Ary was, crucially, a good man. In this post, Kenneth Prewitt, Michael Cohen and Riva Kastoryano join me in remembering a great scholar and gentleman. -Jeff

He started his career as an Africanist, whose work on the Ivory Coast stands as a classic in the field. Aristide Zolberg became famous as a stellar essayist, whose sharp creative insights could illuminate in elegant strokes great puzzles of the human condition, including perhaps most significantly his “Moments of Madness,” a deeply learned piece reflecting on the telling question he posed: “If politics is the art of the possible, what are we to make of the moments when human beings in modern societies believe that ‘all is possible’?” And then there is his great achievement: A Nation by Design, his magnum opus. It is both a crucial account of an under examined part of the American story, while it is rich with comparative insights, as Riva Kastoryano describes in her reflections. It is a classic for reasons that Ken Prewitt underscores.

Ary was a disciplined scholar, as Michael Cohen highlights, who crossed disciplines freely, a tough – minded empiricist with great imagination. He was also a man who experienced a great deal, both the good and the bad life offered in his times. A Holocaust survivor, whose memoirs of his childhood await publication, he was married to the great sociologist of memory and art, Vera Zolberg. (For my appreciation of my intellectual relationship with Vera click here)

Ary and Vera, co-conspirators, together for sixty years, they were a beautiful team, and as a team they contributed to family (their children Erica and Danny and many more), friends, colleagues and students, and the world of arts and sciences broadly. “The Zolbergs” hosted innumerable New School events, as well as informal dinners, in their beautiful SoHo loft, with impeccably prepared meals, setting the stage for intriguing conversation, featuring Ary, the great cook and storyteller.

We at The New School and a much broader academic and personal world are in mourning. Here are some thoughts of Kenneth Prewitt, Riva Kastoryano and Michael Cohen, Ary’s good friends and colleagues. More sustained discussion of Aristide Zolberg’s work will surely follow. A memorial event at The New School in September is now being planned.

Kenneth Prewitt, Columbia University

The mark of an unusual intellect is scholarship that is timely – it speaks to today’s issues – and timeless – it will be read a century and more from now. Ari Zolberg’s scholarship, and especially his magisterial A Nation By Design, is a case in point. This was his last major work, where perhaps one is less surprised to find a lifetime of scholarship put to such brilliant use. More surprising is that his earliest major book Creating Political Order, written nearly a half-century ago, has the same remarkable feature. It was must reading for any interested in the newly independent nations of West Africa, but it is still being read today – and not just for its value as political history. Each of these books, as was true of all his writings, has an air of immediacy. But each is theoretically rich in a manner that speaks across decades if not centuries.

This combination of immediate relevance and insights that cross time and place made Ari an exceptionally valued colleague and teacher, as hundreds can testify. I offer one personal example. Shortly after finishing my Ph.D., Ari was instrumental in my recruitment to the University of Chicago. In one simple and wise sentence he taught me what the life of the mind was about – “what matters is to do one piece of scholarship truly well, because if you can do it once you can do it again, and you will want to.”

Michael Cohen, The New School

Ary was intellectually tough. I had gone to Chicago to study with him because of his unique approach to understanding African politics and my desire to do fieldwork in the Ivory Coast, the site of his early work. I still remember receiving my first paper back from him. It looked like a war zone, every page filled with comments, questions, and suggestions written in bright red. I was stunned. At the bottom of the last page, he wrote, “pretty good paper.” I still have it, 47 years later.

I now know that he was preparing me for serious social science research. He demonstrated, by example, what it meant to “prepare,” to be aware of the intellectual commitment required before one went into the field. It was, as he once remarked, “just showing respect for the people you would be meeting. You should know who they are and where they came from.”

This was more than just advice about fieldwork, but also I came to understand, about him. People should know that he had traveled a long way himself – at that time from Belgium, to New York, to Chicago, to Abidjan, and the journey continued.

I am forever grateful for these lessons. Not easy, but profoundly helpful.

Riva Kastoryano, Sciences Po

I first met Ary in 1984 in a workshop in Paris, at Sciences Po. I had just finished my Ph.D. on migration and urban sociology and gotten a Lecturer position at Harvard, in Social Studies. We talked about migration studies in France and the United States, the questions it raised in the two countries, and the challenges. This discussion was very important for me, it was a very valuable initiation to (re)think my thesis with his arguments and in comparative perspective. He would say afterwards that “Migration studies were not a priority at Sciences Po. I kept telling them how important it is and very soon they will have to realize it.” He was right.

It was Ary who introduced a political approach to the study of migrations in France, in the early 1980. Until then, research, theses and books were mainly on the economic implications of migrations, taking migrants as a part of the labor force. We also had sociological studies on the process of migration itself, inspired mainly by the urban sociology of the Chicago School. Ary stimulated students to think of migrants as political actors… That was new! And he had a lot of echoes, influencing the orientation of many research projects in France.

Ary’s views and writings on migrants’ political participation, on the one hand, and migration on a more macro level as border controls on the other, have had a great influence on the next generation. He studied refugees, immigrants and immigration from many various angles: border control, immigration policy, immigration and foreign policy, integration, ethnicity, citizenship of course, with a historical perspective. He questioned the responsibility of the international community, human rights and development policy, and wondered about the future, when he wrote in 1991 on “the future of international immigration.”

In an interview I conducted of him in 2007 in New York that has been published in CERI’s book series on “challenges of the globalization,” we talked about the changing understanding of borders and the new challenges of the globalization. “On the political level state borders still matter, but I think they will go through transformations in the XXIst century.” He was always using a comparative perspective: “the nature of borders has changed in the European Union, maybe we will get to the same situation in North America. It would be easy for the United States of America with Canada, but more difficult with Mexico.”

Comparisons – spontaneous and reflexive – have been the basis of his thoughts and writings. Even in his last book A Nation by Design is about immigration in the United States, it is impossible not to think of other contexts, and he himself questioned whether the American nation is not after all “a nation like others.” Comparisons led him to develop global visions before the age of globalization in social sciences: already in 1995 he writes about “global flows, global walls, global movements, global system.”

Historian, sociologist, political theorist, Ary thought discussed and wrote about all aspects related to the arrival, settlement, integration and assimilation of migrants. New challenges led him to question conventional approaches without rejecting them. He questioned the resistance around language (Spanish in the United States) and religion (Islam in Europe), as new perspectives to review the classical patterns with new lenses of multiculturalism, citizenship, dual citizenship and transnationalism emerged, always in different contexts. Ary Zolberg, the cosmopolitan, at the same time Africanist, Europeanist, Americanist. He didn’t have any choice but to compare within a global perspective.

His fame and work is not limited in Europe to France. Belgium – his native country of course, Austria, Germany, Netherlands; you will see Ary’s name in every prestigious institutions in these countries, and conferences, and in the tables of contents of influential journals and collective books.

I had the privilege to participate in many conferences with Ary in many different cities in Europe and the United States. Beyond very stimulating presentations and fascinating general discussions, it was a real pleasure to stroll with Ary in those cities, go to museum, bars, restaurants… He was a bon-vivant, full of energy, always discovering new places, new tastes… He always had many stories to tell.

When I visited Ary in the hospital in Paris after his stroke, I was scared. When I saw him recovering so wonderfully, I thought that he was as we say in French “the force of the nature” “the force of life”. And he was…. I repeated that when I last saw him a month ago in New York, with the idea of rejecting that he can reach an end. I will miss him for all of that.

Aristide Zolberg was a leader in our shared long standing intellectual home, The New School for Social Research, as he was a path breaking, broad ranging political scientist. He also was, crucially, a good man. In this post, Kenneth Prewitt, Michael Cohen and Riva Kastoryano join me in remembering a great scholar and gentleman. -Jeff

Ary started his career as an Africanist, whose work on the Ivory Coast stands as a classic in the field. He became famous as a stellar essayist, whose sharp creative insights could illuminate in elegant strokes great puzzles of the human condition, including perhaps most significantly his “Moments of Madness,” a deeply learned piece reflecting on the telling question he posed: “If politics is the art of the possible, what are we to make of the moments when human beings in modern societies believe that ‘all is possible’?” And then there is his great achievement: A Nation by Design, his magnum opus. It is both a crucial account of an under examined part of the American story, while it is rich with comparative insights, as Riva Kastoryano describes in her reflections. It is a classic for reasons that Ken Prewitt underscores.

Ary was a disciplined scholar, as Michael Cohen highlights, who crossed disciplines freely, a tough – minded empiricist with great imagination. He was also a man who experienced a great deal, both the good and the bad life offered in his times. A Holocaust survivor, whose memoirs of his childhood await publication, he was married to the great sociologist of memory and art, Vera Zolberg. (For my appreciation of my intellectual relationship with Vera click here)

Ary and Vera, co-conspirators, together for sixty years, they were a beautiful team, and as a team they contributed to family (their children Erica and Danny and many more), friends, colleagues and students, and the world of arts and sciences broadly.  “The Zolbergs” hosted innumerable New School events, as well as informal dinners, in their beautiful SoHo loft, with impeccably prepared meals, setting the stage for intriguing conversation, featuring Ary, the great cook and storyteller.

We at The New School and a much broader academic and personal world are in mourning. Here are some thoughts of Kenneth Prewitt, Riva Kastoryano and Michael Cohen, Ary’s good friends and colleagues. More sustained discussion of Aristide Zolberg’s work will surely follow. A memorial event at The New School in September is now being planned.

Kenneth Prewitt, Columbia University

The mark of an unusual intellect is scholarship that is timely – it speaks to today’s issues – and timeless – it will be read a century and more from now. Ari Zolberg’s scholarship, and especially his magisterial A Nation By Design, is a case in point. This was his last major work, where perhaps one is less surprised to find a lifetime of scholarship put to such brilliant use. More surprising is that his earliest major book Creating Political Order, written nearly a half-century ago, has the same remarkable feature. It was must reading for any interested in the newly independent nations of West Africa, but it is still being read today – and not just for its value as political history. Each of these books, as was true of all his writings, has an air of immediacy. But each is theoretically rich in a manner that speaks across decades if not centuries.

This combination of immediate relevance and insights that cross time and place made Ari an exceptionally valued colleague and teacher, as hundreds can testify. I offer one personal example. Shortly after finishing my Ph.D., Ari was instrumental in my recruitment to the University of Chicago. In one simple and wise sentence he taught me what the life of the mind was about – “what matters is to do one piece of scholarship truly well, because if you can do it once you can do it again, and you will want to.”

Michael Cohen, The New School

Ary was intellectually tough. I had gone to Chicago to study with him because of his unique approach to understanding African politics and my desire to do fieldwork in the Ivory Coast, the site of his early work. I still remember receiving my first paper back from him. It looked like a war zone, every page filled with comments, questions, and suggestions written in bright red. I was stunned. At the bottom of the last page, he wrote, “pretty good paper.” I still have it, 47 years later.

I now know that he was preparing me for serious social science research. He demonstrated, by example, what it meant to “prepare,” to be aware of the intellectual commitment required before one went into the field. It was, as he once remarked, “just showing respect for the people you would be meeting. You should know who they are and where they came from.”

This was more than just advice about fieldwork, but also I came to understand, about him. People should know that he had traveled a long way himself – at that time from Belgium, to New York, to Chicago, to Abidjan, and the journey continued.

I am forever grateful for these lessons. Not easy, but profoundly helpful.

Riva Kastoryano, Sciences Po

I first met Ary in 1984 in a workshop in Paris, at Sciences Po. I had just finished my Ph.D. on migration and urban sociology and gotten a Lecturer position at Harvard, in Social Studies. We talked about migration studies in France and the United States, the questions it raised in the two countries, and the challenges. This discussion was very important for me, it was a very valuable initiation to (re)think my thesis with his arguments and in comparative perspective. He would say afterwards that “Migration studies were not a priority at Sciences Po. I kept telling them how important it is and very soon they will have to realize it.” He was right.

It was Ary who introduced a political approach to the study of migrations in France, in the early 1980. Until then, research, theses and books were mainly on the economic implications of migrations, taking migrants as a part of the labor force. We also had sociological studies on the process of migration itself, inspired mainly by the urban sociology of the Chicago School. Ary stimulated students to think of migrants as political actors… That was new! And he had a lot of echoes, influencing the orientation of many research projects in France.

Ary’s views and writings on migrants’ political participation, on the one hand, and migration on a more macro level as border controls on the other, have had a great influence on the next generation. He studied refugees, immigrants and immigration from many various angles: border control, immigration policy, immigration and foreign policy, integration, ethnicity, citizenship of course, with a historical perspective. He questioned the responsibility of the international community, human rights and development policy, and wondered about the future, when he wrote in 1991 on “the future of international immigration.”

In an interview I conducted of him in 2007 in New York that has been published in CERI’s book series on “challenges of the globalization,” we talked about the changing understanding of borders and the new challenges of the globalization. “On the political level state borders still matter, but I think they will go through transformations in the XXIst century.” He was always using a comparative perspective: “the nature of borders has changed in the European Union, maybe we will get to the same situation in North America. It would be easy for the United States of America with Canada, but more difficult with Mexico.”

Comparisons – spontaneous and reflexive – have been the basis of his thoughts and writings. Even in his last book A Nation by Design is about immigration in the United States, it is impossible not to think of other contexts, and he himself questioned whether the American nation is not after all “a nation like others.” Comparisons led him to develop global visions before the age of globalization in social sciences: already in 1995 he writes about “global flows, global walls, global movements, global system.”

Historian, sociologist, political theorist, Ary thought discussed and wrote about all aspects related to the arrival, settlement, integration and assimilation of migrants. New challenges led him to question conventional approaches without rejecting them. He questioned the resistance around language (Spanish in the United States) and religion (Islam in Europe), as new perspectives to review the classical patterns with new lenses of multiculturalism, citizenship, dual citizenship and transnationalism emerged, always in different contexts. Ary Zolberg, the cosmopolitan, at the same time Africanist, Europeanist, Americanist. He didn’t have any choice but to compare within a global perspective.

His fame and work is not limited in Europe to France. Belgium – his native country of course, Austria, Germany, Netherlands; you will see Ary’s name in every prestigious institutions in these countries, and conferences, and in the tables of contents of influential journals and collective books.

I had the privilege to participate in many conferences with Ary in many different cities in Europe and the United States. Beyond very stimulating presentations and fascinating general discussions, it was a real pleasure to stroll with Ary in those cities, go to museum, bars, restaurants… He was a bon-vivant, full of energy, always discovering new places, new tastes… He always had many stories to tell.

When I visited Ary in the hospital in Paris after his stroke, I was scared. When I saw him recovering so wonderfully, I thought that he was as we say in French “the force of the nature” “the force of life”. And he was…. I repeated that when I last saw him a month ago in New York, with the idea of rejecting that he can reach an end. I will miss him for all of that.

A personal story

At the University of Chicago, I wrote my dissertation on a marginal theater movement on the other side of the iron curtain. I was studying alternative theaters in a polity, The Polish People’s Republic, which officially understood itself to be revolutionary, and that was analyzed by some critics, both internal and external, as being totalitarian. Thus, I read both On Revolution and The Origins of Totalitarianism. From the point of view of Arendt scholarship, the effects of these readings were minimal. From On Revolution, I came to understand her point about the difference between the French and the American revolutionary traditions, giving me insights into the Soviet tradition, but this barely effected my thinking back then. From The Origins, along with other works, I came to an understanding of the totalitarian model of Soviet society, a model that I rejected. My dissertation was formed as an empirical refutation of the model.

But then I went to the New School, and in the spring of 1981, I came to appreciate Arendt in a much more serious way. A student kept on asking odd questions in my course on political sociology. I would use key concepts, and he repeatedly challenged my usage. “Society,” “ideology,” “power,” “politics,” “authority,” “freedom:” I would use the terms in more or less conventional social scientific ways, and he would question me as an Arendt student. From me: society as a unit of human association; for him society as the confusion of the public and the private. I understood ideology as a distinctive metaphoric system that makes an autonomous politics possible (Geertz student that I was). He saw ideology as a specific historical development, a special type of modern thinking and of doing politics that connected past, present and future, and when linked with terror the cultural component of totalitarianism. I understood power, politics and authority, as all involving the interplay between culture and coercion, based in the latter, for him, careful distinctions should be made, showing that political power, based in freedom, is the opposite of coercion. I soon realized what was going on, and although he very much challenged my authority as a young Assistant Professor (31 at the time), teaching in a graduate course in which many of the students were older than me, and quite sophisticated, I was intrigued. What he was talking about suggested a way to understand something I was observing that I knew wasn’t properly appreciated.

That summer I read just about all of Arendt’s major works. I was especially moved by her approach to the problems of the public and her conceptualization of politics as the capacity for people to act in concert. This was an unusual time in my life, an unusual time in contemporary politics. The darkness of the twentieth century was being lightened from the margins, and only a few were able to see it.

I was then observing the beginnings of major transformations in the political landscape that were developing in Poland, but yet not broadly recognized. From this century, I can say now that I was observing the forces that ultimately led to the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Empire. When Arendt wrote about dark times, she referred to the era of modern tyranny, of the totalitarianism of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes. This was a time when the illumination of public acts was dimmed. She observed that:

“It is the function of the public realm to throw light on the affairs of men by providing a space of appearances in which they can show in deed and word, for better and worse, who they are and what they can do, then darkness has come when this light is extinguished…”

But, she also noted that:

“even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth….”

She celebrated the acts of great individuals who shed such light in her book Men in Dark Times. In everyday actions, I saw in Poland the constitution of an alternative public space for such appearance in an emerging opposition movement that was then rapidly developing, leading a few months later to the establishment of Solidarnosc, the first independent union, the broad societal movement, constituting a free and open public space in a totalitarian order.

Yes, after my summer reading I gave up on my critique of the totalitarian model, or more precisely, I refined it. I came to understand that although there can be no totalitarian society, that there were totalitarian movements and regimes and their oppositions, and that sometimes the oppositions come in the form of heroic individuals, what Arendt wrote about, but at other times they took on broader public form. Her postscript to The Origins on the Hungary of 1956 (the 50th anniversary of which was celebrated a week ago) was my guide. Hannah and I, then, became very close.

Arendt was with me as I went off to understand what was happening in “the other Europe”, as Philip Roth would name it. In that Europe, in small interactions, big things were happening. People met each other and formed spaces of appearance apart from party-state definition. They spoke and acted freely in each other’s presence, revealing themselves and constituting alternative public spaces. They did so in theaters, in underground publications, in independent unions (first very small, after 1980 nationwide), in unofficial theaters, literary salons, bookstores and clubs. As I observed these developments, Hannah was my guide. With her guidance, I understood that the end of the activities of the opposition was to create a public space. That the question of whether the activities would lead to reform of the system (no one imagined its collapse) was really secondary. The constitution of a free public space was primary. That was the major transformation itself. It made it possible for people to be free. It provided dignity. And it created power that clearly would be consequential, although the exact consequences were unknown.

I even took part a bit; Adam Michnik and I created a semi clandestine democracy seminar based at the New School in New York with branches in Warsaw and Budapest. Our first reading was The Origins. The three groups each read the book and discussed it. The discussions were recorded and the proceedings exchanged. We functioned as an opposition activity from 1985 to 1989, and for about five years after, we functioned around the old bloc as an open activity. I will be happy to describe this in detail after my presentation, if any one is interested.

At the time, there was an everyday mundane feeling about these activities. But after the fact, it is clear to me that they were truly revolutionary. They were little gems of the lost revolutionary tradition that Arendt wrote about, and they speak to our present circumstances. This is what I am working on these days. Her guidance endures.

So let’s fast forward for a moment, to the new configuration of dark times, remembering Arendt’s counsel, “Dark times…are not only not new, they are not a rarity in history, although they were perhaps unknown in American history…”. From the point of view of New York, the U.S. is an exception no longer. “Darkness has come when this light [of the public] is extinguished by ‘credibility gaps’ and ‘invisible government,’ by speech that does not disclose what is, but sweeps it under the carpet, by exhortations, moral and otherwise, that, under the pretext of upholding old truths, degrade all truth to meaningless triviality.”

I have been thinking about this since the days immediately following the attacks of September 11, 2001, thinking that led to the publication of my most recent book: The Politics of Small Things: The Power of the Powerless in Dark Times. I try to accomplish a number of different things in my small book, things I attempted to very compactly express in its title. I have already explained quite a bit in this presentation. I have a feeling that in Arendt’s sense we do again live in dark times, but that they are different from the ones she knew. There are again struggles between gigantic forces of good and evil, in which both sides, moving both between East and West (think the war on terrorism), or North and South (think Chavez and Bush), darken the spaces of appearance. But, I also think that to appear, speak to each other, develop a capacity to act together, as theorized by Arendt, but also as described by the former Czech dissident and President, in his greatest work “The Power of the Powerless,” presents an alternative, a still significant “politics of small things.” And that its power can be formed in every day interactions, both face to face interactions and virtual ones using the new media.

Mine is an attempt to find the men and women in dark times who present alternatives. I do this by using the work of Arendt and Erving Goffman to explain how the grand narratives of terror and anti terror are not the only or even the most effective ways to address the pressing problems of our times. Terrorism is not the only weapon available to the oppressed, and militarized anti terrorism is not the only or even the most rational way to fight the very real dangers of global terrorism. I can obviously not make the case here. What I would like to do is to look at some details of the argument, as Hannah is with me. In that I am looking at mico interactions as the location for alternatives to the oppressions of the new grand narratives, the key theoretical issue is how can we tell when micropolitics is really an alternative, and when it is a sort of enactment of disciplinary powers of one larger regime or another. In my book, this problem presented itself as I attempted to show that the micropolitics of the Christian right and the anti-war left and the Dean campaign in the United States were not just presenting competing partisan positions in 2004 during the Presidential elections. The alternative was between a new and efficient authoritarian unfreedom and a new and promising free democratic politics. To get at the issue and to the theoretical center of my presentation today, I propose we look at the way Arendt explains the relation between truth and politics, and the way Michel Foucault postulates the relationship between truth and power. Let me be forthcoming, I do not think that they present competing positions accounting for the same thing, but complimentary accounts of two very different, even opposite phenomena.

Alternative Frameworks: Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt

Foucault analyzes the problem of knowledge and power as the problem of the truth regime. Truth is a production of social practices and their discourses. It produces power and is controlled by it. There is no distance between truth and the powers. There are alternative powers with alternative truths. Foucault explains: “It is not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic, and cultural, within which it operates at the present time.” The analytic task is to explore truth regimes. The critical task is to do the “detaching.” The people developing the alternative publics around the old Soviet bloc, thus, can be understood as engaging in this sort of bodily detachment. But what is the value of it? Why choose one truth regime over another? Foucault does not explain. Arendt is critically suggestive in answering just these questions, as was my experience in the 80s. Now I will try to explain the crucial reason why she was such a help back then and how she provides a guide now.

Arendt maintains that there are two fundamentally different types of truth, factual versus philosophical truth, which have two very different relationships to political power. Factual truth (which is not part of Foucault’s scheme) must be the grounds upon which a free politics (which is also not part of Foucault’s scheme) is based. Philosophical truth must be radically separated from politics, the possibility of which Foucault denies. Her distinctions are made to facilitate an understanding of the nature of totalitarianism and its alternatives. This is crucial for the present inquiry, both for scholarly and for normative reasons. It centers on the constitution of public freedom and the possibilities of a democratic culture. Such constitution and possibility exist in and through the domain of a free public. While Foucault cannot distinguish between totalitarianism and liberalism, Arendt reveals how in the relationship between truth and power this crucial distinction is made. And we can thus recognize dark times and places, and also recognize the sources of light as alternatives.

In order to make the contrast between the two different types of truth clear, Arendt reflects upon the beginning of WWI. The causes of the war are open to interpretation. The aggressive intentions of Axis or the Allies can be emphasized, as can the intentional or the unanticipated consequences of political alliances. The state of capitalism and imperialism in crisis may be understood as being central. Yet, when it comes to the border of Belgium, it is factually the case that Germany invaded Belgium and not the other way around. A free politics cannot be based on an imposed interpretation. There must be an openness to opposing views. But a free politics also cannot be based on a factual lie, such as the proposition that Belgium’s invasion of Germany opened WWI. Modern liberal democracy requires a separation of politics from philosophical truth, but it must be based upon factual truths, in order for those who meet in public to share a common world in which they can interact politically. In modern tyranny, factual truth is expendable as a matter of principle, while the tyranny is based on a kind of philosophical truth, an ideology, an official interpretation of the facts. When Arendt highlights Trotsky as a kind of totalitarian everyman in The Origins, she observes that he expresses his fealty to the truth of the Communist Party. But that he could be air brushed out of the history of the Bolshevik revolution, contrary to the factual truth that he was a key figure, commander of the Red Army, second only to Lenin, also is definitive of totalitarianism. This is the real cultural ground of political correctness, of official truth. The purported scientific understanding of history of the Party substitutes for the political confrontation, debate and deliberation. It is enforced by terror. As Hannah and I travel around the old bloc and as we spoke and acted with our opposition colleagues, we were involved in attempts by social actors to free themselves of the official truth and to ground themselves in the factual truth.

From the point of view of Foucault, or, for that matter, from the point of view of the sociology of knowledge and culture, there is much that is unsatisfying about Arendt’s position. The distinction between fact and interpretation, which she insists upon, is in practice hard to maintain, and empirically it is hard to discern. But, this is not the telling point from Arendt’s point of view. Rather, it is that the distinction needs to be pursued, so that a free public life can be constituted. A democratic public cannot be constituted if political questions are answered philosophically, nor can its citizens interact freely, speak and act in the presence of each other, if the grounds of their interactions is based upon state imposed lies.

The politics of race in America cannot proceed democratically if a politically correct standard of racial interaction were actually imposed. (This is of course far from the case, given the popularity of critics of political correctness) But, just as well, a democratic confrontation of the legacies of racial injustice in the U.S. could not proceed if the school texts instructed the young that blacks owned whites, rather than the other way around. For a free public life to exist, there needs to be space for speech and actions based upon different opinions, then the people, and not the theorists, philosophers, historians or scientists, can rule. And their rule can proceed on solid grounds if they share a political world together, which has some factual solidity.

The politics of truth is in the interaction. Factual truth is the bedrock of a free politics. Difference of interpretation and opinion is its process. That the factual sometimes fades into the interpretive does not mitigate against the requirement that an interpretive scheme or doctrine cannot substitute for politics. That the interpretive sometimes seems to the convinced to be the factual does not mitigate against the requirement that for people to meet and interact in a free public, they must share a sense of a factual world. That fact and interpretation get mixed up, is very much a part of the messiness of politics, a messiness, which is confronted in concrete interactive situations. This points us in Goffman’s direction, a direction I can’t go into here. For now, we need to consider a bit more closely Arendt’s position so that the historical context of our inquiry can be understood.

When Arendt first presented her diagnosis, the central critical thrust of her work involved her identification of the National Socialism of Germany with Soviet Communism. Although using traditional political categories, these regimes appeared to be opposites, one of the right and the other of the left, she underscored that in their use of ideology and terror, in their mode of governance, in their projects of total control, their similarities were much more important than their differences. They were regimes systematically organized to eliminate a free public life (her central normative concern). While The Origins can be read as a “dialectic of the enlightenment” with the teleology taken out, it is also an account of the destruction of free public space in political life. Arendt presents a sort of decline and fall of public life or as Richard Sennett has put it, a story of “the fall of public man.” Her story of decline and fall takes the reader from the heights of antiquity to the depths of totalitarianism.

She starts with her classical ideal. Pre-Socratic Greece represents for her the time when freedom beyond necessity flourished in the polis:

The Greek polis once was precisely that “form of government” which provided men with a space of appearances where they could act, with a kind of theater where freedom could appear…. If, then, we understand the political in the sense of the polis, its end or raison d’ etre would be to establish and keep in existence a space where freedom as virtuosity can appear. This is the realm where freedom is a worldly reality, tangible in words which can be heard, in deeds which can be seen, and in events which can be talked about, remembered, and turned into stories before they are finally incorporated into the great storybook of human history.

The history of Western thought, for Arendt, is the history of the decline of the appreciation of this ideal situation, with catastrophic consequences in modernity. The Greek turn to political philosophy meant that the philosopher, the intellectual in contemporary language, sought to substitute the truth for political governance. The Christian identification of freedom with free will turned freedom into a private and not a public matter. This confusion of public and private, from Arendt’s point of view, explains the identification of freedom with sovereignty as articulated by such thinkers as Hobbes and Rousseau. Structurally this is manifest with the rise of society, as the place where she sees the public and the private confused as a matter of principle. Modernity intensified this loss of a distinctively political capacity, even as independent democratic and republican political forms were invented. Arendt notes, with approval, the Anglo-American conception of political party, especially as defended by Edmund Burke. Competing parties presented alternative notions of the common good. Continental parties serving the interests of particular classes, she understands, as movements that confuse the particular interests with the public good, the interests of property, real and capital, and the interests of labor, rural and urban, with the interests of the public. Anti-Semitism, Imperialism and Totalitarianism, the three parts of the Origins, each involve developments that destroy political capacity, as they are central to the history of European civilization. Totalitarian movements and regimes are the culmination of this story of radical de-politicization.

Arendt argues that what is distinctive about totalitarianism is its unique conflation of culture and coercion, ideology and terror. The problem with her position is that it requires what appear to be utopian beliefs about the relationship between truth and politics: that interpretive truth and politics can be radically separated and that the factual truth can be the basis of politics. While her critique of the substitution of philosophy for politics may be cogent, and while it may be crucial for intellectuals and artists not to confuse their insights and imaginations for democratic deliberation and decision, her ideas about the separation of politics from truth may still seem unrealistic. Every political movement after all has its ideology, it can be observed. Further, it is quite unclear how to maintain this separation while maintaining a commitment to factual truth. In these postmodern times, we are very much aware that one person’s interpretation is another’s factual truth. Indeed, the sociology of knowledge, at least since Mannheim, points in the same direction. It would seem that Foucault with his ideas about truth regimes is on the empirical mark. Yet, as I have already tried to demonstrate, there is a normative problem with Foucault’s position. He cannot distinguish between Trotsky and Wilson, between a totalitarian and a liberal. Further, there are also empirical grounds for rejecting the Foucaultian position.

This is where small things matter. It is a question of appearances, working to sustain realities. Truth and politics, knowledge and power, do not have a general relationship in modernity, as Foucault maintains. Rather, as we have already noted, social agents constitute the relationship in concrete interactive situations. The authorities of the old bloc tried to maintain an ideological definition of the situation. They did conflate knowledge and power. They presented an official truth and demanded that people appeared to follow its edicts. But in the alternative publics in the Soviet order, the imposed relationship was questioned. In official space people pretended to believe the official ideology, but they found places where it could be questioned.

Around the kitchen table people, something I explore intensively in my book, in small gatherings of close friends and relatives, the pretense was dropped. People presented themselves to each other in a different guise. They constituted a clandestine public space where they could speak and act together, free of the demands of officialdom. A real escalation of the struggle against the official order was evident when this hidden space of free interaction came out into the open. Foucault would explain this development in a sort of value neutral way. One truth regime, that of dissidents, was emerging from another. Perhaps, we would even want to go so far as saying that the regime of the new hegemonic order of globalization could be observed in the detaching of embodied practices from the truths, that is the ideology, of the old regimes. Note how much more we observe using Arendt as our guide.

In the positions of Foucault and Arendt, we observe two distinct understandings of political culture, two different ways of understanding the relationships between power and knowledge, truth and politics. While both get us beyond the lazy use of stereotype, e.g., all Russians seek a strong central authority, Americans are flexible, the British are more formal, the French more rational, (Brazilians are not quite modern?) etc., they do so with very different formulations. Where Foucault sees an identity, Arendt sees a variable relationship. For Foucault, political culture is about truth regimes, about the particular way that power and knowledge are united. For Arendt, political culture is about how and how far power and culture are distinguished and related. I think both analytic approaches provide insights into important aspects of political experience.

In fact, I am not sure that we could decide which one is more accurate. Foucault reveals an important part of the story, generally not sufficiently appreciated. The powers are revealed and operating in the activities of daily life and there is a form of knowledge that both accounts for this and makes it difficult to inspect critically. Knowledge and truth discipline. But there are different kinds of truth and they have different relationships with power, politics, Arendt forcefully maintains. This is a critique of Foucault’s position, but more significantly, it highlights a domain that Foucault ignores. The political implication of this is great. It means that there is a domain for freedom which Foucault does not recognize. This provides the grounds for normative judgment, making it possible to contrast tyranny with freedom. It makes it possible to discern real alternatives in dark times.

Seeking Light in Dark Times

In conclusion, I would like to summarize what I have learned in my political travels with Hannah Arendt and point to some implications as they have shaped my most recent and future research:

1. After being confronted by my student, I learned to think about politics differently and appreciate the significance of the democratic opposition in Central Europe as it was developing. It then became possible to understand that there was developing a major political power emerging in opposition to totalitarianism, that this power was based on simple interactions of people set apart from the official order. A small example is the democracy seminar I took part in. The large and historically significant example was Solidarnosc. There was back then the confrontation between the totalitarian and the free world, between socialist and progressive forces and the forces of capitalism, between the geopolitical forces of good and the Evil Empire, but the political transformation from within the old order came from a political force not recognized in the grand clash however it was depicted. It was a political force in Arendt’s sense.

2. This suggests a different way to think about our present darkness, about the world of the war on terrorism and the world of globalization. It suggests that we need to look at what I call a politics of small things as it presents alternatives to terrorism and anti-terrorism, to globalization and anti-globalization. Terrorism is not the only way for the weak to resist. And militarized anti terrorism is not the way to meet the threat of the terrors of fundamentalism (of all sorts). Politics in Arendt’s sense stands as an alternative.

3. This led me to analyze how the internet, as a domain for politics in Arendt’s sense, has been used by opposition forces to the war on terror in American politics. I analyze this in my book in an ethnography of the virtual politics of the Dean campaign and the anti war movement.

4. And it is now leading me to continue my journeys in darkness with Hannah. We are spending time in the Middle East, trying to identify alternative political forces, in the Palestinian territories and Israel, in special places where Palestinians and Israelis meet as equals, speak and act in the presence of each other, revealing themselves, and creating the capacity to act together, doing politics in dark times, at the heart of darkness.

I am looking forward to talking to you further about these travels, if you have any questions.

To skip this introduction and go directly to the full In-Depth post, click here.

A couple weeks ago, I gave the keynote address at a conference honoring my dear friend and colleague, Vera Zolberg. The papers presented to this conference, “From the Art of Memory to Memory and Art,” were in her special fields of inquiry, the sociology of culture, the arts and the study of collective memory. It was a wonderful event, a long set of conversations with Vera and her work. The day’s proceedings revealed how her fields of inquiry have advanced in the past twenty years, how she has contributed to this advance, and how the fields can and do speak to general public concerns. I am hoping that we will be able to put them together in a special collection drawn from the conference. Here I present my contribution to give a sense of what we discussed and its significance. I started with one of my pet peeves, concerning the word “reflection.”

To continue reading the full In-Depth post “Art, Culture and Memory: Conversations with Vera Zolberg,” click here.

I am thinking of this pet peeve of mine today for two reasons: because I think that the work of Vera Zolberg stands as a model of what can be learned when we move beyond sociological truism in thinking about the sociology of the arts and memory, and culture broadly understood, and also because I am, ironically, tempted in opening my presentation today with a “reflection note.” As in: the intellectual quality of Zolberg, as a sociologist of the arts, collective memory and culture, is a reflection of the quality of Vera, as a person. And, ironically, I am not sure I can, or should even try, to explain this connection between professional accomplishment and personal quality, but I know I should talk about both the quality of Zolberg’s work and about Vera as a person (our people would say a mensch) today.

Vera and I have been closely connected professionally for a long time, from the beginning of my career as a serious student of sociology. We both worked to specialize in the sociology of the arts at the University of Chicago. When I was preparing my special field exam in this area, I discovered that there were three students who focused in their studies on the arts before me, Mason Griff (who I had studied with as an undergraduate), Hugh Dalziel Duncan and Zolberg. This was when I first read Vera’s work, her dissertation on the Art Institute of Chicago (a work that I still refer to, as the students in this semester’s departmental dissertation seminar can confirm).

Vera and I studied with the same teachers, Morris Janowitz, Donald Levine, Terry Clark and Edward Shils. I would say they, particularly Janowitz (Vera’s chair), only tolerated our interests. But there is no doubt that Vera’s accomplishment in analyzing the sociological complexities of the Art Institute, made it so that they accepted my work on Polish theater more readily. She showed how significant a study of an art institution could be in understanding social structures and processes more generally. I had an easier time of it, because she preceded me by a few years. I think that in a similar way all who study the sociology of the arts have benefited from Zolberg’s writings, especially after her publication of Constructing a Sociology of the Arts.

As for many of you, I at first only knew Zolberg as an author, who showed in her dissertation on the Art Institute of Chicago how careful institutional analysis of the workings of a museum over time could start an inquiry into the big questions about the relationship between art and politics, culture and social life. As a student, I perceived this in her work. She has acted upon it in her research and writings ever since.

Only a bit later after I read her dissertation, we actually met. It was towards the end of my studies at the University of Chicago. I can’t remember who arranged the meeting (it may have been Janowitz), but I do remember the place we met and (vaguely) the reason why we met. It was in the cafeteria in Woodward Court, a building that no longer exists at the University of Chicago. We met on some business connected to the Social Theory and the Arts conference. This was the beginning of our life long conversations about the sociology of the arts and culture, with collective memory to be added as we both went along.

At that time, I was struck by the personal qualities of Vera as a person. She was elegant, warm and respectful, reaching out to me, taking me more seriously than I took myself. She had broad and interesting experience and knowledge. She seemed to know many accomplished scholars and cultural figures. And most strikingly, she was friendly. It was, in fact, at this time that I noticed her most special quality, her gift for friendship. She cares about the person she is talking to. She makes human connection.

Vera and her husband Ary, are perfect hosts. An invitation to their loft for dinner is an invitation to a world of fine food, fine conversation and fine art (art which is drawn from their travels and reveals their unorthodox taste). Vera’s gift for friendship clearly has contributed to a rich and warm personal life. It also has contributed to scholarship. Over the years, the sociology, liberal studies and the politics departments of the New School, and our Graduate Faculty more generally, have been enriched by occasions at the Zolberg’s.

In a similar way, Vera’s sincere social embrace, I think, helped develop the circle of scholars who institutionalized the sociology of culture in American sociology and beyond.

We sociologists have concepts to describe such developments: social capital and social networks. The inadequacy of the concepts, their thin coolness, is revealed in Vera’s life. As I said, I first saw this at the Woodward Court cafeteria, and because we both moved from Chicago to The New School, I have regularly enjoyed her friendship ever since. And this has not been separate from scholarly exchange and learning. Rather, friendship and scholarship have been intimately connected. Today’s conference vividly reveals this. The issues and problems we have been discussing grow out of our conversations with Vera’s work and with her person.

Thus, we have been talking about the institutional practices of art and around art.  Zolberg returned to the topic in an important article published in Theory and Society, “Conflicting Visions in Art Museums.” From my point of view, the most upsetting move in the piece is her summary of it. In her abstract, she maintained: “the macro-trends in society which are most germane to museum formation are professionalization of occupations, bureaucratization, elite formation, democratization of education, and market rationalization. These are reflected at the micro-level in institutions founded and developed in their context.” Reflection once again: yet, in the article itself what Zolberg studies is not an automatic process of reflection, but the social actions that constitute both the macro and the micro. She shows how the move from pre-professional laymen’s, to art professional curators’ to post professional managerial executives’ leadership has shaped the development of American museums, but also that this leadership has always met with a variety of different forms of resistance in museums and from the greater society, that push and pull them in different directions. She describes and analyzes the professionalization of the leadership and the staff of museums and then, the rise of bureaucratic managerial control as a challenge to art standards. The big story is of the developing autonomy of the art world in opposition to the control by gilded wealth (the founders and original administrators of American art museums) and then the re-colonization of the art world by corporate powers. But she also highlights resistance.

We could observe that the museum does imperfectly “reflect” developments in the greater society. But the real interest, as Goffman would say, “where the action is,” is how this imperfection works, which Vera nicely explains. The macro and the micro are constituted by action.

For example, Zolberg gives an account for how émigré German Jewish scholars influenced professional developments and the refinement of critical art historical standards, but she also shows how that influence was limited by elite anti-Semitism. More significantly, she analyzes the continued tensions between wealthy collectors and museum benefactors, with artists, art professionals and managerial experts: understanding how artistic values, and cultural judgment and cultural capital are at stake, taking us far beyond the confines of museum walls. What I especially like about her analysis is that she gives account of the tensions in the art world, its rich qualities, rather than provide an easy formula for its central values or ideological functions. Her theoretical contribution is in the details.

This textured account of art museums informs Zolberg’s approach to collective memory, another theme we have been talking about today, a conversation which has also been one of her major contributions to sociology, as was most nicely revealed in Zolberg’s great study of collective memory, “Contested Remembrance: The Hiroshima Exhibit Controversy.” I remember thinking this was a particularly wonderful piece when Vera first presented it to General Seminar here at The New School, in which it stimulated a very interesting discussion, and have continued to think so when I first read it, and now re-reading it in my preparation for giving this talk. What I think is particularly exciting about her analysis is how she extends her themes that she developed concerning the institutional workings of art museums, and shows how they illuminate the sociological study of collective memory. Her analysis is of the sociological texture of contestation in institutional life.

“Contested Remembrance” is a study of the controversies surrounding an exhibit at the National Air And Space Museum in Washington DC. The primary artifact was the “Enola Gay” B -29 bomber from which the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Vera presents an analysis of the exhibit as key interested parties debated about the dropping of the bomb and how they learned to hate and love it. WWII veterans, professional historians and museum curators, the Japanese government, peace organizations and anti-war activists and crucially official Washington, especially Congress, battled over the exhibit. Zolberg shows how the exhibit provided a public space for a debate about the bomb and American identity. She shows that the exhibit does not present a clearly articulated institutionalized collective memory, but a domain for debate about the connection between past, present and future at the sacred center of American public life. Collective memory is understood as contested public remembering. This is the insight I drew from the work, it’s great accomplishment to my mind beyond the specifics of the case.

It is an important study, which contributed to the renewed interest in collective memory in sociology, and in the social sciences and psychology more generally. Yet, I must admit, I have some concerns about this intellectual movement. I wonder: Why is it that so many of us, including Zolberg and many of you here, have become interested in collective memory? Why is it that the student-sponsored conference on memory, which this special conference honoring Zolberg is an extension of, is probably the single most successful interdisciplinary project in the history of The New School for Social Research?  I think there are both positive and critical answers to these questions.

The positive side is obvious. A new domain of interdisciplinary inquiry has been opened, and its exploration helps address difficult and important problems. I myself was working on this topic when Vera and I first met. I published my one and only article in the American Journal of Sociology, using collective memory to account for the existence of critical expression in Communist societies. Later the Czech writer, Milan Kundera summarized my argument in his novel, A Book on Laughter and Forgetting, more succinctly than I could: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Yet, I think there is something troubling about the collective memory renaissance. At one of the earlier meetings of the conference, I expressed my concern, from the audience. As I recall, I wondered out loud whether our interest in the topic was a sign of a major cultural problem: resignation and an absence of imagination – careful study of memory of the past, with little investigation of forward looking projects. The next year I gave a paper, entitled. “Against Memory.” My point was that forgetting was every bit as significant as remembering.

Emphasizing this point, I have recently been playing with the concept of “the wisdom of youth,” thinking about how the ignorance of the young about the past, or at least their sense that it is really passed, is a significant ground for creativity. This explained my own journey to Poland, willing to go to a country from which my grandparents fled, because the horrors of the first part of the 20^th century seemed to me to be over, in a way that wasn’t possible for my parents or grandparents. It also explains how the young before their elders took it as being quite possible that a black man could become President of the United States, and now, most significantly, the new “new social movements” from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street seem to be manifestations of this special forgetful wisdom. I am struck by the fact that a sociology of generations is necessary to understand the new movement wave and believe that collective forgetting is part of the force behind this generational push.

I am not questioning the importance of studying memory, least of all am I questioning Vera’s work on the subject, rather what I am trying to do is highlight the importance of continuing to study the imagination as it works against memory, as it is unconstrained by established practices. And I see two ways that Zolberg has addressed this in her writings.

First, there is her ongoing concern with how museums work, particularly relevant is her concern with how museums confront and are pushed by contemporary artists, and second, of course, her continuing interest in “outsider art.” The creativity of those who work outside of the collective memory structures of official art institutions, even against them, are a significant part of the liveliness of the art world, which Vera recognizes both in her work and in her life.

Significantly, she and Ary early on studied and collected African Art, stimulated by their work and shared adventures in the Ivory Coast. I suspect those experiences were important in how she studied both the center and the peripheries of the art world, to use the language of Edward Shils. Significantly the hierarchy that Shils maintained was crucial for understanding the relationship between center and periphery, Vera has questioned in much of her work.

Zolberg’s most influential work, I imagine, is her 1990 book, Constructing a Sociology of the Arts. It has been translated into Italian, Korean, Spanish and Portuguese. It provides a comprehensive overview of the field, which recognized and summarized new research and theory, the various currents and central problems up to the moment of its publication, and, more significantly, the book suggested problems that the field needed to address. It pointed to the kinds of research and debates, the kinds of scholarly conversations, that should be done, which, by now, have been done, strikingly by Vera and her students. For Vera, I think, it is a pivotal work. It summarized where she was then and suggested where she would be going.

I have to admit. She took seriously research that I questioned, perhaps too quickly, with the foolish assertiveness of youth. To my mind, too much of this work took the arts to be like any other social institution, to be examined in the same way, without any special concern with their specific aesthetic and normative value. Our different judgments of the value and limitations of Bourdieu’s sociology of the arts can be found here.

During the decade before the writing of her book, roughly dating back to the time Vera and I first met, there was a rapid development in the sociology of the arts. It entered the sociological mainstream. Perhaps the key figure was Howard S. Becker. He published his book, Art Worlds, and mentored a significant group of sociologists who were informed by his explorations, including Chandra Mukerji if I am not mistaken. (And by the way, Becker served on my dissertation committee) There was also much work being done on the social organization of art, the production of culture, the socialization of artists, among other themes. Zolberg seriously and deliberately considered all these inquiries. She highlighted two sociological approaches, ones that systematically studies how artwork comes to be art, and the other which examines what are the effects of these things and performances called art on the greater society. Informed as I was by critical theory, I found much of this problematic. Studies of the production and reception of the arts, with no art, it seemed to me.

A hint at the quality of our conversations about these things is revealed in how she thanked me in her acknowledgements. She wrote: “I have profited as well from contact with my colleague Jeffrey Goldfarb, whose serious commitment to the goals of cultural excellence and democracy have stimulated me to probe more deeply the implication for sociology of the disciplinary cleavages in academic life.”

The fact is that I believed the new sociology of art was turning away from the art, not thinking sufficiently about its critical role in social, political and cultural life, as was explored by Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and Lowenthal, my teachers in this regard. Zolberg, on the other hand, who never turned away from the art, appreciated, more than I did, how the study of the context and reception of art helped shape the quality of art, and its critical potential. I felt sociologists didn’t go far enough. Vera was more patient. She understood and appreciated what I was after, but she also understood how more limited studies could help get us there. This she has done in her subsequent work, on outsider art and on collective memory.

Sometimes patience is a virtue, as Vera’s long and distinguished career reveals. The wisdom of youth, including mine back then, has its limits. And what I especially appreciate was that as she took seriously pretty conventional studies of the art institutions as institutions like others in the social world, she knew that something distinctive was involved.

Vera and I have had many conversations over the years on the topics discussed at this special conference in her honor, indeed, on topics we first started talking about in Woodward Court many years ago. Perhaps the most interesting ones were mediated by our students and colleagues, who have been informed by our critical and empirical interests, drawing from the sociology of culture that was developing in the first decade after Vera and I met, and who have extended Zolberg’s contributions in scholarly discussion with her and in conversations of their own, as has been revealed in the papers presented in this conference and in the remarkable work of her students.

Her students have had long and fruitful conversations with Vera, culminating in their serious contributions to intellectual life: Lisa Aslanian, Catherine Bliss, Anne Bowler, Hui-tun Chuang, Karen Coleman, Irit Dekel, Lindsey Freeman, Yifat Gutman, Nancy Hanrahan, Siobhan Murphy Kattago, Despina Lalaki, Susan Pearce, Donna Marie Peters, Jackie Skiles, Amy Sodaro, Hakan Topal, and Sophia Vackimes. Their work ranges from the historical analysis of the futurists, to a high theoretical critical analysis of the sociology of music, to an ethnography of tap dancing, to a critical analysis of the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, to studies of collective memorials of the murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, and of the African American burial grounds in lower Manhattan, and of the presence of the Palestinian absence in Israeli collective memory.

These “conversations with Vera,” between Zolberg and her colleagues and students, and on a personal note, I add, between Vera and me, are testaments to her and their shared accomplishments, as they have defined the sociology of the arts, the sociology of collective memory and the sociology of culture.

PS. The papers at the conference were excellent. They affirmed Vera’s patience and addressed my critical concerns. I am hoping we can find a publisher. More about that soon, I hope.