When Marx Mattered by Bershady Harold J.;

Author:Bershady, Harold J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Notes

1. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, San Diego, 1985.

2. Beekman Publishers, Woodstock, NY, 1972.

3. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1943.

4. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1971.

5. Monthly Review Press, New York, 2009.

6. Macmillan Company, New York, 1948.

7. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1973.

8

The New Left

My wife and I arrived in Madison, Wisconsin, in late summer 1959. The small, clean, tidy, and very white city (110,000 inhabitants), which is also the state capital, and the large, sprawling university (36,000 students) were the opposites of what I had known in Buffalo.

The primary reason I had applied to the University of Wisconsin was to study with Hans H. Gerth. He and C. Wright Mills had published a readable translation of several of Weber’s remarkable essays, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology1 (1946), which for many years was the chief source of Weber’s writings available to American students. I also knew Gerth had studied with Mannheim, and from hints dropped in a few of his other writings, inferred Gerth knew several of the neo-Marxist writers as well. From my reading in sociology as well as searching through university catalogues, Gerth seemed to be one of the sociologists in the country with whom I thought I might have some intellectual affinity.

The reception for new students given by the Department of Sociology was also on a scale several times larger than anything I had experienced before. In addition to the sociology department in the College of Letters and Science, to which I had applied, there was also at the University of Wisconsin a separate Department of Rural Sociology some of whose members and students were present at the reception. The two departments were distinct, but occasional crossovers between them occurred. All told, there were about twenty faculty members at the reception and perhaps forty or more new and second-year students.

Gerth knew who I was and why I had come to Wisconsin, because I had not only identified myself quite clearly in my application letter to the department but was also pointedly ushered over to him by the chair of the department and introduced. I was clearly going to be his student. I will relate just one story of the many I could tell that may indicate something of the flavor of the man I discovered at that first meeting. As we were chatting about the work I had done in philosophy and was hoping to find some relation to in sociology, I asked Gerth quite innocently what he thought of the department, leaving unsaid the remainder of the question—“for the pursuit of my interests.” He hesitated for a moment as though thinking it through and then, answering only the stated part of the question, said in his heavy German accent (which I will not attempt to reproduce): “The more I think of it, the less I think of it.” I was startled by this response and must have shown it, but then laughed. “Ja,” he said, and then in an attempt to leaven the harshness of his comment, added with a shrug of self-deprecation, “I am a phrase monger.

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