Philosophical Encounters in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1958–1971

When I first met Irving Louis Horowitz, he was already looking back on a forty-year career of scholarship in which he had amassed a book-length bibliography. We met in his citadel of books at Transaction, which until recently was housed in the old headquarters of Camp Kilmer, located on the Livingston campus of Rutgers University. I knew when I approached the building that I was on the grounds of a former army post; I had followed my father’s deployments in the States and overseas in the fifties and sixties, and the blocky, functional military architecture was familiar to me. What was missing from the building in the 1990s was the small white picket fence that used to surround the headquarters that Major General Ralph Wise Zwicker occupied in 1954 when he was the post’s commanding officer. By 1954, Horowitz had already published two books on philosophers, The Renaissance Philosophy of Giordano Bruno (1952) and Claude Helvetius: Philosopher of Democracy and Enlightenment (1954). The fact that Horowitz was a renowned sociologist but showed a distinct interest in philosophy attracted my attention. The fact that he occupied the same offices as Zwicker also caught my interest. In both cases I felt a rapport with Horowitz, though as a novice series editor at Transaction, I was reticent about my feelings.

Certain things stood out from our first meeting: Horowitz had a photograph of Charlie Parker near his desk, which told the story that he was an early fan and that without his parents’ knowledge, he would slip into smoky clubs to catch his sound; he had a theological exchange with the Vatican that was commemorated with a plaque on the wall; and he seemed to enjoy the idea that he occupied the building that once served as General Zwicker’s headquarters. At the time, the irony was lost on me, but I came to understand that Zwicker had once faced off against the US Senator Joseph McCarthy at a very public meeting in which McCarthy declared Zwicker unfit to wear the uniform. McCarthy would grill Zwicker about Irving Peress, a military dentist who served and was promoted under his command at Camp Kilmer. Peress, a graduate of the City College of New York, was known to have been a supporter of the US Vice President Henry Wallace and active in the American Labor Party. McCarthy not only accused Zwicker of perjury, but he also declared the military to be soft on communism. His bluster did not sit well with the military that put him back on his heels when they revealed that McCarthy’s attacks were motivated by personal reasons. It is historically satisfying that Zwicker and Horowitz should have occupied the same office.

Horowitz did not suffer the same scrutiny as did Zwicker or Peress, his fellow City College alumni, but he would come to identify with academic exiles Mario Bunge and Gino Germani, both of whom suffered ostracism under separate fascistic political regimes. Thanks to the intercession of Bunge, Horowitz was able to maintain professional continuity by establishing an institutional affiliation at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, from 1956–1958. This university had just been liberated from Perón’s authoritarianism, and Horowitz found a hospitable environment in which to maintain the literary production that began earlier with his work in philosophy. Horowitz would intermittently work alongside Germani, an exile from fascist Italy, to help establish a newly-minted sociology department where Germani invested his time in empirical studies and where Horowitz sharpened his theoretical edge.

The years after Horowitz earned his graduate degree from Columbia University in 1952 had to be tumultuous, with Horowitz scrambling for an institutional footing; raising a growing family; creating a publishing enterprise out of thin air with Paine-Whitman, which would go on to produce fourteen titles in its short life; and commuting between the United States and Argentina. His literary production was not hampered by these circumstances; by 1958 he was publishing in the premier philosophy journal founded by Marvin Farber, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (PPR). In the thirteen years that he would...