Irving Louis Horowitz: Social Science as a Vocation

I first met Irving Louis Horowitz when he asked me to become the editor of The American Sociologist in 1995. That journal had been founded by the eminent Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons in 1965 and was first published by the American Sociological Association (ASA). In many respects, the story of the journal’s demise, disappearance, and resurrection speaks forcefully for Irving’s disenchantment with the profession of sociology, even as he remained inarguably the single most important figure to preserve the intellectual contribution of sociology as a discipline over the last half century. Without his continuing commitment to the publication and reissuing of classic works in the sociological tradition by living, long-dead, and even longer forgotten figures in the discipline, sociology would be a much less rich enterprise than it is today. When the ASA ceased publication of The American Sociologist in 1982 because of internal bickering over whether it was becoming too much of an outlet for criticism of the profession, it lay dormant for five years. Then, in Irving’s inimitable manner, he persuaded the ASA to give him the rights to revive it under the same title. I was privileged to serve as its Editor for three years when he asked me to consider succeeding him as Editor-in-Chief of Society, the journal/magazine that he had edited single-handedly for thirty-five years. We worked together, he as Editor-at-Large, for a decade until he and his wife, Mary Curtis, decided to sell all the Transaction journals to Springer Science, a decision that has assured the uninterrupted publication of dozens of these journals since 2007, including The American Sociologist and Society. Duringthe followingfive years, Irving and I no longer worked together on Society, but he continued to write reviews and articles that exemplified his commitment to an enterprise he created out of little more than the force of his own intellect and a business acumen that impressed those who knew him well.

Transaction’s motto, which links scholarship with business, is ‘Publisher of Record in International Social Science.’ There is a certain bravado in such a claim, but consider for a moment its multiple meanings. First and foremost, Irving took seriously that social science should not be confined to one national model of thought or practice. Yet the goal he was simultaneously defining and setting was one to which all publishing aspires: to be read, cited, and preserved. In all respects, his commitment to live to almost see Society in its fiftieth year of uninterrupted publication was testament to an entrepreneurial spirit that combined two visions of social science, which embraced both the marketplace and the realm of ideas. I was honoured to write the Preface for a collection of his writings, entitled Tributes: Personal Reflections on a Century of Social Research (2004), on numerous figures in social science whom Irving knew personally or whom he had published over the decades. Reflecting on his motivations, I wrote,

Ideas may be immortal, but no one I know can say whether this or that idea is immortal. I suspect that publishers of ideas know this best of all. There is nothing more sobering about the mortality of ideas than to discover one’s book is out of print. It is impossible not to acknowledge that so many of the tributes [by Irving] are to the many people over the past forty years whose ideas have achieved that limited immortality of remaining available in print because of the good offices of Irving Louis Horowitz and Transaction Publishers. The costs borne by the publisher are recouped in the remarkable pantheon of thinkers and writers on display here. This is a book of the ideational lives neither of saints nor of sinners, but of those whose life’s works have mattered first to Irving because they matter most of all to his vision of social science.¹

What Irving recognized very early on was that there could be no ideational culture without a corresponding material one. He was a dualist par excellence, and this orientation of heart and mind led him consistently to...