Irving Louis Horowitz
Irving Louis Horowitz died a few weeks ago, and I haven’t been able to bring myself to honor him as he deserves. He was a force of nature, and you got it all from him, right in your face. Passionate affection, unbreakable loyalty, great intellectual brilliance, surprising physical strength and dexterity, lots of good humor. Or else you got derision and contempt, unrestrained criticism—well, you got that always, which was most welcome to me–and, in his younger years, direct confrontation of the sort he knew from the streets.
He never did things by halves. And if you were going to be his friend, you couldn’t get away with half measures. It was all or nothing. So when he left us—after his umpteenth heart attack and emergency surgery—it was a tremendous blow. One of the basic drivers of our lives has been removed.
His contributions to our understanding of the world are legion, from Renaissance philosophy to Cuban Communism, from totalitarianism to a brilliant discussion of C. Wright Mills, and seemingly countless and invariably significant issues.
I always told him that he wasn’t a sociologist at all, but rather an historian, one of the best. Few so well understood the passionate irrationality of the modern world as Irving did, and his great work on “radicalism and the revolt against reason” will last a very long time. He well understood the menace of myth in politics, and dreaded its consequences in our age of mass movements and totalitarians who perfected mob rule. Those same insights were brought to bear on Castro’s Cuba, on the celebrated but wrong-headed work of C. Wright Mills, and on the often controversial and internally contradictory writings of Hannah Arendt, after whom Irving’s chair at Rutgers was named.
Like many other scholars whose work straddles sociology and history, I owe a great deal to Irving. On two seperate occasions I put to him ideas I had for a book and he said “convince me”. On each occasion an hour later I was exhausted but he said “OK I’ll take it.” By comparison dealing with high bureaucracy, high caution British publishers who worry about categories had been a nightmare. Irving was an entrepreneur.He did not care whether a book was history or whether it was sociology because he himself was a master of both.
He was also good company and good conversation grounded in immense erudition , as I quickly discovered when I first met him at Bar Ilan University, Israel. After that I would go each year to the otherwise boring London book fair just to meet him. A wonderful man
yes, indeed. thanks very much.
“the revolt against reason”: Yes, . . . the greater the ambient comfort, the greater the possibility and likelihood ever larger numbers of people, who may be so empowered, will indulge in ever lengthier time spent in returns to puerile interests which before, must needs have been set aside in order to absorb and use reason and its concomitants that, ambient comfort which allowed for leisure pursuits might be achieved.
And in that way, “the revolt against reason” would describes also, the ancient’s use of that part of the life of Prometheus as a depiction of the fall of, or the second of four eras in the life of any civilization.
Upon being banished from the realm of the gods, Prometheus–whose name means: “Wisdom and Foresight”–gave himself as their king, to rule in the affairs of men–the first stage. But then, being turned out of his throne, he was left to wander the streets as the evil dogs of chaos increased to bite, tear, and destroy, . . .
I feel said to know that a great personality now not between us.I read many of thing written by him like Renaissance philosophy, Cuban Communism etc.I appreciate his vast view about thing.God Bless him.
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