This month marks the 10th anniversary of the death of somebody whom I only had the privilege of knowing towards the very end of his life, but who nevertheless greatly shaped me: Stanley Hoffmann.
Stanley was a larger-than-life figure on Harvard’s campus, where he taught for over half a century. But he was also something much more profound: the representative of a humanist left deeply steeped in an appreciation for the complexities of the world and the need to reject wanton violence as a means of politics. I have been thinking of him, and missing the clarity of his moral convictions, particularly acutely over the past two weeks.
For this reason, I decided to share an appreciation of Stanley’s work and his character, first published a few days after his death, with you today.
I met Stanley Hoffmann at Harvard when I had only been in graduate school two weeks, and was just about ready to despair of the whole enterprise.
Those first weeks had been spent in something that Harvard’s government department referred to as “math camp.” With the social sciences taking a quantitative turn, the main purpose of the first years of graduate school had become to ensure that students “tool up.” A true political scientist, I learned, pursues general laws, not particular truths. He hopes to derive these laws from columns of numbers, not stumble upon them through a deep immersion in a particular place. Asked by a student how much time he should spend on learning the history and culture of the area in which he hoped to specialize, a senior professor in the department answered without hesitation, “Oh, you can always learn about that kind of stuff later on. I strongly suggest you prioritize the stats sequence.”
I was happy to brush up on math, keen to learn statistics, and impressed with some of the insights these new methods afforded. But the department’s pre-professional atmosphere depressed me. Before arriving in Cambridge, I had been giddy at the prospect of trying to understand some of the world’s most pressing problems at the world’s finest university. Instead, I was spending my days talking about the importance of advanced statistical skills on the “academic job market.” Within a few days, I was starting to wonder whether I had come to the right place.
Then I got to know Stanley.
If math camp is an image for what much of the academic world has become, Stanley was the embodiment of what it had once been. Nowadays, there is an assumption that one can be an influential intellectual or a serious academic, but not both. Stanley was living proof of this statement’s falsity—and he has been an inimitable role model to me, as he had been to countless others, ever since.
Born to a Jewish mother in Vienna in the fall of 1928, Stanley moved to Paris in the early 1930s, surviving the war in hiding in southern France. “It wasn’t I who chose to study world politics,” he wrote in a memoir about his childhood. “World politics forced themselves on me at a very early age.”
His contributions to our understanding of the world of politics, and of much beyond that, were prodigious. He wrote about international relations with the same fluency as he wrote about French politics and culture, making equally accomplished contributions to our understanding of cross-border duties and the shortcomings of the European Union. He shared his knowledge generously, both with his readers at the New York Review of Books and with the legions of students to which he remained devoted until his last days.
In contrast to the current self-understanding of mainstream political science, Stanley knew many of these truths to be specific rather than universal. Politics, he believed, could not be reduced to eternal laws because it was shaped by the ideas of great thinkers as well as the personalities of great statesmen. Structural factors were, of course, at work in human history, and some of them might surely be captured by numbers—but much of what mattered most was irreducibly cultural, and stubbornly contingent.
