In the fall of 1990, Social Research and the New School for Social Research organized a multi-institutional collaboration around the idea of "Home."  This was the second in what we hope to be a continuing series of Social Research projects around critical contemporary issues, the first of which was "In Time of Plague: The History and Consequences of Lethal Epidemic Diseases."  Our collaborators in the Home Project were five major New York City museums - the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Brooklyn Children's Museum, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Jewish Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.  A series of public programs and exhibits on the theme of "Home: A Place in the World" were presented at the museums and at the New School with the aim of interpreting and focusing attention on key aspects of one of our most fundamental and complex concepts.
    The timeliness of this project is surely obvious.  We live at a time when the idea of home has become problematic.  We are confronted every day with painful images and stories about the growing numbers of homeless people, about criminal violence toward children, and about the plights of those exiled from their homelands.  And all of this coexists with the persistent images of home as a place of comfort, safety, and refuge.
    A national conference, "Home: A Place in the World," a central part of the Home Project, was held at the New School in October 1990.  It was designed to explore the ideology of home, its meaning as a central human idea as well as the crises engendered by its loss in homelessness and exile and by the experience of loss suffered in alienation.  The papers from this conference appear in this issue.  We hope that the sustained reflections to be found in these papers, which range from "Landscape as Home" and "Alienation and Belonging to Humanity" to "A Curse to Themselves and a Menace and Injury to the City: Homelessness in New York City History" and "The Long March from Hearth to Heart," will begin to unravel the intellectual, the moral, the historic, and the cultural tangles in which the idea of home is embedded.  It is our belief that in so doing we will engender a deeper understanding of what it means not to belong, and not to have a home at a moment when that condition has become so widespread and urgent that it demands an effective and humane response.
    Many people helped to make the "home" conference and the larger Home Project possible.  I am grateful to them all.  I am especially grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Rockefeller Foundation for their extremely generous support.  Without their help there would have been no Home Project and no "home" conference devoted exclusively to a panel discussion on problems of "Homelessness Present."  This session was done in collaboration with the Columbia University Seminars on Media and Society directed by Fred Friendly.

    Home: A Place in the World
    Editor's Introduction                                                                                                                                       5

    The Idea of Home
    Introduction                                                           Stanley Cavell                                                                 9

    Homelands                                                            Simon Schama                                                               11

    It All Depends                                                       John Hollander                                                              31

    House and Home                                                  Joseph Rykwert                                                              51

    Exile: A Keynote Address
    Introduction                                                          Eric Hobsbawm                                                             65

    The Long March from Hearth
    to Heart                                                                Breyten Breytenbach                                                     69

    Homelessness Past
    Introduction                                                          Alexander Keyssar                                                        87

    Homelessness and Dickens                                   Steven Marcus                                                               93

    A Poor Apart: The Distancing of
    Homeless Men in New York's
    History                                                                 Kim Hopper                                                                107

    Exile, Alienation, and Estrangement
    Introduction                                                         George Kateb                                                             135

    Alienation and Belonging to
    Humanity                                                             David Bromwich                                                         139

    Slavery, Alienation, and the
    Female Discovery of Personal
    Freedom                                                             Orlando Patterson                                                      159

    Rembrandt's and Freud's
    "Gerusalemme Liberata"                                      Sanford Budick                                                           189

    Home as Place and Center for
    Private and Family Life
    Introduction                                                        Alan Trachtenberg                                                      211

    Prescribing the Model Home                               Gwendolyn Wright                                                      213

    The Public and the Private in the
    Stately Homes of England,
    1500-1990                                                         Lawrence Stone                                                          227

    The Home and the Family in
    Historical Perspective                                         Tamara K. Hareven                                                    253

    The Idea of a Home:
    A Kind of Space                                               Mary Douglas                                                              287
 
 

Breyten Breytenbach, a novelist born in South Africa and now living in Paris, wrote True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1985).  His most recent novel is Memory of Snow and of Dust (1989).

David Bromwich, professor of English at Yale University, is the author, most recently, of Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost (1989).

Sanford Budick is director of the Center for Literary Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  His most recent book is The Dividing Muse: Images of Sacred Disjunction in Milton's Poetry (1985).

Stanley Cavell  is Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University.  His most recent book is Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (1990).

Mary Douglas taught anthropology at the University of London, Northwestern University, and Princeton.  Her most recent book is How Institutions Think (1986).

Tamara K. Hareven is Unidel Professor of Family Studies and History at the University of Delaware.  Her books include Family Time and Industrial Time (1982).

Eric Hobsbawm, Emeritus University Professor of Politics and Society at Cambridge University, is now a member of the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research.  His most recent book is The Age of Empire (1989).

John Hollander is A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of English at Yale University.  His most recent books are Melodious Guile (1988), criticism, and Harp Lake (1988), poetry.

Kim Hopper is a research scientist at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research and visiting professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research.

George Kateb is proefssor of politics at Princeton University and author of Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (1984).

Alexander Keyssar, associate professor of history at Duke University, wrote Our of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts (1986).

Steven Marcus is George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.  His most recent book is Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis (1984).

Orlando Patterson is professor of sociology at Harvard University.  His most recent book is Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991).

Joseph Rykwert is Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.  HIs books include The First Moderns (1980).

Simon Schama, professor of history at Harvard University, is the author of The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1987) and Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989).

Lawrence Stone is emeritus professor of history at Princeton University and author, most recently , of The Road to Divorce: England, 1550-1987 (1990).

Alan Trachtenberg, Neil Gray Jr. Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University, is the author, most recently, of Reading American Photographs: Images as History from Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (1989).

Gwendolyn Wright is professor of architecture and history at Columbia University and author of Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (1983).