A Passionate and Critical Realist

Irving Louis Horowitz—a scholar, teacher, publisher, mentor, and friend, whose work on Latin America, especially Cuba, I had admired for decades—became on 28 January 2009 ‘my ILH.’ On that day, he generously acknowledged my book review of The Long Night of Dark Intent (2008) in the first letter of a two-year correspondence from which I quote throughout this article. Only a sociologist and political scientist in ‘passionate pursuit of the real’ (Czeslaw Milosz’s definition of poetry) would have chosen his title for a book on a half century of Cuban communism, The Long Night of Dark Intent, from a poem by Robert Frost.

ILH wrote in his personal correspondence with me, ‘As you well now know, since my 1964 essay on the Stalinization of Cuba, I have been simply declared a soul lost in purgatory from the hard Left with its soft reading of Communist rule.’ And he added, ‘Even the Council of Foreign Relations (of which I have been a member for 35 years …) found my views on Cuba not only beyond the pale, but more, beyond commentary. … The hard Right was not much better, given my early identification with the cause of Cuban democracy [and] the overthrow of the corrupt, feeble Batista regime.’ ILH edited eleven volumes of Cuban Communism and is considered a leading voice on the subject.

In addition to having written hundreds of articles and essays, ILH authored more than fifty books, many of which appeared in translation and multiple editions. As founder of Transaction Publishers, he deserves credit for making works by key Latin American thinkers available in English, such as Venezuelan Carlos Rangel’s The Latin Americans: Their Love-Hate Relationship with the United States (1987), and for publishing new books on Latin American politics, such as Robert J. Alexander’s Rómulo Betancourt and the Transformation of Venezuela (1982), Alvaro Vargas Llosa’s The Madness of Things Peruvian: Democracy Under Siege (1994), and Torcuato Di Tella’s History of Political Parties in Twentieth-Century Latin America (2005).

In 1962, ILH founded the journal Transaction: Social Science and Modern Society, which strove to bring to sociology, economics, political science and the other social sciences the same explanatory rigor that Scientific American applied to the hard sciences. The name Transaction was changed to Society in 1972.

ILH concluded his first letter to me by saying, ‘My review of a half century of Cuban communism is intended to make clear that I have not knuckled under, and have few regrets about my views.’

I treasure that letter. It brought to mind (and heart) lines from two poems written by Jorge Luis Borges about the Dutch philosopher of Jewish origin Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677). ILH had met Borges in Buenos Aires around 1958, in the company of Pablo Levin, the translator of the Spanish-language edition of The Idea of War and Peace in Contemporary Philosophy (1957). (ILH had spent years as a graduate student in Argentina, where he received a PhD from the University of Buenos Aires.) Borges’s first Spinoza poem echoes the life and work of ILH: ‘Free, from metaphor and myth / He polishes a stubborn lens’ (Libre de la metáfora y del mito / Labra un arduo cristal).¹ ILH did very well in polishing the lens to see and understand Cuba’s sociopolitical reality.

The second poem states, ‘No one was granted such prodigious love as he: / The love that does not expect to be loved’ (El más pródigo amor le fue otorgado, / el amor que no espera ser amado).² ILH did not expect to be loved (or admired) by his colleagues in the world of contemporary social sciences. He did not knuckle under, and he had few regrets. Author and foreign correspondent Georgie Anne Geyer knew and admired profoundly both ILH and Borges. Of ILH she said, ‘It is really astonishing; few of us travel such journeys and inspire (and doubtless aggravate) so many along the road. He makes the old saying, “When you come to a turn in the road, take it!” seem true. He seemed to take all the...