Stanley Hoffmann died ten years ago. His model for what it means to be a publicly engaged intellectual is quickly dying out in the age of social media.
With this one, you got me — for good. I felt exactly the same way when I started my PhD, and I share the same nostalgia for academic intellectuals who were less self-assured by statistics or experiments. All the more in these challenging times, when mainstream social science is clearly failing to help us grasp the profound changes the world is undergoing. I know little from Stanley Hofman, but now will make sure to learn more about his work.
It’s a book I read and loved as a student. I think with titles the allusion is usually implicit, especially since the content of the piece isn’t related to Laslett’s excellent book, but more than happy to formalize my debt here. :)
What a gift to the world those Viennese refugees turned out to be. And CES is a wonderful institution.
In the 1980s I wrote him a letter (not knowing him, with no academic standing whatsoever)suggesting it was time for Europe to stand on its own, and that this would lead to a stronger foundation for future friendship. He responded with a very long handwritten letter on that old air mail stationary.
I take that as evidence of his decency, and respect for democratic debate regardless of one’s status.
It is crazy to remember that the Internet and then social media were the things that would bring people together and advance society toward a more ubiquitous knowing people. Today we should accept that our great mistake in that judgement was rooted in our failure to know enough about history and human behavior (aka, human evolutionary psychology)... or more accurately, the so called "experts" in that field of social science got so politically corrupted as to cancel those considerations in pursuit of yet another unattainable utopia where their bank accounts would be full and their egos well attended to.
We never installed the needed guardrails.
We used to rely on these academically gifted and trained experts, and the media that would publish their findings in 8th-grade reading level format, to keep us truly informed and grounded. Maybe it was only bad timing that digital information delivery happened at the same time that the centered and factual Tom Brokaw and the NYT was replaced by partisan promotion... and that science, once a respected and independent discipline, was coopted by politics and the government contracts that would flow for pledging fealty to the right political side.
As I roll this all up to a final singular concluding cause... it is the advance of psychological egoism with a what used to be a shared value foundational morality. The digital age did not only NOT bring us together... it made little false Gods out of each of us. We really no longer care about country nor our fellow man. We no longer care about professional ethics and integrity. I believe many of us no longer even care for our neighbor. We are now in it to extract as much as we can from the system before we die, and to hell with anyone else.
Sadly, very well said... from the "middle" road and whether you lean left or right, discourse and conversation is always the best road. :-) We seem to have lost the middle ground.
From the 1997 movie The Devil's Advocate - your last paragraph brought this to mind. I always thought it was a bit prophetic, not 1976 Network prophetic, but still:
The next thousand years is right around the corner, Kevin, and Eddie Barzoon-take a good look, because he's the poster child for the next millennium! These people, it's no mystery where they come from. You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire, you build egos the size of cathedrals, fiber-optically connect the world to every eager impulse, grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green, gold plated fantasies until every human becomes an aspiring emperor, becomes his own god, and where can you go from there? And as we're scrambling from one deal to the next, who's got his eye on the planet? As the air thickens, the water sours, and even the bees honey takes on the metallic taste of radioactivity. And it just keeps coming, faster and faster. There's no chance to think, to prepare. It's buy futures, sell futures, when there is no future! We got a runaway train boy, we got a billion Eddie Barzoons all jogging into the future. Every one of 'em getting ready to fist-f*@# god's ex-planet, lick their fingers clean as they reach out toward their pristine, cybernetic keyboards to total up their billable hours.
Yes, I would’ve liked to meet him. I bet there’s other faculty, or staff like him. I don’t know if today’s attack on universities and truth, and speaking out, will deter more Stanley Hoffman from speaking.
You may not have meant to, but your essay made an argument for the Democratic Party or other opposition groups to seek charismatic, thoughtful leaders, which we are really short of.
I came to Harvard in '63 and came after Ross his course on war. I sat in and was engrossed by his ability to teach and lead one to think more deeply about war, both ancient and modern. He was amazing!
I had the great privilege of working with Stanley Hoffmann as my undergraduate tutor in Social Studies, the interdisciplinary honors program he founded with other anti fascist intellectuals like Albert Hirschmann and Americans like David Riesman and the Francophile Larry Wylie. He directed my undergraduate thesis, about the persistence of national identity in the EU, and also my Ph.D thesis about the Ligue de l’Enseignement, anticlerical education reformers (“You will like them,” he said) in the Second Empire-
And I Ioved them! Mortified
in the 1860’s that another Republic had fallen to another Bonaparte, they organized to preserve the Third Republic and enacted free, compulsory, secular primary education in the 1880’s. All members who survived were Dreyfussard in the ‘90’s, I also wrote my junior essay at Radcliffe for him, about the tragic impasse of the 1930’s when leftists who should have opposed fascism opposed conscription and rearmament and chauvinists who should have feared Germany preferred Hitler to Blum/Stalin
I still remember the grief I felt when, flying back from England in 2015, after meeting John Julius Cooper, son of Duff Cooper, who resigned from Chanberlain’s Cabinet over Munich, I read of his death,
I wanted to talk him again about the events of the late ‘30’s. He was a wise and inspiring teacher.
There's no substitute for decency. Like other character traits, it has to be innate, but it also needs to be learned, channeled properly; and it can be stifled by hostile environment or lack of examples to follow. Sadly, social media occasions the former, and permissive upbringing denies the latter.
Beautiful. Can you or someone who knew him do a piece on Alan Charles Kors of the history department at Penn (and the founder of FIRE)? He specialises in European intellectual history.
He's one of the last of the intellectual menschs out there. History for him is a vocation, not a tool to advance grievance politics.
A professor and person who changed my life. A role model. There are thousands of students whose lives he's impacted. He deserves an essay like this too.
Yet, it truly seems that it is the world's loss as well. You can have a moral compass as well as sit and understand others; and understand that we live in everchanging and complex society. Thank-you for the article, and your feelings.
I graduated from Berkeley's Political Economy of Industrial Societies in the program's infancy, a fresh spinoff of Hoffman's approach in both teaching and research.
Most of my Quant skills I grew on the job. Quant technology changes! Now my skills are obsolete.
No problem, though: I have continued to develop my understanding of our real world, including France bien sur,which turns out to be resilient to technological change in the quantitative social sciences.
With this one, you got me — for good. I felt exactly the same way when I started my PhD, and I share the same nostalgia for academic intellectuals who were less self-assured by statistics or experiments. All the more in these challenging times, when mainstream social science is clearly failing to help us grasp the profound changes the world is undergoing. I know little from Stanley Hofman, but now will make sure to learn more about his work.
He was so right to criticize area studies that did not encompass history and culture and now, even, rarely require language fluency.
There is an academic tradition of acknowledging authors which is missing in this piece. It is Peter Laslett who wrote "The World We Have Lost"
It’s a book I read and loved as a student. I think with titles the allusion is usually implicit, especially since the content of the piece isn’t related to Laslett’s excellent book, but more than happy to formalize my debt here. :)
What a gift to the world those Viennese refugees turned out to be. And CES is a wonderful institution.
In the 1980s I wrote him a letter (not knowing him, with no academic standing whatsoever)suggesting it was time for Europe to stand on its own, and that this would lead to a stronger foundation for future friendship. He responded with a very long handwritten letter on that old air mail stationary.
I take that as evidence of his decency, and respect for democratic debate regardless of one’s status.
It is crazy to remember that the Internet and then social media were the things that would bring people together and advance society toward a more ubiquitous knowing people. Today we should accept that our great mistake in that judgement was rooted in our failure to know enough about history and human behavior (aka, human evolutionary psychology)... or more accurately, the so called "experts" in that field of social science got so politically corrupted as to cancel those considerations in pursuit of yet another unattainable utopia where their bank accounts would be full and their egos well attended to.
We never installed the needed guardrails.
We used to rely on these academically gifted and trained experts, and the media that would publish their findings in 8th-grade reading level format, to keep us truly informed and grounded. Maybe it was only bad timing that digital information delivery happened at the same time that the centered and factual Tom Brokaw and the NYT was replaced by partisan promotion... and that science, once a respected and independent discipline, was coopted by politics and the government contracts that would flow for pledging fealty to the right political side.
As I roll this all up to a final singular concluding cause... it is the advance of psychological egoism with a what used to be a shared value foundational morality. The digital age did not only NOT bring us together... it made little false Gods out of each of us. We really no longer care about country nor our fellow man. We no longer care about professional ethics and integrity. I believe many of us no longer even care for our neighbor. We are now in it to extract as much as we can from the system before we die, and to hell with anyone else.
Well, most of us anyway.
Sadly, very well said... from the "middle" road and whether you lean left or right, discourse and conversation is always the best road. :-) We seem to have lost the middle ground.
From the 1997 movie The Devil's Advocate - your last paragraph brought this to mind. I always thought it was a bit prophetic, not 1976 Network prophetic, but still:
The next thousand years is right around the corner, Kevin, and Eddie Barzoon-take a good look, because he's the poster child for the next millennium! These people, it's no mystery where they come from. You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire, you build egos the size of cathedrals, fiber-optically connect the world to every eager impulse, grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green, gold plated fantasies until every human becomes an aspiring emperor, becomes his own god, and where can you go from there? And as we're scrambling from one deal to the next, who's got his eye on the planet? As the air thickens, the water sours, and even the bees honey takes on the metallic taste of radioactivity. And it just keeps coming, faster and faster. There's no chance to think, to prepare. It's buy futures, sell futures, when there is no future! We got a runaway train boy, we got a billion Eddie Barzoons all jogging into the future. Every one of 'em getting ready to fist-f*@# god's ex-planet, lick their fingers clean as they reach out toward their pristine, cybernetic keyboards to total up their billable hours.
Yes, I would’ve liked to meet him. I bet there’s other faculty, or staff like him. I don’t know if today’s attack on universities and truth, and speaking out, will deter more Stanley Hoffman from speaking.
You may not have meant to, but your essay made an argument for the Democratic Party or other opposition groups to seek charismatic, thoughtful leaders, which we are really short of.
I came to Harvard in '63 and came after Ross his course on war. I sat in and was engrossed by his ability to teach and lead one to think more deeply about war, both ancient and modern. He was amazing!
Not Ross but across
I had the great privilege of working with Stanley Hoffmann as my undergraduate tutor in Social Studies, the interdisciplinary honors program he founded with other anti fascist intellectuals like Albert Hirschmann and Americans like David Riesman and the Francophile Larry Wylie. He directed my undergraduate thesis, about the persistence of national identity in the EU, and also my Ph.D thesis about the Ligue de l’Enseignement, anticlerical education reformers (“You will like them,” he said) in the Second Empire-
And I Ioved them! Mortified
in the 1860’s that another Republic had fallen to another Bonaparte, they organized to preserve the Third Republic and enacted free, compulsory, secular primary education in the 1880’s. All members who survived were Dreyfussard in the ‘90’s, I also wrote my junior essay at Radcliffe for him, about the tragic impasse of the 1930’s when leftists who should have opposed fascism opposed conscription and rearmament and chauvinists who should have feared Germany preferred Hitler to Blum/Stalin
I still remember the grief I felt when, flying back from England in 2015, after meeting John Julius Cooper, son of Duff Cooper, who resigned from Chanberlain’s Cabinet over Munich, I read of his death,
I wanted to talk him again about the events of the late ‘30’s. He was a wise and inspiring teacher.
There's no substitute for decency. Like other character traits, it has to be innate, but it also needs to be learned, channeled properly; and it can be stifled by hostile environment or lack of examples to follow. Sadly, social media occasions the former, and permissive upbringing denies the latter.
Beautiful. Can you or someone who knew him do a piece on Alan Charles Kors of the history department at Penn (and the founder of FIRE)? He specialises in European intellectual history.
He's one of the last of the intellectual menschs out there. History for him is a vocation, not a tool to advance grievance politics.
A professor and person who changed my life. A role model. There are thousands of students whose lives he's impacted. He deserves an essay like this too.
I sadly don’t have the pleasure of knowing him but would love to read such an essay!
I'd take a stab at it myself, but I don't think I'm a good enough writer
Very interesting indeed! Thanks for this.
I am sorry for your loss :-(
Yet, it truly seems that it is the world's loss as well. You can have a moral compass as well as sit and understand others; and understand that we live in everchanging and complex society. Thank-you for the article, and your feelings.
Thank you for the memory.
I graduated from Berkeley's Political Economy of Industrial Societies in the program's infancy, a fresh spinoff of Hoffman's approach in both teaching and research.
Most of my Quant skills I grew on the job. Quant technology changes! Now my skills are obsolete.
No problem, though: I have continued to develop my understanding of our real world, including France bien sur,which turns out to be resilient to technological change in the quantitative social sciences.
Wonderful and profound piece. Many Thanks.
Beautiful.
Definitely not 🥹😭 over here. Nope.