Pluralism in Scholarship and Experience

Ira Katznelson Pluralism in Scholarship and Experience I HAVE KNOWN ARISTIDE ZOLBERG FOR 40 YEARS. WE HAVE BEEN colleagues at the University of Chicago and the New School for Social Research. We have taught together and have edited a book together (Katznelson and Zolberg 1986). To have had the privilege of reading, w orking with, observing, and participating w ith an intellectual and personal friend whose analytical power probes fundam ental questions w ith great acuity has been one of life’s best privileges. If I had chosen the title for this conference about Aristide’s schol­ arship, it would have been th at of a book w ritten by another form er colleague at the University of Chicago, the late Wayne Booth, the great literary critic who w rote Critical Understanding: The Power and Limits of Pluralism. From the beginning, Aristide’s w ork has explored the power and limits of pluralism. His has not been a rom antic embrace—a simple w arm support for m ultiple cultures—for he has always understood that w ith pluralism comes danger, sometimes death. But he also has cele­ brated deep pluralism for offering hum ankind some of its most noble, m ost profound, and m ost m oving experiences. Probing this range, Aristide has always insisted on the quest for critical understanding, a search that has taken him on m any expeditions, some literal, others conceptual and analytical. He has taught many deep lessons about why, what, and how to study. The why always comes first. Only spend tim e and energy, he counsels (and this is w hat he practices) w hen the questions at hand are im portant, and not just for scholars. Only study, he advises, w hat you passionately wish to understand because the answers m ight m atter. social research Vol 77 : No 1 : Spring 2010 405 Do so, he recommends, by being open to using the full kitbag of tools available to social scientists (thus refuse to waste time in sterile m eth­ odological warfare), but always with a historical, a comparative, and an institutional sensibility. We once lived together in a political science departm ent in the Midwest. At m any m eetings concerned w ith faculty hiring, one of a small num ber of distinguished Straussian political theorists would justify a grudging vote for someone w ho did statistical research by deploying imagery, quoting the ancients, about the full body, explain­ ing that a body needs all its parts, including its feet. W ith that, they could vote for a left toe. Aristide would get incredibly im patient w ith th at kind of speech; sooner or later he would explode, saying some­ thing like, “You are the left toe!” Here, as elsewhere, he refused the choice between theory and in-the-trenches work, knowing that both, together, are required for powerful social studies to proceed. Not only has he hated bias about research methods, he has used a variety of approaches to chase after an understanding about hum an heterogeneity, knowing that these m atters have been embedded from the start w ithin the history and lineage of the W estern liberal tradition, a tradition to w hich Aristide is indebted and w hich he would like to strengthen, but not credulously. His realism is normative. The challenges he has probed are rooted in liberalism ’s found­ ing m om ents, including Magna Carta of 1215. That great docum ent contains 63 chapters or clauses that were forced on King John by rebel­ lious m agnates who w anted rights and liberties. W hat makes Magna Carta so significant is how it put everyone, including the king, under the rule of law. “All these customs and liberties we have granted shall be observed in our kingdom insofar as they concern our own relations w ith our own subjects,” it proclaimed. W ith this first codification of the m odern notion of rights came the question that Aristide has chased for m any decades, the question of membership. W ho gets those rights? W ho are “our own subjects” eligible for rights. W ho belongs? Other key Zolbergian them es already appear...