Remembering Herbert Blumer
Neil Smelser
Dr. Neil Smelser, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California Berkley, wrote this memoir at the request of Dmitri Shalin and gave his permission to post it in the Erving Goffman Archives.
Neil Smelser
Dr. Neil Smelser, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California Berkley, wrote this memoir at the request of Dmitri Shalin and gave his permission to post it in the Erving Goffman Archives.
Memorandum
Herbert Blumer
Submitted by Neil Smelser
The first time I met Herbert Blumer was when I visited the University of California, Berkeley in the winter of 1957, when I first came to the campus for job interviews. I was just finishing my doctoral dissertation at Harvard and had come on to the job market. I had not been offered the job as yet, but I was confident, both because the market for young sociologists was very strong at the time, and Talcott Parsons, my thesis supervisor (and with whom I had completed co-authoring Economy and Society) had given me good press to the Berkeley campus. Ultimately I received an offer from Berkeley (the day after my visit) and competing offers at the Assistant Professor level at Michigan and Harvard.
As chair of the department, Blumer had me into his office during the one-and-one-half day visit. He was quite formal and distant, officially describing the position and asking me some questions about my work, but revealing little else about Berkeley or about himself (all I really knew about him at the time of the visit was that I had read his work on collective behavior; his work on symbolic interactionism was not really in the intellectual culture of Harvard during my graduate-school years). Several other faculty members—especially Marty Lipset, but also Reinhard Bendix, Hannan Selvin, and Leo Lowenthal—were actively welcoming and extremely sociable (Lowenthal even told me during the first day of the visit that I was surely going to be offered the job). I attributed Blumer's aloofness to the fact that he was officially the chair and that, because I hadn't actually been offered the job. But it also struck me as odd that, on the day after the visit when I was visiting the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford), it was not Blumer but Lipset who telephoned me and said the job was mine if I wanted it. (It was a comical phone call, because I talked to Lipset on the phone in the presence of Talcott Parsons [my mentor and a Fellow at the Center at the time] who was standing beside me and whispering urgently again and again, "Don't say yes!", because he knew a Harvard position was going to be offered to me). I accepted the Berkeley offer a few weeks later, but in keeping with my reading of my visit, I informed Lipset, not Blumer of my decision, and nobody asked me to inform Blumer).
When I arrived at Berkeley the following fall, Bendix had just come into the chairmanship, so all official arrangements were handled through him. I didn't really see much of Blumer during the first year, and he didn't seek me out at all. During the second year, however, I took the initiative in setting up a meeting with him. We had a lunch at the faculty club at my invitation. The reason for this was that I had been working very hard since I had come to Berkeley on what would become Theory of Collective Behavior. I know that Blumer was one of the figures in that field, and I wanted feedback on chapters that I was drafting on the panic, the craze, and the hostile outburst. I asked Herb if would read one of the chapters (on panic, I believe) and give me feedback and he agreed. We arranged to have another lunch a couple of weeks later. During that lunch Herb obviously showed that he had read the material. He gave no overall judgment—either encouraging or discouraging—but seemed to land on one major point, and he repeated that point again and again in different ways. The essence of his objection was that I was giving too much emphasis to structural determinants of the panic process and too little attention to the perceptions and meanings and interpretations of the actors involved. This point was of course consistent with his symbolic-interactionist perspective, and also consistent with his ongoing critique of Parsons and other functionalists who, he believed, regarded the actor as the passive vessel through which structural forces passed and determine the actor's behavior. I heard Blumer and I think his message led me to think somewhat differently about the kinds of interpretations I was developing, but in a way his objection, if I had taken it seriously, would have undermined my entire theoretical perspective and would have led me to write an entirely different book. So I can say that I responded only partially—and, I suppose, minimally in Herb's opinion—to his critical approach.
A month or so later I sent him a copy of the next chapter on crazes, asking him for feedback on that one, too. This time we did not have a lunch. Instead, he wrote me a very long letter (six or seven single-spaced pages, as I recall). In this letter he developed the very same line of objections as he had put forward in the lunch, and the letter was as repetitive as the luncheon conversation had been. I wrote an equally long letter back to him, explaining and defending my position and implicitly criticizing his. I still remained undaunted, and in the end sent him almost every chapter of the book. He responded to all of them by letter, but after a while the correspondence became boring, because his points were always the same, and my responses tended to be the same, too. There must have accumulated almost fifty pages of correspondence. I gave him credit in the Preface of the book, but in reading those words recently, I think I was more generous than I really felt.
Herb and I served together on a number or orals examinations for graduate students, I examining usually in social theory, he in social psychology. I didn't like his style very much, and was embarrassed by it. He would always ask the same questions, focusing on George Herbert Mead's theory of personal interaction. He would ask the students to reproduce Mead's point of view, and if the students didn't use the right words, he would continue to ask until the student would get it right. I felt it was demeaning to the students, and more about Herb's insistence on things that in revealing the students' command of material and analytic abilities.
We also appeared together on panels at scholarly conferences and ASA meetings. I remember one line of exchange that was especially striking. I ventured a theoretical critique of the symbolic interactionist approach—I thought it was civil enough—namely that with the insistence on the idiosyncrasy of the meanings that guided actors' behaviors—the approach (a variant of phenomenology) was caught in a position of not being able to generalize but only to tell descriptive stories, and for that reason found itself difficult to measure up to the scientific canon of seeking generalizations about human behavior. Herb reacted very strongly to this point, because he prided himself on the empiricist characteristic of the symbolic-interactionist approach ("you have to dig for the facts" was his phrase), and resented any suggestion that it was non-scientific or anti-scientific.
Between 1962 and 1965 I was editor-in-chief of the American Sociological Review. It was a rewarding experience, but one of the more difficult side issues was that quite a number of Berkeley colleagues sent me manuscripts, thinking, perhaps, that this younger colleague (though I had been promoted to Full Professor in 1962) would be an easier touch than another editor. Herb was one of those who contacted me. He submitted a manuscript on economic development, which he had prepared in the course of an academic visitorship in Brazil. The essence of his argument was that development was a pragmatic, seeking process, and difficult to generalize about. I sent the ms. out for review, and the reviews were generally negative. I had to reject the manuscript and tried to do so diplomatically, but Herb was quite gruff about the decision, attributing it to reviewers' (and presumably my) intellectual rigidity. That decision didn't help our relationship at all, though the situation didn't develop into any kind of fight.
I seldom saw Herb socially at parties and other kinds of gatherings. When we did meet, we were always civil but distant from one another, finding it difficult to find things to talk about. I often wondered why we never really broke through the aloofness. After all, we had a lot in common: we were both Missouri boys (I was born in northern Missouri, and though I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, my family and I visited the state numerous times, and I felt Missouri roots); we were of common ethnic stock; we both were sports fans. But we never came to the point of having a personal relationship, much less a friendship. I felt he was shy, certainly more so than I, because I did develop collegial and friendly relationships with others. At one point I even entertained the implausible thought that Herb might be afraid of me, because that seemed to be consistent with his behavior; but it was implausible because he was twice my age and was certainly an established scholar and sociologist. In the end I suppose it was because of a theoretical impasse. Herb regarded me as hopelessly wrong-headed and beyond his influence (he once introduced me to an academic in what I suppose he thought were flattering terms, saying that Talcott Parsons regarded me as his best student; he couldn't give his own opinion but quoted that of a theoretical foe). I regarded him as hopelessly dogmatic. We couldn't get beyond that impasse, and what might have developed as an intellectual and even a personal relationship never had a chance to do so.
[ 5.29.2009 ]
* The Erving Goffman Archives (EGA) is the web-based, open-source project that serves as a clearing house for those interested in the dramaturgical tradition in sociology and biographical methods of research. The EGA is located in the Intercyberlibrary of the UNLV Center of Democratic Culture, http://www.unlv.edu/centers/cdclv/archives/interactionism/index.html. Postings on the website are divided into several overlapping sections: “Documents and Papers,” “Goffman's Publications,” “Goffman in the News,” “Biographical Materials,” “Critical Assessments,” and “Comments and Dialogues.” For inquiries regarding the EGA projects, please contact Dr. Dmitri Shalin, shalin@unlv.nevada.edu. When you cite the materials collected for the EGA, please use the following reference: Bios Sociologicus: The Erving Goffman Archives, ed. by Dmitri N. Shalin (UNLV: CDC Publications, 2009).