Volume 49 No. 3 (Autumn 1982)
Arthur J. Vidich, Issue Editor


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Benjamin N. Nelson

Our friend and colleague, Benjamin N. Nelson, died in Germany in September, 1977. Among those who knew him, his erudition and the catholicity of his intellectual curiosity were legendary. In this age of disciplinary specializations and academic technicians, his theoretical perspective was universal. It was this that made his intellectual presence a powerful example to his students and colleagues. Always prepared to open himself to new ideas and knowledge, Nelson's ideal was that of the universal scholar conversant with the central ideas of all the world's great civilizations. He understood the integument of civilization and, because he did, had a sure intuition for the primitive past which always intrigued him. He lived for this commitment with a passion that denied any doubt about where he placed the central meaning of his life. His family, his personal life, his marriages, and his friendships were all extensions of his larger intellectual endeavors, whose object was to resolve fundamental philosophical and historical problems of the social sciences. But he did this without spiritual pretension; his method was to learn how to ask the right questions.

Ben began his intellectual career as a medievalist, focusing on the legal and juridical status of the person in the European Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance. He could, when he wished, be so transparently profound, "naive" in this effort, that one understood why children regarded him as a natural ally. There is no doubt that in this work his presence in the world as a Jew played a basic role. Nelson's early work came to fruition in his first book, The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood [1]. When he went to the University of Chicago in 1945, he joined the Committee on Social Sciences where, working with Edward Shils, Reuel Denney, David Riesman, Frank Knight, Charles Merriam, Harold Lasswell, and others, he read deeply in the classics of sociology, political science, religion, and psychoanalysis. It was there in Chicago, then the singular center of intellectual vitality and creativity in the United States, that he developed and extended his conception of the problem that was to be the force that drove him the rest of his life. From a sociological perspective--that is, one that focused on the processes of human interaction--he wished to comprehend in historically specific terms the ideational matrix of the human consciousness. For him history meant not only all the great civilizations given in the historical record, but also their intermixes, crosscurrents, and transformations since the origins of civilization itself.

Religion, law, science, the arts, and political ideology were the arenas of civilization that provided him with his primary empirical data. It was for this reason that his substantive interests included Weber's studies on the world religions, the works of the great medievalist legal scholars, and the entire field of nineteenth-century jurisprudence, including the works of thinkers such as Maine, Maitland, and Blackstone. It also accounts for his intensive study of the minds of specific thinkers like Abelard, Galileo, Grotius, Michelangelo, Maimonides, Machiavelli, the Catholic popes, Luther, John Cotton, Shakespeare, Freud, Jean Genet, and Picasso, to mention only a few of the many men whose minds he strove to penetrate and comprehend. In his later years, he came to call his project the comparative and historical analysis of civilizations [2]. From the very beginning of his intellectual odyssey, however, his aim was to integrate and transcend the social-scientific discoveries of the great thinkers of the nineteenth century whose ideas in the twentieth century were for him coterminous with the very idea of the social sciences.

Ben did not bring his ideas together into a synthetic magnum opus. Whether he might have done so had he lived is a question no one can answer. It appears to us, however, that for all of his vast wealth of knowledge, and more likely because of it, he had not yet found the formulation for his problem that would have enabled him to select and order the ideas and data with which he worked. Everyone of us who knew him, however, knew that he had formulated a very large number of the themes that would be indispensable to a comprehensive synthetic interpretation of the history of civilized consciousness [3]. Yet many of the thematic dimensions of his central project remained both unwritten and undeveloped, not yet integrated into his own thinking. We know this because, in his lectures and his conversations with us, he was always ready to experiment with new themes and problems evoked by his own responses to the books that were uppermost on his mind at the time. Inquirer of the world that he was, his system remained open to the end.

While many of his formulations, ideas, and interpretations do not appear in written work, they have been left behind as the intellectual capital of hundreds of students and colleagues on several continents, who listened to his lectures and overheard his dialogues. In the classroom or in the lecture hall, an apt or even a naive question could evoke from him an integrated analysis of a problem that he had not yet posed for himself. He was able to use the living theater to clarify his ideas for himself, but these encounters also at times revealed that his knowledge and the scope of his ideas exceeded his ability to formulate the all-embracing question. At the end this all-embracing question still eluded him. Yet, to the end, he struggled with great vitality to reach the heights, never failing to stop to help anyone who had faltered on the same path.

[1] Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949.
 
[2] An excellent representation of this work may be found in Benjamin Nelson, On the Roads to Modernity: Consciousness, Science, and Civilization, edited by Toby E. Huff (Totowa, N.J.: Rowan and Littlefield, 1981). Professor Huff's preface includes both a biographical statement and an appreciation of Nelson as a scholar and a person. It also points to the specific sources of Nelson's ideas and to his utilization of these ideas in formulating his own project.

[3] For a full bibliography of Nelson's writings from 1933 to 1977, see ibid., pp. 263-270.

 
 

Arthur J. Vidich
Issue Editor

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