On the Work of Meyer Schapiro
Volume 45 No. 1 (Spring 1978)
Arien Mack, Editor


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Benjamin Nelson 1911-1977

My old friend, and formidable intellectual antagonist, Ben Nelson lived the life of the mind with an astonishing fidelity. I welcomed our disagreements; they meant more to me--and were more fruitful--than all the conventions that we learned to depend upon for status and support in the academic world.

But when I had the news of his death my sorrow reached beyond myself to all of those he leaves behind--lonely, more isolated, more aware of our vulnerability.

For Ben was a unique figure in our intellectual culture. He refused to be confined to a single discipline and was, characteristically, Professor of Sociology and History at the New School, which does not have a history department. He moved easily through an immense cultural landscape--he was the only person I have ever known who could quote from Nicholas of Cusa at the breakfast table in order to make a critical point about some little known aspect of Freud's work. The past was alive for Ben; as an accomplished medieval historian he had a sense of the origins and complexity of modern Western civilization that was a constant challenge to the sociologists with whom     he identified in his later professional life. As a sociologist, Ben Nelson deployed an endless, youthful curiosity in his pursuit of the meaning and order of our civilization. Nothing seemed to escape him, nothing was beneath his notice. He appeared to be aware of every book of any consequence published in the social sciences, literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis. He remained equally abreast of changing styles in toothpaste commercials or manners in the White House, teasing out their larger meanings and presenting them with great verve and brilliance.

Ben knew more about civilization than anyone I have ever encountered. His study of what held civilizations together was, I think, an aspect of his polished regard for civility and civil order. Ben was one of those rare, authentic conservatives who was deeply aware of the hard-won beauty of the human cultural achievement, and of just how precarious it all is. Yet he never surrendered to any establishment or identified himself with people in power, even when they beckoned to him. Perhaps we should call him a radical conservative, one who wished to preserve and perpetuate the highest achievements of which we are capable, and he quietly mourned the debasement of culture and mores in his own society. For that reason he never lost his faith in the younger scholars with whom he surrounded himself and to whom he listened carefully, always teaching, always learning, always alert to quality and any hint of originality. He was more impressed by the potential of an assistant than by the heavy credentials of the president of the American Sociological Association.

Ben paid a price for his independence. When he came to the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, he came as an internal emigre, a distinguished and irrepressible refugee from the conventional academic establishment. And it was during this last decade of his life at the New School that his underlying concern with the nature and order of civilization matured. He died in the midst of that work, en route--as he never stopped being, symbolically--to a conference on civilizations that he had organized in West Germany.

Yet these things that I have been trying to say about Ben cannot, and do not, touch his human complexity, his suffering, his vulnerability, his estrangement, his renowned idiosyncrasies, above all, his capacity for grace. What we have lost at the New School and in American intellectual life, as his colleagues here and abroad will testify, is a force of uncommon gravity.

What I have lost is a friend whom I have known for a generation, with whom I maintained an unbroken, sometimes unspoken dialogue. But, typically, my last, most vivid memory of Ben was his dancing a slow sarabande with the utmost deliberation with our three-year-old daughter, Sarah, who had simply gone to him without a word, taken his hand, and led him out to the center of the living room a few weeks ago, in his retreat at Montauk.

    
Stanley Diamond

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