. Not everyone is motivated by the same things.

“Americans mean well, but they don’t understand that acting with all one’s might to do good can be seen as a form of imperialism,” Hoffmann continues. “Within 10 minutes, these good intentions can turn into a benevolent condescending attitude toward the lesser tribes.”

In one of his early books on U.S. foreign policy, Gulliver’s Troubles (1968), Hoffmann deploys the metaphor of a giant besieged by tiny adversaries who nonetheless fetter him effectively. An apt analogy to the United States’s predicament 40 years ago, it appears nearly oracular today, when there is daily proof that, as Hoffmann says, “Populations with even a small number of rebels can make large armies ineffective.” (His 2004 sequel with Frédéric Bozo, Gulliver Unbound: America’s Imperial Temptation and the War in Iraq, argues that the United States blunders into snares when it lumbers forward, heedless of foreign nations’ histories and indigenous sentiments.) “The people surrounding Paul Bremer [M.B.A. ’66, head of the provisional authority governing Iraq in 2003-04] had never been in the Mideast and knew nothing of the region,” Hoffmann says.

The years since 2001 “have shown the absolute fiasco of unilateralism,” he declares. “We make reality, but if we make it alone, it will boomerang.” The United States seemingly needs to relearn expensive lessons it has already paid for, and forgets things it used to know. “In 1945 and in the immediate postwar period, the United States did respect, within limits, what Europeans wanted,” Hoffmann explains. “We had an enemy, the Soviet Union, which was repressing its satellites, and we had to do better than that. But remove the Soviet Union, and we tried to tell the world what to do—it doesn’t work. And it only got worse with the rise of the neocons.

“The French, for example, get terribly annoyed when Americans and conservative British tell them that France has to cut down on social security and work longer hours,” he continues. “The French know enough about America to know that there are aspects of American life that they don’t want—overwork, short vacations, and rather poor social and public services, for example.” Not long ago, during a taxi ride to Boston’s Logan Airport (Hoffmann was about to fly to Holland), the driver asked how the Dutch were doing. “They are doing fine,” Hoffmann replied. “They are at least as prosperous as we are, maybe even more so.” The driver said, “But that’s not possible! We are the most prosperous country in the world!”

With his dual citizenship, writing in both French and English (he sometimes translates himself), and with strong sympathies toward both nations, Hoffmann is ideally equipped to explain France to Americans and Americans to France. His full-year course, “Political Doctrines and Society: Modern France,” which he taught for more than three decades beginning in 1957 and into which, he has written, “I poured everything I knew and thought about France, and out of which came most of what I have written on her,” he calls the achievement of which he is most proud, because there was nothing like it. “I was, I am, French intellectually,” he wrote. “My sensibility is largely French—I like the frequent obliqueness, indirection, understatement and pudeur [modesty] of French feelings. But in my social being, there is something that rebels against the French harness, style of authority, and of human relations.”

Historical perspectives inform Hoffmann’s explanations of modern France. World War I, for example, was fought in France and the Low Countries—not in England or the United States. In the war, France lost 1.4 million soldiers out of a national population of 40 million; an equivalent loss for the United States today would be 10.5 million troops—nearly 3,000 times the current U.S. military death toll in Iraq. “France had a very, very rocky time after World War I,” Hoffmann explains. “Many came back mutilated, there was general exhaustion, and most people were turning pacifist because they didn’t want another war. In World War II they lost ‘only’ 600,000. But the period after World War II was one of extraordinary creativity in France; they came out of that war less exhausted and with a growing birth rate and much more vitality.”

That postwar vitality energized the young Hoffmann, who as a 16-year-old recharged his energies by spending the summer of 1945 lounging on the benches of the Bois de Boulogne, absorbed in the novels of André Malraux. (“If anybody ever gave me the impression of a genius, it was Malraux,” Hoffmann says, recalling a 1972 meeting he and his wife Inge [Schneier] Hoffmann had with the writer. “You cannot reproduce a conversation with Malraux; he started at 20,000 feet, there was no small talk. He was utterly charming, witty, sardonic.”) Hoffmann became a naturalized French citizen in 1947, enrolled in doctoral studies in law, and went to the Salzburg Seminar in American studies in the summer of 1950, deepening his fascination with the United States.

In 1951 he came to study in Harvard’s government department, receiving an A.M. in 1952. He then returned to France for army service (“sheer boredom”), and when he wrote to Harvard to say he wouldn’t mind returning, the department surprised him by offering, not the chance to write a Ph.D. thesis, but an instructorship. His “rather monstrous” law thesis, published in 1954, sufficed as a credential.

When he came to Cambridge to stay in 1955, Hoffmann decided, “This was a wonderful place. I felt I could live here and remain French. It was a cosmopolitan place in which one could function without anyone wondering where your passport was issued.” He smiles, adding, ”I am French, and a citizen of Harvard.”

Hoffmann is a professor in the grand classical sense, a man of wide learning rather than a discipline-bound specialist. “He’s a profoundly cultured man,” says Ellen Frost. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who, as a visiting lecturer in the government department in 2000, taught a course on globalization with Hoffmann and Sandel, says, “What I like about Stanley’s writings in the New York Review of Books is that he doesn’t engage in these crazy numerical or quantitative analyses of international relations. You live it and breathe it when you listen to him, because it’s really textured by deep knowledge of history, philosophy, sociology—he weaves all the strands together.”

Albert Camus had a major influence on Hoffmann, who this spring gave a new course (in French) on the writer. “His existentialism is the philosophy to which I feel the closest,” he says. He met Camus only once, when the latter was giving a talk to American students in Paris. “He was irresistible,” Hoffmann recalls. “Very charming. He looked like a handsomer version of Humphrey Bogart. Camus’ influence on society and culture was a much greater one [than Sartre’s], because he was much more readable—he wrote unbelievably beautiful French.”

The myth of Sisyphus, which Camus used as a touchstone for an eponymous 1942 essay, also informs Hoffmann’s philosophy. “There are two main ideas I take from Camus,” he says. “One, that there is no such thing as linear progress: the rock has a tendency to roll back down the hill again, and nothing is ever finally accomplished. Second, one has to keep trying anyhow; that the rock will roll down again shouldn’t prevent you from trying to push it back up.” Hoffmann typically closed the last lecture of his course on ethics and international relations (which he first offered in 1980 with Michael Smith, and will give again with J. Bryan Hehir, Montgomery professor of practice of religion and public life, next spring) by reading the two final paragraphs of The Plague, where Camus explains that after the end of the plague, “the rats will return to the city.” The victories won for humanity are always provisional ones.

His mentor Raymond Aron declared that “Anyone who believes that all good things will come together at the same time is a fool,” Hoffmann says. “My quarrel with Thomas Friedman is that he believes that thanks to globalization, individual liberty, democracy, prosperity, and peace will all arrive together. That requires a breathtaking optimism or naïveté, and also explains his initial enthusiasm for the invasion of Iraq. Friedman is not an imperialist, but he does have this conviction that America has this formula for the world that will be good for everybody.”

Hoffmann finds the contemporary international situation grim and much of current U.S. foreign policy both benighted and disheartening. “One reason I haven’t been teaching international relations this year is I find it so discouraging, I can’t face it,” he confides. “If someone told me that after the end of the Cold War, one would hear about nothing but terrorism, suicide bombings, displaced people, and genocides, I would not have believed it.”

Twenty-seven students and auditors, ranging in age from undergraduates to some in their 60s and 70s, sit at their places in Sever this spring for French 190, Hoffmann’s course on Camus. In front of the room, their professor is eloquent, graceful, and gently humorous; when a student opens the window shades, he quotes Goethe’s dying words, “Mehr Licht!” [“More light!”] Hoffmann’s lectures “are finished works in themselves,” says Louise Richardson, noting that Harvard faculty often sit in the back, auditing the artful presentations. “How many international relations scholars will you find teaching Camus?” asks Thomas Friedman. “They don’t make them like Stanley anymore.”

Hoffmann once asked Richardson, who has studied the 1956 Suez crisis in depth, to suggest some relevant readings because he was preparing a lecture that dealt with it. “I recommended five books,” she recalls. “And he read all five!—even though the Suez crisis was only a small piece of the lecture. Stanley takes scholarship and teaching very seriously. He reads an extraordinary amount.”

In true European style, he is also happy to ask his students to do the same, and compiled impressively long reading lists for full-year courses like “War,” which had three lectures per week, plus a section. War and Peace could be the assigned text for just one of those lectures. When asked if that was unreasonable, and if an excerpt from Tolstoy’s magnum opus might not suffice, Hoffmann asked, “Which part of War and Peace summarizes the themes?”

Ellen Frost had Hoffmann for her junior tutorial in social studies. “He was brilliant, and because I was young, that was intimidating,” she recalls. “But he was also very caring. He saw through any kind of pretension, hypocrisy, or bluff, and has a deliciously wicked sense of humor, tinged with paradox. Humor permeates him.” Hoffmann once observed that, “What the classical economists called ‘harmony of interest through accumulation of goods,’ Rousseau summed up in one word: ‘greed.’” Discussing Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, he might casually quote Clemenceau to the effect that “Even God didn’t need 14 points.”

Michael Smith describes Hoffmann’s teaching style as “rigorous presentation of competing points of view at their most persuasive, followed by a devastating critique, followed by his own take on the issue. There are two ways of teaching: provide a suit straight off the rack, so to speak, or plant seeds and let them grow. Stanley plants seeds; he allows you to develop your own arguments.” Smith adds that “one of Stanley’s signal virtues as a teacher is that he treats everyone as an intellectual equal. You can be a freshman or a head of state and you’ll get exactly the same Stanley: he doesn’t dumb anything down and he doesn’t flatter you for the sake of your position. There’s not an ounce of condescension in him.” (Right after earning her doctorate, Frost wrote her mentor a long letter about her first job, working in the U.S. Senate. “Back came the loveliest handwritten letter,” she recalls. “It said, ‘Dear Ellen, Please call me Stanley, unless you want me to call you Dr. Frost.’”)

During the Harvard student protests in the spring of 1969, Hoffmann led teach-ins on Vietnam and became something of a hero to undergraduates. “Some of the students’ grievances were perfectly understandable, and the decision to call the police was an unbelievable mistake. [President Nathan] Pusey said that the confrontation had nothing to do with politics, that this was a problem of ‘manners.’ On the right, some conservatives in several departments were on a rampage. At the first faculty meeting after the University Hall occupation, [economic historian] Alexander Gerschenkron explained that the students were exactly like the Bolsheviks in Russia, and that there was only one thing you could do with such students: ‘Beat them! Beat them! Beat them!’”

At the same time, Hoffmann didn’t countenance the left-wing students’ ambition to shut down the University, and felt it was important “to prevent the ‘ultras’ [extremists] from taking over. I was really concerned with trying to keep it together,” he recalls. “Stanley is passionately committed to open debate and free intellectual exchange,” Frost explains. “To him, that is the soul of a university.” That, and of course, its students. “What mattered [in 1969] was that one listened to what the students had to say,” Hoffmann says, “because students were what the University was about.”

Hoffmann listens carefully to his own students, who frequently end as colleagues and friends. “I’ve been a teacher first, and a writer second,” he says, notwithstanding his 18 books. “I like writing, but it’s a lonely job and I am happier in front of a classroom than a blank page. I need the input and the stimulation that the students provide. They are fun. I am not ready to give up yet—or rather, I am ready, each time I am away from my students. But when I am with them, I want to go on forever.”

A traditional debate among international-relations scholars pits “realists,” who believe that national self-interests and power considerations ought to guide decisions, against “cosmopolitans,” who emphasize universal values like human rights over national self-interest. Hoffmann, a complex and subtle thinker, does not fit easily into either camp. “I’ve always considered Stanley a liberal realist,” says Sultan of Oman professor of international relations and former dean of the Kennedy School of Government Joseph Nye, a Hoffmann student. “He has always understood both dimensions.”

Like Camus, Hoffmann has a passion for human rights, broadly conceived, and a powerful ethical sense. Ellen Frost contrasts the pragmatism of the realist Henry Kissinger with Hoffmann’s cosmopolitanism. “Kissinger feels that the American public accepts foreign-policy initiatives only if they are tied to some ethical rationale,” she says. “Stanley has a different approach: he thinks foreign policy should be infused with universal ethical principles.” Smith notes that Hoffmann “was influential in bringing the study of norms and ethics to mainstream international relations. It had been marginalized.”

“As an academic, I have had one thread to guide me in my divagations: concern for world order,” Hoffmann writes. He defines world order as including how states arrange their relations to prevent a permanent state of war, and how they orient themselves in the postwar international system. That said, he is not a pacifist, and if he generally favors international cooperation, it is not so much for moral reasons as because, as Frost explains, “Things are more likely to work if you have other countries helping out.”

Though Hoffmann disagreed with his domestic policies, he feels that President George H.W. Bush did a “masterful” job managing the transition to the post-Cold War era. “Without gloating, he handled the Soviet breakup, the reunification of Germany, even the Gulf War very well,” Hoffmann says.

In his estimate, the greatest statesman of his lifetime was Charles de Gaulle. “There is no exact equivalent for the word ‘leadership’ in French,” Hoffmann says. “I recently reread de Gaulle’s speeches and marveled at the eloquence of his style, the pedagogical talent he had—he was the son of a schoolteacher. For the French, leadership means pedagogy: the capacity to explain the world, and to make people feel that the leadership takes them seriously. We haven’t had a real teacher since de Gaulle, and that has produced a funk in France. One component of leadership is making people feel that they are intelligent, that they understand. It’s something that has been missing in both France and America for a long time. People want to be enlightened. If you don’t do that, if it is all electoral tricks, or canned speeches, then there is going to be nothing but contempt and distrust of the people in power.”

Similarly, “In the old days, international relations was understood by average people, and today it is not,” Hoffmann declares. “Jargon has invaded everything and the relationship of theories to reality has faded. There are all these wonderful equations, but how are they affected by a real-world phenomenon like death? When I came to Harvard, American foreign policy was near the top of the hierarchy of subjects taught here. Today, there is no tenured government professor teaching American foreign policy. At present, the hierarchy of prestige values everything that is abstract and theoretical, and you cannot do that with foreign-policy studies. They have to be concrete and deal with concrete issues.”

Reality, with its complexities and paradoxes, continues to absorb him. He enjoys welcoming former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin to Harvard as much as he does teaching a freshman seminar on “Moral Choices in Literature and Politics.” The best word for Hoffmann’s thinking and writing might be “nuanced,” reflecting his deep reading of the facts, including those that seem to have escaped everyone else’s attention. His goal is always to understand, and, on a good day, perhaps exert a bit of influence as well, but never to reach fixed conclusions. In Hoffmann’s festschrift, the late Judith Shklar, former Cowles professor of government and Hoffmann’s close friend, summed up the pleasures of teaching and learning with him. Her essay tried, she said, to give an idea of “what it was like to have gone on a long intellectual journey with him that contemplates no arrival, but only the pleasures of the open road.”

Stanley Hoffmann is a Faculty Associate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. He is also Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor, Department of Government, Harvard University.

Craig A. Lambert ’69, Ph.D. ’78, is deputy editor of Harvard Magazine.