Stanley Rothman - The End of the Experiment: The Rise of Cultural Elites and the Decline of Americas Civic Culture

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The End of the
Experiment

The End of the
Experiment

The Rise of Cultural Elites and the
Decline of Americas Civic Culture

Stanley Rothman

Althea Nagai, Robert Maranto, Matthew C.
Woessner, and David J. Rothman, editors

First published 2016 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 2016 by Taylor & Francis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2015015674

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rothman, Stanley, 1927- author.

The end of the experiment : the rise of cultural elites and the decline of Americas civic culture / Stanley Rothman; edited by Althea Nagai, Robert Maranto, Matthew Woessner, and David J. Rothman.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4128-6248-6 (acid-free paper) 1. Elite (Social sciences)--United States--History--20th century. 2. United States--Social conditions--1960-1980. 3. United States-Social conditions--1980-4. Political culture--United States. 5. New Left--United States--History. 6. Rothman, Stanley, 1927---Influence. I. Title.

HN90.E4R68 2015

305.520973--dc23

2015015674

ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-6248-6 (hbk)

Contents

by Robert Maranto

by Matthew Woessner

by Althea Nagai

(with Althea Nagai)

(with Althea Nagai)

(with Althea Nagai)

by Althea Nagai

by Stephen H. Balch

by April Kelly-Woessner

by David J. Rothman

Big Picture Social Science: Stanley Rothman and the American Experiment

Few social scientists have had the impact of Stanley Rothman, who passed away in 2011 after a half-century studying social phenomena, particularly American elites. Rothman (like Aaron Wildavsky, James Q. Wilson, Theodore J. Lowi, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, Irving Louis Horowitz, and a handful of other late twentieth century political scientists and political sociologists) was one of the last of the great social science renaissance men, spanning subfields and fields to ask big questions with depth, breadth, verve, and methodological rigor. Broadly educated, and with the life experiences common to members of the greatest generation, Rothman helped reshape how we view elites and the American regime. He represented the best of academia. I cannot think of comparable intellectual figures on the scene today.

When I ask my students what political science isand usually they have no earthly ideaI say it is what political scientists do. Of course a better answer is that political science applies social scientific methods to political phenomena, developing and testing theories (ideally interesting and nontrivial ones) about how politics works. The best political scientists systematically ask questions no one else dares ask. Their scholarship demands our attention. This was Stanley Rothman. To paraphrase Matthew 7:16, by their works you shall know them. I knew Rothmans work long before I knew him, and well enough to know that he was an ideal political scientist. Toward the end of his life, I came to know him as a person and to understand that he was not just a great political scientist but also a great collaborator and a good person. This was the point at which he transformed in my life from Rothman to Stanley. I got to play matchmaker for Stanley to collaborate on his last book (before this one) with Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner, two brilliant young scholars who will attest that Stanley was the ultimate meritocratic thinker, with no respect for rank or position, only for human decency and intellectual rigor. He was a mensch and a scholar.

Those terms fit Stanleys background. Like many of the greatest generation of American political scientists, he came from modest roots. His father was a cab driver who died of acute pancreatitis in Stanleys childhood, a tragedy from which he never fully recovered. Stanley spent his youth in material poverty, but intellectual wealth. Depression and World War II-era New York offered unparalleled class and intellectual mobility, when various strains of Marxism contended with various strains of liberalism, and when the eventual defeat of the former was by no means foreseen.

Stanley briefly served in the US Navy at the very end of World War II, mustering out without combat, and then returned to City College (now City University) of New York to complete his bachelors degree at a time when CCNY was a sort of blue-collar Harvard. Following an unsatisfactory year at Brown University, where he completed an MA, Stanley went on to the real Harvard as a graduate student and instructor, completing a dissertation on the English labor movement under the renowned Sam Beer. Becoming intellectually aware in this time and place gave Stanley the discipline and tools to approach a great variety of questions, understandingin a way that few of us dothat politics is not trivial.

Stanley belonged to a generation that witnessed the tens of millions of corpses piled high by fascist regimes, and tens of millions of corpses piled higher by Marxist regimes. Each ideology went from savior to horror in a single generation. Strangely, for many on the left, Marxism remains today more dream than nightmare. To paraphrase Orwell, some theories are so absurd that only intellectuals can believe them. Stanley was never a man of the rightI believe he rarely voted Republican. He was, rather, a humanist, a patriot, and a clear-eyed analyst. Stanley brooked no fantasies, and as one drawn to the important questions, he sought to understand how many intellectuals and still more pseudointellectuals were seduced by authoritarian, and later totalitarian, grand illusions.

This is, after all, one of the big questions of modern inquiry: how can so many smart and often decent people believe such silly, horrid things? Characteristically, Stanley explored this question through a range of disciplines and methods, and at least in part by placing himself in the mindset of those he studied. He produced an enormous quantity of clear, readable, methodologically rigorous work in his five decades as a social scientist, much of which warned about the growing gulf between elites and masses that endangered American democracy.

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