The Enduring Importance of Nathan Glazer
Like a number of his fellow New York intellectuals, Glazer’s life remained poised between the little magazine and the Academy.
Nathan Glazer, who died last month at age ninety-five, enjoyed an illustrious career that spanned seven decades and the fields of sociology, public policy, politics and urban studies. He wrote on the myth of the American melting pot, the nature of American communism, the unsavory methods of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the perils and importance of affirmative action, the social failure of modern architecture and on the limits of social policy. Glazer’s intellect was voracious, his mind perpetually curious, open and unpredictable.
Politically, Glazer was equally unplaceable, a man initiated into an obscure and tiny group of American Marxist Zionists as a college student during the Depression, who became a staunch anti-Communist in the post war years, then a critic of the New Left and liberalism in the sixties. A vocal foe of affirmative action in the seventies, he was decried as a neoconservative by the Left only to change his views in the 1990s, leading many conservatives to see him as a wholly “unreliable” ally.
And they were on to something. It is precisely Glazer’s “unreliability,”—a refusal to follow a party line—that defines both his social science work and his political views. In his acute mind, theoretical purity could never match the messiness, the confusion of facts that the world presents to us.
Glazer has jokingly confessed to being a man of “weak commitments,” a statement that could only have come from a man who grew up in a world of intense and overwhelming political and intellectual commitments. He stormed the ramparts time and time again; against Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union, against American communism, against the New Left, and against political correctness. But his capacity for intellectual combat has never distorted his essential openness, his willingness to live with intellectual and political uncertainty. Most of us retreat from uncertainty into ideology; Glazer found in it a sandbox for his active and playful mind.
In this sense Glazer is perhaps distinct even from the brilliant and iconoclastic group of writers with whom he spent much of his life arguing, known as the New York intellectuals. The New York intellectuals were a new phenomenon in American intellectual life: a bunch of poor kids, mostly children of Jewish immigrants, who grew up outside the intellectual establishment and through second generation pluck and striving and talent pushed their way to the very forefront of American culture.
The New York intellectuals were distinguished early on by two defining interests—obsessions really. They were young converts to the cause of Marxist radicalism during the Depression years and madly in love with literary modernism. Marxism—though foreign to the American body politic—burned through the immigrant neighborhoods of New York and the intellectual precincts of Greenwich Village, a utopian fever dream that captured the imaginations of writers, artists and laborers alike. The Modernist movement, equally rebellious, artistically utopian and not yet accepted by the Academy, was just as intoxicating for young intellectuals. These European inventions were transmuted into central concerns of American political life through the powerful writing of the New York Intellectuals.
Glazer would first encounter these ideas in Partisan Review a journal begun in 1934 by Philip Rahv and William Phillips dedicated to these twin causes. Early on, Rahv and Phillips and their magazine lived inside the orbit of the American Communist Party. But the party’s heavy-handed Stalinism saw no place for the politically untamable and culturally subversive strains of Modernism. For the writers gathered around Partisan Review there was no contest. They took their magazine and exited the Party, stage Left, choosing intellectual independence over party line. Observing Stalin’s murderous rampage against fellow party members in the thirties, the Partisan Review group developed a sophisticated Marxist critique of Soviet communism that by the forties had evolved into a deeper one of Marxism-Leninism itself. As would-be revolutionaries, they were appalled by Stalin’s lethal totalitarianism and its cost in human life; as writers they were aghast at his assault on intellectual freedom. Casting off their Marxism in the postwar years, they came to embrace American democracy.
In hindsight all this dabbling in revolution feels remarkable. But remember that at this time Nathan Glazer was not yet twenty and his fellow New Yorkers were not yet into their thirties. Glazer would write that during these years, his fellow “intellectuals did not then know much about the politics of their own country,” and “their knowledge of [the Soviet Union] was as abstract as their knowledge of . . . the political and economic world.” And it should be remembered that far older men and women took far longer to see as clearly as Glazer and his friends ultimately did.
Out of this experience came an understanding for Glazer and his fellow New York Intellectuals of the perils of ideology, of grand theories that claimed to explain everything but instead blinded one to what Lionel Trilling called “the variousness and possibility” of life. Their radical youth had also given the New Yorkers great skill in polemic and argument, which could prove equally seductive—and equally problematic. The excesses of brilliance, the arrogance of theory could betray even people with discerning minds.
No New Yorker learned this lesson more thoroughly or thoughtfully than Nathan Glazer. No one became less enchanted with theory, with the abstract generalizations that thrilled with their grand visions but just as surely betrayed the complexities, the unreliability, of life itself which could not be shoehorned into any theoretical model, no matter how far-reaching, how elegantly argued, how sophisticated its reasoning.
“The old New York intellectual style of pronouncing judgments on a basis of less than adequate knowledge in politics and literature could not survive: It was specialize or die,”
Glazer would write in his later years. Leaving Marxism behind, Glazer in the years after City College gravitated to sociology. It still gave him the chance to explore big ideas, to work at the intersection of politics and social policy and social relations.
His personal experience equipped him to write on The Social Basis of American Communism (1961). The young sociologist neatly turned the tables in his exploration of the American Communist Party’s appeal to various immigrant groups, using ethnicity as the lens to view the class struggle, and embarked on a life-long study of America’s “ethnic pattern” that would lead, through a number of early essays in Commentary magazine, to his groundbreaking study of 1963 Beyond the Melting Pot, written with Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Like a number of his fellow New York intellectuals, Glazer’s life remained poised between the little magazine and the Academy. He spent seven years at Commentary magazine as an assistant editor while getting his degree, covering a social science beat, The Study of Man — designed just for him. It allowed him to survey the work of his newly chosen profession and to follow his own interests. The young man emerging from the thickets of Marxist abstraction was drawn to sociology’s interest in the empirical, the concreteness of fact. But from the beginning, he also recoiled at sociology’s misguided attempt to make a science of itself, to believe that statistics and questionnaires and polls could produce scientific certainty. After all, Marxism, too, had claimed to be a science. Glazer was content with a more humble approach to the world.
Wary of theory and immune to the purely statistical, Glazer found his place in an imaginative sociology based on research but not limited to the purely quantifiable, producing work that allowed space for his own creative mind to take flight. The key to Glazer’s unique approach can be found in his beautiful essay on two giants of his field, Tocqueville and Riesman, one a nineteenth century French proto-sociologist, the other his mentor, David Riesman, with whom he had worked on The Lonely Crowd.
What he appreciates in these men are their “leaps of imagination.” While sociology cannot “dismiss the [central] significance of empirical work,” “ a large thesis, with implications for many areas of life, is not easy to encompass in detailed empirical studies, which try to reduce the thesis to elements that can be objectively measured and tested.” Glazer himself demurred from the grand generalization, partly out of a certain humility, but also because his mind simply did not work that way. In fact, Glazer’s method seems to be the exact opposite. Burrowing into details he builds from the bottom up, enlarging the significance of each one till the sum of myriad parts seems to become much greater than the whole.
Writing of the austere theoretical constructions of the great emigre political philosopher Hannah Arendt, for whom he had much admiration, he nonetheless notes that she had no use for “the social and its grubby ordinariness,” the “cussedness” of reality. These are of course the things Glazer himself revels in. Glazer’s very method of deduction is fueled by contradictions that undermine theory. Theorists build beautiful, logical structures; Glazer’s essays constantly run into contradictions of fact and argument that lead to larger if less “beautiful” truths about how Americans live, how public policy works—or doesn’t, how society organizes itself and ultimately how we as humans understand our own identities.
Even Glazer’s writings on architecture and urbanism show the same suspicion of grand designs for cities or housing developments in favor of the wisdom and modesty embedded in the jumble of an ordinary city street, one built from the bottom up, which manages to reflect the contradictory yet somehow compatible desires and needs of its inhabitants. He gives a nod to the Italian immigrants of San Francisco’s Castro and New York’s Greenwich village for their culturally inherited ability to create a sense of community through small storefronts and cafes and whose collective, if only partly conscious, understanding of urban life was far greater than modernist geniuses and would-be master city builders like Le Corbusier.
While one usually associates the scale of a thinker’s vision with the duration of his ideas, the continuing relevance of Glazer’s work lies in its very specificity. His 1953 Commentary essay “America’s Ethnic Pattern,” one of the first explorations in his lifelong preoccupation with ethnicity, is as remarkable to read today as it was when it was first published. Glazer was already well on his way to debunking the myth of complete immigrant assimilation that he would soon demolish in Beyond the Melting Pot. His concern here is the relationship between American identity and ethnic consciousness over the course of American history and he shows that the charge of dual identity flung at successive waves of twentieth century immigrants is in fat a phenomenon stretching back through American history. If anything, Swedish and German immigrants of the mid-nineteenth century—with more fully formed national identities upon arrival—had a more powerful double identity than later Italians and Jews and Greeks, even seeking to carve out national homes on American soil. Paradoxically, it was the group experience of America that produced a greater ethnic national consciousness among Jews, Italians and Greeks.
These observations led Glazer to a far suppler grasp of the interplay between national identities than many of his generational peers on both the left and right. If dubious about its more extreme propositions, he was far more open—certainly less threatened by—multiculturalism during the great debates of the 1980s and 1990s. His book We are all Multiculturalists Now from 1997 and his opening essay in this book “American Epic: then and now” are thoughtful and wry meditations on the realities of fragmentation in American society in the late twentieth century.
On the one hand he clearly roots for a central American identity to hold the country’s vastness, its hyphenated population together. On the other, he recognizes how much race has disunited the country’s white and black citizens since its very inception, belying the myth of an Edenic, united America of the past. Glazer had little fear that Americanness was disintegrating simply because he understood that American identity had always been far more elastic, more ambiguous, more double-sided than those who wished to narrowly define it ever imagined. In one of the most recent essays in this volume, “Assimilation Today, Is One Identity Enough?” from 2004, Glazer muses on yet a further evolution of this process, the recent trend of dual citizenship, once unthinkable, that is now comfortably embraced by any number of Americans.
Glazer’s sojourn at Commentary in the fifties coincided with the height of the Cold War. Communism, a once parochial interest of Glazer and the New York intellectuals, became the central issue of American foreign policy. At the same time, America’s fear of a newly powerful Soviet Union was opportunistically manipulated into a domestic “red scare” by Senator Joseph McCarthy, the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities(HUAC) and countless other state and local officials across the country. Commentary rushed to the precarious center of a roiling national controversy.
Glazer and the New York intellectuals knew that the feckless American Communist Party never came close to posing this kind of existential threat. But they were also aware that the Party was wholly subordinate to the Soviet Union and a willing instrument of its foreign policy, not to mention an active recruiting ground for Soviet spies such as Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg. Intellectual pugilists from the streets of New York, the men and women around Commentary, who had long fought communists in intellectual circles, rose to the fight, focusing their ire on the wrong-headed defense of the Party by Left wing writers.
Many thought they ignored the plight of those many well-meaning men and women who had flocked to the party (or its many front group) as a champion of economic justice. It was Glazer’s self-assigned job to craft a devastating attack on the senator’s modus operandi, “The Method of Senator McCarthy.” Did Glazer do enough? Anyone who has studied the period knows it was an ethical malestrom. To this day, almost alone among the combatants of that era on either side, Glazer has not protected himself in later years with the armor of self-righteousness.
Did Glazer seek out political fights or did they find him? As the McCarthy era faded from view, Glazer got a job teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, just in time to confront the student protestors of the Free Speech Movement in 1964. Many of the young radicals, intensely political like himself, were his students or his former students and he could not help but sympathize with their initial fight against racial discrimination in the Bay Area or their plea for greater openness in the university. But when their demands grew as well as their fury against an essentially liberal and open university, he broke decisively with them.
Ultimately he saw in the New Left a utopianism, a fatal attraction for sweeping political theories of American society that discarded all the “messiness,” “the grubby ordinariness” he had come to embrace. The young members of the New Left were interested in heroic gestures; Glazer at middle age understood life’s uncorrectable ambiguities. He was accused of having grown too comfortable, too sedate, but these characteristics were hard to find in his own fierce defense of America’s—and the university’s—pluralistic values against denunciations of American democracy as merely a corporate sham.
In 1965, while Glazer was at Berkeley, his New York friends Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell hatched an idea for a new magazine they named The Public Interest, designed for an age of remarkable political consensus in Western political life. Marxism was a spent force. Liberalism dominated both the Republican and Democratic parties in America. “The end of ideology” had come, according to Bell and others. The new journal would replace ideology with social science knowledge in its exploration of public policy. If Glazer’s distance did not permit him to be a founder, he was one in all but name and would go on to be a co-editor of the magazine with Kristol for many years, after Bell left the journal.
The new magazine represented a sea change in New York intellectual sensibility, a revolution in what Glazer described as the group’s wholly “abstract relationship to politics” in its early years, especially American politics. The magazine’s creation was a mark of how far Glazer and Bell and Kristol had traveled since their youth. They had not only come to understand the American political scene, they now felt they were in a position to influence it—and influence it they did. The Public Interest was a landmark publication whose imprint was left not only on American public policy over four decades but on subsequent generations of intellectuals.
The Public Interest focused on the hard-headed realities of public policy, a seemingly less heady endeavor than that of the New York intellectuals’ earlier more literary magazines. Yet it approached policy with the erudition and flair reminiscent of Partisan Review.
To read Glazer’s Limits of Social Policy, (Commentary 1971), from the same period, one is reminded of how much has changed in our political life since then. It is a sober-minded and wholly original analysis of what he terms the “crisis in social policy”.
The crisis Glazer seeks to understand is the massive rise in the welfare rolls and the continuing break up of families, despite decades of liberal social policies. He takes us through a litany of plausible explanations—lack of jobs, poorly targeted payments to single mothers only, greater access to benefits for those previously denied—and one by one discards them as faulty or at best partial explanations for the problem. Glazer carefully marshals his data and takes a broad view, comparing the United States to more generous European welfare systems. He is neither hysterical nor incendiary nor dismissive. But he is disturbed.
He assails the midcentury liberal arrogance that all social problems can, in the end, be solved by government programs. More devastatingly, he argues that the very social policies designed to ameliorate social problems must inevitably create new ones. The authority of government professionals cannot help but further erode “traditional measures, traditional restraints, traditional organization.” The one-time radical has become a defender and admirer of tradition. Marx has given way to a touch of Burke. Liberal optimism to a more conservative caution. Or has it?
“How does a radical—a mild radical, it is true, but still someone who felt closer to radical than to liberal writers and politicians in the late 1950s—end up by the early 1970s a conservative, a mild conservative, but still closer to those who now call themselves conservative than to those who call themselves liberal?” Glazer asked in his essay “On Being Deradicalized.” Part of the explanation lay in a year he had spent working in the federal government in Washington, DC He come away with a respect for the talented bureaucrats with whom he worked.
He discovered that, in fact, they had considered many of the radical ideas that Glazer and others had dreamed of, but that the implementation of social programs was far more complicated than he had realized and was made so much harder because “so many varied interests played a role in government, and . . . most of them were legitimate interests. It was a big country, and it contained more kinds of people than were dreamed of on the shores of the Hudson.” But he also found a kinship between his mild radicalism and mild conservatism; each favored the “anti-bureaucratic, the small and immediate, the human-scale as the salvation of a society grown too large, too highly organized and articulated.” Who then had moved? Perhaps it was the Democratic Party, pushed leftward by the young radicals of the sixties, who had done much of the moving.
Glazer and his friends at The Public Interest—Irving Kristol, Dan Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan—were soon labelled neoconservatives by Michael Harrington in Dissent magazine. (Irving Kristol, who had privately referred to himself as such in earlier years, now proudly took it and ran with it as he moved rightward toward true conservatism.) Today, the original meaning of the word has been all but buried by its more recent connection to the hawkish foreign policy of the second Bush administration. But in the seventies and eighties, it was one’s take on domestic policy that mattered. For Glazer (as for Bell and Moynihan) the neoconservative label obscured as much as it revealed. The fact is that Glazer’s skepticism about liberal social policy never turned into a conservative dismissal of it. In another classic essay, “Reform Work, Not Welfare,” Glazer found welfare wanting, but pushed for increased government assistance and programs to make low income work more rewarding. But one had to actually read Glazer to appreciate the complexity of his views, the nuances of his analyses—and few did.
And for Glazer, particularly, perhaps nothing mattered more than his stance on affirmative action. If his disaffection with Great Society liberalism and his opposition to the New Left separated him from much of mainstream liberalism at the time, his strong and vocal opposition to affirmative action pushed him beyond the pale for many liberals.
For Glazer, the son of immigrant Jews who had gone to college in an era when unspoken quotas kept many qualified Jewish kids out of the nation’s best schools, the belief that success should be based on merit was more than just a matter of abstract principal. His impassioned 1975 book Affirmative Discrimination, written after he had moved to Harvard, placed him at the center of a deeply divisive debate. Sides were clearly chosen and Glazer found himself aligned with conservatives once again on this highly visible issue.
In the court of public political opinion, one is judged by one’s associations and the fact is that a number of the writers associated with The Public Interest, led by Irving Kristol, did move rightward. For these men and women, the critiques that Glazer, Wilson, Bell, Moynihan and others were making of liberal social policies led them to larger philosophical conclusions about the difficulty—and hazards—of social engineering. Their moral temper led them to a belief in the importance of culture as against government social programs.
Glazer shared these concerns, and yet his mind and temperament led him elsewhere—into a kind of political no man’s land. His friend Daniel Bell left the editorship of The Public Interest as his views diverged from Kristol and the others. Daniel Patrick Moynihan remained a contributor to the magazine but also became a staunch Democratic senator for New York. Glazer not only stayed with The Public Interest but comfortably became its co-editor. He had no use for labels, no fear of them, though, to be sure, he lamented their foolishness and inaccuracy. He has always been content to be a party of one.
Glazer never lost his belief in the importance of social welfare policy, despite the limitations he saw in it attributable not only to human fallibility, but also to larger philosophical concerns about the disruptive consequences of government intervention and rapid social change. He feels that the issues of poverty, family stability, and inequality must be addressed however imperfectly by government, that we can learn from our mistakes, that we must keep on trying. Some might claim that this is nothing more than softheartedness—or even worse, soft headedness—an attachment to an expired set of beliefs that cannot be shaken, even in the light of facts.
All this, of course, would be wrong.
In the mid nineties, some twenty years after the publication of his book Affirmative Discrimination, Glazer made news with a reversal of his original position. “In Defense of Preference” from The New Republic amounts to a powerful endorsement of affirmative action on campus. It is also a guide to Glazer’s mind and his stance on the world. After years of being pilloried on the Left for his views, he shocked many conservatives with what seemed like a sudden reversal. Those on the Right who had relied on his arguments, who counted him in their camp, began to whisper that Glazer might be unreliable.
And, of course, Glazer had long ago chosen to accept life’s ambiguities, its uncertainties over party or cause. As a thinker he has never fit in—into the academy, into an ideological mode, into any of the straightjackets that all sides of the political spectrum rely on for convenience.
Glazer did not decide his earlier logic was faulty, nor dismiss the importance of merit, nor the distortions caused by affirmative action and the endless search for diversity. He continued to maintain that affirmative action was misplaced when applied to groups aside from African Americans. But, at the same time, he looked back over twenty years and saw that he had been wrong on other things. He saw that despite many gains, African Americans had not made the progress he expected and that is moreover necessary for America’s democratic health. He saw the importance of “participation” for African Americans in all levels of education and in all spheres of life. He believed that, despite continuing education gaps, black Americans should not be excluded from America’s best colleges, just as businessmen had come to understand the importance of their contribution to the corporation. And that America continues to owe “a special obligation” to African Americans because of a special history of malignity toward them. For Glazer, purity of logic must give way to messy facts, high principle to the “grubby ordinariness” of how life in fact works—and doesn’t work.
This is not merely sentiment in Glazer, an emotional swing back to the Left, an attempt to curry favor with the rest of the Harvard faculty after years in the wilderness on this issue. Rather one sees that it grows out of a respect for larger epistemological concerns. The fact is that he is not exactly sure why African American progress has been impeded to the degree it has. Glazer abhors the notion that absolute equality of achievement in all areas must be mandated. Different groups and different individuals have different talents. But even with this, a disparity remains between blacks and whites that cannot be tolerated and that we have failed to fully cure.
We have identified many things that may contribute to this inequality, some of which are within our control and others that are subject to the forces of history, like the lingering fact of racism, the flight of good jobs from the city, the concentration of black poverty and its deleterious effects to the breakdown of the two parent family. Conservatives see it as primarily a cultural problem, those on the left as predominantly an economic one. Glazer, like many other thoughtful people, sees the interplay of economics and racism with family instability, the combination of structure and culture. The fact remains that there is a gap in our knowledge not only about the exact causes and how they interrelate, but of how to fix the problem. Social science falls short and at this moment, Glazer accepts that he—we—do not yet know and may never fully know. Faced with this he chooses what he sees as the most pragmatic solution that will cause the least harm to those who have suffered the most—and whose lack of progress most impedes American progress.
Meanwhile he long ago made peace with the uncertainty that threatens any fixed political position. And it is for this reason that Glazer remained, as he called himself, a man “of weak [political] commitments.” For those who insist on very strong commitments, who wish to be part of a team, Glazer will always remain a thoroughly and gloriously unreliable man.
Copyright 2017 from When Ideas Mattered by Nathan Glazer, editors Joseph Dorman and Leslie Lenkowsky. Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, a division of Informa plc.
Joseph Dorman directed the documentary, Arguing the World (1998) on New York intellectuals, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe and Irving Kristol. His most recent film is MOYNIHAN (2018) on the life of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Image: Wikimedia Commons