Irving Louis Horowitz and Freedom Review

When my best friend Mark Wolkenfeld and I travelled to Piscataway to visit Irving at the Transaction offices, we found a big, burly, disheveled man, wearing an old sweater and jeans ample enough for his considerable girth and muscle, yelling into the telephone at someone with a mix of profanity worthy of a Seventh Avenue macher and reason and logic worthy of a teacher. He motioned us—he seemed to have 360-degree peripheral vision and caught every nuance of every conversation within range, and if he did not, he guessed what was being said, sometimes embellishing his guess from his own rich fund of informed prejudices—to sit down and wait. He did not motion us to make ourselves comfortable, in the manner of lawyers, salesmen, university functionaries, and even politicians and state officials. No, he just signaled us to sit down, shut up, and wait for him to finish, which he did after another tirade followed by a remark on the human condition, made sotto voce and spoken to himself as much as to whoever was within hearing range and maybe even to whoever was still on the line: ‘I don’t know why people are so determined to f——up, I just don’t know.’ He shook his head a few times and looked up at us as if we were perfect strangers.

Five minutes later we were old buddies, and he was patiently explaining, with a seductive mix of authority and charm, the facts of life in the magazine publishing business. The authority came from the fact that as the heart, soul, and brains of Transaction, Irving at this time in his life had, I would guess, thirty years of experience with scholarly journals, many rather specialized and a few of more general intellectual interest, including his own Society.

The charm came from the fact that he really liked Freedom Review. When Irving liked something, or someone, it showed. He, as teacher but also as a human being—the two qualities are not mutually contradictory—told you, his voice slowing down and his pitch lowering an octave or two, that you were really on to something and therefore you had a responsibility, a moral obligation, to do it as well as possible. Then he would shake his head as if we were discussing Hegel (which we as likely as not would be in a while) and repeat himself.

Mark and I were in charge of Freedom Review, but we were beholden to the organization that published it, Freedom House, which did not provide us with any business framework for the journal that we could understand. Irving, who was an actual reader of Freedom Review and an ardent supporter of Freedom House’s stated mission, wondered why the structure had turned so seedy and offered to help.

In one of his many contradictions (though I prefer to call the quality his ‘Whitmanesque’ capacity to embrace differences and transcend them intellectually, if not always emotionally), Irving, a scholar, thinker, editor, and writer of rigorous standards, also liked the nuts and bolts and the hard-nosed business of publishing. He loved publishing. Printing costs, paper, cover design, titles, distribution networks, and marketing fascinated him. Ideas and their relation to the societies that produced them fascinated him even more; he built a major publishing house on the basis of this passion: he wanted ideas out there, available, ideas and demonstrations of the way things are, the way things were, and the way things happened, forcing reflection, thought, discussion, and more writing, which would lead to more papers in more journals and more books. Publishing is a mission and a business. There was something of the Jesuit in Irving: if he had a mission, he organized himself to get it done well. He was a competitive man who made the cut on the City College of New York basketball varsity team. He played to win. He engaged in the battle of ideas with this same attitude, even if—as a teacher, scholar, and humane and humanistic Jew—he loved discussion and reflection for their own civilized and civilizing sakes...