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Regional Oral History Office University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California Philip Selznick An Oral History with Philip Selznick Conducted by Roger Cotterrell January 28-January 30, 2002 For the Center for the Study of Law and Society University of California, Berkeley Copyright © 2010 by The Regents of the University of California Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ********************************* All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Philip Selznick, dated June 17, 2010. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Excerpts up to 1000 words from this interview may be quoted for publication without seeking permission as long as the use is non-commercial and properly cited. Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to The Bancroft Library, Head of Public Services, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should follow instructions available online at http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/collections/cite.html It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Philip Selznick “An Oral History with Philip Selznick” conducted by Roger Cotterrell, 2002, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2010. iii Interview History—Philip Selznick Philip Selznick founded the Center for the Study of Law and Society at UC Berkeley in 1961 and served as its chair for eleven years. As Martin Krygier wrote in the Introduction to Legality and Community: On the Intellectual Legacy of Philip Selznick (Robert A. Kagan, Martin Krygier and Kenneth Winston, eds., Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), Selznick's works "span over 60 years and several disciplinary domains. He has been a major figure in each of the fields he has touched... general sociology, the sociology of organizations and institutions, industrial sociology, sociology of law, and moral and social (or public) sociology." At UC Berkeley from 1952 until his retirement in 1984, Selznick founded not only the Center for the Study of Law and Society, but also the Jurisprudence & Social Policy Program (including the PhD program and undergraduate Legal Studies program), and served as chair of the Department of Sociology. In January 2002 the Center for the Study of Law and Society invited Roger Cotterrell to Berkeley from Queen Mary, University of London, to interview Selznick. Cotterrell, a leading figure in the sociology of law in England and internationally, is the author of Emile Durkheim: Law in a Moral Domain, The Politics of Jurisprudence, and Law's Community: Legal Theory in Sociological Perspective. The transcribed interviews were reviewed and lightly edited by Roger Cotterrell, and reviewed for accuracy by Philip Selznick. We were and are grateful for the advice and assistance of Ann Lage and the Bancroft Library's Regional Oral History Office throughout this process, and our thanks to Mim Eisenberg for her professional transcription. Excerpts of these interviews, selected by Jiri Priban, were published as “Selznick Interviewed: Philip Selznick in Conversation with Roger Cotterrell,” in the Journal of Law and Society, Volume 31, Number 3, September 2004 , pp. 291-317. Rosann Greenspan Executive Director Center for Law and Society June 24, 2010 ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW Interviewee: Philip Selznick, Interview #1 Interviewed by: Roger Cotterrell Date of interview: January 28, 2002 Transcribed by: Mim Eisenberg/WordCraft, Inc.; December 2002 Edited by: Roger Cotterrell; April 2003 [Begin Tape 1A.] ROGER COTTERRELL: Oral history interview with Philip Selznick by Roger Cotterrell, 28th of January, 2002 [at Philip Selznick’s house, Berkeley], interview number one, tape number one.I wanted to ask you a few things about early years, family background and so on. I think I got some facts, which I hope are right. You were born 8th of January, 1919. PHILIP SELZNICK: Right. COTTERRELL: New Jersey. SELZNICK: Newark, New Jersey. COTTERRELL: Your father was Louis Schacter? SELZNICK: Louis Schacter, yes. He was an immigrant. I don’t know really much about him. My mother and father were divorced when I was still a very small child. I was a year old or something like that. COTTERRELL: And your mother, Etta Bragar [pronouncing it BRAH-gur]. SELZNICK: Bragar [pronouncing it BRAY-gur], B-r-a-g-a-r, yes. She was also an immigrant, from Russia. I think he was an immigrant from Romania. There was some scandal, and they had a divorce and my mother remarried to a fellow whose last name was Selznick, my stepfather. I was still quite young then, four or five years old. COTTERRELL: They were divorced, according to what I read from [Douglas] Webb’s paper, in 1921, so you must have just been two. SELZNICK: Is that right, ‘21? That sounds right, yes. COTTERRELL: So your mother remarried. SELZNICK: Right. 1 COTTERRELL: And his first name, your stepfather’s first name? SELZNICK: Manuel, M-a-n-u-e-l. COTTERRELL: Selznick. So you adopted his surname. SELZNICK: Yes, it wasn’t a very explicit act. I think when I was sent to school, that was the name they put down, and that’s the name I’v had. I’ve always been a little bit alienated from it. I’m not comfortable with it. COTTERRELL: Why is that? SELZNICK: Well, because I never did feel that this was really my name. I never felt that the other was really my name, either. I think for a time, when I was graduating from college, I thought of changing my name to-- the only family I really knew was my mother’s family, and so I thought of taking the name Bragar, but at that point I think I felt, Well, no, that would be hurtful if I did that, so I didn’t do it. As it turned out, it didn’t matter because a couple of years later, they got divorced too, my mother and stepfather, so it really wouldn’t have mattered. But we play the cards we’re dealt, and one of the cards I was dealt was this name. COTTERRELL: Right. I think your stepfather worked in the garment industry. SELZNICK: Yes, he was a cap maker. He worked throughout the Depression, even while we had this store in Newark. He went to work every day. I guess that’s how they managed to survive without extreme poverty. I mean, there wasn’t any money around, but it wasn’t that extreme. COTTERRELL: So you really grew up in very much a working-class family? SELZNICK: Yes, very much so, yes. COTTERRELL: Did you feel as you were growing up that it was a pretty tough life, that it was hard? SELZNICK: Not really, no. I became something of a bookworm rather early in my life, and so I think that I lived in this world of books. I read every one of [Alexandre] Dumas’ books. I read a great deal-- I’m talking about when I was, I don’t know, ten, eleven or twelve years old. I read a lot of things like the Greek myths and so on, and I was a regular patron of the library. I think that helped to define me more than anything else. It was the world of reading and I was able to read, and so I think I probably gradually distanced myself from family life. I mean, it was there. Of course, you’re married to it, but it was not-- I mean, this was a struggling world. I think there wasn’t a lot of strong sense of much to be gained from the family as such, although I did relate to some people in my mother’s family, like a couple of my uncles. One uncle, especially, whom I visited. I had a cousin, one of his sons, who was more or less my age, a little bit younger, and so we were good friends. So I would visit there. COTTERRELL: But you said your stepfather and mother were divorced fairly soon, so the center of your family was your mother in those years? [Both accept refreshments.] 2 SELZNICK: Yes. My relation with my stepfather was always very distant. There was no real connection there. COTTERRELL: I wanted to ask you whether you felt your childhood and school days were a happy time. SELZNICK: Mixed. [Speaks with food in his mouth.] I think they were kind of mindless times, years. You just did what was expected of you, and you didn’t think too much about it. I was always aware of being somewhat marginal. COTTERRELL: Was it a political household? Political interests? SELZNICK: No. No. COTTERRELL: And a religious one? SELZNICK: Not religious, either, or at least minimally, conventionally religious, enough so that-- respectability as a Jewish family would require that a boy would be sent to Hebrew school and prepare for his Bar Mitzvah.