Thirty-seven: The Widening Horizon

One of Paul Lyon’s notable characteristics was his ability to pepper almost every encounter with some information that one did not know, though one frequently felt that one ought to know it. I remember on first meeting Paul in the fall of 1996, standing at the top of the stairs from the I-wing gym (I didn’t know at the time that this would be one of the places we would most frequently bump into each other, Paul holding his gym clothes), he informed me about a trip he had made to England in the 1960s during which he had stayed with distant relatives in the large and extensive Jewish community of Leeds. Well, of course, the fact that there was a large Jewish community in Leeds was news to me, and almost every subsequent encounter followed in a similar vein as I learned about historians and academics he knew (and I should have), about Philip Roth and Newark in the 50s, about incidents at the college, and on and on.

One name that came up frequently was E.H. Carr, an English historian we history undergraduates all read in our first weeks at British universities. I had some recollection of his work – What is History? – remembering mainly the outlines of his various points about the study of history, and the fact that these fit loosely within a Marxist approach; but I had not gone back to it, and the finer points Paul made about Carr were, truth to tell, frequently more opaque for me than they perhaps should have been. But I got enough of a sense from Paul, during many of these conversations, that Carr had been a guiding light for him in shaping his approach to his research and writing.

Added to this, I also knew that Paul did not believe that there was a clear divide between his work as a historian and his commitment to social work. It was no surprise to me when I read this in his self-evaluation letter for his application for the Distinguished Professorship. He believed that the two parts of his work were linked, and he felt, not surprisingly, that Stockton was a place where he could realize his vision of himself as a Social Work Historian, or a Historian Social Worker. The present informed his understanding of the past and his understanding of the past shaped his action in the present. He was a little mystified, I believe, when it was suggested that he wasn’t a real historian or not a real social work professor; he believed he was both and more. He would also have been mystified by the need to explain how a historian ended up as a social worker, or how a social worker ended up writing so much history.

Well, it turns out that Edward Hallett Carr's work may have been an inspiration for this vision of himself as crossing boundaries of disciplines in the way that he did. One of the wonderful parts of the memorial service for Paul was the invitation to go up to his office and pick out a book of his to take away and keep as a memento. You just know that he would have loved this idea! And, I imagine that many others like me went into his office wanting to find something that spoke to them directly, or in some way brought them and Paul into some form of connection. Well, I was having great difficulty – we had talked about so many topics and had many overlaps in our work – until my eyes looked up at the top shelf where Paul kept his volumes on the study of history.  There in the midst of these books, was a hardback copy of Carr’s What is History? published in 1967. Once I had seen it, it took me no time whatsoever to choose this book, as I certainly felt a compulsion at that moment to find out more about Paul’s view of this discipline that we had inhabited together.

I certainly was not disappointed in my decision.  When I got home and opened the book I found many passages highlighted, which, it seemed to me, placed a lot of Paul’s comments in context and helped me to understand better what he felt he was doing in his work. I thought I would take note of a few in case you are also interested.

The first comment that seemed to conjure up Paul for me was this: “Great history is written precisely when the historian’s vision of the past is illuminated by insights into the problems of the present” (p.44).  Here, already, you can see Paul engaging both past and present simultaneously, feeling his way around the present in social work, in part to help him understand history better.

But, a longer passage (which Paul had marked both in yellow magic marker and with two bold ink lines down the margin), struck me as significant, in terms of the relationship between social work and history – if one were to substitute social work for sociology in this contrast with history:

This is perhaps the place for a brief remark on the relations between history and sociology. Sociology at present faces two opposite dangers – the danger of becoming ultra-theoretical and the danger of becoming ultra-empirical. The first is the danger of losing itself in abstract and meaningless generalizations about society in general. Society with a big S is as misleading a fallacy as History with a big H. This danger is brought nearer by those who assign to sociology the exclusive task of generalizing from the unique events recorded by history: it has even been suggested that sociology is distinguished from history by having “laws.” The other danger is that foreseen by Karl Mannheim almost a generation ago, and very much present today, of a sociology “split into a series of discrete technical problems of social readjustment. Sociology is concerned with the historical societies every one of which is unique and molded by specific historical antecedents and conditions. But the attempt to avoid generalization and interpretation by confining oneself to so-called “technical” problems of enumeration and analysis is merely to become the unconscious apologist of a static society. Sociology, if it is to become a fruitful study, must, like history, concern itself with the relation between the unique and general. But it must also become dynamic – a study not of society at rest (for no such society exists), but of social change and development. For the rest, I would only say that the more sociological history becomes, and the more historical sociology becomes, the better for both.  Let the frontier between them be kept wide open for two-way traffic. (83-84)

I can hear Paul talking about the need not to become “an apologist of a static society,” of the need to understand that society is not “at rest,” and the need for “two-way traffic” between disciplines; and I can imagine him feeling that the two parts of his work strengthened each other.

The next passage speaks more to Paul’s ability to write about people with whom he didn’t necessarily agree, as in his last book on Conservatives and Conservatism:

Let us therefore reject the notion of the historian as a hanging judge, and turn to the more difficult but more profitable question of the passing of moral judgments not on individuals, but on events, institutions, or policies of the past. These are the important judgments of the historian; and those who insist so fervently on the moral condemnation of the individual sometimes unconsciously provide an alibi for whole groups and societies. (100)

And the Paul, who adapted to new ways of looking at things, and he certainly did, could be found in this statement:

The abstract standard or value, divorced from society and divorced from history, is as much an illusion as the abstract individual. The serious historian is the one who recognizes the historically conditioned character of all values, not the one who claims for his own values an objectivity beyond history. (108)

The last chapter of What is History? is called “The Widening Horizon,” and I think Paul had really taken this chapter to heart. The chapter talks about the limitations of Hegel (imagining that history ended in the present), the failure of Marx (in believing that it ended in a particular kind of proletarian revolution), and it praised Freud for his contribution to our understanding of history (once again highlighting the significance of interdisciplinarity for Paul). Freud, Paul highlighted, “has encouraged the historian to examine himself and his own position in history, the motives – perhaps hidden motives – which have guided his choice of theme, or period and his selection and interpretation of the facts, the national and social background which has determined his angle of vision, the conception of the future which shapes his conceptions of the past.” But, for Carr, and I think for Paul, history was about the future – that widening horizon. It was about endeavoring to understand the past in order to make the future better. You clearly got the sense of this in the well-crafted film of Paul teaching screened during the memorial service. He outlined the histories of slavery and some of the negative aspects of the American experience, talked about some of the achievements (and the idealism of the “City upon a Hill”), and gave a clear sense of how he felt things ought to be. This was the idealist in him; not the Hegelian or Marxist idealist, who thinks he knows how things should end up looking, but the simple humanist; one who looks forward to the future because he sees the possibility of making things better than they now are, however imperfect and in need of change they will remain.

My very last conversation with Paul occurred the day before he went into hospital, though he didn’t mention that he was going to be having a check-up of any kind. We talked about the lecture engagements in China that I had helped arrange for him, and about his hopes for American Studies at Stockton, and we talked about me writing a letter for his Distinguished Professor file. We then happened to fall into conversation about the former Yugoslavia and about the dissident intellectual, Mihailo Markovic, whom we both had known at Penn, just before Paul started at Stockton (when he was teaching history). Markovic, who ended up being severely beaten (Paul informed me) for breaking with the Milosovic regime, had advocated challenging theory with praxis. He was a dissident primarily because he wouldn’t fall in line with the orthodox views of his country’s rulers. I could see that Paul had really imbibed a good deal of this spirit, wanting to insure that his own work was grounded in some form of engagement, and I remember saying as he left (he had other meetings to go to) that we should get lunch and talk about it some more.

Paul was always going to leave some things unsaid; he had so much to say that things would inevitably be left for further discussion. I think I like that feeling of being left in mid-conversation – perhaps, in part, because it allows me to make up his lines in future imagined dialogues, lines that I will inevitably agree with! – but more because it keeps a connection with him going, like reopening the pages of What is History? And after delving into this book again, I think it is clear that Paul endeavored to widen the horizon for everyone he came into contact with; and he succeeded with so many!