The Polish Peasant in Oberlin and Chicago the Intellectual Trajectory of W

Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 DOI 10.1007/s12108-008-9045-y

The Polish Peasant in Oberlin and Chicago The Intellectual Trajectory of W. I. Thomas

Andrew Abbott & Rainer Egloff

Published online: 26 June 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008

Abstract This paper examines the historical sources for W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s celebrated monograph on The Polish Peasant in Europe and America.It first characterizes the work itself, a monumental interpretive casebook of largely biographical material about individuals and groups. It then seeks the origins of these qualities, looking first at Thomas’s prior work, then at the personal influence of Florian Znaniecki and Robert Park. Since these sources do not sufficiently account for the unique qualities of the work, we then turn to three other important sources: 1) the casebook tradition in the social reform literature and beyond, 2) the psychiatric concept of the life history, and 3) the literary sources that Thomas had taught in his prior career as an English professor. We close by identifying the autobiographical roots of the work in Thomas’s own life history.

Keywords Chicago School . Life History. Casebook . Literature . Psychiatry . Personality . Social Change . W. I. Thomas . Adolf Meyer

Long retrospect tells us that Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America was the defining work of early American sociology. Its theories of social organization and social personality sustained the Chicago School in the 1920s. Its massive documentation set new standards in methodology. Its focus on immigration

All manuscript references in text are given in the format used by the various collections themselves. The format is discussed at first usage. Note also that all references to Adolf Meyer’s works are given to the Collected Papers (Winters 1950–1952), rather than to the original sources, for ease of reference. To save space, standard works (e.g., the novels and other literary works mentioned in “The Literary Framework of the Polish Peasant”) have not been listed here. A. Abbott (*) University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected]

R. Egloff Collegium Helveticum, Zurich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] 218 Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 captured a central feature of contemporary society. Indeed, The Polish Peasant was one of the six works chosen—on the basis of wide consultation—by a Social Science Research Council panel of the mid 1930s seeking the most important social science works published after World War One.1 Yet viewed in prospect, The Polish Peasant seems harder to understand. Thomas’s prior work did not concern immigrants. It did not use personal documents. It did not focus on social personality. Quite the contrary, after a biological phase in the mid 1890s, Thomas spent his first dozen years on the Chicago faculty (1895–1907) researching and teaching the comparative ethnology of non-industrial societies. Although he always retained his concern with psychology broadly understood, his substantive focus was on social customs and practices, and his theory of society was the loosely-theorized institutionalism characteristic of American anthropology before Boas. Not only are there no obvious precedents in the work of Thomas, there are few if any in social science more generally. To be sure, one can find surface resemblances here and there. But partial precursors do not account for the work as a whole. The origins of The Polish Peasant remain an enduring puzzle: where exactly did this magisterial work come from? In this paper, we sketch an answer to that question. We begin with an analysis of the formal structure, substantive interests, and methodological approach of the work itself. We then turn to what seem the probable sources for those qualities. As we shall show, a number of Thomas’s past and present selves came together into a final product that, although flawed in many ways, was nonetheless a comprehensive and in its own way cohesive work. The task is not easy. Sources on Thomas are few and scattered. His spectacular departure from Chicago in April 1918 made him a somewhat mythical figure to generations of sociologists: a famous colleague without an academic position, a path-breaking scholar who was a bon-vivant, a collector of data who left no papers, a restless intellectual who played golf daily. As a result, much of what is “known” about Thomas is in fact legend.2

1 For the SSRC reference, see the foreword by E. E. Day in Blumer 1939. Berle and Means’s The Modern Corporation is the other of the six whose reputation has endured. 2 The best printed sources on Thomas’s life are Faris 1948, Young 1963, Janowitz 1966, Deegan and Burger 1981, Murray 1988, and Haerle 1991. Although the unpublished E. Thomas 1986 is not mainly biographical, it discusses Thomas’s life as well, and its archival coverage is by far the most comprehensive of any source to date. Another useful source is Luther L. Bernard’s draft recollection of Thomas (Original in the Bernard archives at the Pennsylvania State University, copy in the Morris Janowitz Papers at UCSCRC [MJP], Box 80, Folder 5, hereafter referred to as Bernard n.d.). Thomas’s “official” autobiographical document, written at Bernard’s request in 1928 and published in 1973 (Baker 1973), is short, vague, and undoubtedly ironic: the bucolic countryside he describes in his early childhood was in fact recovering from front-line status in the Civil War, the supposedly rustic Thomas in fact learned Latin and Greek early enough to be teaching them at the University of Tennessee at age twenty, and so on. Readers of this piece, desperate for information on Thomas, have taken it largely at face value. But read in the context of Thomas’s subtle readings of other people’s autobiographies, it looks dangerously close to parody. His own opinion of it, given in a letter to Kimball Young 2 years later (UCSCRC Miscellaneous Archives, W. I. Thomas [hereafter MAWIT], WIT to KY 4 May 1930) was contemptuous: “Bernard asked me to do something of this kind.…I did it. I would not do it again. It bored me.” Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 219

This legendary quality is complicated by a number of personal idiosyncracies of Thomas as a thinker. Most important, Thomas never cared much about the ownership of ideas, in particular about their attribution to him. Although this disattention to ownership shows most clearly in his many collaborations, both published and abortive, it is evident in many other ways. He was clearly embarrassed by the longstanding debate over who really wrote which parts of The Polish Peasant.3 He made no public outcry about the false attribution of Old World Traits Transplanted to Robert Park and Herbert Miller. He offered to give the half-done Unadjusted Girl research to Miriam Van Waters with no strings attached (WIT to ESD 17 Feb 1921, Ethel Sturges Dummer papers (ESDP)). It is characteristic of Thomas that his famous apophthegm “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” is of contested attribution (Thomas and Thomas 1928:572) and that his only major institutional contribution to American social science—the foundation of the “culture and personality” school through his work for the Social Science Research Council in the late 1920s and early 1930s—is almost completely forgotten.4 The Van Waters affair underscores another of W. I. Thomas’s qualities—his vagabondism. The reason he gave to Ethel Sturges Dummer—his personal “funding agency”—for offering to send Van Waters all his Unadjusted Girl research materials was that he was becoming so interested in psychoanalysis that he wanted to write a book about it. Indeed, Thomas changed intellectual points of view steadily over his lifetime (see Murray 1988 for an elegant quantitative analysis), much as he changed disciplines (from classics/philology to English literature to folk psychology to sociology) and residences (from Elk Garden, Virginia, to Morristown, Tennessee, to Knoxville to Berlin to Göttingen to Oberlin to Chicago to New York to Berkeley, with several lengthy European tours [1896, 1910–1911, 1912–1913] thrown in). Finally, Thomas was never a systematic theoretician, aiming to build a stable, enduring scheme. Indeed, we shall make a strong case in this paper that Thomas never lost the profoundly interpretive frame of mind that came from his years as an English professor. He used concepts eclectically and often contradictorily to evolve a

3 “Dear Dorothy,” Thomas wrote to his new fiancee in January 1935, “as I said in our conversation, I can’t get much interested in the problem of the precise authorship of the Polish Peasant.” (UCSCRC MAWIT, WIT to DST, Jan 1935). At the end of the letter, he promised her that he would publicly call her the sole author of The Child in America (jointly published 8 years before) if she wanted it. 4 Anthropologists periodically rediscover Thomas’s role in culture and personality studies. See Murray 1988 and Darnell 1990. As for the “Thomas theorem” as Merton called it, it is also attributed to Dorothy Swaine Thomas (as coauthor of Thomas and Thomas 1928) and to Znaniecki (see E. Thomas 1986:327 citing Howard Becker). The phraseology “real in fact and real in their consequences” occurs already in TPP (I:295). The underlying idea first appears in Thomas in the concept of “definition of the situation,” which dates from Thomas 1917, although one can find hints of it earlier. For a long and self-involved account of the whole “Thomas theorem” affair, see Merton 1995. Thomas’s remark about Old World Traits Transplanted is striking “You know darned well how much I had to do with Old World Traits Transplanted but do you expect me to tell you for publication? The men concerned there were my friends, and acted friendly. I needed the money.” (MAWIT, WIT to Kimball Young, 4 May 1930, denying Young’s request for Thomas’s autobiography in no uncertain terms). “I don’t regard myself as important,” Thomas continued. “I don’t want to be noticed. I don’t care whether a word appears about me in print living or dead.” See also Raushenbush 1979:92. 220 Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 way of thinking about the world, a way of interpreting social reality. It is very significant that Thomas never used the word “theory” to refer to conceptual systems, but rather “standpoint.” For him, ideas were a way to interpret reality, and he made do with whatever was at hand. For all these reasons it is quixotic to try to discover Thomas’s “real ideas” about this or that. There was no one Thomas, even at one point in time, much less over time. (In the early 1920s Thomas was simultaneously discussing behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and spiritualism with various interlocutors.) Nor was it ever clear where “Thomas” ended and his collaborators—Florian Znaniecki, Dorothy Swaine Thomas, Robert Park—began. Or which exact source gave him his psychology— James or Dewey or Baldwin or Steinthal or Wundt. Or his anthropology—Tylor or Boas or Westermarck or Morgan. He was—in his own phrase—a “creative man,” an evolving thing, shifting his attitudes with times and places and people. On this argument, the puzzle with Thomas is to figure out what if any were the continuities of his life, for it is plain from decades of critical literature that those continuities probably do not lie in his theories, his methodology, his epistemology, or his substantive ideas. We aim therefore to read The Polish Peasant outside these usual frameworks and to look elsewhere for the sources of its peculiar qualities. Why should the reader care, or, put another way, how is Thomas relevant today? His elusive theories provide no intellectual sound bites. His endless text frightens readers of slim paperbacks. His multiform analysis identifies no central independent variables. Rather, the case for Thomas’s importance is an historical one. He was from 1910 to 1940 one of the half dozen most influential minds in American sociology. His work shaped that of dozens of students and followers. Most important, his career captures a phase of American intellectual life that is all too easy to read teleologically, as an imperfectly realized version of our own. It was a time when the social sciences were not very scientific in fact or even in intent, when disciplinary associations still included hundreds of amateur scholars and do-gooders, when funding often came through direct relationships with wealthy patrons. Thomas was important in himself and in his time, not because he was a precursor to the present. Reading Thomas carefully enables us to understand how a major intellectual project came together in that time, before sociology had been concretized into the fixed forms now taught in theory and methods classes. The fact is that several generations of readers found The Polish Peasant a uniquely compelling piece of sociology. To understand why that should have been in the case, we must understand the intellectual project that it brought to fruition.

The Polish Peasant

Publication

The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (hereafter TPP) is a work of some 2200 pages, originally published in five volumes (Thomas and Znaniecki 1918–1921). Its Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 221 publication was complicated by the fact that Thomas left the University of Chicago in April 1918, midway through its production. Discovered in a downtown hotel with an Indiana woman whose husband was in service overseas, Thomas was charged under the Mann Act and a local hotel registration ordinance. The university fired him days later.5 Thomas’s subsequent acquittal put the university in the position of having fired him without cause. Moreover, it may have been under some pressure from Miss Helen Culver, who was not only the chief funder of The Polish Peasant project but also a major donor to the University.6 As a result, the university had to make a fairly generous financial settlement, under which Thomas received the plates and remaining copies of TPP (as well as of his earlier books Sex and Society and Source Book for Social Origins). The remaining three volumes of TPP were published by Richard Badger, a Boston publisher who operated on what would now be called a vanity basis, but whose list included some fine poetry as well as some

5 Thomas was fired by a special Trustees‘ Meeting of 16 April 1918, the decision confirmed by a regular Trustees‘ Meeting of 14 May 1918. (Trustees‘ Minutes, UCSCRC [hereafter TM] 10:424–8; the notification letter was 16 April, J. S. Dickerson to WIT, in UCSCRC Board of Trustees, Secretary, Correspondence, Addenda, Volume S, p. 275.). Thomas’s correspondence with Ethel Sturges Dummer provides the best guide to this episode beyond the sensational newspaper articles. (Nearly all the Thomas- Dummer letters are in a continuous chronological series [which has been filmed], so we have generally omitted folder numbers. The lone exceptions are those letters exchanged exactly at the time of the firing, which are located in the folders on the 1917 Suggestions project [folders 233 and 333].) The Thomas- Dummer correspondence shows that Thomas’s work for the Carnegie Foundation antedated the episode and thus was not cooked up by his friends to give him work, as has been sometimes assumed (WIT to ESD 9 Ap 1918). It also shows that Mrs. Dummer, who would become Thomas’s main funder for the next eight years and who had already known him well since the mid-teens, got over the episode very quickly. She found out about it from her family (she was at the Dummers’ house in Coronado, California at the time; see the exchanges with her husband and her sister Marion Dauchy) but although disappointed and shocked, set it aside in the welter of other important events—the news of the Western front, the birth of her namesake grandchild, and the impending imprisonment of a friend’s son for conscientious objection. (Her sister’s husband remarked “that Thomas was usurping the prerogative of an officer. If an officer had run away with the wife of a professor, that would have been romance. This is a mess” [MFD to ESD 24 April replying to Mrs. Dummer’s long note about her thoughts of the affair, unfortunately lost]). Thomas himself wrote her somewhat sheepishly on 9 May 1918 offering to relinquish all connection and forwarding a copy of his official statement. Her reply of 24 July 1918 conveyed her thoughts (in a separate document, apparently lost) but tactfully forwarded an architectural book concerning places like the City Club where the Dummers and Thomases had met. By Thomas’s August reply, it is clear that they are completely on their pre-incident footing; indeed, Mrs. Dummer would become one of Thomas’s principal interlocutors for the next decade. A somewhat darker view of the matter shows in Mrs. Thomas’s letter to Mrs. Dummer of 13 Nov 1919 referring to her inability to understand the episode (“I long ago stopped trying to understand the other lady and to pierce the mystery of how she came to be”), but says that her husband “has developed a touching dependence on me.” But it is striking that the harsh public condemnation of Thomas is not to be found in the correspondence of the women who knew him best. 6 Miss Culver gave about $40,000 toward The Polish Peasant project (TM 10:570). This particular figure would seem to be Miss Culver’s own recollection, and there is little reason to doubt her formidable monetary skills. The original arrangement with the Trustees had been for up to $7,000 per year for 5 years (Haerle 1991). Thomas habitually used the figure $50,000, and it has become proverbial in the Thomas literature. The monies beyond the planned $35,000—whatever their amount—were most likely subsidies for publication, as we note below. Miss Culver gave the University well over a million dollars in the 1890s, largely in endowments for biology buildings and research. 222 Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 high quality medical and psychological textbooks and journals. Thomas’s agreement with Badger has long since disappeared, but Badger issued Sex and Society, Source Book for Social Origins, and Volumes 3, 4, and 5 of TPP under his own imprint after 1918. By late in the 1920s Thomas was able to negotiate a new edition of TPP in two volumes, reorganized and repaginated, from Knopf (Thomas and Znaniecki 1927).7 The format of TPP was greatly constrained by costs. The original plan had been for eight volumes, a design quite different from the five-volume version finally published or the reorganized two-volume edition from Knopf. Most noticeably, it concerned Poland as a whole, not just the peasantry.8

Mid 1916 Plan Actual 1918–1921 Vol 1 Introduction to peasant society Methodological note introduction to peasant society First six series of peasant family letters Vol 2 “Primary group” (family) Balance of peasant letters Vol 3 “Disorganized” autobiography “Disorganized” autobiography Vol 4 Reorganization in Poland Disorganization and reorganization in Poland Vol 5 “Organized” autobiography Disorganization and reorganization in America Vol 6 Nobility Vol 7 Bourgeoisie Vol 8 Synthesis of Polish culture

The press was skeptical about the financial viability of the longer plan, and even under the five-volume plan eventually accepted, subsidies of several thousand dollars were required from Thomas to pay for composition and plates (the press planned to pay the rest, hope to break even, and return Thomas a 25% royalty). The

7 The University of Chicago Press files (UCPressP) are in UCSCRC, and contain files on all of Thomas’s Chicago books. The Badger papers (RGBP) are at Harvard’s Houghton Library. They cover only the last few years of the Badger enterprise (late 1920s and early 1930s), but make the vanity basis of Badger’s arrangements with authors very clear. In addition to publishing TPP, Badger continued the publication of Sex and Society and Source Book for Social Origins. Somewhat confusingly, he used the original copyright dates (1907 and 1909 respectively) as if he had held the copyrights at those times, even though he acquired the copyrights only on 20 November 1918 (UCPressP 451:7) and though there is no indication anywhere that Thomas had any direct contact with him before 1918. (Thomas would have known of Badger in 1918 through people like Adolf Meyer, who was on the board of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, a Badger publication.) Although Sex and Society dropped out of sight quickly (after a large initial sale), Badger printed another 1000 copies of the Source Book as late as November 1926. (RGB to MPC 27 Nov 26, RGBP item 378). Badger’s fragmentary invoice records (RGBP item 398) indicate that the book was still selling five to ten copies a month in the early 1930s. In 1927, when Thomas arranged for a new edition of TPP from Knopf, he had apparently forgotten about the transfer of the copyrights of the first two volumes (see D.P. Bean to WIT 3 Nov 27 and related correspondence in UCPressP 451:7). 8 The Press files on The Polish Peasant contain repeated and elaborate discussions and negotiations about the design, cost, and ultimate disposal of the materials. Thomas sold well: Sex and Society sold 3892 copies in its first 10 years and Source Book 2175 in its first seven (UCPressP 451:5 and 451:6). The TPP files (UCPressP 451:7) indicate that the case-book format was to a certain extent the Press’s idea, as a way of saving money by putting the letters in 10-point. (ACM to NM 4 May 1916) An undated typescript in UCPressP 451:7 between items for 4 May and 28 Nov gives the eight volume plan reported in text. The decision to go to the five volume format was made by mid 1917 and seems to have been largely cost- based, at least on the Press side. Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 223 three Badger volumes were no doubt published on a straight vanity basis: the entire cost advanced and profits to be shared by author and publisher.9

Structure and Content

The book that resulted from this complicated process has a number of sections, which—as the various reorganizings of it show—could be arranged in a variety of ways. The first main section concerned the “primary-group society,” by which Thomas and Znaniecki meant a society in which the individual personalities of members were largely governed by the rules of primary group (in this case, extended family) organization. This analysis was supported by discussion of over 700 letters written to Polish immigrants to America by their families at home. These had been elicited by advertisement in Polish newspapers in Chicago. Thomas and Znaniecki paid from 10 to 20 cents per page for them (TPP 1:400; Wladek Wiszniewski reported 10 to 15 cents, see TPP:2222–3; 20 years later, Thomas recalled 10 cents [WIT to DST Jan 1935].) The letters were transcribed, translated, and then printed in series by family (in some cases there are dozens of letters involving a single family), each series preceded by the authors’ commentary on it. Like all the documentary data in TPP, these letters were set in ten-point type, both to set them off from the main text and to save money. This format was standard in medical and other casebooks. The “primary group” analysis—in today’s terminology the analysis of the traditional society—took up the first two volumes of TPP. Volume Four was an analysis of disorganization and reorganization in Poland. Here the data were stories and letters from local newspapers in Poland, collected on extended trips to the field. These varied from stories about crimes or schools or radical groups to complaints about new and old values. They were loosely organized around institutions such as the family, community, church, manor, press, and cooperative. But the discussion never treated these institutions as fixed systems of rules in breakdown (as in modern institutionalism), but rather as recipes that were enacted and changed and translated into new things under the impetus of shifting values and attitudes. Volume 5 gave the same kind of analysis, but of disorganization and reorganization in America. Here the data were similarly diverse. On the “organization” side were

9 On the eight volume plan, see also WIT to ESD 6 June 1915, ESDP. Neither the amount nor the source of the subsidies to the University of Chicago Press is known. An approach to Miss Culver was proposed by Press Director Laing and Thomas, but vetoed by President Harry Pratt Judson, (GJL to HPJ 28 Nov 16 with penciled reply, UCPressP 451:7). Perhaps Miss Culver was approached by Thomas himself, since the Thomases knew her well enough for Mrs. Thomas to stay with her in Florida on occasion (Helen Culver to Jane Addams 18 Mar 1922, Jane Addams Papers, Series I, Box 9, Swarthmore College Peace Collection). It is also unclear who advanced the money for the Badger volumes, which must have cost $5,000 at least. Thomas’s financial settlement with the University brought him some cash but surely not enough. The obvious candidate is Mrs. Dummer, who had known Thomas since the early teens at least and who bankrolled him through the period 1918–1926. But her papers show no sign of any dealings with Richard Badger. Note that in point of fact, the University of Chicago Press published the first two volumes on a basis only slightly different from Badger’s: Thomas took most of the risks through the subsidies. It should however be noted that these subsidies were not particularly unusual. Many or even most monographs in this period were published at the writer’s expense. For example, at this time all Chicago dissertations were, if not otherwise published, printed in multiple copies at the author’s expense for the library’s use in its exchange relations with other libraries. 224 Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 records of various local churches and of the Polish National Alliance and other large- scale civic and religious organizations. On the “disorganization” side were records from social service agencies, the legal aid society, the criminal and juvenile courts, and the coroner’s office. By comparison with Volume 4, the “American volume” was relatively heavy on interpretation, although documents still make up the majority of it. Volume 3 of TPP contained the life history of a single individual, Wladek Wiszniewski, a young man of peasant origins who became an apprentice, then a journeyman, and eventually a master baker, before ultimately fleeing to America to escape his siblings’ plan to make him the unique support of their aging and rather exploitative parents. This 200-page document is preceded by a 100-page introduction and punctuated by continuous commentary and interpretation in footnotes. It is the most readable and in many ways the most persuasive of the book’s volumes, above all for its exacting portrayal of a particular consciousness and a set of social worlds completely foreign to most readers at the time or since. The series was completed by a Methodological Note, written when the two first volumes were completed, but placed at the beginning of the published text. The Methodological Note comprised three main sections: a general discussion of the philosophy of science, a formal theory of the relation of individual and group psychologies resting on the concepts of “attitude” and “social value,” and an investigation of the implications of that theory for the organization of the various social sciences. The argument developed in the Methodological Note (and repeated in the introduction to Wladek’s life history) provided a conceptual vocabulary for the reciprocal structuring of individuals and social groups in a process of social becoming. Unlike the corresponding argument of Thomas’s good friend George Herbert Mead, this framework was concretely anchored in particular social actualities; to the Thomas social psychology corresponded an actual sociology—a theory of organization, disorganization, and reorganization—which was combined with a dynamic view of social motivation to provide a comprehensive framework for understanding social life.10 Despite its claims, the argument of the Methodological Note was not causal or predictive. Indeed, in the context of the larger work, its scientistic framing seems quite adventitious. As actually used through the text, the “theory” of the Methodological Note is a sophisticated set of interpretive categories—what Thomas called a standpoint. It is used now to interpret a broken home, now to show the foundations of clergy power in Poland, now to recount the peculiar transformations of social values in the crucible of social change. The real power of the framework emerges only gradually, from its endless repetition in analyses of the particular materials that constitute the majority of the text, analyses that bring the reader ultimately to that first-hand sense of individuals and groups in the sweep of history that is characteristic of novels like War and Peace. Indeed, posing the question “what is the basic intellectual contribution of The Polish Peasant?” is more or less

10 Because the Knopf edition is the more widely available one (both in its original printing and in a Dover reprint in 1958), all citations to TPP, unless otherwise noted, are to this, the second edition. The Knopf edition combined the first two volumes of the original edition into Volume I. Knopf Volume II contained the other three volumes of the original, but in the order IV, V, III, that is, with Wladek’s autobiography at the end. Despite its enormous length, the work is extraordinarily compelling when read in its entirety. Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 225 like posing the question “What is the basic idea of War and Peace?” Much of the controversy over the “scientific” quality of TPP, famously attacked by Herbert Blumer in 1938 (Blumer 1939) stems from this type of misreading.

Central Qualities

Stepping back from this huge work, one can see that it presents a number of basic qualities that need to be, if not explained, at least traced to their sources. It was, first of all, a monumental work—twice the size of Thomas’s Source Book.11 Second, it was organized not as a sourcebook—a collection of mainly secondary analyses and ethnographic reports—but as a “casebook,” with hundreds of primary documents interpreted in light of a general framework of analysis. Third, those documents were primarily letters, case history reports, and extended personal narratives; that is, the vast majority of them were biographical in some sense. There are some organizational histories and discussions, but even these are often organized around organizational documents, as “biographies” of groups. Fourth, the work is about social change, in particular about the shift from traditional to modern society and the ways in which the many social processes of contact, imitation, borrowing, and above all immigration both constitute and determine that shift. Fifth, that substantive topic is investigated from a particular theoretical stance—that of “social psychology,” understood as the interpenetration of social and individual consciousnesses (via values and attitudes respectively) and conceptualized more or less explicitly. And finally, that theoretical stance, although quite well-developed, is in practice deployed in a manner that we would today call “interpretive” rather than “causal” or “scientific.” There is not so much an attempt to explain social reality as there is to understand it. In summary, then, TPP is a monumental interpretive casebook of largely biographical material about individuals and groups, examining a massive process of social change through study of the shifting patterns of individual and social consciousness that constitute that change. This characterization of the text, it will be noted, is largely formal. It does not focus on the specific substantive, theoretical, and epistemological issues that have generally drawn analysts’ attention. This formal focus reflects our hypothesis— specified at the outset—that the continuities of Thomas’s intellectual life were ultimately not substantive, theoretical, or epistemological, but characterological. In particular, this way of characterizing the text attempts to sidestep the “Thomas or Znaniecki” issue that has bedeviled readings of TPP from its first appearance. Evan

11 It is nonetheless worth recalling that TPP was not particularly unusual in its length. Many contemporary studies were of similar magnitude. The Pittsburgh Survey (1908–1911), with multiple authors, grew to six volumes and 2600 pages. Booth’s Life and Labor of the London Poor had been four volumes. Bronislaw Malinowski wrote three books totaling 2000 pages about his Trobriand Island research, including in Coral Gardens and Their Magic quite as many magic spells as TPP does letters. Malinowski was a great admirer of Thomas. Speaking at the SSRC Hanover Conference in August 1926 he said: I certainly would try always to keep as close as possible to W. I. Thomas because I admire his work very much. His work on the Polish peasant—being a Polish peasant myself—I would regard as belonging to social anthropology, and we Poles are savages in many respects, as are all other nations. (SSRC 1926:62) 226 Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258

Thomas’s(1986) enormous and overwhelmingly documented dissertation settles that question insofar as it can ever be settled, coming to the unsurprising conclusion that it is largely a joint work, but that Znaniecki’s contribution has been considerably undervalued. E. Thomas’s excellent analysis, however, mainly concerns theory, epistemology, and substance. By considering the text’s more formal properties, we seek another dimension of possible continuity in Thomas’s trajectory.

The Prior Work of W. I. Thomas

Thomas’s prior work gives only scattered hints of the qualities that make TPP unique. Up until 1893, when he was 30, Thomas was an English professor, not a sociologist. And when he came to Chicago in 1893 to become a sociologist his first study was biology; among the 16 courses on Thomas’s transcript are eight that are wholly or partially biological. Indeed, his Ph.D. dissertation was entitled “On a Difference in the Metabolism of the Sexes” (reprinted slightly abridged in Thomas 1907) and concerns biological differences almost exclusively. None of this biological Thomas appears in TPP. But Thomas saw biology in dialogue with social inquiry. In “The Scope and Method of Folk Psychology” (1896), the first of many programmatic papers, Thomas insisted that biological analysis—in particular the new biological psychology of Wundt and others—be supplemented by investigation of the social environment of mentation. He quoted Steinthal: “only in and through society is man a psychical being.” (1896:439). As in all his programmatic pieces, he finished with a schedule of important topics—habitat, somatic anthropology, reproductive life, technology, aesthetic, animism, and jurisprudence. The list makes clear his combination of the biological and the comparative psychological approaches, as it does his debt to the German “folk-psychology” tradition that Steinthal helped inaugurate. There are, to be sure, hints in this piece of where Thomas will go in the future. For example, he criticizes the German folk-psychologists for their excessive attention to the universal social spirit (a theme they got from Herder and Hegel), reminding us of “the rhythm between individual consciousness and social consciousness whereby each is enabled to live more fully” (1896:441). But only an extreme teleology could see such a remark as a direct ancestor of the social psychology of TPP.12 Thomas’s biological phase passed quickly. In his first book (Sex and Society 1907), which collected nine of the articles he had published over the preceding decade, only the first piece—his dissertation—was fully biological. The rest used the methods and data of ethnology and folk-psychology to think about the “biological” difference between men and women. Although the result was an approach to gender difference quite advanced for the time, the book betrays almost no hint of the social psychological themes that would dominate TPP. Its main framework is a

12 Thomas’s Chicago PhD was in Folk Psychology (sociology was the second field). On the basis of the transcripts we have seen, it seems to be the only such PhD Chicago ever gave. Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 227 straightforward comparative ethnology, underpinned by Thomas’s version of the then common evolutionary psychology.13 Thomas’s second book, Sourcebook for Social Origins (1909), was a collection of readings, to which he himself contributed an introduction, comments on each part, and excerpts of two previously published pieces. Thomas’s introduction set forth a theory of social evolution in terms of attention, control, habit, crisis, and imitation, terms that recur throughout his earlier work and that come in the main from the pragmatist psychology of James, Dewey, Baldwin, and others. The problem of individual and group is mentioned, but takes no major place. In the Source Book commentary sections, Thomas advocated a historicist and processual theory of culture that was opposed to Spencer’s immanent evolutionism, relying heavily on Westermarck, Tylor, Morgan, Rivers, and the other founders of modern anthropology. Modern society appears in the Source Book only as something that the study of “savage society” will help us understand. The only foreshadowing of TPP is the emphasis on the role of “great men” in the “reconstruction” of civilizations (1909:19— Thomas had in mind men like Moses, Confucius, and Chaka), a theme that had persisted from an earlier article (Thomas 1905:448) and that was tied to the importance of “crisis” in provoking social change. This would eventually become the theory of “leadership” in TPP. But here too, only an extreme teleological eye would notice the link. Other than the two books and the papers collected in them, Thomas’s major papers prior to the beginning of the Polish project included “The Gaming Instinct” (1901), “The Psychology of Race Prejudice”(1904), and “The Province of Social Psychology” (1905). The “Race Prejudice” piece, although interesting for its careful distinction of race prejudice and caste prejudice, contained little that is linked to Thomas’s later social psychology (indeed it contained one of Thomas’s few references to a “group personality” of the kind he elsewhere so strongly condemned, 1904:601). By contrast, “The Gaming Instinct” does contain some hints of the future in its evolutionary account of man’s pursuit of excitement, from hunting to war and on to routinized activities like football games, playing the stock market, and gambling. Shorn of its biological framing, this paper is the probable ancestor of Thomas’s later theory of the “desire for new experience,” with which it shared terms like “vagabondage.” The last of these papers, the “Province of Social Psychology” of 1905, has an auspicious title and begins with language that might come directly from TPP: The province of social psychology is the examination of the interaction of individual consciousness and society and the effect of the interaction on individual consciousness on the one hand and on society on the other. (1905:445).

13 Donald Fleming’s(1967) history of the concept of “attitude” sees in Sex and Society Thomas’s first statement of a revolutionary concept of attitudes as uniting cognitive and emotional judgments. But even he notes that these “brilliant but glancing references” (1967:324) are by no means the central material of the book. On Thomas’s development from a biological to a social understanding of sex differences, see also Balfe 1981. 228 Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258

But this promising beginning was followed by the familiar attention/habit/crisis view of individual psychology, transferred almost directly to “states of consciousness of the social group.” Although Thomas deployed here for the first time the “great man” theory that eventually became his theory of social reconstruction, that is the only solid hint of the future. The article concludes with another programmatic list of important sites for research, again largely taken from ethnology and then-standard psychology: cultural contact, comparative analysis of mentation, abstraction, inhibition, affect, temperament, and education. The reader of this paper, too, will not suspect that TPP is coming14. In summary, there is surprisingly little in Thomas’s work prior to 1910 that would lead us to expect TPP. There is a tendency to processualism and a few hints about group mind, great men, and motivation. But even the main programmatic statements (1896, 1905) do not point us in the expected directions. Reading them at a single sitting, one gets the feeling of a writer whose heart is not in the abstractions they present to the reader. It is social reality itself that interests Thomas, not formal theories of its development. The immediate foundations of Polish project, as Haerle (1991) has shown, were laid around 1910 (Thomas himself [Baker 1973] dates them from slightly earlier). As we noted above, real estate magnate Helen Culver, whom Thomas had known since at least the mid 1890s, made an agreement in that year to fund Thomas one quarter a year for independent research on “race psychology.” The funds provided up to $7000 per year for 5 years. Given Thomas’s salary (ca. $3500), most of this money must have been used for programmatic expenses, and indeed Thomas spent much of the 1910–1914 period in Europe, traveling and consulting with scholars.15

14 If one looks hard enough, there are of course dozens of minor continuities between the early and late Thomas, if only because Thomas’s mind was itself so capacious and porous. It is this fact that makes E. Thomas’s analysis of Thomas’s thought (E Thomas 1986 C. 2) ultimately unpersuasive. It is also troubling that E. Thomas uses later work of Thomas and Znaniecki to help decide what was going on in TPP, as if intellectual personas were immanently evolving trajectories and hence could be read in either temporal direction. This may have been true of Znaniecki, but hardly of Thomas. 15 On Thomas’s salary, see TM 6:153, giving his associate professor salary as $3000 as of 1908. Since he was promoted in 1910, his salary was undoubtedly raised slightly. At the same time, however, he ceased his position as Superintendent of Departmental Libraries, which had paid $1000 annually since 1896 (TM 1:410). Haerle’s study, based in part on documents not in public hands, is invaluable reading. It is not clear how Thomas first met Miss Culver. It may have been through Thomas’s biological interests, which were evident in Thomas’s letter to Miss Culver of 16 December 1895 (quoted by Haerle). Thomas’s correspondence with President Harper re Miss Culver in 1895–1896 shows that he already knew her by November 1895 and that he was actively assisting the University in its attempt to annex some of Miss Culver’s millions (University of Chicago President’s Papers UCSCRC [UCPresidP] 64:4.) The connection may also have come through literature, of which Thomas had just been a college professor and in which Miss Culver had a deep interest, as Haerle notes. The two may also have been connected through Hull- House, although Miss Culver tended to limit her involvement in Hull-House to her donation of its premises. The exact amount of Thomas’s “course buyout” is unclear. The Trustees‘ vote of 25 May 1910 approved the 2 quarter proposal, but another of 16 August 1910 speaks of only one. On 23 June 1914 the deal was extended on the grounds that Thomas had had to teach overtime because of departmental need, and negotiation was still continuing in early 1918 (See T. Arnett to Harry Pratt Judson UCPresidP 64:4.) Note that the account of the origins of the work in Bernard n.d. is quite different. Bernard saw Thomas starting the study out of boredom and a desire for a vacation, and seeking his first funds from Mrs. Dummer. Although this last was an obvious mistake, the boredom theory was apposite. Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 229

This spadework produced in 1912 yet another programmatic article (on “Race Psychology”), which Thomas in fact used as part of his solicitation of European scholars’ cooperation with his new research.16 In a vague way, this paper prefigures TPP. It argues for empirical, comparative, and inductive research. It stresses the utility of documents. It takes social life to be dynamic. It sees the importance of individual psychology even while it considers institutions yoking individual and society and mentions the various social forms of knowledge. But despite these appearances, the 1912 article still seems largely foreign to someone who has actually read TPP. There is in it no indication of the sophisticated social vision of the self that will emerge 6 years later in the “Methodological Note” and, more important, in the interpretations of letters and documents. Indeed, the paper doesn't even conceptualize the problem to which the later concept of a “life-organization” of the social self will be the answer: there is little discussion of tradition, control, and breakdown. Read in the other historical direction, however, the headings in the 1912 “Race Psychology” piece make much more sense. They are the terms Thomas had been shuffling around in his programmatic pieces for nearly 20 years, reflecting the three constituencies in which he was most active: “mental faculties,”“race psychology,” and “magic/religion” for the anthropologists; “attention,”“imitation,”“crisis,” and “habit” for the psychologists; and “family,”“occupation,”“position of women,” and so on for the reform community in which he and his wife were so active. The 1912 document is an epitome of where Thomas had come from rather than a vision of where he was going. There are a few general resemblances to TPP, and the emphasis on documents is indeed new. But reading the 1912 paper and TPP side by side makes it clear that a huge watershed was passed between them, a watershed that must have been passed by early 1916, when the first volumes of TPP were sent out for review. One aspect of that watershed is easily understood: the limitation to Poland. Thomas’s correspondence recruiting Samuel Harper to work on the Russian peasantry shows that as of mid-1912 he was planning a series of volumes, possibly with separate authors, on various European peasantries—Poles, Russians, Hungar- ians, Slovaks, Romanians, Italians, Irish, and Jews. These would be “sourcebooks” in his word, but unlike his own Source Book, would comprise mainly documents, with some interpretation. Taken as a whole, this series would serve as a general dataset for thinking about immigration and for comparison with the situation of American blacks. Pursuing this project, Thomas spent some portion of 1910–1911 in Europe and was again there from July 1912 to mid-spring 1913, returning to Chicago for the Spring Quarter. Indications are that he spent a substantial amount of time in Vienna on the first stay. On his second stay, he spent most of his time furthering the work in Poland. He had originally (WIT to SNH 30 June 1912) planned to visit Italy and Ireland on his way home, but by late fall (WIT to SNH 23 Nov 1912) had limited the project to Russia, Poland, Italy, and Germany, and was promising Harper (a Russian specialist) more attention to Russia (at one point he was planning two volumes on Muscovy and one on Ukraine). In a letter from

16 See the general letter (in German) from Thomas to Sehr geehrter Herr, Berlin 1912, in the Samuel N. Harper Papers (SNHP) at UCSCRC, Box 1, folder 16, bylined Amerika Institut, Berlin NW 7. 230 Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258

Chicago of 29 November 1913, however, Thomas said that he was unable to return to Europe for 9 months and that he planned to do the volumes on the Poles first.17 By 9 months later, of course, Europe was at war. Whether Thomas had been planning the restriction to Poland or not, he now had no choice. This accident had three consequences, all of crucial importance. First, because the war meant that no further documents could be gathered in Europe, the search for documents in America assumed greater importance. Indeed one can see from the dates given in the TPP text that the data supporting the relatively short volume on Polish life in America was nearly all gathered after it became clear that return to Europe was impossible, as was the Wiszniewski biography. Even the peasant letters were mainly gathered in 1914.18 Second, since the only available groups left for study were Polish immigrants in Chicago, the study became, perforce, one of migration. Thomas had made contact with migration organizations in Poland before the war; Znaniecki, after all, had been head of the Emigrants’ Protective Society in Warsaw from 1911 to 1914. But the war forced the issue and made migration an inevitable focus.19 Third, with the comparison to other peasantries ruled out by the war, comparative race psychology was no longer a possible theoretical frame. A new central theme was required. The first possibility may have been the study of a complete society; that would explain the 1916 eight-volume plan with its final “Synthesis of Polish Society as a Whole.” In this plan, clearly, Znaniecki would have played an even larger role. But some time

17 Serving as the basis for our estimates of Thomas’s travels in these years, these letters are found in the SNHP, Box 1, Folders 15 and 16. Dates are given in text. All letters are from WIT to SNH. On the earlier stay, which may have been as long as 18 months, see WIT to SNH 5 July 1912 and also the letters to Miss Culver mentioned by Haerle 1991:27. Although the letters suggest an April 1913 return by Thomas, he may have been back in Chicago by mid-March, as there is a “report”—possibly verbatim—from him in a G. H. Mead seminar of that time. (See UCSCRC Ellsworth Faris Papers, notebook 1, course 3, “Social Consciousness.”) Thomas’s general methodological strategy of collecting he undoubtedly got from anthropologists. In the period 1907ff. (and possibly before), he was in close contact with George Dorsey and other anthropologists at the Field Museum. The Source Book was dedicated to one of them, William Jones, who was killed by the Ilongot in 1909. See G. A. Dorsey to William Jones, 26 July 1907, UCSCRC Fred Eggan Papers, Box 118, Folder 16. 18 Only about a third of the documents in the “America” volume are dated. Of those that are dated, the vast majority are dated 1914 or later. As for the Wiszniewski autobiography, internal evidence (TPP II:2220ff) shows that it was completed around March 1915. The autobiography also establishes that advertisements for peasant letters appeared in Dziennik Chicagoski in the fall of 1914 (TPP II:2222). The letter series themselves permit us to date this data more closely. Of the 51 datable letter series in the “primary group” analysis, 31 terminate in 1914, 6 in 1913, 6 in 1912, and 8 earlier. The series in 1914 are clumped, making it seem that ads were probably run in April and July (as well as later in the fall). When exactly Thomas and Znaniecki knew that return to Europe would be impossible is unknown. The Balkans were at war during much of Thomas’s stay July 1912–April 1913 and flared up again in the summer of 1913. However much Thomas—like many others—may have hoped that the July 1914 affair would be another short war, at some point fairly soon thereafter, he must have realized that the work would have to be finished from materials gathered in America. Znaniecki arrived in the United States in September 1914. His (brief) account of the timing of the various research efforts corroborates ours, although he - not surprisingly - thought the focus on Poland to be much more inevitable than it seems to us to have been (Znaniecki 1948). See also E. Thomas 1986:330 ff. 19 The migration theme did have earlier roots. Thomas had taught a course on migration since 1910. This course had been renamed “The European Peasant” in 1913, indicating that Thomas’s interests were shifting away from migration towards studies of peasantries tout court at the time when the war forced his hand, making migration central. All course information on Thomas derives from the Annual Register of the University of Chicago. Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 231 in 1916 or 1917 that plan was set aside and “social psychology” emerged to become the main theme of the project.20 But if the accidents of history explain the shift of the work’s theory away from “race psychology” and of its substance towards immigration and the “modernizing” of a particular peasant nation, they explain little about the strong move to social psychology, the biographical-documentary approach, and the strongly interpretive cast of the work’s thinking. As we have seen, there is little obvious suggestion in Thomas’s prior work of any of these things. They seem to have grown up quickly in 1912–191621.

Thomas’s Collaborators: Znaniecki and Park

A first possible source for these new ideas is personal influence. Two very important men entered Thomas’s life in the period 1912–1916. In early 1913, he met Florian Znaniecki, then head of the Emigrants’ Protective Association in Warsaw. He recruited Znaniecki as a collaborator, and the latter moved to Chicago in September 1914.22 The 32-year old Znaniecki, a philosopher, became Thomas’s research assistant and, after 1915, his full collaborator until about 1920. Znaniecki almost certainly wrote the introductory “primary group” section of TPP and probably wrote the main draft of the text of the Methodological Note (for a detailed discussion of authorship see E. Thomas 1986, C. 5). There is no question that Znaniecki made major intellectual contributions to TPP and that he drafted substantial parts of the text. But he seems an unlikely source either for the formal qualities that we see as marking the work or for its central intellectual stance. There is in Znaniecki’s past no enduring interest in documentary analysis. His prior and subsequent works show a strong inclination to abstract theorizing rather than interpretation. His concept of cultural systems—adumbrated mostly during and after his collaboration with Thomas—was more realist and emergentist than it was pragmatic and individual. Any serious comparison of his

20 The material on other societies found its way into Old World Traits Transplanted (OWTT). See Znaniecki 1948:766. On the authorship of OWTT, see among published sources Volkart 1951:259 and Raushenbush 1979:92ff., and among manuscript sources WIT to Kimball Young, 4 May 1930, MAWIT, and WIT to ESD 13 Dec 1919, ESDP. Note that the Miller/Park/Thomas team that produced OWTT first emerged at the American Sociological Society meetings in 1913, when Small suggested the addition of Miller’s paper on “national individualism” to Park’s and Thomas’s papers on assimilation. (See Publications of the American Sociological Society, 8:100). 21 It is striking that Thomas’s first major pronouncement on the Poles—his American Sociological Society paper of December 1913, reprinted in the AJS (Thomas 1914)—is largely an essay on the macrosociology of assimilation. It contains almost no signs of an interest in social psychology. Thomas’s turn towards a social psychological work may, then, have come even later—and more sharply—than we suggest above. Note that Thomas had already met both Znaniecki and Park by this time, as we discuss below. 22 Znaniecki’s own account of his move to America and his relation to Thomas is in Znaniecki 1948. Evan Thomas’s 1986 dissertation gives a comprehensive discussion of Znaniecki’ssociologyandhis contribution to TPP. Even he, however, comes to no final judgment on whether Thomas invited Znaniecki or he simply came to America (E. Thomas 1986:618–619) For another analysis, see Orbach 1993. Orbach’s figure (155) of April 1915 for submission of the first two volumes of TPP to the Press is clearly a misprint for April 1916. There is no evidence in the Press folder for the 1915 date. 232 Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 contemporary sole- authored work (Znaniecki 1915, 1919) with that of Thomas (Thomas 1917, 1921) leaves no doubt whose was the determining mind in TPP.23 This comparative evidence from internal analysis of Thomas’s and Znaniecki’s works is corroborated by an important piece of explicit evidence—Thomas’s transformation of his course offerings. This transformation—Thomas’s first in nearly a decade—appeared in print in the September 1914 printing of the University’s Annual Register, and therefore must have been written no later than mid-summer 1914, i.e., before Znaniecki’s arrival in the United States. In his new dispensation, Thomas continued his courses on “Social Origins,”“Mental Development of the Race,” and “The Immigrant.” He replaced his course on “Sex in Social Origins” with a (more modern) course on “Prostitution.” He ceded the course on “The Mind of the Negro” to Robert Park (who renamed it “The Negro in America”). He discontinued “Art and the Artist Class,”“The Origin and Psychology of Occupations,” and “The Mind of the Oriental,” and replaced them with new courses on “Social Attitudes,” “The Psychology of Divergent Types,” and “The Jew.” All three new courses were clearly rooted in Thomas’s program of research on European peasants. More important, the course descriptions clearly foreshadow the core themes of TPP. The “Social Attitudes” course bespeaks the importance of “ethnographic materials, biographies, and personal documents.” The “Divergent Types” course covers, inter alia, “the gypsy, the pariah, the ‘poor white,’ the Russian ‘beggar community’” as well as “the vagabond, the hobo, the criminal, the prostitute, the moron, and the man of genius.” More important still, the Social Psychology section of the course-list now started with a preamble that is a complete statement of the Chicago program in social

23 Znaniecki’s English language work of the time is nearly impenetrable, given the combination of abstract topics, an unfamiliar language, and a philosophy compounded of phenomenology, Hegelian idealism, and an admixture of pragmatism. It is not surprising that when Thomas sent Adolf Meyer a Znaniecki paper to add to the Suggestions volume (Jennings et al. 1917), Meyer read it and reacted with real alarm (AM to WIT 23 Mar 1917 AMP). The heart of Znaniecki’s philosophy was a concept of culture (in the German sense) as a more or less objective realm of becoming that is always tending towards, but never achieving, logic and rationality (Znaniecki 1919:39–50). “Cultural schemes” were the elements of this supra- individual world and had an internal logic that feels to the present-day reader somewhat structuralist. Znaniecki aimed to provide a progressive account of knowledge that would steer between Hegelian immanentism and naturalistic evolutionary arguments (Znaniecki 1919. c. 1). A source on the Thomas/ Znaniecki division of labor that E. Thomas happened to miss is Thomas’s letter to Floyd N. House of 8 Jun 36 (in the F. N. House papers, University of Virginia, Box 1). Thomas says: I had had a course of Social Attitudes for several years before I met Z [this is not correct unless the course had some other title] and I wrote the attitude portions of the Methodological Note. But Znaniecki had a volume in Polish on values and we together combined the two. However, p. 55 and thereabouts, [a somewhat formalized section on causes and effects] written by Z., is, I think, nonsense, and I would have omitted this and other points in the second printing but for the fact of the cost. On Thomas’s general distrust of theorizing as reported by his student Tomatsu Shibutani, see also Murray 1988:399, n. 21. For a slightly different view of the perennial “Thomas versus Znaniecki” issue, see Orbach 1993. Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 233 psychology as it would develop over the next 20 years. It is worth quoting in its entirety: The courses in social and racial psychology, although dealing with various and apparently unrelated subjects, have nevertheless a systematic character. They aim: (1) To define and illustrate a method for (a) the analysis into their elements of the fundamental social attitudes, habits, and modes of behavior, and for (b) the determination of racial and individual temperaments and attitudes. (2) To describe and explain the processes of social interaction (a) by which individuals and groups of individuals arrive at self-consciousness and acquire moral distinction and individuality, and (b) by which the social attitudes of individuals—their sentiments, habits, and technique—are modified, generalized, and transmitted, in the form of custom, convention, and tradition, as a social inheritance.... (3) To investigate through the medium of biographies, letters, psychoanalytical records, and other intimate documents and expressions of the inner life, the more divergent types of human behavior, as represented in individuals and isolated groups, and to determine the influence of traditional inhibitions, social pressures, and occupational interests upon the natural aptitudes and temperaments, and the relation of these factors in the formation of the character of individuals and of the characteristic traits of groups, races, and nationalities (Annual Register 1913– 1914, pp. 162–3.).24 All the truly defining qualities of TPP are already present in this paragraph: the use of case format and of biographical and ethnographic materials, the simultaneous focus on individual and group consciousness and their co-constitution, the heavy emphasis on process and temporality, even the subtheme of deviant types. In summary, the course evidence narrows the window for the transformation in Thomas’s thinking to the brief period between the “Race Psychology” piece of May 1912 and this clarion statement of September 1914; this outline is far indeed from the “Race Psychology” essay. Vis a vis Znaniecki, what matters is that all this was in print before Znaniecki’s arrival. That Znaniecki’s ideas challenged and furthered those of Thomas and that Znaniecki’s persistence drove the production of so massive a text as TPP turned out to be are both true without question. But that the governing ideas and forms of TPP did not come from Znaniecki in the first instance this course evidence shows beyond a doubt. The case for Robert Park’s influence on Thomas is much stronger. Park and Thomas were in many ways a matched pair. Both were in their late forties. Both had grown up in rural America. Both had done graduate study in Germany. Both had traveled extensively in Europe and had recently studied European peasants. Both had strong ties to social reform and had espoused socially unpopular ideas. Both had unconventional careers and had studied many different things. The immediate rapport that linked them was encapsulated in the (apocryphal) story that having gone to Tuskegee for a 1-day conference, Thomas stayed 2 weeks to talk to Park. (For the actual story of this meeting, see Raushenbush 1979:67–72)

24 The preamble is, of course, unsigned. But since nearly all the courses listed under Social Psychology were Thomas’s, his authorship is almost certain. As we shall show below, there is good reason to think, however, that Robert Park played at least some role in its composition. 234 Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258

It is clear from the correspondence that Park’s effect on Thomas was overwhelming. Thomas was a man given to enthusiasms, as is evident again and again in his correspondence with Ethel Dummer. But his reaction to Park goes beyond enthusiasm. Long since an unbeliever, he starts his first letter to Park, “My dear Brother in Christ, I am amazed to find how ignorant I was before I met you and how wise I seem to be now. Truly it was a great experience to meet you.” Two weeks later he says, “It has been the greatest thing that ever happened to me to meet you” and asks Park to “Write a line whenever you can to your blood-brother.” By 3 July (writing from Germany), he has mellowed to “Mein Lieber Freund,” but notes that “I got a lot out of our visit and confirmed my alliance with you.” It is plain from the correspondence that Thomas planned a complete amalgamation of Park’s work on American blacks with his own project about peasantries (their own plan for such a larger comparison had taken Park and his employer Booker T. Washington to Europe in 1910–1911). As with Samuel Harper (re Russia), Thomas expansively projected the possibilities of “volumes” for his peasant series on “Tuskegee materials,” on “the south in general,” on the West Indies, on West Africa, and on southern poor whites. But beyond this practical fact of common interests and the characteristic sketching of extravagant plans, the Thomas side of the correspondence—five letters over the period 23 April to 3 July 1912—bespeaks an overwhelming emotional excitement. One could truly say that Thomas fell in love with Park, or perhaps fell in love with his own image of Park. This extraordinary encounter with Park was transformative in Thomas’s life. In the years before 1912 Thomas had been getting tired of teaching (he was later to say that he disliked it and would turn down job offers in the 1920s).25 Indeed, he was perhaps even tired of being a scholar: “I was not, as I recall it, a ‘thoughtful person’” (Baker 1973:249). He would later speak of the European research project as something of a junket: “This venture was also exploratory, a wanderlust at first” (Baker 1973:249). Indeed he later recalled his consternation when Helen Culver advanced a small fortune to carry out what Thomas had idly proposed: “I had promised a great (also big) work, and what was I going to do about it?” (MAWIT, WIT to DST Jan 1935) These later judgments are corroborated by more contemporary evidence, like Luther Bernard’s seemingly uncharitable suggestion that Thomas’s whole peasant project arose out of a desire to stop teaching and find new excitements in Europe. (Bernard 1924:3–7) And Thomas himself wrote in the conclusion of his 6 May 1912 letter to Park: “Up to this point golf has been my main interest, but I think I shall be pleased to work now in our vineyard.” Something in Robert Park awoke the sleeping intellectual in Thomas. Nearly all the work for which he is famous postdates this meeting. On Park’s side, the relationship seems to have been less heated. Of Park’s letters, only one survives (6 October 1912) and that is all intellectual business. By fall 1913, Park was in Chicago for part of the year, in the first of a series of makeshift positions that would bring him into the Department as a full-time professor only in 1923. In the years following Park’s arrival in Chicago, he and Thomas moved in parallel but not tightly connected directions. Park began to set forth his own systematic account of social life. As Pierre Lannoy (2004) has

25 For example, Thomas wrote Ethel Sturges Dummer on 16 October 1925 “I heard yesterday a rumor I was to be called to Columbia, but why should I want to go to jail again?” (WIT to ESD, 16 Oct 1925, ESDP) But he did in fact think about giving some lectures, see WIT to ESD 18 Nov 1925. Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 235 persuasively argued, this involved a transformation of the social survey tradition into a non-reformist sociology but also drew heavily on Park’s longstanding involvement in communication—newspapers, ghost-writing, public relations—to evolve a notion of moral community. Park also gradually transformed the Sumnerian concept of institutions into a new concept of human ecology (Gaziano 1996). In all this Park’s debt to Thomas included not only the directly borrowed concepts of attitude and situation, but also the entire “point of view and scheme of organization” of the Park and Burgess textbook (1921:vii: Lannoy and Ruwet 2004 demonstrate the extraordinary debts of Park’s original “City” essay to Thomas’s 1912 “Race Psychology” piece). Finding direct influences in the other direction is difficult, particularly since Park had published little under his own name prior to his meeting with Thomas. Park’s doctoral dissertation, Masse und Publikum, focuses on the concepts of imitation and social will, neither of which plays much of a role in TPP. Aside from major philosophical writers, Park’s main sources had been Le Bon, Tarde, and James Mark Baldwin, all of whom Thomas knew well before he met Park (he had spoken of Baldwin’s “first-rate importance” in the Source Book 1909:318). One might possibly attribute the concern of TPP with the Polish press to Park if one did not know that Thomas had been collecting press material heavily on European trips before he met Park. Indeed, it is hard to see any concepts in TPP that might have come from Park. It is much more likely that Park was the catalyst who pushed Thomas to develop and concretize his own ideas, who rekindled in him an intellectual excitement and perseverance that seem never thereafter to have left him. But all this means that the sources of TPP themselves are as obscure as ever. Personal influences clearly gave Thomas an energy and a productivity he had lacked before. But they did not produce any of the fundamental attributes of his great work. So we are left with the original question. There seems on the surface surprisingly little precedent for TPP in the prior work of W. I. Thomas. The form of the work was new. The social psychological theory that drove it was new. The very problematic of tradition, change, and the society/individual relation was new. Neither of the great personal influences in his life seems a direct source for these qualities. Where, in fact, did The Polish Peasant come from? In the remainder of this paper, we discuss three such sources, each of which played an important role in Thomas’s life: the casebook tradition, the psychiatric concept of the life history, and the Victorian literary analysis of personality and social change.

The Polish Peasant and the Casebook genre

The first important source for TPP was what we may call the casebook tradition. The concept of a book whose exposition was based on cases was in fact quite general in the non-sociological circles in which Thomas moved. Such books were standard not only in the reform community, but in the medical and legal communities as well. Thomas in all probability simply borrowed the genre from these sources. Medical casebooks were an occasional but quite old genre, dating to the early 19th Century and even before. Surgery and obstetrics had been the dominant specialties for the early casebooks. These were not, however, typically designed as expository texts. They might be directed to particular problems or difficulties in 236 Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 practice. Or they might in effect be advertisements for a clinic or hospital proud of its reputation in a particular area of medicine. But in general the medical case literature was found in journals; individual cases and small case series were routinely published in periodical form throughout the 19th Century. Whole books of cases were relatively unusual.26 Casebooks as an expository genre first evolved for the teaching of law. In 1871, newly appointed Dane Professor Christopher C. Langdell of the Harvard Law School had revolutionized the teaching of law by insisting that it be taught not from treatises, but from structured and organized books of cases. Although there had been many legal “casebooks” before, they were simply reporters—digests of authoritative cases without comment. Langdell created the modern casebook, consisting of carefully arranged and commented case materials designed to lead a student through the history of a particular legal area. Shortly thereafter his colleague James Barr Ames created the substantively-organized casebook, which aimed to teach legal reasoning and process rather than (as in Langdell’s casebooks) legal doctrine. By the 1890s, legal casebooks were becoming the standard means of instruction throughout American elite law schools, and by 1910 they had begun to dominate the entire law school system.27 In medicine, the casebook tradition began to turn didactic much later, with the emergence of the Boston publisher William Leonard’s “Case History Series.” Between 1910 and 1920 Leonard published casebooks on neurology, pediatrics, obstetrics, gynecology, neurosyphilis, shellshock, and tuberculosis. But a community much closer to Thomas had begun publishing casebooks well before this point. The social reform community began to use the casebook format shortly after 1900, a practice that grew naturally out of the work of charities organization societies, which was from the first organized around the investigation of “cases” of need. With the spread of such social work practices to hospitals and psychiatric settings, and with the creation of the (Chicago) juvenile court by reformers, case-based practice spread more widely. In 1899, Mary Richmond’s Friendly Visiting Among the Poor had included 20 pages of illustrative case material. By 1912, Sophonisba Breckinridge and Edith Abbott (1912) reported 70 pages of case material in their volume on delinquency, while also interspersing commented case material throughout the text. In 1917, Richmond published her monumental Social Diagnosis, a 500-page textbook of social work filled with case material and organized around a sophisticated biographical hermeneutics.28 Another reform literature permeated by case thinking was vocational guidance, invented more or less whole cloth by Frank Parsons. Parsons’s posthumous Choosing a Vocation,

26 Thomas was clearly aware of case-based medical work early on. His early work (1897:45) contains citations to Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, one of the most notable casebooks in medical history. It is also worth recalling that William James, one of the clearest intellectual influences on Thomas, had used documents extensively in Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902. Our judgment of the quantity and character of early medical casebooks is based on surveys of major catalogues, particularly Worldcat and the online catalogue of the New York Academy of Medicine. 27 The standard work on the case method is Stevens 1983. On Langdell, see also Schofield 1907. 28 Like Thomas’s 1912 article on “Race Psychology,” Richmond’s text concludes with a long questionnaire. Richmond thanks law professor John Wigmore (see below) for his advice on concepts of evidence (Richmond 1917:56), a fact that nicely shows the derivation of casebooks from the legal tradition. Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 237 published in 1909, was an exposition of case methods for locating good employment. After a short exposition of 100 pages, it appends 50 pages of cases illustrating those methods. Indeed, the casebook model had expanded into general publication via the collection of life stories. In 1906, Thomas had reviewed for the AJS the original of this genre: The Life Histories of Undistinguished Americans, by Hamilton Holt: This volume contains an interesting series of human documents, representing in the main American conditions as seen by foreign immigrants, and presented for the most part in their own words.....Perhaps the most striking and instructive feature of the narratives is the disclosure of the conditions which make for content and discontent. No matter how hard the conditions of life are found by the immigrant in America, they are milder and present better opportunities for the improvement of his condition than those at home.... Thomas 1906:273–274. In 1910, it was Thomas’s wife’s turn, for in that year she reviewed for AJS Jane Addams’s volume on The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, a volume drawing extensively (if informally) on stories of actual individuals. Thomas’s close connections with workers in the reform casebook tradition came largely through Hull-House, where he, his wife, and their friends the Meads were all very active. Breckinridge (at times a Hull-House resident) and Abbott were Thomas’s colleagues on the University faculty, their courses listed or cross-listed in sociology. Breckinridge and Abbott’s sister Grace ran the Immigrants’ Protective League on whose board Mrs. Thomas served (Lissak 1987). Mrs. Thomas had also spent some time as a case investigator for the Juvenile Protective Association in the period 1908–1910, as did Grace Abbott (Anderson 1988:177, 242; Costin 1983:39). And another figure associated with Hull-House—Northwestern University’s John Wigmore—had in 1906 produced the definitive legal casebook on evidence to supplement his earlier treatise on evidence. In short, Thomas cannot have been unaware of the importance of case-based thinking throughout the reform world, and, as we have seen, he was quite aware of Holt’s example beyond it.29 There is ample evidence that he knew the casebook model well, and it is quite likely that these various works in the reform literature served as models for TPP.30

29 Deegan 1988 c. 5 discusses the reform activities of Thomas and his good friend George Herbert Mead at considerable length. It is quite probable that the first contact between Mrs. Dummer and Thomas came through Thomas’s wife’s activities for the JPA, of which Mrs. Dummer was a founder. (Anderson 1988:189, 242.) 30 One might have expected that TPP would have been strongly influenced by the six volumes of the Pittsburgh survey, the greatest single product of reform social science. But while those volumes have a large amount of individual case-type material scattered in them, particularly in the volumes on work accidents and on wage-earning Pittsburgh, none of them is organized as a casebook per se. 238 Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258

Life History and the Psychiatrists

But if the reform literature provided one general source for the casebook format and biographical conceptions of TPP, psychiatry provided another. In Thomas’s immediate world, the two sources were joined in the person of William Healy, the local doctor’s son who had been chosen to head the new psychiatric clinic attached to the Chicago Juvenile Court in 1909 on funds provided by Ethel Sturges Dummer.31 Healy’s The Individual Delinquent (1915) was a typical case-book, half devoted to general theory and methodology and half devoted to illustrative cases grouped by their leading causes. The layout is exactly that of the opening volumes of TPP; even the emphasis on “social factors” as they lead to “individual outcomes” is similar. Indeed, Thomas refers to Healy’s book in TPP (I:79), and the records of Healy’s clinic provided the data in TPP on boys’ and girls’ delinquency (II:1776–1821). This is hardly surprising. As a frequenter of Hull-House and (not later than the mid teens) of Mrs. Dummer’s hospitable mansion, Thomas knew Healy well, well enough in fact to be one of the three speakers at the farewell dinner held for Healy when he left for Boston in 1917.32 There is thus a strong likelihood that Thomas may have been influenced by both the structure of Healy’s book and its biographical focus on the evolution of delinquency in the lives of children. But behind this direct influence of psychiatry through Healy loomed another and far more important psychiatric figure. In designing The Individual Delinquent, Healy had taken the advice not only of law professor John Wigmore, whom we noted earlier as author of a definitive casebook on evidence, but also of America’s most eminent psychiatrist, Johns Hopkins’s Adolf Meyer (WFH to ESD 24 Jan 1914 ESDP 578). Indeed Meyer’s influence on Healy is evident in the fact that, after Healy himself, Meyer is the man most cited in The Individual Delinquent.

31 Oddly, given Healy’s immense subsequent reputation, he was not the main choice of the psychiatric establishment, as the consultation letters in ESDP folder 372 show rather clearly. He appears to have gotten the job through the connection between his father, a prominent Chicago physician, and John Wigmore, who was close to the Hull-House group in general and to Julia Lathrop in particular. Our main source on the history of psychiatry in this period is Abbott 1982. 32 The printed dinner invitation with program is to be found in ESDP 578. Healy, Wigmore, and Thomas spoke on the origins, legal relations, and “social bearing” of the juvenile court respectively. The dinner was 30 January 1917, that is, before Thomas had given the talk included in Jennings et al. 1917. The letters between Healy and Mrs. Dummer make it very clear that the former was very strongly influenced by the thinking of Adolf Meyer prior to about 1913. By the time he had finished The Individual Delinquent, however, he was well on the way to the more or less psychoanalytic position he adopted in Mental Conflicts and Misconduct (1917). For his part, Thomas explicitly recognized the impact of psychiatry on his work. In his “standpoint” for the Americanization studies that led to OWTT, Thomas wrote: It is comparatively easy to study formal organization (societies, clubs, churches, etc.) and it is done, but the field of behavior has been relatively neglected by the student of society, and undertaken seriously only by literary men—Zola, Ibsen, Shaw, Meredith, etc.—and the psychiatrists. “Life Histories—Standpoint and Questionnaire” in UCSCRC Robert Park Collection, 17:9 Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 239

But Healy was not the only man Meyer influenced. Years later, Thomas would tell his second wife that Meyer was one of the three scholars who had most influenced his thought.33 It is therefore important to evaluate both the means and the content of this influence. The means are considerable. During his PhD studies at Chicago Thomas had taken a course with Meyer on “The Architecture of the Nervous System” in the fall of 1894, shortly after the young neurologist had arrived in America, and Dorothy Swaine Thomas later reported that Thomas and Meyer had met frequently at dinners at Mrs. Dummer’s house.34 And there is evidence that Thomas regularly read journals where Meyer regularly published.35 Close indirect personal ties abound. Meyer’s Hopkins colleague J. B. Watson was an old friend of Thomas’s. Meyer served on the Juvenile Court search and advisory committees with George Herbert Mead, Julia Lathrop, Ethel Dummer, and James R. Angell, all friends or acquaintances of Thomas. Meyer and Lathrop had been in close contact since Meyer’s Kankakee days (Addams 1935:87) and after 1908 both were active not only in the Healy clinic, but also in the incipient national mental hygiene movement, of which both were trustees (Dain 1980:121, 160). Thomas even knew the man who had found Meyer his Kankakee job, Ludvig Hektoen, a former assistant physician at the hospital (WIT to ESD 6 June 1915; Lief 1948:45) and colleague of Thomas’son the Chicago faculty. At the time of the writing of TPP, these links became closer. When in 1916 Mrs. Dummer decided to sponsor a lecture series on education, she solicited Meyer to lead it and on the advice of his colleague Watson Meyer suggested that she recruit Thomas to speak on education from a sociological point of view. The lecture series

33 Leighton 1952:xxii. Thomas cannot have been less than sixty when he made the remark about influence, as he didn’t meet Dorothy Swaine Thomas until the mid 1920s. Since Thomas was much involved with psychiatry in the late 1920s (largely through Harry Stack Sullivan, who like himself was a free- floating intellectual in New York at the time, see Perry 1982:c. 29), Meyer may have loomed large in his mind at the time simply through recency. But the judgment is more likely to be a long-term one, as we argue in text. It is interesting to speculate on the other two major influences Thomas had in mind. Mead— from whom Thomas took two courses when the philosopher was a beginning Assistant Professor—is an obvious possibility, as are William James and Robert Park. 34 We know about this course through having inspected Thomas’s University of Chicago transcript, although Thomas mentions it, as well, in his life history document (Baker 1973:248). On the dinners, see Leighton 1952:xxii. There is evidence for such meetings as early as 1916. Given Mrs. Dummer’s relentless hospitality, they undoubtedly preceded that date as well. Meyer kept up ties at the University, speaking later of his “neighborly contacts” with Dewey, Mead, and Tufts of the University of Chicago (AM III:471–472). 35 We know that Thomas read Psychological Bulletin, (since he cited a paper from it in 1912 [1912:741]), in which Meyer published five articles and twenty-five book reviews in the period 1905–1912. Meyer’s papers in Psychological Bulletin included his landmark 1908 paper on “reaction-types” in mental illness, in which he speaks of mental events as “attitudes and reactions of the person as a whole” (AM II:601). It should also be recalled that the common language between the two men to some extent arose from their common immersion in the larger stream of pragmatist psychology: both Meyer and Thomas had been strongly influenced by William James. 240 Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 and the book it spawned led to occasional correspondence between Meyer and Thomas during the years in which the latter three volumes of TPP were completed.36 There are thus numerous links through which Meyer’s ideas might have influenced Thomas, some direct and many indirect. Documenting the content of that influence is more difficult. It is clear that Thomas’s interests came to focus more closely on psychology in the years after 1905. His Psychological Review piece of 1904 had begun to talk about attitudes and had cited the psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing. Three of his 1905 book reviews raise psychological issues (the reviews of Howitt, Davenport, and Jenks), while 1906 brought his review of Holt’s collection of biographical accounts of the everyday psychology of everyday Americans. The next year brought Thomas’s admiring review of William James on “The Energies of Men,” as well as a penetrating review of Sumner’s Folkways that specifically faults the book for its “lack of psychological standpoint” (Thomas 1907:117). Three years later (1910) Thomas was in Vienna, where, according to Bernard (1924:16), “...in close contact with the Freudians [Thomas] worked out his theory of the four wishes....”37 In the context of this major shift in Thomas’s concerns through the latter half of the 1900–1910 decade, the many terminological and conceptual commonalities between Thomas and Meyer are very suggestive. Both men used the word “standpoint” to mean “theory.”38 Both men used the pairing of “organization” and

36 The best place to follow the creation of this lecture series is through the correspondence in ESDP 333, not in the folders containing Mrs. Dummer’s correspondence with Thomas. We know from the lecture series correspondence that Thomas read and admired Meyer’s paper. There was correspondence between Thomas and Meyer later in the 1920s about various abortive collaborations, and we know that Meyer was privately reading Thomas’s work on Levy-Bruhl in 1923 (AMP XII/1/785) although he had found Thomas’s behavior in 1918 unacceptable (AM to ESD 9 Nov 20 ESDP 669). The absence of Thomas- Meyer correspondence 1894–1916 in Meyer’s files—given Meyer’s compulsiveness—is affirmative evidence that there was no correspondence. We do know that Meyer was occasionally at the University of Chicago: he was staying at the Quadrangle Club in 1916, for example (AM to ESD 14 June 1916 AMP I/ 991/1a). Meyer’s acquaintance with Mrs. Dummer dates at least from the first beginnings of the Juvenile Court Clinic in 1909, see correspondence in ESDP 372. On the other connections, Thomas obviously knew Watson very well, speaking of him as “an old friend of mine.” (WIT to ESD 7 Feb 17 ESD 333) By contrast, his letters to Meyer are headed with the more formal “My dear Dr. Meyer.” 37 Thomas was well enough versed in Freud to present a report on the “Freudian Complex” in one of G. H. Mead’s seminars, on 17 March 1913, as we know from the Faris notebook mentioned in note 17 above. 38 Understandable in Meyer whose first language was German, this usage was Thomas’s most pronounced linguistic idiosyncracy. In Thomas, the word is everywhere, even in titles, e.g., Thomas 1912. In Meyer, see, e.g., AMP X/2/30/p. 1, opening his lectures on psychiatry in 1900 at Clark, and also AMP XI/2/22 p.1 at New York later in the decade. See also the following, in Meyer’s Collected Papers (hereafter AM followed by a volume number [I–IV]), AM II:611 in 1910 and AM III:38 in 1915). This commonality could be explained by Thomas’s sojourns in Germany, but dozens of American scholars spent long periods in Germany without bringing back this particular idiom. Thomas tended to mean two things by “standpoint.” First, he used it to mean “theory,” as in the title “Race Psychology: Standpoint and Questionnaire” (it is striking confirmation of this meaning that he sometimes used “standpoint” without an article, as in Source Book 1909:316: “The first three selections in part II may be accepted as sound standpoint for the interpretation of savage mind and they also contain standpoint for the interpretation of the succeeding parts of the volume”). Second, he used “standpoint” in the modern sense to mean a point of view, as in “from the standpoint of primary group.” Sometimes it is clear from the context that he intends one or the other meaning. At other times, he seems to mean both, as in Source Book (1909:16) where he suggests that “attention” is a standpoint, meaning that thinking about the social process in terms of attention is an interesting (but perhaps arbitrary) way to parse that process. Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 241

“disorganization,” to refer to patterns of change.39 Both also shared the concept of “attitudes,” which appears briefly in Meyer’s 1908 Psychological Bulletin paper and more noticeably in the 1915 pedagogical paper in which his concept of “life chart” first appears in print (AM III:38). A more thoroughgoing similarity was the concept of “situation.” Meyer’s whole theory of sociobiology was about reactions and adjustments to situations (AM II:598). And of course “situation” was to be a leading term in Thomas’s thinking from 1917 onward. A final terminological continuity was the use of the word “efficiency” in the context of individuals. One of the stranger aspects of TPP is its recurrent concern with the “efficiency” of the life organization (I:78ff, II: 1891–1907). To be sure the idea of social efficiency in TPP grew out of the work’s interest in the possibility of rationally directed society (see I:1) and belonged to the national vocabulary of reform at the time (See, e.g., Callahan 1962, Haber 1964). But the notion of personal efficiency, although extensively discussed in TPP, was not standard usage in reform. However, personal “efficiency” was one of the bywords of the mental hygiene movement in which Meyer figured so prominently, and it appeared in Meyer’s first writing on the subject in 1908–9 (AM IV:340) as it did in Meyer’s Suggestions lecture a decade later (AM IV:371).40 These terminological commonalities are merely suggestive, however. Far more important is the concept of biography the two men share. Indeed, the core element of Meyer’s contribution to American thought was the idea of the life course of the body and the person. As he put it in his lecture in the 1917 series, “psychology has learned to make the biography its very frame and starting point” (AM IV:352). Meyer’s ideas were to be the foundation of the life-course concept that came to undergird the mental hygiene movement, the American (i.e., broadened and socialized) version of Freudianism, and through them the folk psychology of 20th Century America. The very pervasiveness of the concept of life course in that folk psychology makes it hard for us to see that it was more or less invented by American psychiatrists, led by Meyer. The reader of William James’s Psychology will not find there a concept of the evolution of the self over the life-course. But the idea is fully developed in TPP, which takes the life-course concept and marries it to a social world conceived in terms of institutions in dynamic change. And since a focus on the life course and biography is currently taken to be the central contribution of TPP

39 Meyer first uses the term “disorganization” to refer to mental illness in the New York teaching materials (AMP XI/2/22 p 10). It first appears in print in the title of an article of 1905 (“The Role of Habit Disorganizations in the Essential Deteriorations” (AM II:421) His 1908 Psychological Bulletin piece speaks of “mind as an organized being” (AM II:583). “Disorganization” appears briefly in the Thomas’s Source Book (1909:21 along with “social organization”), but then largely disappears until TPP, in which it is one of the handful of major concepts. A more surprising similarity with Thomas is the use of “individualization,” which for Meyer meant moving from diagnostic types as labels to an understanding of individuals as the product of unique situations and reactions. See, e.g., AM IV:71 1913 as well as Meyer’s paper in the Suggestions lecture series. TPP focuses on a similar individualization generated by the uniqueness of social experience. 40 “Efficiency” appears in Thomas’s correspondence with Mrs. Dummer as early as 17 November 1916 (ESDP 333). It is prominently featured in Thomas 1917. We know that concepts of efficiency were current at Chicago well before TPP because Divinity School Dean Shailer Mathews - one of Chicago’s most central and visible faculty members - gave in 1911 a lecture on “Scientific Management in the Churches” in which he set forth “The Seven Principles of Efficiency in Church Work (1912:16). 242 Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 to sociology, it is particularly important to understand the actual origins of the life course concept. To do that, we must study the work of Meyer. Biography had not been where Meyer started. He had come to the United States in 1892 as a highly trained neurologist, working at the Eastern State Hospital in Kankakee, Illinois, while moonlighting as a neurology instructor at the University of Chicago. But his hospital position brought him into contact with Julia Lathrop, who was on the State Board of Charities and Correction, who in turn introduced him to Hull-House (where he spent a week after a bad fall at the 1893 Fair). Through Lathrop he got involved in the study of problems in children (Lief 1948:49, AM IV:321), a first essay in life study. It was during this period that Thomas took his course with Meyer, who was 3 years his junior. Luckily, the teaching materials for the course survive in part (Adolf Meyer papers (AMP) IX/2/1–4). The course design and two surviving lectures indicate a course completely concerned with nervous systems compared across organisms. They are meticulously detailed, as was Meyer’s work throughout his life. Collated in with these materials are two other lectures, which embody Meyer’s scientific stance at the time. These concern psychiatry, and they urge an extreme phenomenological and inductive approach, showing Meyer’s disdain for the arbitrary theorizing and classifying that dominated psychiatric thinking at the time: We try to make carte blanche of our memory, forget all the names and definitions of mental diseases and begin to study one case after another, keeping altogether to the facts, to the word of the patient and avoiding every attempt of bringing in ideas. (AMP IX/2/2:p2/3) We must always remember that most of our hypotheses on the subject are reached by the deductive rather than the inductive method, and therefore to be trusted with reserve by the scientist. (AMP IX/2/2:p1) Such inductivism would characterize all of W. I. Thomas’s work as well. He had an obvious reluctance to theorize. It is quite possible that a charismatic early teacher could have strengthened this bent in Thomas the student.41 Meyer’s move to Worcester State Hospital in 1895 brought him into direct contact with G. Stanley Hall at Clark University and William James, Josiah Royce, Morton Prince, and many others in Boston. (Hale 1971:100) Such thinkers encouraged him to think psychologically as well as anatomically. But the main influence on him in this period was the great German psychiatrist Kraepelin, with whom he studied in

41 It is possible, given that Thomas’s dissertation relied considerably on medical and occasionally on psychiatric sources, that Meyer may have helped advise it in some capacity. Of the teachers who taught Thomas’s courses, only Meyer, Loeb, and Frederick Starr had the expertise necessary to supervise Thomas’s thesis. Without assuming Meyer’s involvement, it is hard to explain Thomas’s citations to such esoteric medical sources as Virchow’s Archiv and such psychiatric ones as Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (both citations 1897:45). At the same time, Thomas’s role as superintendent of departmental libraries at Chicago gave him wideranging opportunities to see different sources. He held this post from 1895 [W.R. Harper to J. Robertson 24 July 1895 UCSCRC University of Chicago Library Records [UCLR] 2:1] to 1910 [WIT to E. D. Burton 19 Mar 1910 UCLR 3:6), when he resigned, presumably because he was about to go to Europe for several quarters. The post required that he negotiate between the departmental libraries, run largely by their senior faculty, and the smaller “general library.” Thomas’s library position thus meant that he interacted with nearly every senior faculty member at the university. Mead, Loeb, Hektoen, and others might thus also be sources for his connection to psychiatry. Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 243 the summer of 1896. The revolutionary fifth edition of Kraepelin’s textbook had argued that psychiatric ailments should not be imagined simply as clinical pictures (in the older classifications, such static concepts had led to endless clinical arguments), but as comprehensive disease entities defined not only by symptomatic presentation, but also by etiology and—above all—by typical course. For Kraepelin, a psychiatric disease concept must describe a natural history. Of this course-based concept of disease, paresis was the great exemplar. The clinical picture of paresis had long been known, but Kraepelin had organized the concept of paresis around its inevitable course of mania, paralysis, and death. And Meyer was an early (1897) convert to the syphilitic etiological theory of paresis, which completed this Kraepelinian concept (see AM I:439). Paresis was above all a “life course” disease, often killing patients several decades after infection, although, conversely, not all tertiary syphilis took the form of paresis. Like the perplexing complexity of etiology in dementia praecox, the imponderable development of syphilis over the life course persuaded Meyer of the centrality and the complexity of the long-run development of the whole person. In 1902 Meyer left Worcester to build the New York Psychiatric Institute on Ward’s Island, which he turned into a postgraduate training institution for the assistant physicians in the many New York state hospitals. It was during this period as a teacher that he developed a fully comprehensive approach to patients’ lives. Even in the Kankakee period, his hand-written notes on case- history taking (AMP IX/1/1) betray an interest in everything about a patient from the condition of the patient’s mother during pregnancy to childhood friends to adult physical and mental status. But he came to see the dangers of the unrestrained data-gathering without interpretation. As early as 1898 he decried “endless biographies of patients” (AM II:65). A few years later he cautioned the New York physicians: [The case or written record] should not attempt to be a biography and yet should contain the features which are likely to be important for a correct appreciation of the evolution of the entire derangement, physical and mental. (“Case Taking in Mental Disease” AMP XI/2/21 p. 2) Inductivism was beginning to be replaced by a clinical vision of disease as a complex process involving the whole person and a sense of the importance of carefully chosen background information in guiding our interpretation of that process. This concept of “evolution of the entire derangement” gradually became recon- ceptualized as a form of theoretically informed biography.42 In 1904, he concluded a major review: We need less discussions of generalities and more records of well- observed cases, and especially records of lifetimes, not merely snatches of

42 Meyer’s reviews of Kraepelin (in two large review essays of 1904 [AM II:331–385, 386–404]) had clearly moved in this direction, as had his 1903 article on the various diatheses (personalities prone to this or that illness, see AM II: 321–330). Meyer recognized that one reason for Kraepelin’s (in his view) success had been the sheer availability of biographical data: The relatively small material of the Heidelberg clinic, and the fact that it is fed by a district which is easily accessible and furnishes extensive records of the patients’ families and relatively uniform conditions of life, render it in most respects ideal for an extensive study of what the patients were, are, and prove to be, in the subsequent years of their lives. AM II:349. 244 Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258

picturesque symptoms or transcriptions of the meaning of traditional terms (AM II:385) Meyer’s 1905 paper on dementia praecox (AM II:421) moved further towards a long-run, dynamic approach to psychiatry with its concept of “habit disorganization.” By 1908 he was telling his colleagues: It has become my conviction that the developments in some mental diseases are rather the results of peculiar mental tangles than the result of any coarsely appreciable and demonstrable brain lesion or poisoning. (AM II:583) The same paper speaks of mind as “a sufficiently organized living being in action” (AM II:584) and of “a truly dynamic psychology” (AM II:586). In another 1908 article he showed his absorption of the psychological, adjustment-based approach of the pragmatists: “in order to be dynamic, the ‘mental reactions’ are taken as complete phases of adaptation, or conduct and behavior....” (AM II:601) He coined the term psychobiology to refer to his scheme (AM II:602) and began to envision all action as “reactions to situations” (AM II:433). In 1908, Meyer’s biographical theories acquired universal visibility. In that year was published A Mind That Found Itself, a 300-page autobiographical account of the personal history and mental illness of its author, Clifford Whittingham Beers (1908). Meyer had read and criticized the entire manuscript before publication and was, indeed, cited in it at length as the principal professional referee (William James had been Beers’s first convert; he read the manuscript in 1906, and his imprimatur was prominently featured in the book).43 Of the Hull-House circle, both Jane Addams and Julia Lathrop can be documented to have read the book (Dain 1980:107) and it would be astonishing indeed if Thomas had not.44

43 On James’s and Meyer’s roles, see Dain 1980:71–86. Beers’s book was one of a long line of such books, see Alvarez (1961). But Beers‘ manic organizing dovetailed well with the progressive mind, and the book touched off an organization (The National Committee on Mental Hygiene), a phrase (“mental hygiene”), and a movement that had blanketed American consciousness within 15 years. Sales were solid but not overwhelming in the early years: 4500 copies in the first 6 years (Dain 1980:98). But the book was reissued as recently as 1980. 44 The mental hygiene movement that Beers launched over the next few years would spread Meyer’s concepts to the general public (in fact, Meyer coined the phrase “mental hygiene” Beers 1908:265). So also did the profession of psychiatry. It is hard to overestimate Meyer’s preeminence in American psychiatry. He left New York in 1911 to design (and after 1913 to head) the new Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins, whence he retired thirty years later. Having worked in the three dominant communities of psychiatrists in America (Boston, New York, and Baltimore), Meyer knew every major American psychiatrist and neurologist as well as many of the country’s major psychologists. He trained generation after generation of physicians and specialists. And he wrote some 300 papers, reviews, reports, and occasional pieces, on topics ranging from neuroanatomy to psychiatric nosology to occupational therapy to mental hygiene to medical teaching. Small wonder that one of his most famous students said “The intellectual and spiritual stature of Adolf Meyer was such that none of his students can claim to have understood it all. He has stood out among men in our experience like one of his own Swiss Alps…” Leighton 1952:xiii) Note that Freud did not really become a dominant part of the American psychiatric picture until the 1920s, although leading American psychiatrists had been aware of him since around 1900 and some of the non-psychiatric intellectual elite (social scientists like Thomas, Edward Sapir, and William Ogburn and amateur intellectuals like Mrs. Dummer) had begun reading him in the 1910s. For example, the word “sublimation” is used in its Freudian sense in TPP (II:1868). Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 245

By the time of his 1909 paper (AM II:443–458) at the famous Clark twentieth anniversary celebration (at which Freud also spoke), Meyer had completely transformed the Kraepelinian argument that diseases are characteristic chains of events into the notion that diseases simply made up one part of the total development of an individual. Shortly thereafter, he concretized these ideas into the notion of a Life Chart, a pictorial representation of an individual life trajectory. Although it had previously been used in teaching, the Life Chart first appeared in print in a 1915 paper (AM III:38), then reappeared in the 1917 paper Meyer gave in the Suggestions series with Jennings, Watson, and Thomas (Jennings et al. 1917). Meyer’s concept of the life history was without question the preeminent biographical theory in Thomas’s intellectual world. The case reports of the social workers had none of Meyer’s psychological sophistication. The case histories of the Freudians were focused on the evolution of particular symptoms and employed a purely intrapsychic logic that Thomas could never have accepted. But Meyer’s concept embraced everything from physical health to family relations to social complexities. And A Mind That Found Itself showed that autobiography was a viable form for communicating a particular point of view, providing an obvious example for Wladek’s autobiography in TPP.45 It is then hardly surprising that Thomas emphasized Meyer’s influence on him. No doubt Thomas—like everyone else Meyer taught—found him a charismatic teacher during his first years as a sociologist, then turned to Meyer’s ideas again when his own interest turned towards psychology. And that is why, although Thomas had little interest in biography before TPP, in that work the biographical interpretations seem subtle and intricate beyond the explicit theory that supposedly guides them. The terminology, the interpretive stance, the focus on the whole personality in changing environments: all these are hallmarks of the Meyer approach. It seems likely, then, that a substantial portion of the general interpretive stance of TPP has its roots in psychiatric thinking in general and in the biographical views of Meyer in particular.46

The Literary Framework of the Polish Peasant

While the casebook genre and the psychiatric life history provided Thomas with models for important aspects of TPP, there remain a number of puzzles: the book’s

45 Another publicly very successful psychiatric biography in this period was Morton Prince’s celebrated story of Miss Beauchamp, The Dissociation of a Personality (1905), which required a second edition within 3 years. It should be reemphasized that Meyer was quite strongly influenced by the pragmatists himself, having known James, Dewey, Mead, and Tufts as we noted earlier. 46 The two men were similar in other ways as well. Like Thomas, Meyer was no theorist. Like Thomas, Meyer changed his ideas considerably over his life. And while Thomas did not have Meyer’s teaching record, in later life he was renowned for his charisma. One can even see in Meyer’s never-fully-extirpated mania for gathering facts a scientist’s version of Thomas’s inveterate collecting of documents. 246 Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 formal structure of five (or in the original, eight) parts; its core topic of the relation of the individual personality to social change and disorder; its evidentiary obsession with documents of all kinds; and its valuing of interpretation over explanation. To find the roots of these qualities, we must look further back in Thomas’slife, to his period as an English professor. A careful analysis of the major texts he taught in that era shows that the structure, topic, and evidentiary structure of TPP have their deepest roots in the 19th-Century English literature Thomas had taught and loved. When Robert Park said that Thomas “was essentially an artist,” he was exactly right. Thomas had built his intellectual self on the study of poetry and fiction.47 Thomas spent his late 20s as a professor—and a popular one (Barnard 1969:82)— of English Language and Literature. He had taken MA and PhD degrees in the subject at the University of Tennessee in 1886 and had studied it (along with other things) in Germany. There is no evidence concerning Thomas’s graduate studies in English, although remarks in his life history document (Baker 1973:247) about linguistic studies in Tennessee and Germany suggest philological interests, an image that fits well what we know of the discipline at the time (Graff 1987) and that finds echoes in one of his earliest publications, a Chi-Delta prize oration on “Lost History” (Thomas 1883). After his European tour, Thomas arrived at Oberlin College in the fall of 1889 and taught English there at least through the spring of 1893. He was listed in the Oberlin catalogue as a professor of English through 1893/1894 and as professor of sociology in 1894/1895, in which year he was listed for both some English courses and some sociology courses. Although we know both from registration records at the University of Chicago and correspondence with Oberlin that Thomas lived in Chicago for most of the period 1893–1895, we also know that he attended faculty meetings at Oberlin regularly in the spring term of both years, which means that he probably taught some or all of his Oberlin courses and had only a partial leave. It

47 The remark about Thomas as artist is attributed to Park by Ellsworth Faris, in a review of the Volkart- edited collection of Thomas’s writings Social Behavior and Personality (Faris 1951:876). The general affinity between the Chicago School and literature has long been the subject of comment. See Cappetti 1993, Lindner 1993, and Cote 1996. Although the customary connection is with urban realists like Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, and James T. Farrell (and with small-town realists like Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis), these are all younger writers. Thomas’s sensibility seems to us much closer to that of his exact age peer Edith Wharton, who—while she wrote mainly about the upper classes— anatomized the location of individuals in social structures exactly as did Thomas. Like Thomas (Baker 1973:247) and so many others of their generation, Wharton found reading Spencer, Westermarck, and evolutionists an eye-opening experience (Wharton 1934:94). Indeed, in The Age of Innocence, Wharton drew systematically on anthropological metaphors. Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 247 should be recalled that Oberlin was an easy overnight trip from Chicago on one of the nation’s major rail arteries.48 It is clear from Thomas’s course announcements that even during this period he had already begun to think about literature itself “sociologically.” As early as the 1890–1891 catalogue, the announcement for his survey of English literature reads: “A brief survey of the history of English literature is made by means of lectures and assigned readings, the relation of English literature to English history is pointed out, and occasional lectures are given on poetics.” Even his course on Early Middle English, 1150–1350, (announced for 1894/1895 in 1892/1893) notes “parallel study of historical conditions,” and his course in Old English included “the historical relations of English literature.” A course on “Epic Poetry” (which covered not only the Greek and Roman standards, but also the Eddas and the Mahabharata), notes “Parallel study of historical conditions. Collection of sociological data from the works read.”49 Thomas’s tenure as an English professor coincided with the beginnings of instruction in modern literary appreciation. English had previously been mainly a philological field; one learned Anglo-Saxon and Middle English for mental discipline, puzzling over ancient Germanic texts as one puzzled over the Greek

48 Thomas’s presence at Oberlin in the springs of 1894 and 1895 was kindly verified for us in faculty meeting minutes by Oberlin Professor Emeritus Robert Longsworth. Thomas’s Oberlin resignation was transmitted by the faculty to the Trustees on 25 February 1895. The mechanics of Thomas’s move to Chicago seem straightforward. Correspondence with the Oberlin treasurer, articles in the Oberlin Review, and a faculty vote of 17 April 1893 all testify that Thomas was the faculty chair of the committee for Oberlin’s quite extensive exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in the summer of 1893. An 1893 letter (20 Nov 1893, WIT to G. W. Shurtleff, OCA RG 7, Office of the Treasurer) shows that once arrived he simply stayed on in Chicago. Thomas’s letter of 20 June 98 to Chicago’s President Harper (UCPresidP 64:4) indicates that Oberlin gave him a two-year leave with pay for the first year, conditional on his returning. That Thomas was in debt to Oberlin for large sums at least until 1907 (the letters in OCA RG 7 make this clear) underscores the conditional nature of this advance. He had to return these funds when he left for the Chicago faculty (definitively in 1895) and since he no doubt did not have the money, the debts must have been converted to notes, on which correspondence shows Thomas paying steady interest until at least 1907. Correspondence with Oberlin President Henry King (WIT to HCK 23 Feb 1907 in OCA RG 2/6, the Correspondence Files of Henry Churchill King) makes it likely that Thomas was able to retire the debts through a raise at Chicago and sales of Sex and Society (which sold well, as noted earlier). Thomas’s “sociology” teaching at Oberlin came under the heading of “Christian sociology.” His address on this subject during the “Institute of Christian Sociology” held in the fall of 1894 (reported in the Oberlin Review 22:9:136, 21 November 1894) is his earliest known statement about sociology. (There is a speculative case that Thomas was influenced by a Swiss–American “sociologist” Albert Chavannes of Knoxville, see Knox 1963.) Given the complexity of Thomas’s arrangements, it is not surprising that there is also some unclarity about Thomas’s exact starting date at Chicago. In TM 1:192 (3 April 1894), the Trustees appointed him to unspecified “service” in addition to his Fellowship as of July 1894. But in the May 1894 announcements (in the Annual Register), which record what had happened in 1893/1894 and announce what was coming in 1894/1895, Thomas is listed only as a Fellow in Sociology. The following year he is listed as Instructor in Ethnic Psychology, and the year after that as Assistant Professor (i.e., for 1896/1897). 49 This course list, like much other evidence, underscores Thomas’s linguistic power. Later writers (and even he himself on occasion) sometimes considered him an indolent scholar, but it is clear from these lists that Thomas by this time knew French, German, Latin, and Greek fluently (he had taught ancient and modern languages at Tennessee), as well as enough Anglo-Saxon to teach it and enough Italian to read it. He of course learned Polish when the time came (E. Thomas 1986: 335). 248 Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 classics in other courses. But while Thomas’s courses included a few on Middle English and Anglo-Saxon, the majority were courses in the newfangled literary appreciation. He routinely taught courses on Chaucer, on Shakespeare, and on Milton, as well as on 18th and 19th Century English poetry and 19th Century American poetry. Yet he found time for prose and fiction as well. A course on essayists covered not only Steele, Addison, Swift, and Burke from the 18th Century, but also Carlyle, Arnold, and George Eliot from the 19th. A course on fiction ran from More and Lyly through Richardson and Fielding to recent works like Romola and Henry Esmond (indeed, there is an entire course in 1893/1894 on the fiction of George Eliot).50 There are several striking themes in the modern texts that Thomas chose to teach. The first of these we have already seen in Thomas’s course announcements—an obsession with history. The course on the novel includes Scott’s Kenilworth, Thackeray’s Henry Esmond, Eliot’s Romola, and Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter; Dickens’s David Copperfield is the only 19th Century novel Thomas taught that was not a historical novel. And it is conspicuous that not only are the other four historical novels, but three of them (all but Kenilworth, which is a pure romance) are novels about the difficulty of an individual finding stable ground within a radically challenging society. Of the 18th Century texts, Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield concerns the Augustan version of this “social change” theme—the opposition of country virtues and town vices. Second, an astonishing number of Thomas’s texts have some complex narrative form, most often first person. More’s Utopia is a combination dialogue and first- person travelogue. Lyly’s Euphues is a loosely framed third-person narrative in which are contained the first-person essays, dialogues, and letters of the fictitious Euphues. Sterne’s Sentimental Journey is a (fictitious) ironic autobiography filled with references both to characters in Tristram Shandy and to Sterne’s real life. Long sections of Fielding’s Amelia consist of tales within a tale, all told in first-person. Henry Esmond claims to be an edition of an autobiography written by the fictitious editor’s equally fictitious father, who writes about himself sometimes in first, sometimes in third person. Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus is a report from a fictitious editor of the fictitious works and autobiographical documents of an equally fictitious German scholar. Hawthorne’s third-person Scarlet Letter is framed within an elaborate first-person narrative of the author’s days as a customs inspector. Eliot’s Impressions of Theophrastus Such is a set of essays by the eponymous (and fictitious) Theophrastus. David Copperfield is, like Sentimental Journey,toa considerable extent autobiography posing as fiction. Most of these elaborate narrative structures involve documents, and since the narratives are generally first person, these documents are usually autobiographical. Sartor and Esmond are the clearest examples, both of them involving “found” autobiographical documents, and the former involving extensive discussion of the proper interpretation of such found documents. But the course also contained the

50 The courses listed here are, with some exceptions, from the announcements, which concern planned courses. However, they are equally good indicators of the content of Thomas’s reading and concerns in the early 1890s, whether they were given or merely planned. As we noted earlier (note 48), Thomas probably taught some or all of his Oberlin courses in 1893–1895, despite his apparent move to Chicago. Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 249 supreme English example of “documentary” fiction, Richardson’s one-million-word Clarissa, told from end to end by means of its protagonists’ correspondence. In all this, the fiction Thomas taught (or in some cases planned to teach) was in fact quite unusual. Among all the fiction he ever covered, only Kenilworth and the Eliot novels are told completely in third-person omniscient narration, the dominant form of English prose fiction since the mid-18th Century. (And that may be because Kenilworth and two of Eliot’s novels were historical novels.) It is also very striking—given the later work of the Chicago School—that Thomas did not teach any of the great “social problems” novels of the English midcentury, even though these were undoubtedly as well- known to him as to his students: Disraeli’s Sybil, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and North and South,andDickens’s Hard Times, Bleak House,andDombey and Son, for example. The problematic of the fiction Thomas taught is rather the problematic of individual identity, the question of who exactly “I” am in the context of a changing social world. We see then already in Thomas’s English teaching a preoccupation with themes that are at the heart of The Polish Peasant: the problem of history, the consciousness of the individual, the way these two things go together, and the ambiguous relation between documentary representation and actual experience. These themes are continued in two courses we consider in detail. The first of these is the course on George Eliot, which covered all of the latter’s major novels: Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede, Felix Holt, Romola, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. The first three of these are essentially moral fables (although Adam Bede is a historical novel, the history provides only the framework, not the main content). But the latter four constitute the most sustained attempt to understand the position of the individual in times of social change in 19th Century British thought. Felix Holt confronts the tangled intersection of personal relations, decline of tradition, and radical politics. Romola asks how a woman of high social standing can live a socially meaningful life when the very nature of society is in question.51 Middlemarch famously anatomizes the tangled web of personal ambitions and marital happiness in a changing world, and Daniel Deronda interrogates the question of ethnic identity in the context of emerging nationalism. All of Eliot’s work, as is well known, involves an attempt to find and to found a notion of duty and personal morality appropriate to a society that has lost its religious and other traditional foundations. Her questions are indeed the questions that speak—in endless small detail—through the letters of Polish peasants. What do children owe parents? What do spouses owe each other? How and why should people marry? In what way is the individual separate from the social milieu that makes him? How, in short, can the

51 Not surprisingly, Romola was a touchstone text for the women who began Hull-House, where it was read aloud to Italian peasant immigrants in the opening weeks of the settlement in 1889 (Addams 1961:83). What the contadine can possibly have thought of Eliot’s enormous and slow-paced novel can only be imagined. But to Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr it spoke very directly. We thank Peggy Bevington for pointing out the Romola/Hull-House connection. 250 Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 individual live life? These are her questions, as they are Thomas and Znaniecki’s 50 years later.52 But the specific focus of Thomas’s intellectual concerns in his English professor years—and the degree to which those concerns exactly prefigure those of The Polish Peasant—emerge even more clearly when we consider the one figure to whom Thomas devoted an entire course in each of his years teaching at Oberlin—Robert Browning. Browning had died in the very year that Thomas arrived on Oberlin’s campus.53 Thomas’s texts on Browning included the well-known textbook of Hiram Corson (1886), one of the major figures in 19th Century literary appreciation (and pillar of the American Browning industry), An Introduction to the Poetry of Robert Browning. Corson’s book included four preliminary essays, including one on personality. Indeed, Browning’s overwhelming focus on the nature of personality— evident in the dramatic monologues that were the cynosure of his oeuvre and that are discussed at length by Corson—is of course closely cognate with Thomas and Znaniecki’s focus in TPP. Browning’s greatest work, by common agreement then and since, was the monumental The Ring and the Book, a poem of 21,000 lines on the subject of an obscure Roman murder in the late 17th Century. While its length makes it quite unfamiliar to today’s readers, The Ring and the Book was thought by many in the late 19th Century to be one of the greatest single works of English poetry, on a level with Paradise Lost and The Faerie Queene. Thomas planned whole courses on The Ring and the Book in two of his years at Oberlin, indeed in one of those years splitting the course into two separate tracks so that the book could be read in more detail in one of them. To judge from his course listings, this poem was the most important single work in English literature. The poem’s plot is relatively simple and can be summarized as follows:

A nobleman down on his luck marries the pampered daughter of a plebian house to retrieve his fortunes. The marriage (and the deal) turn sour. She escapes with a priest (who is probably her lover, but it is never clear), but is traced. The husband calls in legal authority, which separates priest and wife (who is pregnant, it is never clear by whom). The wife however leaves her asylum to take the child to her

52 The influence was two-way, of course. That the precursors of modern sociology—Comte in particular— influenced George Eliot is well known (see the excellent review by Vogeler 1980). Indeed, Eliot had at one point been desperately in love with Herbert Spencer (on Eliot’s lifelong engagement with Spencerian ideas, see Paxton 1991). Moreover, Eliot had read and reviewed the work of Wilhelm Riehl, one of the most influential of Germany’s midcentury social analysts. See her widely anthologized essay on “The Natural History of German Life,” (Westminster Review July 1856.) Thomas would undoubtedly have considered this essay—among the most important Eliot ever wrote, given its obvious relation to her own “peasant” novel Adam Bede—in the Eliot section of his course on essayists. 53 Like George Eliot, Browning was something of a secular prophet. Moreover, in Browning’s case the religious themes of many of his poems allowed discussion of “dangerous” topics without leaving the respectable religious fold (See Greer 1952). This was important, for there were religious tests for the Oberlin faculty, as is clear from Thomas’s extraordinary letter of 29 February 1896 to his successor Wilfrid Cressy (OCA RG 21, II Letters, box I). See also Bernard n.d. and Barnard 1969:c.2) Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 251

parents’ house, where the husband finds her and kills both her parents and her. The courts then try and execute the husband. (AA summary) The reader who turns to this forgotten classic is at once overwhelmed by its intimate parallels with TPP. For one thing, the origin of Browning’s great poem— told at great length in the poem’s first book—is virtually identical with the origin myth of The Polish Peasant. Browning was trolling the Florence bookshops one day when a yellow volume caught his eye in an obscure corner. He picked it up and found inside a huge collection of personal documents. These were all the pleadings and counterpleadings and depositions and related documents—by the various protagonists and eye-witnesses and lawyers and judges—relating to the murders.54 This is exactly the same story as Thomas’s in his autobiographical document for Luther Bernard: I trace the origin of my interest in the document to a long letter picked up on a rainy day in the alley behind my house, a letter from a girl who was taking a training course in a hospital, to her father concerning family relationships and discords. It occurred to me at the time that one would learn a great deal if one had many letters of this kind. (Baker 1973:250) Consciously or unconsciously, Thomas’s fascination with documents goes much further back, deep into his years as an English professor. Chance had favored the prepared mind. Second, the obsession of The Ring and the Book with how given social events look different from different points of view clearly prefigures one of the fundamental themes of TPP, and indeed of Thomas’s whole oeuvre: the multi-perspectival nature of social reality and of social events. Probably no theme more undergirds the hundreds of letters in the Polish Peasant than the different definitions of various financial transfers by various family members—as contribution, as family maintenance, as personal sacrifice, as dowry, as robbery, as extortion, as honor, as loans, as gifts. And the multiple definitions of family financial transactions in a time of change are precisely Browning’s themes in The Ring and the Book. Like TPP, the poem consists of different “books”—12 of them—each giving one individual’s view of the events described therein. The first and last books are frames from the poet (as in so much of the literature Thomas taught—and as in TPP—there is a “framing” interpretation around the “evidence” presented). Books 2 through 4 give three versions of public opinion about the murder: from those on the nobleman’s side, those on the wife’s side, and a via media. Books 5 through 7 give the views of the three principals (nobleman–murderer, wife, and priest–lover), while Books 8 and 9 have versions of the two opposing lawyers. Book 10 is the final legal judgment (by

54 Thomas’s brother Thaddeus was a colleague and friend of the man (C. W. Hodell) who in 1909 published a translation of this “Yellow Book”—Browning’s original source—into English, and it is interesting to speculate whether Thomas might not have met him. (See Knipp and Thomas 1938:92) W. I. Thomas, of course, could have read all of Browning’s sources in their original languages had he wished. It should be noted, however, that the “found documents” story was a common one. Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) uses exactly the same story, although in that case—unlike the Browning—the story is a fiction (see the essays collected in Person 2005:291–386). On the complexities of Hawthorne’s narrator, see Leverenz 1983. 252 Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 the Pope), and Book 11 is a deathbed soliloquy from the husband. Each of these books contains a complete and self-consistent interpretation of all the many claims and counter-claims, the acts and the forbearances, that make up the tangled chain of events leading up to the murders. The subjects are all the thematics of Thomas’s peasant letters: duty, honor, family, continuity, individual rights, social rules, misrepresentation. The poem reads much like the longer series of peasant letters in TPP—the Markiewicz and Wroblewski series, for example, in which single transactions are seen from several points of view. As this outline makes clear, not only are the particular themes and the perspectivalism of The Ring and the Book cognate with TPP, so also is the work’s overwhelming concern with personality and indeed with autobiography. The ten separate narratives not only show the shifting structure of the social groups involved, they also deeply characterize the changing individuals who make them. As in so many of Browning’s works, this is done through soliloquy, but here, as in TPP, the different soliloquies concern the same events and so develop additional layers of depth and irony. In TPP, this depth is developed only in Wladek’s autobiography (it is worth recalling that there were originally to be two such autobiographies). Here Thomas and Znaniecki, like English teachers with a class of neophytes, not only footnote the unclarities, but call the reader’s attention to the layers of ironies and complexities in Wladek’s innocent text.55 Taken in sum, the evidence is very strong that many basic aspects of TPP reach back into Thomas’s years as a teacher of English. The concern with the place of the individual in times of social change, the focus on the personality, the obsession with documents and representations of the self: these are all written plainly in the choices Thomas made of texts for teaching. And postulating that the interpretative stance characteristic of literary reading was Thomas’s basic intellectual attitude goes a long way to explaining the shortcomings that generations of critics have found in his theories. Most of Thomas’s theoretical articles read like loose collections of new and old readings. There are some more or less constant vocabularies in them—and a few idées fixes—but the reader of Thomas’s work prior to TPP will not find the consistent theoretical argument characteristic of dozens of his contemporaries. It is plain that Thomas’s heart is not in the explicit theory. By contrast, his heart is in the interpretive passages that permeate TPP. The documents illustrate his basic themes— in dozens of different ways, with different people, in different contexts. And, for Thomas, those themes are clearly the better for being dynamically deployed in interpretation rather than rigidly laid out in argument. That we today prefer them laid out in neat little theories is our loss, not a fault in Thomas.

55 Oddly enough, Thomas’s senior colleague and former teacher Albion Small had been experimenting with multiperspectivalism only a few years earlier. In Between Eras from Capitalism to Democracy (1913), Small had created a series of dialogues between a set of only slightly fictitious Chicagoans. (“The sociologist” Randall is transparently Small’s own attempt at self parody, right down to former employment at a university in Maine.) These characters, who include capitalists and their various family members as well as university folk and a variety of radicals (but no working class characters), debate the rights and wrongs of a strike against the Avery Company. The work culminates with a three chapter paean to Small’s brand of genteel communism. Thomas would undoubtedly have known about this book, which Small had published by the Inter-collegiate Press of Kansas City, MO, USA. Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 253

The Creative Vagabond

We have seen then that the roots of TPP reached deep into Thomas’s first intellectual love, English literature. After 1910, those themes and stances came together with historical circumstances, the casebook genre, the psychiatric notion of the life history, and a dynamic young Polish philosopher to produce The Polish Peasant.56 In the last analysis, however, the core story of the Polish Peasant—the disintegration of the rural household and the rise of individualistic personalities in the children who leave it—was the story of William Isaac Thomas himself. In tiny Elk Garden, Virginia, where W. I. Thomas was born in 1863, the Thomases were indeed members of a “peasant nobility:” leading members of their local community, possessed of substantial lands and woven into a strongly-knit kin group. A young school-master and part-time Methodist preacher, Thaddeus P. Thomas had married into the Price family in 1856. The 400-acre farm he received as a dowry turned him into a farmer; like so many of the migrant Poles his son studied, he moved back onto the land. In and around Elk Garden were the farms of his wife’s brothers and father. Like them, the Thomas farm was in 1860 a largely self-sufficient unit, worked by Thomas, a farm hand, and a slave, who presumably also came with the marriage.57 All this was upended by the Civil War, in which two of W. I. Thomas’s maternal uncles served as well a paternal uncle who died in a Federal prison.58 Over the ridge from the Tennessee and Virginia Railway, Elk Garden was only lightly touched by war operations, being spared the devastation that visited northeastern Tennessee

56 It is now clear exactly what Robert Park meant in his often quoted remark that “Thomas’s interest was always, it seems, that of a poet….and of a literary man in the reportorial sense” (In “Notes on the Origins of the Society for Social Research,” reprinted in full in Kurtz 1982; the quote is found on p. 337). It is thus by no means surprising that the outside Press reviewer on TPP (Professor J. H. Tufts) commended the letters for their “purely literary interest, which is very considerable as disclosing human sympathies and behavior in frank, unsophisticated, and unspoiled fashion.” UCPressP 451:7. 57 The farm census return for 1860 shows a classic freestanding operation. Stock were few (nine horses, three milch cows, four steers, three pigs, 33 sheep), but the farm turned a substantial product: 1500 bushels of corn, 500 bushels of oats, 100 bushels of potatoes, 75 lbs of butter, and $40 of home-made manufacture (1860, Schedule 4, Russell County, p. 13). The huge corn output was mostly for winter feed, not for the market, although the new railroad (1856) was already changing the local economy when the war began. The T. P. Thomas family owned three slaves in 1860, a 35 year-old man, a 26 year-old woman, and an 11 year old girl (1860 Census, Russell County, Schedule 2, p.237). It is not known whether this was a family, nor did any of them remain in the household as hired help in 1870. All census information reported here and below was retrieved by the senior author from microfilms of the manuscript census held at the Center for Research Libraries. On the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad, a crucial stake in the Civil War, see Noe 1994. For a chilling picture of life in the Holston and Clinch River country in wartime and the postwar, see Fisher 1997 and Blair 1998. 58 Information on Thomas’s relatives comes from a variety of sources, and is assembled in Tate (1974). We have consulted many of the primary sources used by Tate and have found his work generally reliable. As for Confederate attitudes, Russell County was one of the more secessionist of the southwestern counties. The Thomases and Prices seem all to have been Confederates, Mrs. Thomas’s elder brother Richard rather vehemently so, as can be seen from his later columns in the Holston Methodist. There is, however, no evidence that W. I. Thomas’s father served in any capacity in the Confederate Army. His brother-in-law’s brief biography of him (Price 1913:295–296) speaks of heart problems, which may have prevented the elder Thomas’s service. 254 Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258

60 miles to the southwest.59 But a new world had come, and by 1870 Thaddeus Thomas had become a commercial farmer, raising beef because the war-induced expansion of the Midwest lands had driven grain prices down.60 But like many of the Polish peasants, Thomas senior saw no way forward on the land. In 1873, he sold the farm and went into business in Morristown, Tennessee, as business manager of his brother-in-law Richard Price’s newspaper, the Holston Methodist. In that paper, he conducted an agricultural advice and general ideas column of exactly the kind reported at length in the sections of TPP on peasant education—dispensing advice about fertilizer and stock and fallowing along with reports of Grange meetings and discussions of the relation of farmers and the working classes.61 A year later, after a disastrous fire destroyed the paper’s machinery and subscription lists, the elder Thomas went into the marble business in Knoxville, in which he remained until his death in 1884. The four Thomas sons who survived scattered in classic peasant fashion. The eldest (Price Thomas) remained with the parents in Tennessee, briefly becoming head of education in the state.62 Thaddeus Thomas took a BA at Vanderbilt, then a PhD at Johns Hopkins, remaining in Baltimore at the Women’s College (Goucher). Henry Bascom Thomas moved to Chicago and became an eminent orthopedic surgeon.63 And W. I. Thomas became the vagabond, like Wladek in The Polish Peasant.He never stopped changing fields. He never stopped moving around. He never stopped reading new things and having new ideas and new collaborations. The fact is that he was bored with stability (Bernard 1924 emphasizes this quality of Thomas.) In this context it is not surprising that nobody intimately concerned with Thomas seems to have been very upset by the events of 1918. His wife was plainly not upset; their

59 Civil War documents show only one hostile military operation in Elk Garden. Part of George Stoneman’s (Union) Cavalry passed through the town on its way back from ruining the Confederate saltworks at Saltville in December 1864 (See Davis et al. 1891–1895, Plate 118). 60 In 1870, the Thomas farm reported 56 steers and 25 pigs and was producing more wheat than corn (1870 Census, Schedule 3, Lebanon Township, p. 3). The family now numbered father, mother, five children, one white domestic servant, one black domestic servant, and the latter’s 1-year-old child (1870 Census, schedule 1, Russell County, p. 25). 61 The elder Thomas’s advice columns are entertaining reading. They make it clear that he read widely in European (including German language) sources as well as in American ones, and that he had a curious, restless intelligence rather like that of his famous son. All the same, the core of the columns was agricultural advice. When Thomas left the paper, the columns ceased. On the history of the paper, see Price 1913:71ff, 90ff. 62 Price Thomas apparently had some wanderlust himself. His successor as Superintendent of Public Instruction in Tennessee notes rather ruefully in his first annual report (Tennessee, Department of Public Instruction, Report, 1898/9, p. 5) that in his (immediately preceding) 2-year term Price Thomas had neither published a report on Tennessee instruction nor gathered the information for one. Like his brother William, Price Thomas was one of the University of Tennessee faculty ousted in a putsch by incoming President Dabney in 1887. (See Montgomery 1961:32ff.) 63 The traditional story (Thomas’s own, in Baker 1973:246) is that Thomas’s father made the decision to move in order to get educations for his sons. He was, after all, a highly educated man himself, despite his 17 years as a farmer. But it is also clear from his Holston Methodist columns that he had probably read the doom of Eastern agriculture already and made the move for financial reasons as well. W. I. Thomas would have been too young to know about this side of the decision. Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 255 marriage had been elastic for a long time. Thomas’s friend Mrs. Dummer wrote the incident off within 3 months. He himself was happy to stop teaching and turned down later job offers. Although Thomas and his wife lived apart for long stretches in the 1920s, she and Thomas divorced only 16 years after the great event of 1918, after 46 years of marriage, probably so that Thomas, ever hungry for new experience at age 71, could marry his collaborator Dorothy Swaine Thomas, 36 years his junior.64 Another of Thomas’s vagabond qualities was a certain disattention to the more mundane details of life. This comes through in accounts of his teaching: “In fact, the course was likely to be half or three-fourths through before the average student gained any clear notion of its logic.” (Bernard 1924) It is evident in his thoughts on method: “In all of this, there is not formal attention to method but the use of some imagination or mind from point to point.”65 It is also evident in his financial dealings with the Oberlin treasurer over the years 1895–1906, which show an improvisatory attitude that must have driven his former-employer creditors wild. In a story that epitomizes Thomas’s vagabondism, Bernard tells of him walking across most of Europe one summer (probably 1896, see WIT to SNH 30 Jun 1912 SNHP); “arriving in London with only a few dollars and a return ticket to the United States, he spent most of his safety fund on a walking stick which struck his fancy.” (Bernard 1924:7) This vagabondage means that Thomas has seemed a disappointment to many who have studied him: if only he had been more systematic, if only he had seen his studies through to completion, if only he had gone beyond interpretation to causal analysis and theory.... If only, indeed, he had played by the new academic rules about the ownership of ideas, about muzzling unorthodox views, about setting an example, about teaching. Thomas looks to us like one of his own Bohemians, a vagabond bouncing from one place, one idea, one collaborator, to another. But he clearly thought of himself as the “creative man:”“[I]n the creative man this disorderliness is expressed in the setting and solution of problems, in the creation of new values.” (Thomas 1917:180) Perhaps if we read Thomas for values instead of theories, we would get the point.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank Andrew Hannah, Associate Registrar of the University of Chicago, for graciously allowing us to view the transcripts of early Chicago sociology PhDs. We would also like to thank Roland Baumann and his staff for their cordial welcome and assistance at the Oberlin College Archives. We also thank Andrew Harrison at the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institution for helping us with the Adolf Meyer papers as well as the staffs of the Schlesinger and Houghton Libraries at Harvard University for their assistance with the Ethel Sturges Dummer and Richard S. Badger papers. We also thank the Rockefeller Archives Center in Sleepy Hollow, NY, USA and chief archivist Thomas Rosenbaum (now retired) for help with Thomas sources in RAC collections. Finally, we thank the staff of the University of Chicago’s Joseph Regenstein Library’s Special

64 The late Ruth Billingsley, Thomas’s grand-daughter, told the senior author (personal communication) that W. I. and Harriet Park Thomas kept in close touch even after Thomas’s second marriage (7 February 1935), in fact spending substantial time together on Thomas’s travels. Thomas is buried beside his parents and his first wife, in lot 790 of the Old Gray Cemetery in Knoxville, TN, USA (Tate 1974). 65 The quote is from a 1928 letter from Thomas to Park quoted by Wirth in Blumer 1939:166. 256 Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258

Collections Research Center, and particularly University Archivist Dan Maier, for research assistance covering many years and projects. All archival sources are cited in the form in which they are indexed by their holders, which of course varies from one institution to another. We regret the perhaps overwhelming nature of our primary documentation, but the fact is that most historiography of Thomas is based on legends, secondary sources, or primary sources read out of context. So we have tried to base this analysis entirely on critical readings of primary materials.

References

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The Interaction Order Sui Generis: Goffman's Contribution to Social Theory Author(s): Anne Warfield Rawls Source: Sociological Theory, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 136-149 Published by: American Sociological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/201935 Accessed: 19/06/2009 09:46

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http://www.jstor.org THE INTERACTION ORDER SUI GENERIS: GOFFMAN'S CONTRIBUTION TO SOCIAL THEORY

ANNE WARFIELDRAWLS Universityof Wisconsin-Madison

Goffinan is credited with enriching our understanding of the details of interaction, but not with challenging our theoretical understanding of social organization. While Goffman's position is not consistent, the outlines for a theory of an interaction order sui generis may be found in his work. It is not theoretically adequate to understand Goffinan as an interactionist within the dichotomy between agency and social structure. Goffman offers a way of resolving this dichotomy via the idea of an interaction order which is constitutive of self and at the same time places demands on social structure. This has significant implications for our understanding of social organization in general.

a conversation has a life of its own and makes significant contribution to the idea of an demands on its own behalf. It is a little social interaction order however, he did not articulate system with its own boundary-maintaining this order in a systematic theory. This paper tendencies; it is a little patch of commitment attempts to redress that shortcoming. and loyalty with its own heroes and its own The elements of a theory of the interaction villains. order which appear in Goffman's work consist (Goffman, 1967:113-114) of four parts. First, the social self needs to be continually achieved in and through interaction. While this is not and is consistent INTRODUCTION position new, with the earlier work of Mead (1934), Goffman Goffman's contribution to social theory consists argues on the basis of this that the presentational in the idea of an interaction order sui generis nature of self places constraints on the interac- which derives its order from constraints imposed tion order and supplies intrinsic motivation for by the needs of a presentational self rather than compliance.1 Second, these constraints not only by social structure. There are four common define the interaction order, but also may resist errors in the interpretation of Goffman's work and defy social structure. Even the encroach- which have contributed to misunderstanding this ment of total institutions on the guarantees of contribution. First, while the notion of a the interaction order can be resisted to a degree. presentational self has presumably been under- Third, interaction is conceived of as a produc- stood, it has nevertheless been re-embedded in tion order wherein a commitment to that order the traditional dichotomy between agency and social structure. Goffman has Consequently ' Giddens that Goffman has been criticized for been interpreted as documenting the struggle says not explaining the motivationof actors to behave as they between agency and social structure. Second, do and that this contributesto the hollow feel of his work of the attention Goffman to because gave (Giddens, 1984:70). One can see that if we accept strategic action, it is assumed that Goffman Gidden's interpretationof Goffman's work the motiva- considered strategic action to be the basic form tion of actors to resist institutional constraint and to of action; that strategic constraints provide the comply with institutional routine would indeed need basic constraint of the interaction order. Third, explaining. But, Goffman has not argued that actors Goffman has been interpretedas focusing on the choose to do these things. He has argued that the interactionorder constraintson actors to do these details of the interactional negotiation of social places structure. Goffman is to have things. Actor's motives do not require explanationwhat Fourth, thought is how and the interactionorder the issues of and requiresexplanation why ignored important inequality would place such constraintson actors and situations. It institutional constraint. is the answerto this questionthat Goffman's work sought Each of these interpretations can and will be to address. He argued carefully over the course of his assessed through a conceptual explication of the career that there were interactional prerequisites and interaction order. While Goffman made a needs of self which places constraints on interaction. These constraints he referred to as the interactional groundrules. Persons conformed with these because if * This paper was writtenwith the supportof an NIMH they did not their social selves would cease to exist. It Post-DoctoralFellowship at the University of Wisconsin- was in their own self interest not to damage themselves Madison. I wish to thank Albert Meehan, George and the interactionin which they were engaged. Goffman Psathas, Doug Maynard, Jeff Coulter, Norbert Wiley, did not fail to address the question. Giddens has simply and RandallCollins for helpful comments and criticisms. posed it in the wrong terms. 136 SociologicalTheory, 1987, Vol. 5 (Fall:136-149) INTERACTION ORDER SUI GENERIS 137 generates meaning. In other words, actions have PART I: THE THEORETICAL CONTEXT meaning with respect to the production order, FOR THE INTERACTION ORDER rather than in relation to institutionally specifi- of social order has to deal in some ends. There is order and to actions Every theory able meaning fashion with the of and social there is an commitment to duality agency whenever implicit structure. What we like to think of as "free" the fact that concerted action. Fourth, persons inhabit a world of obvious social commit themselves to the rules of agents must ground constraint. Some view constraint as the in order for selves to be maintained product interaction of individual as in the notion Goffman as a not a aggregate actions, is treated by moral, of "free market" while others that A clear sense of what argue structural imperative. constraint emanates from social structureswhich means involvement and Goffman by obligations are the control of individuals. distinction from the traditional identifica- beyond their The structuralistor collectivist holds of values with structure one to position tion provides key that the individual is the source of the distinctiveness of the interac- agent understanding variation whole social structure is the source of order itself. tion in social life. to this view the foundations of the interaction order constancy According While structure is a mediator between are evident in Goffman's work, there is one necessary competing individual interests without which the inconsistency which emerges from the important order and constancy of social life would not be discussion: Goffman's view of language is much possible. The individualist position on the other less and less interactively based than his original hand holds either the solipsistic view that there view of self. That is, Goffman the issue neglects is no order or, that order is a of of how is achieved in a constitutive product meaning of individual decisions.3 However, it not based on institutions aggregates order (e.g. grammer). is clear that deviations from structure occur, Goffman's view of Talk invokes tradi- quite therefore even the structuralist grants some structure tional notions of (Goffman, 1981). power of resistance to the individual agent. Here the work of Garfinkel and Sacks who Similarly, the proponent of free agency must argue for a locally produced order of meaning at accept some constraints of social institutions on the level of talk and mundane action provides a aggregate individual actions in order to explain position on language which is compatible with complex social organization. the idea of an interaction order. However, the Over the past ten years there have been details of this argument are beyond the scope of several concerted attempts to "bridge" this gap this paper.2 It is sufficient to point out here that between agency and social structure, via theo- the inadequacy of Goffman's position on ries which synthesize the relative contribution of language and meaning prevents him from both agency and structure to social order. The clearly delineating the boundaries of the interac- work of Habermas and Giddens is among the tion order. This failure to deal consistently with most notable in this regard. Giddens' theory of "double structuration" for instance that the issue of language, and a certain "looseness" argues structure is created mundane interactions as in his use of the notion of morality explain much by of the over his work. Not is well as by formal organizations (Giddens, controversy only For structureis the result of the Goffman inconsistent in the boundaries 1984). Giddens, defining routinization of actions in and time. of the interaction order, but as a result of the through Actions, whether formal or create and of his on Goff- informal, inadequacy position language routines which create and man's later work on frames is inconsistent with reproduce thereby reproduce social structure. His theory promises his earlier position on self. to unite interactional studies with a more This paper will focus on Goffman's contribu- structural view of social order. However, like an interaction order via his tion to the idea of most theoretical discussions of the duality of idea of self and leave to other papers the contribution of Garfinkel and Sacks. The paper 3 is divided into three parts. Part I provides the Phenomenologyis neitherindividual nor structuralin theoretical context for the interaction order. Part the traditionalsense. It is a structuralview in so far as structureis built into the form of human II will discuss the four of the idea of the consciousness. aspects But, it is individualisticin so far as it builds a world out interaction order in more detail. Part III of individual experience. Although some people have considers in a broader vein, the difference called Goffman and Garfinkelphenomenologists they are between Goffman's position and that of sociol- not. Goffman does not begin with structures of ogy in general. consciousness which transcendthe individual. He makes the social self dependenton encountersfor its existence. The constants for Goffman are the constraintswhich the 2 See Rawls, 1987 for a discussion of how Sacks' natureof the social self plces on social encounters. For a conversation analysis completes an understandingof the more detailed discussion of the relationship between interactionorder. Garfinkeland phenomenology see Rawls 1985. 138 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY agency and social structure, Giddens credits the science of institutions, of their genesis and both agents and structure with contributing to of their functioning. "institutionalized" social constraint. This is the (Durkheim, 1938:lvi, emphasis added) crux of the issue: to view constraint as The routinization of actions into institutions and institutionalized the debate in one weights the constraint of those institutions direction. subsequent over human actions is the defined domain of In the debate about individualism and collec- Whether individualist or situationalism and micro sociology. structuralist, tivism, structuralism, have aimed at the and macro the that social constraint sociologists explaining origin, assumption and of institutional- is with institutionalized social maintenance, negotiation synonymous ized social constraint. The view of individual constraint has not been effectively challenged.4 and structure as and entities The of whether institutionalized social separate competing question which assume defines the of the constraint is the or even the form they parameters only primary debate in such a that must either of social constraint is not considered in these way constancy be located in the individual or in social discussions. Whether the source of institutionalstructure.5 ized constraint is credited to individuals or Goffman this view of individual and since Durkheim's Rules the rejects structures, of social structure as and has been de- separate competing Sociological Method, sociology entities. He on the basis of his notion of fined as the of institutionalized social argues study the of self that the needs of constraint: presentation interaction and the social self are a source of in order that there may be a social fact, consistent social constraint which does not several individuals, at the very least, must originate in social structure, and which rarely have contributed their action; and in this joint ends up as part of social structure (via activity is the origin of a new fact. Since this routinization). The constants of the interaction joint activity takes place outside each one of order do not reside in particular individuals us (for a plurality of consciousness enters into either. Rather, they are a function of the it), its necessary effect is to fix, to institute condition of the social self in general as outside us, certain ways of acting and certain Goffman articulated it. Goffman's notion of a judgments which do not depend upon each self which depends for its existence on an order particular will taken separately. It has been of interaction which is constrained by this pointed out that the word "institution" will dependence allows Goffman to argue for the expresses this special mode of reality, pro- recognition of interaction as a separate domain vided that the ordinary significance of it be of action which needs to be studied in its own slightly extended. One can, indeed, without right (1967, 1983). In short, individual and distorting the meaning of this expression, structure are not considered by Goffman to be designate as "institutions" all the beliefs and competing entities. They are the joint products all the modes of conduct instituted by the of an interaction order sui generis. collectivity. Sociology can then be defined as However, because of the assumption that all social constraint is institutional, his plea for recognition of the separate nature of the 4 In that the identificationof social constraint saying interaction order has been misinterpreted. It is with institutionalizedconstraint has not been effectively seen either as a denial of constraint on I don't mean that a hasn't been challenged challenge Goffman's and as made. It is the argumentof this paper that a significant part interpreted reducing order to the of situa- challenge to this idea was offered by the work of both contingencies particular Goffman and Garfinkel. But for several reasons this tions (Knorr-Cetina, 1981:18-19) or individu- challenge has gone unrecognized. I think it is fair to say als. Or it is seen as an argument that structure that neither of these thinkers made a clear theoretical defines even the minutae of interaction (Gonos, statement of their position. And I will also argue that 1977). In the latter regard, his work is seen to particularly in the case of Goffman there were deep have either an existential (Craib, 1976) or a him internal inconsistencies in the argumentwhich kept Durkheimian (Collins, 1986), while in from a clear statement. Nevertheless, I think quality making the former it is often thought not to be sociology what they were trying to argue was quite clear, and that seated the institutionalized at all. deep assumptions regarding in to a consensus about natureof social constraintprevented their argumentbeing The difficulty coming heard. Because the assumption is that constraint exists only in institutional form, the claim that there are interactionalconstraints is interpretedto mean either that 5 Phenomenologicalsociology is an exception here. It institutions constrain the very details of interaction, or was another early attempt to argue for an alternative that institutionalconstraint is being rejected altogetherin source of social order. But, as it locates constants in the favor of the view that the contingencies of either form of consciousness itself it is not strictly speaking a individuals or situations shape action. "social" solution to the dilemma. INTERACTION ORDER SUI GENERIS 139

Goffman's contribution lies in large part with that face-to-face interaction is organized around the available choices. Alexander has argued that the protection of selves during interaction, and the only possible choice is between contingency the protection of the interaction order from self and collectivity (Alexander, 1982; 1983). He interest. takes the gap between agency and social One's face is a sacred and the structure as for a then, thing, the ontological starting point order to sustain it is such a expressive required theory of social order. Given theoretical therefore a ritual one. the is to build a beginning only possibility (Goffman, 1967:19) bridge between agency and social sturcture. It is difficult to comprehend Goffman from within Statements like this have been interpreted to such a framework because he denies that there is reflect Goffman's interest in preserving routine such a gap in the first place. so that institutions can be reproduced (Giddens, Goffman does not begin in the familiar 1984:70). However, by ritual Goffman means fashion with individual agents and social sacred not routine. For Goffman the interaction structures which they must either conform to or order is sacred because it creates and maintains resist. Rather he begins with those settings, the social self not because it provides the commitments, and understandings which allows consistency necessary for the routinization of agents and social structures to have a social social structure. presence in the first place.6 For Goffman the Goffman, does not deny the existence of the social self is a dramaturgical product of social self as performer (1959:252; 1967:31-2), but interaction (1959:253). The dependence of self both in its capacity as performer and performed, on presentation for its existence places con- the self ultimately depends upon interaction. straints on the interaction order, its form, and The social self is the product of a scene, "it is a the actions of participants. Regardless of class, dramaturgical effect arising diffusely from a organizational roles, or formal institutional scene that is presented" (Goffman, 1959:253). structures there are obligations imposed on While the character performed is a product of interactants by the needs of self via the each interaction, the performer is a product of interaction order which cannot be forgone. The many interactions. self is therefore not the ontological starting point For a complete man to be expressed, for a theory of social order. For Goffman it is an individuals must hold hands in a chain of end product, the existence of which depends . . . While it be true that the a order which is the ceremony may upon presentation primary individual has a self all his own, constraint of situations of In sum unique co-presence. evidence of this possession is thoroughly a the interaction order has an existence indepen- of ceremonial labor. dent of either structures or individuals. product joint (Goffman, 1967:84-85) For Goffman contractual are II THE INTERACTION ORDER obligations generated by the requirements of social interaction 1) Ritual self: A Primary Moral Constraint on and the reproduction of the self through its the Organization of Action relations to other selves in interaction: I will refer to this level While others have also argued for the of agreement as a interactional character of the social self (Mead, working consensus." 1934), the further argument that the need for the (Goffman, 1959:10) social production of self places constraints on interaction in a new one. For Goffman the participation in any contact with others is a presentational character of the social self is the commitment . . . an involvement in the face of others that primary constraint of the organization of social is as immediate and spontane- action. ous as the involvement he has in his own The claim that interaction has an orderly and face. moral character rests for Goffman on the (Goffman 1967:6) assumption that selves have a ritual nature, and Contract is necessary because of the fragile nature of both the interaction and the social self. The constant threat of annihilation hangs over 6 This makes Goffman's work difficult to explain both: because social order must be in terms of explained When an incident occurs and commitment and obligations; ideas which are usually spontaneous thought of as philosophical and which are usually only involvement is threatened, then reality is applied to social theory after the fact. With Goffman threatened. these terms constitute the foundation for his theory of (Goffman, 1967:135) order. 140 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

To be awkward or unkempt, to talk or move social structure. Goffman's focus on the self in wrongly, is to be a dangerous giant, a the total institution is an exploration of the destroyer of worlds. degree of resistance which the interaction order (Goffman, 1961a:81) offers. If the total institution does little to the needs of the ritual Goffman's The individual is never secure in an respect self, encounter, work nevertheless reveals for there is the that the concessions won by always possibility selves from total institutions. In between their "front" and fact, one of the discrepancy projected most features of the real self will be revealed: "in our striking Asylums is the numbers Anglo- of concessions obtained from the American at there seems to be no by inmates Society, least, institution. These take the form what social encounter which cannot become embar- of would otherwise to be irrational behaviors and to one or more of its appear rassing participants" are often to official institutional It is therefore, not contrary policy. (Goffman, 1967:99). only These actions make sense when viewed in but also to act in accordance only moral, prudent terms of contract and and if with the consensus because it concession, only working violating one realized that selfhood is at stake and can be would the interaction which the upset upon conces- maintenance of "self" gained through apparently meaningless depends. sions. Take for instance Goffman's discussion Within this view, we have a situation where of "touch relations" in a mental hospital: persons ignorant of their future status in the interaction, enter into an agreemant to accept at On Ward A, as in other wards in the hospital, face value the "front" of all participants, thus there was a "touch system". Certain catego- protecting all positions which they themselves ries of personnel had the privilege of might come to occupy in the future.7 Social expressing their affection and closeness to selves depend for security upon a knowledge of others by the ritual of bodily contact with the character and intention of their fellows. them. They each need to know where the other stands Attendants, patients, and nurses formed one in relation to their respective moral obligations group in regard to touch rights, the rights or they must assume "good faith". Social being symmetrical. Any one of these individ- interaction provides the vehicle through which uals had a right to touch any member of his this mutual identification may be accomplished. own category or any member of the other "They will be forced to accept some events as categories. conventional or natural signs of something not (Goffman, 1967:73-74) available to the senses" directly (Goffman, This "touch doc- Persons who fulfills their interaction system" although excluding 1959:2). to the others of institu- be to their tors, applies regardless obligations may presumed respect tional status. "a kind of between moral as well: Thus, compact obligations inmates and staff is found" (Goffman 1961:97). A state where everyone temporarily accepts It is a small oasis of equality, within an everyone else's lines is established. This kind environment which is otherwise overwhelm- of mutual acceptance seems to be a basic ingly hostile to the very existence of the self. structuralfeature of interaction, especially the Such concessions are, according to Goffman, interaction of face-to-face talk. necessary. Without them the self cannot be (Goffman, 1967:11) "managed"; it disappears. These concessions which are "for" the interests of a This of the self and interaction preserving dependence upon semblance of also tell us about adherance to "involvement self, something obligations" places the moral order which selfhood demands. It is constraints on the social order itself. These an order which stands the constraints do not arise from social eqalitarian against however, institutional distribution of and class the division of rights opportuni- structure, relations, labor, ties. or cultural ideas, but rather from the require- Goffman's work on asylums (1961) intro- ments of the self and sociality. duced the idea that there are aspects of total institutions which are inimical to the mainte- 2) The Interaction Order and Total Institutions nance of social selves. Concessions are necessary for inmates to survive intact. In his Goffman argues that the requirements of the interpretation of Goffman, Giddens translates social self not only place constraints on the the discussion of consessions won by selves interaction order, but also place constraints on from asylums into an issue of tradeoffs in prison discipline which are made necessary by the 7 The obvious similarities to contractarian moral resistance of "capable agents" to prison routine philosophy and the implications of Goffman's position (Giddens, 1984:153-4). This is not Goffman's for ethnics are taken up in another paper "Goffman's argument. Giddens does not acknowledge that Interactionism:Dialectics of Commitmentand Order". there are problems with trying to apply INTERACTION ORDER SUI GENERIS 141

"discipline", "rules" or "routine" in total on the issue of meaning.9 Despite the general institutions in the first place. According to agreement between Goffman and Sartre on the Goffman the ways in which these routines character of the presentation of self, they differ violate the interactional groundrules and thereby over the fundamental relationship between threaten to destroy meaningful action and social meaning and action (Rawls, 1984). Though selves are counterbalanced by the underlife claiming to derive a theory of social structure which provides for the self and interaction. from the individual (i.e., consciousness), Sartre These needs resist institutional constraint in (1960) nevertheless casts the sense of conscious their own right. It is not up to "capable" agents experience against a relation to institutional to decide whether or not to resist institutional order. Goffman, on the other hand, chooses not constraint. The interaction order resists these to begin with consciousness per se, but with the constraints in its own right. interaction within which consciousness takes on a public and communicable form. Goffman and Sartreboth consider the relation- 3) The Interaction Order and Meaning ship of the individual to the group to be a Interaction is usually considered to be orderly in necessary one. For Sartre, however, this is a so far as it pursues institutionally recognizable consequence of the logical order of the material ends and lacking in order in so far as it does not. world and of "otherness." Because interaction For Goffman however, interactional scenes are with others is necessary for the definition of the orderly and meaningful to the degree that self, possession of a self requires the presence of participants are committed to fulfill their others and of a material world. However, this involvement obligations. The interaction order relation to others is for Sartre "inert". It is not is a production order. The meaning of actions is characterized by commitment or "human" in their orderly relationship to the underlying meaning. For Sartre, it is pure material presence enabling conventions of interaction.8 The issue until organized relative to institutional ends of meaning is not one which Goffman handles (Sartre, 1960:256). consistently. He tends to treat non-verbal In contrast, Goffman presents a picture of meaning in a fashion consistent with his idea of constraints on interaction which are internal to an interaction order, whereas his position on interactional scenes. He paints a picture wherein language is highly structural. This section will social order and meaning require a particular focus on those aspects of the production of interactional relationship between individual and meaningful action which Goffman successfully group. Actions do not acquire their meaning deals with in terms consistent with his position primarily through a relation to external ends but on self. This does not represent his general ratherthrough a commitment to the internal ends position on language however which should not of the interaction order. For Goffman the be interpreted in terms of the arguments of this performance requires commitment even for the section. A systematic theory of the interaction simplest of interactions. Meaning is, according order would require a theory of the social to this view, a constitutive production in and construction of meaning in talk such as that through group performance. offered by Sacks and Schegloff. Goffman states that where there is "order," Sartre, who epitomized the attempt by there must be a working consensus. Therefore, interactionists to derive structure from interac- all meaningful relationships of co-presence are tion provides an appropriatecontrast to Goffman characterized by this underlying consensus. For Sartre, there are levels of organized relationships on a continuum from no consensus at all to a of consensus. For there 8 Giddens high degree Goffman, treatsthe sequentialityof actionsin timeas is no a which a and meaningful relationship where there is not temporalquality imparts relationship a tacit of some sort. meaning to those actions (Giddens, 1984:35). This pledge ignoresthe possibilitythat sequentialityis a carefully in contact with others is a constructedfeature of actions participation any whichparticipants use in commitment . . . an involvement in the face in the first is constructingmeaning place. Sequentiality of others that is as immediate and notan accidentalproperty to be reprospectivelyproduced spontane- and discovered. It is not an accidentdue to the dimension ous as the involvement he has in his own of time, but one of the production propertiesof action face. (Goffman 1967:6) itself. Actions are to be of certain produced parts When the "working consensus" is violated, sequences in very specific ways. Institutionaltime may interaction be reversible as Giddens says (Giddens, 1984:35). But, collapses. one of Garfinkel's points is that local productiontime is individuals collapse as units of minimal not. Things look very different backwards. And the tendency to look backwardsmay be partiallyresponsible for our view of daily life as being institutionally 9 For a more detailed comparison of Goffman and organized. Sartresee Rawls, 1984. 142 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

ceremonial substance and others learn that constraints on the order and meaning of that what had been taken for granted as ultimate situation. However, Goffman has pointed to a entities are really held together by rules that source of constraint which transcends situations: can be broken with some kind of impunity. commitment to the enabling conventions of (Goffman, 1967:94) interaction necessitated by the nature of the we must be prepared to see that the social self. impression of reality fostered by a perfor- For Sartre, the existentialist, the problem is to mance is a delicate, fragile thing that can be explain how meaning, or self could ever be truly shattered by very minor mishaps. (Goffman, free of institutional or material constraints since 1959:56) they appear to be defined by these constraints. Therefore, freedom becomes the ultimate exis- There is, for Goffman, no arena of human tential problem. Freedom in this sense is not interaction that is meaningless. The seemingly problematic for Goffman, because meaning is random and "insane" behavior of patients in an an interactional achievement and not an institu- asylum, or queueing up in a line is not tional artifact or residue. 10However, meaning is intrinsically meaningless activity, but rather not a product of contingent situational factors heavily endowed with interactional significance either, but, rather the product of a working for the participants. In Goffman's view, such consensus; a commitment to the interaction situations provide an important arena within order. which interactants continually renew their interactional commitments. Involvement and If one takes a structural view of order and 4) Obligations Goffinan's Notion of Morality meaning, a commitment to the groundrules of interaction is not necessary. The meaning of Those obligations which interactants have to the actions is given simply by their relation to interaction per se, or what I call "interaction external structures. For instance, Sartre de- obligations", appear to delineate a distinct scribes queueing up in line for a bus as a domain of social and moral action for Goffman. tremendously alienating experience because our He finds that a moral commitment to the waiting in line for a bus is defined by the working consensus for its own sake is one of the institutionally given need to go to work, or to "ground rules of interaction". It is a commit- shop or whatever (Sartre, 1976:256). For Sartre ment demanded by the needs of the social self the institutionally defined external goal is all which constitutes the primary constraint on the that gives "waiting in line for a bus" meaning. interaction order. is Therefore as its meaning given completely by When an individual senses that others are external institutional for Sartre the givens, insincere or affected (in their assumed role) he is the least human of all possible social queue tends to feel that they have taken unfair encounters. of their communication to hand describes the same advantage position Goffman on the other their own he feels in line for a or promote interests; they occasion of waiting bus, waiting have broken the rules of interaction. in line at a as not ground supermarket being organized (Goffman, 1967:24) primarily in terms of external ends (that is, where we are going etc.) but organized rather When persons abuse the guarantee of acceptance between participants on the spot regardless of implicit within an interaction and make "aggres- their various social statuses, and external sive use of facework", Goffman says that the situations (Goffman, 1983). Regardless of why "encounter . .. becomes less a scene of mutual they are in that line, they nevertheless make a considerateness than an area in which a contest commitment to the orderliness of the line which or match is held" (Goffman, 1967:24). There is independent of other considerations. In his are immediate negative results within a given presidential address Goffman described the interaction when face is misused. In his queue or line as being one of the most human, discussion of the role which embarrassment most moral of all social encounters precisely plays in maintaining a balance during interac- because it has the least external organization and requires the purest commitment to the interaction order for its own sake (Goffman 1983). 'o While Goffman was able to see the constitutive While the contrast with Sartre shows that aspects of self, he was not able to see the constitutive In does not take a structural view of features of the "linguistic" aspects of encounters. Goffman other while self moral constraints on are those who will that this words, imposes meaning, there argue interaction, in Goffman's view, and the individu- language proves that he is a situationalist or an accomplishmentof practical action does not. Therefore, alist. But, in order for Goffman to be interpreted what Goffmanhas called a moral arena, is also for him an as a situationalist he would have to argue that existential prison of sorts because the structuralfeatures features of each situation provided the basic of language are culturaland institutionalin origin. INTERACTION ORDER SUI GENERIS 143 tion, Goffman says that "the expectations tainly an institutional conception of morality and relevant to embarrassment are moral . . . we one which reinforces a particular status quo. In should look to those moral obligations which other places however, it is equally clear that surround the individual in only one of his Goffman speaks of a morality which concerns capacities, that of someone who carries on the needs of a social self in warding off, to some social encounters" (1967:105). These are moral degree, the demands of social institutions, a obligations which are incumbent on participants morality which is incumbent on one qua in an interaction solely on the basis of their interactant and which sustains the interaction engagement in interaction, irrespective of any only and not the status quo. In other words, institutional status or role which they may sometimes the morality to which Goffman refers claim. appears to be institutionally defined, while at There are also obligations owed by the other times it appears to involve collaborative interaction group to the interactant, qua inter- defense against institutional definition." actant. Goffman says that total institutions have In spite of this emphasis on morality Habermas failed to meet these obligations and calls one "a has characterized Goffman as a cynic focusing place of unholy acts and unholy understand- on the strategic self interests of individual actors ings" (Goffman, 1967:94). He maintains that thereby reducing social order to an aggregate of total institutions stand against the "natural" such self-interested effects (Habermas, state of man (Goffman, 1961:12), thus implying 1984:90-94). This interpretationof his work has that there is a "natural" state of man. He cast doubt on the sociological significance of suggests that this "natural" state exists in a Goffman's contribution. Strategic action is not mutual acceptance and consideration of the selves of others, and he writes that we "must accept and honor the selves projected by the 1 However,Goffman's failure to clearlydistinguish other participants" (Goffman, 1967:105). the interactionorder from institutional order leaves him In the writings before Frame Analysis the occasionallysaying that "playing your role" is a moral assumption that involvement obligations are an commitment.On the one hand, in their capacityto interactional involvement underlying commitment which sustains order, guarantee reciprocity, obliga- and self is and tions are said to be ultimatelyfair and to provide a moral meaning, explicit frequent. foundationfor interaction.On the other hand, Goffman is Goffman invokes the notion of moral obligation led sometimes to of involvement as in with these involvement speak obligations conjunction obliga- obligating interactantsto an institutionalorder. They are tions freely throughout the earlier writings said to trap us in institutional roles, and in circles of (1961:81, 87, 97, 107, 114; 1967:11, 28, 37, expectation which deny us freedom. His ambivalence 49, 95, 105, 117, 122; 1959:9, 10, 13, 35, 36, about the status of these obligations with respect to 248, 250, 251). Although Goffman moves on in ultimate freedom and morality is reflected in his Frame Analysis and Forms of Talk to a statement that "there are categories of persons-in our broad ones-whose consideration of the epistemological issues upon society very membersconstantly pay which his notion of moral consensus rests on the a very considerable price for their interactional existence" one and to a of shifts (Goffman, 1983:6). hand, consideration Rather than this as a in between social and their interviewing ambiguity problem frames, Goffman's work, it can be regardedas a reflection of a relationships on the other, issues of morality real dialectic in the dynamics of social and moral order. remain a central underlying feature of Gof- The implicationsof the interactionorder may be clarified fman's later work, as evidenced in his Presiden- by realizingthat where it has a heavy institutionaloverlay tial Address. the dilemma of human freedom in Goffman's writings Goffman's use of morality as an analytic tool resembles the existential circle within which Sartre and the depends on his conception of commitment to an (1960) post-structuralists(Derrida, 1983) argue interaction order which takes as its end the meaning and self are bound in institutionalconventions, and the of creation and maintenance of self and problem deconstructioninvolves escape from meaning. an all encompassingframe. Whereas, in those Therefore, his rather loose use of the term describing cases where emergent order is relatively independent "moral" blurs the distinction he needs to make from institutioinalconstraint, Goffman is able to reach a between the interaction order and social struc- plateau of moral insight and outline the possibility of a ture. He fails to clearly point out the dialectical freedom and autonomy which transcends particular contradiction between the values of interaction institutionalor culturalconsiderations. and those of structure. On the one hand, Most interaction operates within severe institutional Goffman applies a moral note to social perfor- constraintsand while Goffman described the foundation for an interactionorder in of commitment mance in a fashion similar to Durkheim, stating emergent :erms that it can the common official values and moral consensus, he is also aware of the inherent "highlight immorality of those institutional constraints. But, for of the society in which it occurs, we may look Goffman there is no contradictionbecause the institu- upon it . . . as an expressive rejuvination and tional and interaction order constraints are for him reaffirmation of the moral values of the distinct. A commitmentto the interactionorder does not community" (Goffman, 1959:35). This is cer- entail a commitmentto social structure. 144 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY basic to Goffman's idea of an interaction order may be institutionally defined, the moral and in fact violates the implicit interactional obligation to accept the presentation at face consensus which is the foundation of interac- value, and the corresponding obligation to tion. Habermas has misinterpreted Goffman's represent face accurately, exist independently of position because he has missed the significance particular institutional forms, solely on the basis of "moral" commitment for the achievement of interactional imperatives. This duality consti- and maintenance of stable and meaningful tutes an essential dialectic between commitment action. Whereas Goffman argues that meaning to the enabling conventions of interaction per se rests on a commitment to the interactional and commitment to the enabling conventions groundrules, Habermas interprets Goffman's particular to an institutional context on any position from within the traditional framework particular occasion. Failing to recognize this of goal directed action: dialectic suggests that strategically maximizing the A enables the actor to advantages of institutional roles is a moral performance present If interaction order and himself to his audience in a certain in right. institutional order way; were it of his to clearly distinguished would be obvious bringing something subjectivity that he would like to be seen his maximizing advantage to oneself at the appearance, by of the interaction in a expense order is not a moral public particular way. but The of action are in a right, clearly prohibited by the working dramaturgical qualities consensus certain rest on a structure (Goffman, 1967:24). way parasitic; they While Giddens of action. rejects Habermas' view that goal-directed action is Goffman's (Habermas, 1984:90) strategic mainstay (Giddens, 1984), he interprets Goffman's emphasis on In arguing that the interaction order rests on trust to imply "a predominant concern with the another foundation, Habermas fails to recognize protection of social continuity, with the intimate Goffman's argument that the order of interaction mechanics of social reproduction" (Giddens, rests on constraints internal to it. Goffman's 1984:70).12 Giddens writes that for Goffman inconsistencies on be language may partially tact is important because it prevents "fracture" for Habermas' responsible misinterpretation. of the closure" (Giddens, 1984:75). an "engagement Habermas considers language to be essential He that trust the enclosure of the model of emphasizes protects component dramaturgical rather than selves or This reflects "The model of action meaning. action; dramaturgical Giddens' and is not Goffman's as a medium of self viewpoint presupposes language concern. Goffman focuses on the of (Habermas: 1984:95). Given protection presentation" social selves via the rituals of interaction and Habermas' emphasis on language Goffman's commitment to the interaction articulation of a structural position on language groundrules. Goffman wrote about easily explains Habermas' misinterpretation. Although extensively In addition Goffman's "looseness" in his use encounters, his focus was on the self, con- of moral terminology, occasionally implies that straints on self, needs of self, etc. The encounter one has the same moral obligation to both is merely a setting within which the constraints structural and interactional commitments. A and needs of the interaction order present confusion between levels of moral obligation is themselves. Giddens interprets Goffman as introduced as soon as interaction is interpreted having focused primarily on the encounter with as a vehicle for reproducing institutional forms. the encounter itself placing constraints on the Instead of considering only those obligations selves within it (Giddens, 1984:76). For Goff- which emanate directly from the interaction man the rituals of interaction are not for order to be moral, Goffman seems to treat all preserving encounters, they are for preserving obligations as moral obligations. Goffman presentation of self and the interaction order writes that "society is organized on the principle which sustains it. The order of encounters is that individual who certain social any possesses only indirectly in so far as it is characteristics has a moral to that important right expect necessary for reproducing and sustaining the others will value and treat him in a correspond- ingly appropriateway" (Goffman, 1959:13). He maintains that "it seems to be a characteristic 12 Giddens' concern is with routinization so that obligation of many social relationships that each continuity over time can develop and institutions can of the members to a appearto be "fixed" (Giddens, 1984:70). But that is not guarantees support given Goffman's concern. Goffman is concerned with the face for the other members in given situations" maintenanceof self in and through interaction. Giddens (Goffman, 1967:42). This allows that face can is concerned with duree because he is to add be either an institutional or an interactional trying encounters together via routinization to equal social status, without acknowledging that the moral institutions. On Goffman's view that it is not possible. implications are quite different in either case. They constraineach other in some ways, but institutions While the right to project a certain social role and the interactionorder are separatefor Goffman. INTERACTION ORDER SUI GENERIS 145 social self.13 It is not possible for selves to exist tions in interaction, or in even stronger terms; to serve social structure in Goffman's view the production of institutions through interac- because selves have no "existence" in their own tion.14 Failing to see the distinctiveness of his right. Their existence places demands on social argument renders most interpretations of his structurewhich social structuremust respect if it work inadequate. is to preserve any selves to reproduce it. For Whether or not Goffman would challenge Giddens the focus is on the preservation of the Durkheim's definition of the institutional do- encounter so that it can take its place as routine main is not really important. What matters is in the institutional duree of social life. For that Goffman argues for the existence of social Goffman the focus is on the presentation of self. constraints and social facts which are not the Giddens treats interaction as a basic building effects of routinization, not defined by social block of institutionalstructure (Giddens, 1984:79). structure and not derived from individuals. In For Goffman interaction is important, orderly, other words, Goffman's unique, sui generis and moral (or immoral) in its own right. Unlike version of "social facts," unlike Durkheim's, is Giddens (1984), and Durkheim (1938), Goff- interactional, not social structural. man's notion of trust, or moral commitment is This important contribution of Goffman's not directed at the preservation of social which he shares with Garfinkel and Sacks has structure. Rather Goffman's notion of trust is been almost completely overlooked. Even Giddens directed toward the interaction order sui generis, who claims to be moving away from structural- for its own sake, and not directed toward the ism, interprets Goffman in terms of routiniza- reproduction of social structure at all. tion as the source of patterned action. The assumption continues to be that structure either constrains or the of action III THE PLACE OF THE INTERACTION action, repetition creates for future action ORDER IN SOCIOLOGY expectations through the routinization, or ritualization of action. In Since Durkheim's Rules of the Sociological either case we have a picture of actors, free Method, sociology has been defined as the study actions and structures combining in various of social constraint via the study of social degrees. institutions. Micro and macro sociology have Durkheim wrote The rules of The Sociological clearly articulated competing versions of this Method to make the point that there was an domain making it appear that there is nothing order to social history, and that it was not the new to be said. But the existing theoretical result of an aggregate of individual choices framework has limited the possible arguments. (Durkheim, 1938). In order to establish sociol- Within this framework sociologists of interac- ogy as a discipline he had to establish that there tion are either forced to reduce order to are constraints on action which are outside of situations by denying the efficacy of institu- individuals, social in nature, and which are at tional constraint (situationalism), or grant insti- the same time regular and predictable. Goff- tutional constraint an organizing function (struc- man's work suggests that the institutional turalism). As Alexander (1982, 1983) puts it, constraints which Durkheim identified are only the choice is between contingency and collectiv- one sort of social constraint, and that there are ity. This amounts to saying that either one other sorts of social constraint which account for accepts collective structures as organizing social much social action. Goffman's work can be seen life, or one admits to an infinite number of as adding the second volume to what Durkheim contingent circumstances which drive social began. action. In the latter case social order is reduced Attempts to bridge the dichotomy between to an aggregation of effects. agency and social structure (Giddens, 1984; By challenging the theoretical framework Habermas, 1984; Grannoveter, 1985) ultimately itself new possibilities emerge. Goffman has fall back on the idea of individuals and argued for the existence of an interaction order structures as separate poles in the production of sui generis. This distinguishes his work from orderly and meaningful action. If institutional that of most other interactionists who do not order is not to be reduced to situated emergence, consider interaction an order in its own right. (i.e., that social structure is created in and Instead they study the reproduction of institu- through interaction merely) an idea clearly

13 Nowhere does Goffman place a premium on social '4 Some interactionists refuse to adopt either an reproduction. If anything, he finds the fact that individualistor a structuralistsource of order. They then interaction ritual has to bend to social structural proceed to study "contingency". The irony is that they constraintsdisconcerting. In several places he lamentsthe believe social order and meaning to be contingent fact that the reproduction of social selves sometimes because even though they have denied that structure subjects them to inequalities demandedby the reproduc- organizes actions they still believe that without social tion of social structure(Goffman, 1983:6). structurethere are no constants. 146 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY rejected by Goffman (1983), then what is and extrapolating interactional effects" (Goff- recognized as institutional constraint cannot man, 1983:9). For Goffman the interaction have the status of continual constitutive achieve- order is a self-ordered and separate domain, ments as many interactionists have tried to depending upon mutual commitment between argue. Nor can interaction be seen merely as a actors, which while certainly impinging on vehicle for routinization. Goffman's notion of macro orders can neither be reduced to, nor an interaction order resolves the gap between entirely explain, aggregate and institu- agency and social structure to a degree. tional/structuralphenomena.16 Goffman describes order as the product of The idea that social thinkers can be divided commitment to a shared set of expectations. But between individualist and collectivist perspec- these expectations are obviously not all, or even tives is itself misleading. For example, Goffman primarily generated by social structure (Gof- and Mead (1934), who Alexander (1983) says fman, 1967, 1983). fall on the individualist side of the dichotomy Where it is clear that micro sociologists like were at pains to argue against an individualist Goffman do not accept an interpretationof their position. Both describe the coming into being of work as individualistic it is common to assert, as the individual as an ongoing social process. Alexander does, that the claim that interaction is While they may appear to focus on individuals, orderly and meaningful is simply inconsistent the individual in their terms is not an entity with a micro-perspective (Alexander, 1983; which predates interaction, but rather is a social Gallant and Kleinman, 1983).15 Alexander is product. One only becomes a self by making the right in arguing that contingency follows from a commitment to shared common practices. of social structurewithin the traditional rejection Universal human nature is not a human definition of and social structure and very agency the becomes a interactionists fall victim to this criticism. thing. By acquiring it, person many kind of built not from inner asserts that this construct, up However, Goffman, interpreta- but from moral rules that tion does not to the interaction order as he psychic propensities apply are him from without. sees it. While structure has been eliminated as impressed upon (Goffman, 1967:45) the constant providing for the order and meaning of interaction, the constraints of the interaction This involves a focus on the social arena within order provide an alternative source of constants. which individuals are achieved and sustained, In his Presidential Address Goffman says "it and in particularon its moral character, but, it is appears to me that as an order of activity, the not an individualistic perspective. The arena is interaction one, more than any other perhaps, is primarily social and the individual is a product in fact orderly" (1983:5). of it, not its base line. Randall Collins on the other hand, argues that On the other hand, collectivism seems either macro phenomena can be understood as aggre- to stand for too much or too little. If it is defined gates of micro phenomena. While this position broadly enough to include all of sociology, it is appears to challenge Alexander, in fact it makes of slight use as an analytic tool, except for the same assumptions with regard to the distinguishing sociology from philosophy. If it institutional definition of meaning and order is drawn narrowly enough to exclude Goffman, (i.e., because macro phenomena can be reduced (and other interactionists) by tying the institu- to micro phenomena it therefore has no order). tional, or structural origins of meaning and This position is in turn rejected by Goffman, social order to the definition of collectivism (as who says that a focus on interaction "has led Alexander does), then it would appear to some to argue reductively that all macro- sociological features of society, along with are an society itself, intermitently existing 16 There have been other to of what can be traced back to the attempts challenge composite formalism in social theory. DiTomaso (1982) for reality of encounters -a question of aggregating instance, attacks both formalism and interactionism,but offers no alternative.Her view of interactionalstudies as reducingorder to the individualis similar to Alexander's. 15While Gallantand Kleinman(1983) would appearto Therefore, while DiTomaso makes a promising attempt be arguing for the supremacy of one micro perspective to challenge formalism, she rejects what appears in my over another, what they in fact argue is that symbolic view to be the only viable alternative.Coulter (1982) on interactionin focusing on the negotiation of institution- the other hand holds that everything can be reduced to ally defined roles, that is, studying the production of commonsense, therefore a distinction between institu- social order, while ethnomethodology,which focuses on tions and interactions seems to him to be altogether the constitutive achievement of order in the non- misplaced, because he has rejected the notion of institutionalpatterns of interactionhas somehow missed institutional constraint. The theory of the interaction the phenomenonof social order altogether. See my reply order as I interpret it would accept the idea of (Rawls, 1985) to this and other issues raised by this institutionalframes as "contexts of accountability", but paper. reject the idea that they organize action. INTERACTION ORDER SUI GENERIS 147 exclude some aspects of classical theory as by the interaction order per se, rather than well. 17 having been imposed on interaction either by Goffman rejects the exclusivity of the institu- institutions and the corresponding inequalities of tional definition of meaning. According to the status quo, or by individual inclination. "most of this order comes into Goffman, being The of the interaction order can and is sustained from below as it were" workings be viewed as the of Goffman's assertion that easily consequences (Goffman, 1983:6). of in the sense some order is derived from "below" should not systems enabling conventions, of the ground rules of a game. be taken to imply that he holds meaning to be (Goffman, 1983:5) "contingent" as Collins (1981), Alexander (1983) and others suggest. This would only Certainly Goffman allows that institutions often follow if one assumes that the only source of play an important role in framing meaning and consistency was institutionalorder from "above". social order. But, institutions are not the But, Goffman clearly rejects such a view. exclusive source of consistent, ordered mean- Neither does Goffman claim that institutional ing. There are two sorts of orders, constitutive order can be reduced to aggregates of interac- orders and framing orders. Goffman's later tion. For Goffman, a sort of moral commitment work attempts to deal with the issue of frames to shared order is the primary ingredient in the (Goffman, 1974, 1981). Because his theory of interaction order. Although inconsistent on this meaning is incompatible with his general point, Goffman outlines an order which emerges position on the interactional achievement of from interactional constraints as opposed to an self, however, his work on frames further institutional view of meaning and social order. complicates an understanding of his work. In some cases he continues to describe the The constant theme of individual vs. society interaction order as primarily defined in terms of in Goffman's work should not be interpreted, as institutions and "social structure".But generally it usually is, to refer to an autonomous the interaction order is described as having an individual vs structure. It refers ratherto a much overriding emergent interactional character with deeper dialectical conflict between the enabling a singular moral quality. This important theoret- conventions of the interaction order which ical possibility does not fit within the traditional sustain social being and the institutional con- dichotomy between individualism and collectiv- straints which provide frames for dramaturgical ism. scenes. In so far as Goffman argues that the order and of interaction has an meaning independent Conclusion character emerging from interactional constraints, it is described as having consistent The interaction order sui generis is a new idea. foundations in a commitment to shared prac- The repeated distinction in classical social tices. Those practices belong to and are shaped theory between two forms of social order (primary and secondary groups; mechanical and organic solidarity; rural and urban; public and 17 communal and Not only Durkheim, Weber, and Toennies, but private; associative; Gemeinschaft particularlyMarx, whose entire "1844 manuscripts"as and Gessellschaft) seems to preview the distinc- well as the notions of commodityfetishism and alienation tion between the morality of the interaction would be rendered"individualistic" by this definition. It order and the contingency of institutional norms was Karl Marx who arguedthat "species being" required found in Goffman. But the distinction, as made certainrelations of self to other. For Marxthis was one of by Goffman, is in essential respects quite the primary constraints on the development of a just different from that of classical Classical Social structureswhich this form of theory. society. prevented theorists were trying to explain the transition interaction were merely stages in the development of social forms which would it. Marx from traditional to moder forms of life and encourage Although hence did not did not explicitly say this, this need of "species being" conceptualize the distinction in for an interactionalreciprocity could be proposed as one terms of forms of organization within a single of the dialectical contradictions within those social type of social framework, but rather as compet- structureswhich made such reciproicitydifficult. There is ing social forms in the transition from one sort no reason why an interest in constraints peculiar to of society to another. Therefore, both levels of interaction should not be seen as being extremely action were thought of as having formal, for our of institutionalconstraint important understanding institutional properties and were distinguished in and its historical development. What we cannot do is to terms of these formal reduce the one to the other or we will see neither. The properties. focus on the of and social structurehas The analytic distinction of the level of action duality agency which is been a misleading one. This Marx also said. It depends usually thought of as the counterpartto on a reified notion of individual. The real duality is interaction (primary, private, traditional) usu- between the constraintsof the interactionorder and social ally proceeds in institutional terms. While structure. traditional sociology viewed order as a product 148 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY of structural forces at both levels, for Goffman Derrida, Jacques. 1983. Dissemination. Chicago; IL: the distinction between the two levels of order University of Chicago Press. DiTomaso, 1982. Reductionism lay precisely in the fact that the interaction order Nancy. "Sociological From Parsons to Althusser: Linking Action and is characterized by imperatives which are not Structure in Social Theory." American Sociological defined. The commitments and structurally Review, 47:14-28. values necessary to sustain that order are not Durkheim, Emile. 1915. Elementary Forms of the contingent on the particularities of social Religious Life. Chicago: Free Press. structure. They have in fact the capacity to resist . 1938. Rules of the Sociological Method. and place constraints on structure itself. If London: Free Press of Glencoe. emergent order has non-institutional properties . 1951. Suicide. New York: Free Press. of organization, then these will be missed by . 1961. Moral Education. Chicago; IL: Free Press. such a distinction. It is not surprising therefore, . 1973. 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. 1985. "Reply to Gallant and Kleinman on Sartre, Jean Paul. 1960. The Critique of Dialectical Symbolic Interaction vs. Ethnomethodology", Sym- Reason. London: NLB Press 1976. bolic Interaction 8:121-140. .1966. Being and Nothingness. New York: Press. . 1987. "Language, Self, and Social Order in WashingtonSquare Simmel, 1978. The Goffman and Sacks" Human Studies, forthcoming. George. Philosophy of Money. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Sacks, 1967-74. Lectures. Univer- Harvey. Unpublished Toennies, Ferdinand. 1971. On Sociology: Pure, Ap- of Irvine. sity California, plied, and Empirical. Chicago: University of Chicago . 1974. "A Simplest Systematics for the Organi- Press. zation of Turn taking in Conversation," Language Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society. Berkeley: 50:696-735. University of CaliforniaPress. Cet article est disponible en ligne à l’adresse : http://www.cairn.info/article.php?ID_REVUE=CIS&ID_NUMPUBLIE=CIS_114&ID_ARTICLE=CIS_114_0005

La modernité du risque par Alain BOURDIN

| Presses Universitaires de France | Cahiers internationaux de sociologie

2003/1 - n° 114 ISSN 0008-0276 | ISBN 21305337340 | pages 5 à 26

Pour citer cet article : — Bourdin A., La modernité du risque, Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 2003/1, n° 114, p. 5-26.

Distribution électronique Cairn pour Presses Universitaires de France . © Presses Universitaires de France . Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit. LA MODERNITÉ DU RISQUE1

par Alain BOURDIN

Risque et modernité

Alain Bourdin

RÉSUMÉ Fortement marquée par les grandes peurs contemporaines, la sociologie du risque s’est développée à partir des interrogations provoquées par les catastrophes industrielles, les problèmes environnementaux, de grandes questions de santé publique, la sécurité des personnes, ou les comportements « à risque ». Elle s’est constituée un cadre d’interrogation qui porte sur la construction du risque et les comportements qui lui sont liés. À travers des concepts comme celui de confiance, elle débouche sur des interrogations sociologiques majeures, concernant l’expérience individuelle et le rôle de la connaissance. Ces interrogations sont organisées par la théorie de la modernité réflexive qui fait du risque une catégorie centrale. Cette théorie dynamise la sociologie, mais ses fragilités empêchent qu’elle structure fortement la thématique du risque et qu’elle la lie clairement à celle de l’action rationnelle. Mots clés : Risque, Peur, Modernité réflexive, Société du risque, Rationa- lité, Expertise, Méthode, Théorie sociologique.

SUMMARY Strongly affected by the current great fears, the sociology of risk is rooted in the ques- tionings brought about by industrial disasters, environmental issues and essential topics such as public health, safety policies or risky behavours. It consists of a questioning framework dealing with the constitution of risk and related behaviours. Through concepts like trust, it leads to major sociological queries involving individual experience and the function of knowledge. These queries are structured by the theory of reflexive modernization which designates risk as a central category. This theory stimulates sociology, but its flimsy character keeps it from providing firm ground to the themes surrounding risk and from clearly connecting it to those focusing on rational action. Key words : Risk, Fear, Reflexive modernization, Risk society, Rationa- lity, Expertise, Method, Sociological theory.

1. Je remercie François Ascher, Karel Dobbelare, Marie-Pierre Lefeuvre et Liliane Voyé, dont les lectures attentives et les conseils m’ont été précieux. Cahiers internationaux de Sociologie, Vol. CXIV [5-26], 2003 6 Alain Bourdin

Pourquoi la sociologie a-t-elle mis si longtemps à prendre véri- tablement le risque en considération ? Dès la Renaissance, le sys- tème des assurances prend de l’importance en Europe1. Il nécessite la définition et l’évaluation des risques, qui se développent à travers le calcul des probabilités (dès le XVIIe siècle) et son application, le calcul actuariel. Le capitalisme est indissociable du calcul sur des risques et l’État providence en fait un outil pour organiser la protection sociale. La rationalité instrumentale, typique des sociétés « modernes », repose sur le calcul de risques. Mais si la science éco- nomique a largement théorisé le risque, en sociologie seule la théorie de l’action rationnelle prend en considération les calculs auxquels il donne lieu, pour définir leurs caractéristiques plus que pour interroger ce sur quoi ils portent. Dans la mesure où le risque est assimilé aux dangers ou aux aléas (c’est-à-dire à ce qui vient par hasard), il semble échapper au domaine de la sociologie. Mais l’identification, la connaissance, la mesure des risques, encore plus que les calculs qu’ils entraînent entrent bien dans la sphère sociologique. Pourtant, pendant longtemps, cela n’a guère pesé. Récemment, la sociologie du risque et la théorie de la moder- nité réflexive2, qui lui est étroitement associée, ont connu un succès remarquable. Demain, l’analyse des risques remplacera peut-être celle des conflits sociaux. Comment interpréter ce changement ? La sociologie du risque associe une théorie générale3, une interrogation de phénomènes sociaux contemporains à travers la caté- gorie de risque, une description de ce qui est reconnu comme risque par les autorités politiques, les organisations sociales ou les individus et des conséquences qu’entraîne cette reconnaissance. Elle forme un ensemble complexe et parfois disparate. Qu’il s’agisse d’un domaine particulièrement fécond ne fait pas de doute, mais il n’est pas dépourvu d’ambiguïtés. Son succès ne correspond guère à un retour vers l’examen de la rationalité

1. Cf. les travaux de François Ewald. 2. Représentée en particulier par trois livres : Ulrich Beck, Risikogesellchaft, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1986 (trad. franç., La société du risque. Sur la voie d’une autre modernité, traduit de l’allemand par Laure Bernardi, préface de Bruno Latour, Paris, Aubier, 2001) ; Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1990 (trad. franç., Les conséquences de la modernité, traduit par O. Meyer, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1994) ; U. Beck, A. Giddens, S. Lash, Reflexive Modernization. Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994. 3. La théorie des sociétés du risque s’inscrit dans celle de la modernité réflexive, bien que les apports importants de Niklas Luhmann (notamment Sozio- logie des Risikos, Berlin, de Gruyter, 1991) ne puissent pas être rattachés à ce courant. Risque et modernité 7 contemporaine. Les connexions entre les spécialistes du risque et les théoriciens de l’action rationnelle sont même assez faibles. Souvent, le concept de risque paraît fonctionner comme un point de départ ou un prétexte pour faire autre chose. Quelle est donc la place de la thématique du risque dans la sociologie contemporaine ? S’agit-il d’un nouveau domaine de recherches et dans ce cas comment se différencie-t-il des sociologies spécialisées traditionnelles ? Faut-il au contraire y voir un cadre de lecture de la modernité, qui n’aurait de sens qu’adossé à une théorie : le risque servirait alors à désigner l’expérience de la réflexivité ? C’est à ces questions que l’on tentera de répondre à travers l’examen des grandes caractéristiques de la sociologie du risque, telle qu’elle se donne à voir dans la présente livraison des Cahiers internationaux de Sociologie.

UNE QUESTION SOCIALE

C’est d’abord en raison de l’importance prise dans la conscience commune par la notion de risque que la sociologie s’en sai- sit. Le risque nucléaire, d’abord perçu à travers l’information1 donnée sur l’équilibre de la terreur et des grandes crises comme celle des fusées de Cuba, prend une autre dimension lorsque la contestation du nucléaire civil s’autonomise. L’accident de Three Miles Island (1979)2 et surtout la catastrophe de Tchernobyl (1986) en font une préoccupation de premier plan. Avec Seveso (1976), Bophal (1984)3 ou les grandes marées noires (Amoco Cadiz, 1978)4, le risque technologique connaît une montée en puissance parallè- le5. Les décennies suivantes voient l’irruption du risque sanitaire et biologique avec le sida, la vache folle, les OGM, le clonage... Ces

1. Sans parler de la littérature (écrite et filmée) consacrée aux effets d’une erreur dans le fonctionnement des dispositifs de surveillance. 2. Le 28 mars, un accident majeur se produisit sur le réacteur no 2delacen- trale de Three Miles Island, près de Harrisburg en Pennsylvanie. La catastrophe fut évitée de peu et les effets médiatiques furent considérables. 3. Durant la nuit du 2 décembre, 42 t d’isocyanate de méthyle se sont échap- pées de la cuve 106, entre 16 000 et 30 000 personnes du bidonville sont mortes d’asphyxie. Environ 500 000 habitants ont été contaminés. 4. À quoi l’on peut opposer l’impact relativement limité sur l’opinion de l’éruption du Pinatubo, sans doute pour une part en raison de sa localisation géogra- phique, mais également parce qu’il ne s’agit pas d’un événement procédant de l’action humaine. 5. La prise en considération des risques technologiques par la sociologie est, en France, largement redevable aux ingénieurs praticiens des sciences sociales. Elle se développe à l’ombre des grandes écoles d’ingénieurs, comme en témoigne avec élo- quence le cas d’un des pionniers de la sociologie du risque en France, Patrick Laga- dec. (Cf. Lagadec, La civilisation du risque. Catastrophes technologiques et responsabilité sociale, Paris, Le Seuil, 1981.) 8 Alain Bourdin

événements balisent la construction de grandes peurs collectives : autour de la santé, des technologies folles, de la destruction de l’humanité. La sociologie du risque est peut-être d’abord un écho (qui devient parfois une réponse ou une analyse) des peurs qui dominent les sociétés contemporaines – en tout cas les plus riches d’entre elles. Mais son développement procède également du succès que des catégories venues du monde économique et des sciences qui lui sont liées connaissent au même moment dans le langage de la politique, de l’administration publique et de la vie quotidienne. Les techniques de la gestion (publique ou privée) des risques se sont complexifiées bien avant que la sociologie ne s’y intéresse et celle-ci ne le fait que lorsque s’opère le basculement culturel qui établit l’économie comme la science de référence pour les acteurs et le débat public : la contamination de la sociologie par l’économie s’opère indirectement. Ces deux évolutions se combinent dans ce que J.-G. Padioleau1 appelle « l’hégémonie d’une représentation collective de l’omni- présence généralisée des prises de risques » que concrétisent et acti- vent « des problèmes pressants, inédits, dérangeants, voire inquié- tants, soulevés par des innovations financières, par des recherches génétiques, par des avant-gardes sexuelles ou culturelles perçues comme “dangereuses”... » (p. 43). Si la sociologie s’est volontiers approprié la question sociale du risque, c’est également que son évolution rendait facile et désirable l’introduction de questions ou d’instruments d’analyse en rupture avec la tradition. En effet, ses découpages internes traditionnels étaient organisés à partir des catégories socialement instituées, correspondant à des grands types morphologiques (ville, campagne), à des grands domaines de l’activité humaine facilement identifiables (travail, connaissance, religion, art...), à des institutions, des organisations ou des secteurs constitués d’activité (famille, école, professions...). Elle pri- vilégiait les échelles de raisonnement qui correspondaient à l’idée de société : les systèmes sociaux, la société nationale, les grands groupes constitués (classes sociales, etc.). Elle abordait les processus sociaux à partir de la cohésion ou du contrôle social2, à moins qu’elle ne les inscrive dans une perspective du changement ou du progrès qui était une autre manière de réintroduire le primat d’un ordre global.

1. La société du risque, une chance pour la démocratie, Le débat, no 109, mars- avril 2000, p. 39-54. 2. Cf. notamment F. Dubet et D. Martuccelli, Dans quelle société vivons-nous ?, Paris, Le Seuil, 1998. Risque et modernité 9

Cette posture était également présente en anthropologie où elle semblait justifiée par la fermeture des ensembles étudiés, en sciences politiques où l’on s’interrogeait plus sur le « qui gouverne ? » que sur le « comment gouverne-t-on ? », et dans d’autres sciences sociales. Cette organisation de la discipline continue d’exister et d’évoluer (les gender studies se situent dans cette ligne), mais elle est souvent supplantée par une analyse qui part des processus et fait du cadre social un contexte. Ce mouvement, principalement porté par les diverses sociologies de l’action1, invite à partir des problèmes que se posent les acteurs plutôt que des découpages sociaux. Les travaux inspirés de la théorie des jeux, des démarches telles que celle d’Hirschman, lorsqu’il étudie les processus d’engagement et de défection, balisent cette évolution. Qu’on l’envisage comme objet de calcul ou comme expression des grandes peurs sociales, le risque est typiquement un problème que se posent les acteurs. Ainsi le « problème social » s’inscrit-il dans une évolution du questionnement sociologique, auquel il contribue.

DES TERRAINS D’ÉLECTION

Même si son succès est partiellement dû à des causes internes, la sociologie du risque reste tributaire du questionnement social. C’est pourquoi elle est principalement structurée par les objets auxquels elle s’applique, ce qui délimite de nouveaux domaines de recherche2. Le premier d’entre eux (au moins chronologiquement) est le risque industriel. Son extension est liée à l’impact dans l’opinion et dans l’économie des grandes catastrophes industrielles, mais égale- ment à une évolution générale de l’organisation industrielle qui associe une prise en compte beaucoup plus précise et fouillée des risques avec la recherche de qualité et la flexibilité de la production. Cette évolution modifie la position de l’homme au travail et le risque devient un nouvel élément de la culture industrielle qui affecte les relations professionnelles, en même temps qu’un nouveau problème à traiter. Cela offre des opportunités de recherche aussi bien sur les pratiques réelles et l’élaboration de normes informelles au-delà des règles formelles et des protocoles dans des contextes de veille (comme la salle de contrôle d’une tranche de centrale

1. On pourrait donc le rattacher à la tradition à travers la référence à Max Weber. 2. On en trouve une excellente description dans Patrick Peretti-Watel, La sociologie du risque, Paris, Armand Colin, « U », 2000. 10 Alain Bourdin nucléaire) que sur l’étude des dispositifs de crise dans le cas de catastrophes industrielles. Mais, toujours, c’est la construction de l’action dans des contextes sous forte contrainte (celles des procédures routi- nisées ou celles qui découlent d’un événement exceptionnel) qui se trouve en cause. On retrouve les mêmes thématiques de la veille et de la crise (ou catastrophe) avec le risque environnemental. La veille organise un rapport au monde paradoxal : il s’agit bien d’agir sur lui, de le maî- triser, mais en guettant l’imprévu (sinon l’imprévisible) et en se pré- parant à y réagir, quitte à ne rien faire la plupart du temps. La crise radicalise l’imprévu et fonctionne comme un révélateur des comportements, des attitudes, des contradictions sociales. On s’interroge également sur ce qui la produit, modes d’organisations, grands choix technologiques ou facteurs extérieurs. Dans le cas du risque environnemental, cela concerne des choix de gestion, par exemple celle des cours d’eau et de l’urbanisation si l’on s’occupe d’inondations, mais on se trouve bien vite entraîné vers des questions telles que l’effet de serre, qui mettent directement et radicalement en cause aussi bien l’avenir de l’humanité que le rôle des experts. Si le risque industriel peut, à la limite, se traiter en restant dans la sphère industrielle, le risque environnemental entraîne presque nécessairement le recours à des théories lourdes ou à des idéologies : qualifier un problème d’environnemental, c’est poser implicitement son caractère global (à travers le jeu complexe des relations systémiques) et se situer dans une perspective qui – pour le moins – ne considère pas une lecture dualiste du monde (l’homme d’un côté, la « nature » de l’autre) comme évidente. C’est pourquoi l’évocation de l’environnement tient une place tout à fait particu- lière dans la sociologie du risque. D’autres secteurs de cette dernière abordent plus directement les comportements individuels. D’abord les quelques travaux consacrés aux sports à risque et à tous les comportements ludiques ou sportifs qui entraînent des prises de risques importantes1. Le sujet peut paraître étroit comparé à ceux qui précèdent2, mais, outre qu’empiriquement il correspond à des catégories de personnes et de circonstances clairement identifiables, il permet – parce qu’il porte sur des comportements volontairement choisis en raison même de leur caractère risqué – de s’interroger sur la psychologie de l’homme contemporain, la production du sens dans nos sociétés, voire la situation humaine elle-même.

1. Voir ci-après l’article de Patrick Peretti-Watel. 2. Encore que le seul choix délibéré de comportements à risque dans la conduite automobile fasse beaucoup de morts chaque année. Risque et modernité 11

C’est à propos de la santé, en particulier de la drogue et du sida, que la sociologie du risque, en ce qu’elle étudie les comportements individuels, a connu ses développements les plus nombreux. Dans les deux cas, comme en témoigne notamment l’article ci-après de Jean-Yves Trépos, l’action collective la plus volontariste se heurte à des difficultés qui résistent aux schémas explicatifs habituels. L’usure de ces derniers porte sur l’interprétation des comportements des populations concernées (y compris sur la notion de population cible elle-même) comme sur l’analyse des acteurs, des procédures, des schémas généraux de l’organisation de l’action. La sociologie du risque contribue au renouvellement des perspectives, des probléma- tiques et des modalités de l’action elle-même. Avec la toxicomanie, c’est vers la définition de modalités d’interventions pertinentes que se tourne d’abord la recherche, même si elle n’affiche aucun objectif opérationnel. Dans le cas du sida, le comportement individuel est interrogé pour aboutir à une meilleure compréhension des « ressor- tissants » des politiques publiques (essentiellement de prévention) et l’interrogation de l’action elle-même est moins présente. Quoi qu’il en soit, l’accent est mis sur les rapports que l’individu entretient avec son destin personnel et avec le monde, sur la manière dont il construit ses comportements et dont il produit du sens. On rejoint le risque environnemental à travers les interrogations métaphysiques que cette démarche oblige à considérer. Une autre thématique se regroupe autour de la notion d’in- sécurité. Celle des personnes devant la criminalité ou les « incivili- tés » est devenue un thème majeur dans la sphère politique et médiatique1. Le discours dominant, d’autant plus efficace qu’il fait grande consommation de données statistiques, tout en jouant sur le registre de l’expérience commune et de l’émotion, véhicule une conception désuète des déterminismes sociaux. Les chercheurs subissent son influence2. Comme, par ailleurs, il n’y a eu que peu de sociologues pour s’intéresser à la place, au rôle, aux comportements quotidiens des organismes de répression ou à leurs problèmes spéci- fiques de fonctionnement, et guère plus pour étudier effectivement le fonctionnement quotidien de l’ensemble de la machine judi- ciaire, dans ses différents aspects, on voit l’importance de la théma- tique du risque pour élargir le débat : si l’on admet que l’insécurité est le rapport que l’on entretient avec un ensemble de risques, on

1. Cela n’a rien de spécifique à la France. 2. La critique radicale du discours sécuritaire n’est pas non plus toujours au- dessus de tout soupçon d’idéologie. Pour une synthèse bien informée et rigoureuse, en particulier sur toutes les difficultés de construction des faits d’insécurité, voir Laurent Mucchielli, Violences et insécurité. Fantasmes et réalités dans le débat français, Paris, La Découverte, 2001. 12 Alain Bourdin peut s’interroger sur la manière dont ces derniers sont construits et sont perçus, sur les calculs auxquels ils donnent lieu et sur la manière dont ils sont gérés, toutes choses qui éloignent des lectures simplistes en termes de taux statistiques appliqués à ces boîtes noires trop évidentes que sont la criminalité1 et les incivilités. Comme le montre l’article ci-après de Christine Schaut à partir de travaux de terrain précis, rien n’est plus construit, relatif et contextuel que l’insécurité, ce qui n’exclut pas sa réalité ; introduire la notion de risque c’est se donner les moyens de rendre compte de ce double aspect construit et contextuel, mais également réel et pas seulement imaginaire, de l’insécurité. Si l’insécurité des personnes face à la délinquance, associée à la méfiance à l’égard des étrangers ou aux préjugés raciaux, a pesé sur nombre d’élections en Europe au cours des dernières années, la lutte contre l’insécurité routière y est également devenue un thème fort2. Son intérêt sociologique est de permettre l’association entre l’étude d’effets de dispositifs sociaux, en particulier répressifs, et celle de la manière dont les situations et les normes sont perçues par les usagers et dont sont construits les comportements individuels. On touche à la fois la cognition, les représentations, la cohésion sociale, l’univers des choix individuels et les effets de l’action publique. Dans cet espace carrefour, la notion de risque constitue un fil conducteur qui permet aussi bien d’interroger l’action publique – en termes de gestion – que la connaissance et les repré- sentations – en termes de perception des risques – ou encore les comportements individuels – en termes de prise de risques. En même temps, la question du risque routier est un véritable « tes- teur » de théories car, compte tenu des budgets importants accordés à la recherche sur ce sujet, on a pu développer des expérimentations ou enquêtes significatives sur des hypothèses précises. Des résultats obtenus3, on tire moins l’idée d’une faillite générale des théo- ries qu’un rappel à l’ordre sur l’épistémologie des sciences humai-

1. Celle-ci est mesurée à partir de l’activité des forces répressives, ce qui est un premier défaut. Les enquêtes de victimation, apparues dans plusieurs pays, prennent en compte – à partir du témoignage des personnes – tous les événements, qu’ils aient ou non été enregistrés. Mais les unes et les autres traitent sur le même plan des faits très différents dans des contextes très différents et donnant lieu à des interpréta- tions différentes. Le vol de téléphones portables a fortement contribué à faire mon- ter les statistiques de criminalité en France et cela était en partie dû à des formules d’abonnement offertes par les distributeurs qui rendaient ce vol très attrayant : exemple simple de l’énorme travail d’interprétation dont toutes les données « objectives » sur l’insécurité doivent faire l’objet. 2. Particulièrement popularisé en France en 2002, puisque inscrit dans les grandes priorités du président de la République. 3. Cf. l’article ci-après de Claudine Pérez-Diaz. Risque et modernité 13 nes : les explications trop générales et globales posent toujours pro- blème, et toute régularité établie par les sciences de l’homme ne s’énonce que sous réserve de multiples conditions. Les sciences humaines sont plutôt le cadre d’élucidations localisées et contex- tuelles, ce qui n’exclut en rien la cumulativité. Leur apport concerne moins la connaissance directe du monde que les outils de cette connaissance ou encore une connaissance indirecte qui ne peut s’opérationnaliser qu’à travers des dispositifs localisés. La notion de risque, qui s’inscrit facilement dans cette perspective1, peut égale- ment jouer dans l’autre sens si l’on ne retient que son caractère mesurable (en oubliant qu’il s’agit de probabilités) et l’universalité de sa définition (en oubliant que celle-ci permet justement de rendre compte de diversités et de spécificités). On touche là une des ambiguïtés de la sociologie du risque.

LE RISQUE GÉNÉRALISÉ

La sociologie du risque ne s’arrête pas aux domaines d’élection qui viennent d’être évoqués : elle peut servir de cadre d’analyse pour renouveler la question de la guerre dans le contexte géopoli- tique contemporain2 ou d’instrument d’élucidation du comportement des propriétaires dans une copropriété3. On pourrait multi- plier les exemples. En effet, la sociologie du risque définit des interrogations qui sont applicables à une grande diversité de contextes contemporains. D’abord la perception des risques : comment sont-ils identifiés, construits, nommés, à travers quels filtres, avec quels instruments ? Si l’on définit le risque comme ce qui peut advenir et que l’on ne voudrait pas avoir à subir directement ou indirectement (par ses conséquences), on caractérise une catégorie du rapport au monde qui, tout en présentant un caractère très général, peut prendre des formes différentes et faire l’objet de constructions diverses : l’universalité de la question n’exclut pas la souplesse des réponses. La notion de prise de risque permet d’élargir et de transformer la problématique de la décision. Identifier le moment ou la nature de la décision est souvent chose difficile, qu’il s’agisse de processus collectifs ou de comportement individuel. Souvent l’action se construit

1. Le risque, probabilité plus que réalité (mais réellement probable...), est construit, contextuel, objet d’interprétations et de transformations par la gestion, en ce sens il échappe fortement à sa construction comme fait objectif universel. 2. Cf. l’article ci-après de Rémi Baudouï. 3. Cf. l’article ci-après de Marie-Pierre Lefeuvre. 14 Alain Bourdin de manière continue que l’on peut certes réduire à de microdéci- sions mais sans que cela soit vraiment éclairant. L’avantage du raisonnement sur les prises de risques est qu’il échappe à la recherche du moment de la décision, qu’il permet d’analyser des séquences de comportement (sans avoir à rechercher obstinément un point de départ), et qu’il introduit l’analyse des différences entre ce qui est perçu par les acteurs concernés et ce que l’on peut mesurer à partir d’une norme extérieure visant l’objectivité. Cet affinement dans la compréhension des séquences de l’action est également possible à partir de la gestion de risques. Cette notion très opérationnelle peut être réélaborée par les sociologues. La sociologie crozérienne, en insistant sur le contrôle des incertitudes, nous a déjà fortement entraînés dans cette voie. Comment les risques sont-ils identifiés et perçus ? Quelle importance leur accorde- t-on ? Quels dispositifs met-on en place pour les limiter, les utiliser, les connaître ? Comment la référence aux risques modifie-t-elle l’action et le sens qu’on lui donne ? Ce genre de questions peut s’avérer particulièrement efficace1. Mais aujourd’hui, les acteurs se réfèrent souvent à des modèles de gestion de risques parfaitement explicites et contrôlés. Il n’est plus question d’interroger des modè- les implicites dont la mise au jour nous révèle ce que l’acteur ne sait pas bien lui-même, posture aimée du sociologue, mais l’usage des modèles et les effets que cela entraîne, interrogation pour laquelle la sociologie, même celle des organisations, n’est pas toujours très bien armée2. Enfin, la problématique du risque conduit presque infaillible- ment à celle de la confiance3. Le couple risque-confiance est un opé- rateur très efficace de l’interrogation sociologique contemporaine parce qu’il permet de rendre compte de situations, d’attitudes ou de comportements dans des contextes sociaux et institutionnels différents, sans que l’homogénéité culturelle soit nécessaire. La confiance s’inscrit sur des arrière-plans (religieux, affectifs, moraux, etc.) très différents : comme l’exaltation, la culpabilité4 ou le

1. Elles constituent en outre un espace de coopération particulièrement facile entre les sciences sociales et au-delà. 2. Dans la mesure notamment où ce type d’évaluations suppose une approche « clinique » qui exige une grande familiarité avec les pratiques que l’on étudie. 3. Voir notammment R. Laufer, M. Orillard (éd.), La confiance en question, Paris, L’Harmattan, « Logiques sociales », 2000 ; C. Thuderoz, V. Mangematin, D. Harrison (éd.), La confiance. Approches économiques et sociologiques, Paris-Montréal, Gaëtan Morin, 1999 ; et l’on rappellera G. Simmel, Secret et sociétés secrètes (trad. S. Muller), Paris, Circé, 1991. 4. J. Remy, L. Voyé, E. Servais, Produire ou reproduire ? Une sociologie de la vie quotidienne, Bruxelles, Éditions Vie ouvrière, 1978, t. 1 : Conflits et transactions sociales. Risque et modernité 15 sentiment d’une dette1, elle correspond à des catégories socio- affectives quasi anthropologiques, en tout cas pertinentes dans nombre de contextes. On dispose donc d’un instrument d’interrogation et d’élucidation qui s’adapte à la plasticité sociale et à la diversité culturelle du monde contemporain. Mais, dans ce monde marqué par le double mouvement de radicalisation de l’individuation et du nihilisme (selon la terminologie de Nietzsche), la question du sens se réduit souvent et parfois dramatiquement à la possibi- lité de faire crédit (c’est-à-dire, pour reprendre une formulation de Schütz, de « suspendre tout doute » non quant à l’ « existence du monde extérieur » en général, mais quant à l’existence, au comportement ou au fonctionnement de personnes ou d’objets techniques bien définis) à son entourage, à ses partenaires dans l’action ou aux objets de la vie quotidienne. Cela fait également le succès du couple risque/confiance2.

DES INTERROGATIONS MAJEURES

On le voit, la sociologie du risque ne se définit pas seulement par des objets, mais par un ensemble d’interrogations qui portent d’abord sur le rapport au monde et sur la construction du monde par les individus. Un autre volet, tout aussi important concerne la science, l’établissement des vérités scientifiques, et plus encore la nature et le rôle de l’expertise dans les controverses et les choix sociaux. Cela s’inscrit dans un vaste mouvement, initié par la sociologie des sciences depuis Merton. Mais alors qu’au cours des dernières décennies on s’est surtout préoccupé des conditions de production et de légitima- tion des vérités scientifiques ainsi que du fonctionnement interne (notamment dans les réseaux de pouvoirs propres aux disciplines) du monde scientifique, elle insiste plutôt sur les formes de la relation entre science et société, particulièrement à travers l’exercice de l’expertise et sa réception. Certains abordent ce débat sous le seul angle de la démocratie, à partir notamment de la référence à Haber- mas. On interroge alors le poids des experts par rapport au citoyen « ordinaire », l’obligation qu’ils ont de rendre compte et la manière dont ils le font, dans un contexte de désenchantement vis-à-vis du savoir scientifique et technique. La sociologie du risque s’intéresse plus directement à la nature même des rapports entre cette connaissance et le contexte social. Elle s’interroge en particulier sur la nature des vérités que l’on exige du chercheur ou de l’expert.

1. Cf. M. Gauchet, La démocratie contre elle-même, Paris, Gallimard, 2002. 2. Et de la « sécurité ontologique » chère à Giddens. 16 Alain Bourdin

En effet, on demande aujourd’hui aux chercheurs et aux experts d’entrer dans la conduite de l’action, et de raisonner en termes de risques et de gestion de risques à plusieurs échelles temporelles. On n’attend pas des vérités universelles élaborées dans les conditions et dans les limites d’élaboration des vérités universelles, quitte à ce qu’elles soient parfaitement inutilisables concrètement et immédia- tement, mais des solutions concrètes et immédiates qui soient quand même de l’ordre du savoir universel. Comme cela est à peu près impossible et que la manière dont le monde scientifique définit les vérités universelles se complexifie avec l’évolution des sciences, une relation critique s’instaure et la suspicion grandit en même temps que la confiance, au point que l’on peut se demander si ce n’est pas une trop grande confiance déçue qui entraîne la mise en cause de la science. D’autant que la temporalité de l’actualité, de l’événement, et en particulier de la sphère médiatique s’impose au monde de la science et de l’expertise dont les rythmes et les durées sont très dif- férents. L’exigence est formulée dans la durée des médias et les chercheurs ou experts – outre qu’ils sont souvent obligés de se prê- ter aux exigences de la demande – tentent parfois d’instrumentaliser la temporalité médiatique au profit de jeux purement internes à leur sphère. Le principe de précaution peut apparaître comme une tentative pour résoudre le dilemme1. En tout cas, la problématique du risque paraît une bonne entrée pour analyser les relations entre sciences et société. Sur le plan de la méthode, la sociologie du risque présente l’avantage de s’occuper d’un objet qui n’est jamais donné, même lorsqu’il paraît évident : le risque dit « objectif » a besoin d’être reconnu, connu, explicité. Le risque, tel qu’il est perçu ou défini, fonctionne souvent comme un instrument d’objectivation, voire de calcul des dangers ou des difficultés qui peuvent affecter les comportements individuels et sociaux, qu’ils soient d’origine interne ou externe à la sphère sociale. Il fonde également un système de « bonnes raisons » pour faire ou ne pas faire : je ne dois pas faire ceci par ce que cela met ma vie en danger et qu’il ne faut pas mettre sa vie en danger, ou bien je dois le faire parce que cela met ma vie en danger et que la vie n’a pas de sens si l’on ne la met pas en danger... Cela aussi bien à l’échelle de grands ensembles sociaux opérant des choix

1. Dans la mesure où il veut mettre en place des dispositifs à court terme qui « libèrent » la construction lente de vérité scientifique, ce qui selon les versions s’énonce (version négative) : « En interdisant toute action dont une vérité scientifique ultérieurement élaborée pourrait faire apparaître la nocivité » ou bien (version positive) « en définissant les limites dans lesquelles l’action peut s’exercer avec une faible probabilité de tomber sous le coup de risques que des vérités scientifiques ultérieures mettraient en évidence. ». Risque et modernité 17 collectifs qu’à celle d’individus organisant leur comportement. Les formes de l’objectivation du risque ou les systèmes de bonnes raisons qu’il fonde mobilisent toutes sortes de ressources sociales composites et constituent des analyseurs exceptionnels de la réalité « en profondeur » des sociétés contemporaines. On le voit dans les articles ci- après à propos des schémas d’interaction qui président à la reconnaissance collective d’un risque (Gilbert), de la stratégie d’action par rapport à des groupes cibles, dont l’évolution s’opère à travers la recon- sidération de la définition que l’on donne du risque (Trépos), ou encore de la non-prise en considération d’un risque qui devrait être reconnu (Lefeuvre) : la construction de la non-conscience par les acteurs d’un risque par ailleurs socialement défini et reconnu constitue un objet d’étude particulièrement significatif. Une première conclusion se dégage de cette description : les objets de la sociologie du risque lui sont venus des peurs et préoc- cupations sociales, mais elle a élaboré un ensemble de questions spé- cifiques à forte portée sociologique. Ces questions ne sont pas de même nature que celles qui fondent une sociologie spécialisée (qu’est-ce que l’art, le travail, ou la connaissance en tant que phé- nomènes sociaux ?). Elles se présentent plutôt comme une série d’éléments de théorie, ce qui pose la question des théories sociologiques du risque aptes à rassembler ces éléments. Les tentatives en la matière sont peu nombreuses, et les tenants de la modernité réflexive offrent la seule grande théorie qui donne au risque une place centrale.

LA THÈSE DE LA MODERNITÉ RÉFLEXIVE

Une école, certainement pas, une théorie sans doute, et plus encore un courant théorique, ainsi apparaît la modernité réflexive. Autour de quelques personnalités et travaux emblématiques, une nébuleuse s’est formée, dont les participants sont multiples et à laquelle contribuent durablement ou plus épisodiquement des penseurs assez divers. Cette nébuleuse constitue un pôle théorique de la sociologie contemporaine. L’incertitude des frontières de la nébu- leuse tient à l’organisation de cette pensée sociologique et à la diversité de ses utilisations possibles. Utiliser (et pas seulement citer) le Bourdieu de La distinction ou de L’amour de l’art entraîne une affiliation – au moins partielle et provisoire – alors que les utilisateurs – parfois sans vergogne – des Conséquences de la modernité de Gid- dens, n’ont pas besoin de s’engager vis-à-vis de lui : tout le monde a été peu ou prou influencé par le courant de la modernité réflexive, mais cela n’engage pas vraiment. 18 Alain Bourdin

En s’appuyant notamment sur le résumé que fait Beck lui- même (dans l’article ci-après) des principales thèses de la Société du risque, on caractérisera ainsi les points forts de ce courant : — D’abord, on l’oublie souvent, une utilisation de la notion même de modernité à laquelle les Français sont fort peu habitués, surtout de la part des sociologues, Georges Balandier étant un des rares, pratiquement le seul à l’avoir utilisée d’une manière très proche. En effet, la modernité sert certes à décrire une phase de l’évolution des sociétés, mais également le cœur du mouvement qui travaille les sociétés en mouvement1. Elle est un principe de changement et d’organisation macrosociale, en même temps qu’une expérience qui peut être vécue individuellement. L’histoire récente a connu des sociétés qui, avec le triomphe du modèle industriel, se sont voulu radicalement en mouvement, se sont donc pensées comme totalement vouées à la modernité, et ont fait idéologie de cela. C’est le destin de ces sociétés quand elles deviennent « post »2 qu’il s’agit d’élucider. La perspective adoptée dans cette idée de la modernité (du moins dans sa dimension macrosociale) est l’héritière d’une lecture de l’histoire des sociétés marquée par la dialectique Hégélienne et Marxiste, ainsi que par l’idée, notamment weberienne, d’un processus de rationalisation. Elle en opère une sorte de recyclage. Sans doute accorde-t-elle moins d’importance que ses devancières3 à l’idée d’une progression de l’humanité : il s’agit moins de raconter l’histoire du monde que d’aider les hommes à comprendre leur rapport au monde. Mais elle se situe quand même plutôt dans cette logique et dans une perspective optimiste4. — Ce courant exprime fortement la conviction (partagée par d’autres) que, dans un ensemble de sociétés contemporaines (déve- loppées, démocratiques, sécularisées et entrées fortement dans l’ère postindustrielle et postfordiste), ce qui est socialement construit et reconnu comme tel l’emporte définitivement sur ce qui est donné. Le sens ne réside plus dans des grands messages immuables, mais dans des élaborations sans cesse renouvelées et qui, parfois, forment un véritable marché des valeurs, des symboles et des discours. Des institutions comme la famille ou même l’État sont ce que chacun

1. Prométhéennes aurait-on dit il y a quelques décennies. 2. Comme le dit Beck dans la préface de La société du risque, op. cit. 3. Du moins marxistes, car Julien Freund (cf. Études sur Max Weber, Genève, Droz, 1990) a démontré que la rationalisation weberienne n’avait rien à voir avec la progression vers une société plus « rationnelle », mais les utilisateurs ont parfois confondu. 4. Une étude plus fine conduirait sans doute à nuancer le propos. On n’en voudra pour preuve que la différence de tonalité entre l’expression politique de la démarche de Giddens (The third Way, Cambridge, Polity press, 1998) et la fin de l’article ci-après d’Ulrich Beck. Risque et modernité 19 d’entre nous en fait au quotidien. Les organisations (entreprises, administrations, universités, associations) reposent plus sur la mobilisation de leurs membres et sur leur capacité à produire leur propre comportement que sur un ordre qui s’imposerait à tous. La conscience d’être acteur de la construction sociale se développe. Cela constitue une véritable révolution. — L’idée de réflexivité implique que l’on intègre sans cesse à la construction de l’expérience les résultats de l’expérience acquise ou en cours1, ce qui renvoie aux divers apports des écoles inspirées par le pragmatisme et la phénoménologie. Mais, sur un plan plus historique, elle signifie également que les sociétés qui, à un moment, ont fait de la modernité leur univers unique, sont confrontées non à des difficultés extérieures, mais aux paradoxes et aux effets pervers de leur propre logique. Elles prennent conscience que leurs problèmes viennent d’elles-mêmes. Tchernobyl (peu de temps avant la publication du livre de Beck) est emblématique de cas dans lesquels personne ne veut de mal à personne, ce qui n’empêche pas que se pro- duise une catastrophe qui met en danger une partie de l’humanité. Le 11 Septembre peut être lu comme l’effet de la méchanceté des hommes2, mais ce sont bien les caractéristiques (technologiques, sociologiques, économiques) des sociétés développées à partir de la révolution industrielle qui font que l’action terroriste de quelques hommes peut prendre une telle importance et menacer chacun à tout instant et hors toute logique, alors que la guerre semblait encore établir un ordre. — La réflexivité se manifeste au niveau individuel par l’ex- périence du risque. Comme l’écrivent F. Ewald et D. Kessler3, celle-ci « est placée sous le signe d’une essentielle ambiguïté. C’est une forme de mesure qui, en même temps qu’elle permet de pon- dérer le pour et le contre, ne permet jamais de s’affranchir d’une décision nécessaire. L’éthique du risque est une éthique de la res- ponsabilité qui impose à chacun, individuellement et collective- ment, de se prononcer au cas par cas sur la valeur des valeurs » (p. 67). — Le raisonnement comprend une théorie de la mondialisation des sociétés. D’un côté l’expérience individuelle est elle-même mondialisée, elle est « délocalisée » (Giddens) et « relocalisée » dans un mouvement permanent et passe de plus en plus souvent par

1. « C’est l’examen et la révision constante des pratiques sociales à la lumière des informations concernant ces pratiques mêmes, ce qui altère constitutivement leur caractère » (Giddens, op. cit.). 2. Et l’actuel président des États-Unis ne se prive pas de le faire. 3. F. Ewald, D. Kessler, Risque et politique, Le débat, no 109, mars-avril 2000, p. 55-72. 20 Alain Bourdin l’appartenance à des « communautés mondialisées d’expériences partagées ». Les « gages symboliques » (toutes les abstractions qui fondent les relations sociales : argent, droit, etc.) et les « systèmes experts » (les dispositifs techniques qui remplacent l’intervention de l’homme et que celui-ci ne peut pas maîtriser directement) sont les opérateurs de ce jeu de distanciation. Mais la mondialisation s’opère également par le partage de « menaces globales trans-nationales et non spécifiques à une classe déterminée, qui s’accompagnent d’une dynamique sociale et politique nouvelle » (Beck 1986, p. 27). Le partage des « mal » l’emporte sur la dynamique des « bien ». — Le rapport à la science et à la technologie s’inverse. Elles furent l’objet de croyances positives et associées indissolublement aux certitudes et à la vérité. Le mouvement de la science et des technologies lui-même – et non un retour vers le monde préscien- tifique ou pré-industriel – relativise toujours plus ce qui fondait ces croyances. Les attentes (et donc les exigences) croissantes vis-à-vis des sciences et des technologies alimentent l’aggravation de leur mise en cause1 : les débats récents sur la vache folle, les OGM,le sang contaminé et les divers problèmes de bio-éthique liés aux thérapies géniques en témoignent. Désormais, la question du rapport entre le savant ou l’expert et les autres acteurs sociaux ou citoyens est sans cesse posée et jamais résolue à l’avance. Au demeurant s’interroger sur ce sujet, à partir d’une même référence à la modernité réflexive, n’oblige nullement à tirer les mêmes conclusions, c’est ce que montre l’article ci-après de Florence Rudolf. — Enfin, la demande de maîtrise devient la demande sociale centrale. Elle correspond à des mondes sociaux dans lesquels la peur l’emporte sur l’espérance. Elle est omniprésente dans la pré- occupation de sécurité et constitue le moteur de la construction des différents dispositifs de confiance. Cette demande de maîtrise, fortement liée au processus d’individuation2, mais également au foisonnement des systèmes experts et des dispositifs de délocalisa-

1. À quoi il faut ajouter un raisonnement que l’on trouve notamment chez Giddens ou chez Beck et qui concerne l’évolution même des structures de la connaissance : les systèmes experts sont de plus en plus complexes et dépendants, cela fait que se développe une véritable question des « coûts de transaction » entre ces différents domaines. Cela fait écrire à Beck (Democracy without Enemies, Cam- bridge, Polity Press, 1998) que le véritable problème devient celui de la connaissance des conséquences non voulues de la connaissance. 2. Scott Lash commence sa préface à Individualization (U. Beck and E. Beck- Gernsheim, Individualization. Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences, London, Sage, 2002) par la phrase suivante : « Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society, and indeed the theory of “reflexive modernization” is characterized by two theses : an environmental thesis or the “risk thesis” and an “individualization thesis”. » Risque et modernité 21 tion, est porteuse de dangers politiques et sociaux qu’il convient d’examiner sérieusement. Dans quelle mesure cette théorie permet-elle de donner une consistance à la sociologie du risque, et celle-ci peut-elle apparaître comme un cadre de lecture de la modernité ?

UNE OUVERTURE QUI DYNAMISE LA SOCIOLOGIE

La théorie de la modernité réflexive vaut d’abord par la posture qu’elle adopte, explicitement ou implicitement. Ce qui fait dire dans une heureuse expression à Latour1 : « Beck n’est pas un penseur critique c’est un penseur généreux », ce qui se manifeste – et parfois choque – dans la forme que Giddens donne à ses engagements politiques, c’est une idée de la manière dont les sciences sociales peuvent se situer par rapport à la société. Celles-ci n’auraient pas pour vocation d’expliquer le monde social, c’est-à- dire de faire le compte des causes ou des effets, mais plutôt de l’élucider, c’est-à-dire de rendre clair ce qui est flou ou de l’expliciter, donc de dire ce qui n’est pas dit. Cette démarche-là, même si elle se développe dans le monde académique, s’adresse d’abord à tous les acteurs sociaux et (comme le dit Beck) est construite à partir (il faudrait presque dire en miroir) de l’expérience commune. Elle est donc d’abord réflexive. Cette ambition est indissolublement liée à l’idée que les outils traditionnels de la sociologie, conceptuels et même méthodologiques, sont pour le moins obso- lètes et sans doute radicalement dépassés, parce qu’il n’y a plus de société2 et que le monde est devenu un gigantesque système de mobilité. Il convient donc d’élaborer de nouveaux instruments, à partir de l’expérience des acteurs et en évitant de produire un nouveau système a priori. Centrée sur les acteurs (ce qui ne signifie pas qu’elle en soit toujours bien comprise), la théorie de la modernité réflexive pré- tend à une certaine universalité. Elle permet d’interroger une diversité de situations spécifiques, elle s’applique à des échelles et dans des perspectives très différentes : elle peut servir à la fois pour rendre compte de l’état et du mouvement du monde en général et de situations particulières, individuelles, quotidiennes. Mais con-

1. Dans la préface de La société du risque, op. cit. 2. John Urry remarque avec humour (dans Sociology Beyond Societies. Mobilities for the twenty-first century, London, Routledge, 2000) que la phrase de Margaret Thatcher « There is not such a thing as society » directement héritée d’Hayek) méritait cependant d’être prise au sérieux. 22 Alain Bourdin trairement à d’autres théories générales1, elle n’exige l’adoption d’aucun appareillage immuable : on peut l’utiliser de manière très libre. En ce sens, elle est plutôt localisable (et n’oblige pas à abandonner les savoirs locaux liés à la situation étudiée) que reproduc- tible. C’est probablement un aspect très important de sa puissance et de son succès. En cela, elle se différencie de certaines théories de l’action rationnelle qui, dans leurs versions les plus récentes2, sont également localisables, mais ne peuvent changer ni d’échelle ni de registre. En construisant des instruments pour rendre compte de l’ex- périence contemporaine en même temps qu’un discours sur le sens du monde et de son évolution, la théorie de la modernité réflexive offre à la sociologie le moyen de développer le dialogue avec les idéologies ou les visions du monde actuelles. En effet, elle aborde directement certains de leurs thèmes les plus forts (la mondialisation, la mise en cause de la science, le risque environnemental), elle propose des cadres d’interprétations de ces thèmes et ne condamne pas a priori le discours des acteurs. Certains l’utiliseront pour analyser, mettre à distance ou critiquer des idéologies comme celles de l’antimondialisation ou du développement durable, d’autres la met- tront à leur service. Cette ambivalence peut s’avérer féconde.

DES POINTS DE FRAGILITÉ

À l’intérieur de l’espace ouvert par la théorie de la modernité réflexive, les points de vues et les controverses sont très divers : le débat sociologique de ces dernières années en a été largement ali- menté et c’est là que se sont réalisées ses plus grandes avancées. Cependant, sans adopter un point de vue réducteur3 ou systémati- quement négatif, on peut s’interroger sur ses limites ou ses dérives4 et sur les conséquences que cela entraîne pour la sociologie du risque.

1. Celle de Bourdieu par exemple. 2. Représentées notamment par les travaux de R. Boudon. Voir notamment R. Boudon, Le sens des valeurs, Paris, PUF, 1999. 3. Certaines évaluations de la pensée de Beck à l’occasion de la traduction tardive de son livre en France paraissent singulièrement schématiques. 4. On ne présentera qu’un aspect limité du débat, mais il en existe d’autres. C’est ainsi, par exemple, que l’auteur d’un article récent (A. Elliott, Beck’s sociology of risk : A critical assessment, Sociology-the-journal-of-the-British-sociological- association, mai 2002, 36 (2), p. 293-315) estime que Beck reste trop dépendant d’une conception objectiviste et instrumentale de la construction du risque et de l’incertitude dans les relations sociales et qu’il ne parvient pas à définir les relations entre la dynamique institutionnelle et l’autoréférence. Risque et modernité 23

Tout d’abord, l’utilisation de la notion de risque, malgré sa généralité, sa « transversalité », n’empêche pas le développement de découpages très étroits de l’expérience collective ou de l’organisation sociale. Les bibliographies des articles publiés dans ce numéro en témoignent : d’un côté un tout petit nombre de réfé- rences communes (Beck et Giddens, puis Latour et Callon, souvent mentionnés), de l’autre des listes d’ouvrages très spécialisés qui ne se recoupent pas. Plutôt qu’une catégorie de l’expérience, que l’on pourrait par exemple confronter à celle d’intérêt, ou qu’un cadre d’interrogation des pratiques, le risque définit souvent une classe d’objets qui sert à construire des analyses diverses (et souvent riches) mais sur laquelle on s’interroge peu. On n’échappe pas alors au piège de cette fragmentation de l’expertise évoquée plus haut. En effet, la généralité du concept oblige à développer des instruments spécifiques pour analyser les différents types de risques. Si on le fait en se centrant sur la manière dont le risque est construit, les démar- ches transversales sont relativement faciles, si l’on privilégie le traitement des risques et l’analyse des dispositifs qui y contribuent, l’expertise ne peut que se spécialiser et c’est ce qui se produit le plus souvent. Bien qu’elle traite le risque comme une catégorie de l’expérience, il n’est pas sûr que la théorie de la modernité réflexive offre les instruments pertinents pour sortir de ce piège. Une autre difficulté s’attache tout particulièrement aux débats sur l’expertise et la science. En effet, entre l’expert et le citoyen (non expert), le sociologue prend facilement la position de l’arbitre et l’on a parfois l’impression qu’une seule expertise échappe aux difficultés communes : celle du sociologue réflexif... S’interroger également sur la place de l’expertise sociologique dans ces dispositifs suppose le recours à tout un appareillage et la tentation reste forte de s’en tenir à la livraison d’une bonne parole au succès duquel il est difficile de rester insensible, même si l’on connaît son ambiguïté1. Mais c’est au cœur même de la théorie que se trouve sa principale fragilité. Jean de Munck2, qui reconnaît que la sociologie de la modernité réflexive possède, contrairement au courant postmoderne, l’avantage d’être opérationnalisable pour l’analyse du mouvement des sociétés contemporaines, et celui d’éviter l’irratio- nalisme, émet cependant une critique assez sévère. Pour lui, « La

1. Cela vaut plus encore pour certains sociologues de la science dont le succès médiatique donne parfois l’impression de reposer moins sur leurs apports que sur un côté iconoclaste, voire démagogique. 2. Pour une critique de la raison procédurale, in D. Mercure (éd.), Une société- monde. Les dynamiques sociales de la mondialisation, Québec, Presses de l’Université Laval - De Boeck, 2001. 24 Alain Bourdin réflexivité est un concept trop large pour rendre compte du temps, puisqu’en un sens fort, c’est la modernité tout entière qui est réflexive (c’est-à-dire rationnelle)... On rétorquera que ce que veu- lent probablement dire ces auteurs, c’est que le “régime de réflexi- vité” est en train de changer... Mais alors, première question, pourquoi ne pas identifier ce nouveau régime de réflexivité, le nommer et commencer à en construire critiquement le concept ? » (p. 118). Et plus loin : « D’un autre côté, le concept de réflexivité apparaît trop abstrait et trop univoque pour rendre compte de la polémique des rationalités au sein de la société réflexive. La “modernité réflexive” d’Anthony Giddens et consorts se préoccupe beaucoup de la lutte contre ce qui n’est pas elle, soit la tradition ou la moder- nité orthodoxe, mais non de la pluralité agonistique des significations données à la réflexivité dans les sociétés mondialisées... »1 (p. 118). Cette critique, forte sur le fond, permet également de bien comprendre les dangers « sociaux » de la position adoptée par le courant de la « modernité réflexive ». Celui-ci émet un discours général convaincant qui semble pouvoir s’appliquer facilement, et qui, sans adopter les points de vue radicaux de la sociologie postmoderne, ne construit pas de barrières entre la connaissance et l’action, entre le quotidien et le politique. Du coup, il risque de refléter une opinion commune des milieux éclairés qui ne sera pas autre chose que le point de rencontre des idéologies en vogue dans l’intelligentsia des pays ou il est puissant, des idées reçues par leurs milieux dirigeants et des préoccupations de la strate intellectuelle de leurs médias. De tels lieux ne sont pas forcément inutiles et peuvent s’inscrire dans une dynamique de réflexivité. Mais la posture très surplombante qu’adoptent volontiers les théoriciens de la modernité réflexive peut entraîner la constitution d’une sorte de grand récit, nouvel avatar du prophétisme en sociologie. La mythification du 11 Sep- tembre, devenu sujet quasi obligatoire pour nombre de sociologues, est un piège typique. Ce qu’en disent les théoriciens de la moder- nité réflexive2 stimule la réflexion et ne manque pas de poids sociologique. Mais ils ne se défont pas pour autant de la posture de l’oracle qui déchiffre le message universel que nous envoient les dieux par la catastrophe qui s’abat sur la ville. Sans doute est-ce là une caricature, mais au-delà de la réaction épidermique que provoque la masse d’articles « scientifiques » consacrés au 11 Septembre et qui laissent le sentiment que leurs auteurs s’ins-

1. On pourrait également parler de la pluralité agonistique des rationalités et des processus de rationalisation. 2. Cf. l’article, ci-après, d’Ulrich Beck. Risque et modernité 25 crivent dans une course quasi commerciale à l’interprétation, l’interrogation demeure. Le danger final, qui concerne l’ensemble de la sociologie du risque, tient dans une simplification radicale du social. Est-ce le meilleur moyen pour lutter contre une sociologie hyperparticularisante et localisante, dont le succès inquiète à juste titre ?

LA POSITION AMBIGUË DE LA SOCIOLOGIE DU RISQUE

La sociologie du risque présente plusieurs visages. Certains travaux prennent le risque comme prétexte pour développer des analyses qui concernent aussi bien les processus de réponse au risque que les comportements des acteurs qui subissent, craignent ou gèrent le risque. Mais ils ne s’interrogent pas sur la nature ou la construction de ce dernier. Le risque devient alors une sorte de « boîte noire ». Souvent, cela permet de renouveler l’interrogation de branches traditionnelles de la sociologie. L’exemple de la santé semble particulièrement net à cet égard. D’autres fois, cela facilite l’établissement de ponts entre des domaines qui s’ignoraient (l’étude de l’industrie et celle de l’environnement), voire la structuration de domaines transversaux nouveaux (les « comportements à risque »1). D’autres au contraire s’efforcent d’élaborer une théorie du risque. Celle-ci doit rendre compte de la manière dont le risque est défini et mesuré par les acteurs et de l’usage qu’ils en font pour organiser leur comportement. De ce point de vue, elle interfère fortement et nécessairement avec les théories de la rationalité. Elle doit également rendre compte de la progression de la lecture du monde à partir de la catégorie de risque. Elle doit enfin expliquer ce qu’est la définition sociale des risques, dans l’imaginaire collectif comme dans l’action organisée. La théorie de la modernité réflexive offre un cadre pour cela. Associer fortement le risque et la réflexivité permet de former un noyau théorique puissant. Cependant, parce qu’elle s’intéresse surtout à la progression de la catégorie de risque et à la défini- tion sociale des risques, cette théorie ne donne pas tous les moyens d’une articulation forte avec celle de l’action rationnelle. En outre, en raison du type de démarche privilégié par ses principaux auteurs, elle est plus apte à stimuler et à ouvrir des pers-

1. Mais l’étude des comportements à risque entraîne très souvent une théorisa- tion du risque. 26 Alain Bourdin pectives qu’à structurer véritablement un ensemble de travaux sociologiques. La sociologie du risque reste donc un ensemble relativement disparate et dont les cohérences sont un peu fragiles. Cela n’empêche pas qu’elle constitue certainement un secteur majeur pour les années qui viennent. Laboratoire Théories des mutations urbaines (IFU, Université de Paris 8 et CNRS) [email protected] Persée http://www.persee.fr

Robert Park et l'écologie humaine

Daniel Breslau

Breslau Daniel, . Robert Park et l'écologie humaine. In: Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. Vol. 74, septembre 1988. Recherches sur la recherche. pp. 55-63.

Voir l'article en ligne

Robert Park et l'écologie humaine. L'écologie humaine développée à Chicago à l'initiative de Robert Park à partir de 1915 a pu s'imposer au prix d'une redéfinition du champ sociologique et des conditions de production d'une science sociale légitime. La reconstruction savante de la discipline aux Etats-Unis a été l'oeuvre d'universitaires et de fonctionnaires d'origine sociale relativement basse qui ne disposaient pas de la légitimité des fondateurs de VAmerican Social Science Association issus de la classe dominante de la Nouvelle-Angleterre : soucieux de se réserver le monopole de la compétence scientifique, ces nouveaux venus trouvèrent dans Pévolution-nisme naturaliste le fondement théorique de l'intervention sociale, dont la forme antérieure - la bienfaisance - se trouvait ainsi disqualifiée, et avec elle toute la tradition des enquêtes sociales. Les oppositions théoriques et métho- dologiques entre l'écologie humaine et les "social surveys" (rationalisme/empirisme, organisme/problème social, détachement positiviste/empathie de l'enquêteur) peuvent être interprétées à la lumière de la lutte pour la professionnalisation menée par Park et ses collègues. Cette lutte a été grandement facilitée par l'alliance objective des universitaires et des industriels, qui voyaient dans les recherches menées à l'Université de Chicago une arme contre les utopies réformatrices.

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Malentendus transatlantiques. La tradition de Chicago, Park et la sociologie française par Jean-Michel CHAPOULIE

| Éditions de l’EHESS | L’Homme

2008/3-4 - n° 187-188 ISSN 0439-4216 | ISBN 9782713221866 | pages 223 à 246

Pour citer cet article : — Chapoulie J.-M., Malentendus transatlantiques. La tradition de Chicago, Park et la sociologie française, L’Homme 2008/3-4, n° 187-188, p. 223-246.

Distribution électronique Cairn pour les Éditions de l’EHESS. © Éditions de l’EHESS. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit. Malentendus transatlantiques La tradition de Chicago, Park et la sociologie française

Jean-Michel Chapoulie

MÊME SI LES SCIENCES SOCIALES ont cherché à adopter dès le début du siècle le modèle d’organisation des sciences de la nature, avec ses contacts entre cher - cheurs de différentes nationalités, la communication transfrontalière entre cher - cheurs en sciences sociales a été et reste difficile. Pour ces disciplines, les questions d’actualité, les tendances d’évolution, les méthodes documentaires en vogue à un moment donné, les modes de rédaction des analyses ne sont pas souvent les mêmes des deux côtés de celles-ci. Ce fait est sans doute spécialement frappant pour la sociologie, plus dépendante des débats publics d’une société à laquelle appartiennent par ailleurs les chercheurs. On ne saurait donc s’étonner de la lenteur et des incertitudes de la diffusion qui caractérisent, en sociologie, même les œuvres traitées comme classiques – c’est-à-dire répétitivement inscrites dans les programmes d’enseignement et les histoires conventionnelles de la sociologie. Les incompréhensions et les contre -

sens qui accompagnent si souvent le passage des frontière s des travaux sociolo - S E giques ont cependant leurs contreparties: ils offrent une voie d’accès à la compré - I hension de ce qui reste implicite dans les analyses de sciences sociale s 1. Les R considérant comme une ressource et non comme un obstacle, Marc Bloch (1992 O G

[1949]: 64) mettait en avant les expériences individuelles des chercheurs en invo - É T

quant un «emprunt» aux «expériences quotidiennes» comme un élément du A travail d’historien. Je me propose ici de dégager ce qui, dans ces expériences indi - C viduelles, renvoie à ces éléments collectifs que sont les questionnements et repré - S E

sentations sociales constitués. Pour mettre en évidence ces éléments collectifs, je D développerai l’exemple de la réception des analyses de la «tradition de Chicago» E par la sociologie française, et plus précisément de la quasi non-réception des G A S U ’ L

1. Une analyse de certains de ces éléments, comme le rapport des chercheurs à la culture savante, E se trouve dans Bourdieu (1997). D

L’HOMME, Miroirs transatlantiques , 187-188 / 2008, pp. 223 à 246 éléments centraux de celle-ci que représentent les analyses des «relations de races et de culture» dans le cadre analytique proposé par Robert Par k 2. 224 Les contacts des sociologues français avec les sociologues de la tradition de Chicago peuvent être reconstitués à partir des comptes rendus de voyage et mémoires, des traductions, notes critiques, et références. Je m’appuie ici essentiel - lement sur le dépouillement d’ouvrages et des principales revues de sociologie: pour la période antérieure à 1940, les Annales sociologique s, les Cahiers internatio - naux de sociologie (1945-1965), la Revue française de sociologie (1960-1980 ) 3. Parmi les éléments susceptibles de retenir l’attention des chercheurs lors de ces contacts, on peut distinguer entre schèmes généraux d’analyse – notions, hypo - thèses sur les relations entre celles-ci, interrogations – et méthodes de recueil et de traitement de la documentation. Dans une seconde étape de cette recherche, j’ai examiné les publications françaises sur l’immigration, le domaine de recherche homologue pour la sociologie française de celui des relations de races et de culture pour la sociologie américaine. J’ai procédé pour cela au dépouille - ment de la revue Population et de la collection des «Cahiers de l’ INE D ». Je présenterai d’abord rapidement les recherches de la tradition de Chicago en sociologie, ainsi que quelques repères sur l’histoire de la sociologie américaine et la place qu’y occupent les recherches sur les relations de races et de cultur e 4.

Park, la tradition de Chicago et l’évolution de la sociologie américaine

C’est à l’Université de Chicago qu’est née, à la fin du XIX e siècle, la première entreprise de recherches empiriques sur la société contemporaine installée dans une université américaine. Les débuts furent difficiles, et c’est seulement en 1918 que paraît un premier ouvrage significatif: la monographie de William I. Thomas et Florian Znaniecki sur l’émigration polonaise aux États-Uni s 5. Les recherches 2. L’expression «relations de race et de culture» n’est pas utilisée par Park, mais par les chercheurs de la génération suivante. Il faut peut-être préciser pour un lecteur francophone contemporain que le terme «race» n’a aucune connotation biologique dans son usage le plus fréquent par les sciences sociales américaines après 1930. La définition donnée par un élève de Park peut servir de référence: «La race désigne simplement un groupe de personnes qui sont considérées et traitées dans la vie courante comme une race. L’appartenance à la race correspond simplement aux individus qui sont identifiés et classés comme lui appartenant» (Blumer 1955: 4). J’ai utilisé parfois le terme «rela - tions ethniques» à la place du terme «relations de race» en laissant de côté des distinctions que l’on trouve dans certaines recherches américaines des cinquante dernières années. 3. Au cours de la période 1945-1970, la sociologie n’est pas clairement séparée de l’anthropologie et les trois revues – surtout les Cahiers internationaux de sociologie – publient des articles d’anthropo - logues. La première revue française généraliste d’anthropologie, L’Homme , n’est créée, rappelons-le, qu’en 1961. 4. Une analyse historique détaillée de la tradition de Chicago dans son contexte se trouve dans Chapoulie (2001). La démarche historique, et non hagiographique ou de critique présentiste, de cet ouvrage est présentée dans Chapoulie (2005). 5. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America , New York, A. Knopf, 1927 [1918-1920], 5 vol. Deux traductions partielles existent en français: la traduction du tome 3: Le Paysan polonais en Europe et en Amérique. Récit de vie d’un migrant , Paris, Nathan, 1998, et un choix de textes: Fondation de la sociologie américaine. Morceaux choisis , Paris, L’Harmattan, 2000.

Jean-Michel Chapoulie empiriques sur la société américaine contemporaine connaissent un développe - ment rapide après 1918, sous l’inspiration de cet ouvrage et de l’enseignement de Robert Park (1864-1944), un ancien journaliste qui, en collaboration avec un 225 jeune collègue, Ernest Burgess, publie un manuel en son temps qualifié de «Bible verte» (Park & Burgess 1921). L’ouvrage propose un cadre de notions pour effec - tuer des recherches empiriques sur la société américaine contemporaine. Les mêmes auteurs publient un autre volume (Park & Burgess 1925) destiné à promouvoir des études sur les villes, peu après que l’une des fondations Rocke - feller eut proposé les premiers financements importants pour des recherches en sciences sociales. Ce financement permit, entre autres, la publication d’une collection d’ouvrages, issus le plus souvent de thèses (PhD) en sociologie soute - nues à l’Université de Chicago inspirées par Park. Ces ouvrages portent sur des sujets comme les bandes de jeunes de Chicago, un quartier de la ville juxtaposant zone résidentielle habitée par l’élite et zone d’habitats d’immigrants pauvres, un type particulier de dancing, ou encore l’étiquette des relations entre les races dans le Sud, le mélange de populations dans les îles Hawaï, etc. Ces monographies s’appuient souvent en partie sur un contact direct des chercheurs avec les phéno - mènes étudiés, une démarche nouvelle pour la sociologie américaine jusque-là portée aux compilations de bibliothèque. Cette démarche est prônée par Robert Park, qui l’emprunte au journalisme d’enquête, mais elle sera un peu plus tard identifiée à la démarche ethnographiqu e 6. Les sociologues de Chicago recueillent fréquemment des autobiographies (life history) – deux ouvrages sont par exemple consacrés à la présentation et au commentaire d’autobiographies de jeunes délinquants. Celles-ci, comme les interviews et les observations qui permettent de réaliser des case studies , sont destinées à appréhender les expériences subjectives qui sont la voie d’accès à ce que Park désigne par le terme «ordre moral». Les monographies utilisent aussi une documentation variée collectée par différentes administrations et associations à but social, à la presse, etc. Elles exploitent parfois des statistiques et surtout des représentations cartographiques de la localisation des phénomènes étudiés dans les villes – principalement Chicago. Dans la terminologie introduite par Park, il s’agit par là d’étudier «l’ordre écologique», celui que constituent sur le terrain les relations de concurrence entre groupes sociaux pour l’utilisation de l’espace. Ces monographies, dont la publication s’étend de 1924 à 1940, représentè - S

rent pour la sociologie américaine le modèle de la recherche empirique. C’est à E I leurs auteurs, et à ceux qui les ont inspirés (Thomas, Park, Burgess), qu’a été R O conféré ultérieurement le label «école de Chicago». On peut regrouper en trois G É T catégories les objets étudiés: les villes, leur développement, les comportements A C S E D E

6. Il n’y a qu’une faible distinction institutionnelle entre anthropologie et sociologie à l’Université G A

de Chicago jusqu’en 1929, et, jusqu’à son éviction, en 1918, William Thomas, dans un départe - S U ment d’anthropologie et de sociologie se place toujours du côté des anthropologues. Dès sa paru - ’ tioin en 1922, l’ouvrage de Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific , a été remarqué et apprécié L E des sociologues de Chicago. D

Malentendus transatlantiques urbains, avec notamment la «désorganisation sociale» (délinquance, divorce, suicide, etc.); les relations de races et de culture; enfin, la presse. Ce dernier sujet 226 qui correspond à un intérêt personnel de Robert Park n’occupe à peu près aucune place dans la postérité de l’école de Chicago en sociologie et je le laisserai de côté. Park, qui avait 50 ans lors de son recrutement comme sociologue, n’a pas lui- même publié de compte rendu de recherche qui aurait pu faire date en socio - logie, mais de nombreux essais, ultérieurement réunis en trois volumes (Park 1950, 1952, 1955). Si la ville est un sujet d’intérêt, voire de fascination pour Park, il n’a jamais pour autant mené lui-même de recherches systématiques dans ce domaine. Il n’en va pas de même pour l’étude des relations de race et de culture. Les essais de Park sur ce sujet s’appuient non seulement sur des recherches originales, mais aussi sur une expérience personnelle exceptionnelle - ment riche. Il est l’un des seuls universitaires de sa génération à connaître ethno - graphiquement (selon les termes de sa fille, l’anthropologue Margaret Redfield) le monde des Noirs ruraux du Sud – il a été, vers 1905, secrétaire du principal leader noir de la période, Booker Washington. Il a suivi, comme le montrent ses essais, les avatars d’une évolution extrêmement rapide qui correspond au passage d’une population rurale localisée dans les États du Sud en 1900, à une popula - tion en partie urbaine établie dans le Nord en 1940. Il s’est également parti- culièrement intéressé à un autre groupe victime de discriminations aux États- Unis: les Asiatiques de la Côte Ouest. Parmi les autres exemples retenus de Park, on trouve celui de l’Europe centrale d’avant 1914 analysé par des sociologues bien connus de Park comme Gumplowicz, les Noirs du Brésil (étudié par un de ses élèves), les Îles Hawaï (étudié par un autre). On sait que la présence sur le même territoire de populations d’origines géogra - phiques diverses, culturellement et religieusement différentes, et dont les places dans la société américaine sont extrêmement variées, constitue depuis 1850 un problème public majeur aux États-Unis, notamment aux yeux du groupe anglo- saxon protestant qui occupe une position hégémonique. La perspective proposée par Robert Park sur les relations de races rompt radicalement avec celle qui inspi - rait les analyses antérieures: contrairement à ses prédécesseurs, l’objet central de Robert Park est le système des relations entre ces groupes et non pas des caracté - ristiques supposées substantielles de chacun d’entre eu x 7. Les relations de races sont considérées par Park non comme des éléments durablement stables, mais comme soumises à processus d’évolution. Loin de s’enfermer dans le cas particulier des États-Unis, il a développé une perspective comparative large, insistant sur le fait que les contacts entre groupes de race et de culture sont des phénomènes omniprésents dans l’histoire du monde depuis l’Antiquité (Park 1950 [1939]). Comme je l’ai montré ailleurs (Chapoulie 2008), le schéma d’analyse de Park est une sorte d’abstraction de la situation des États-Unis d’avant 1914, avec ses vagues successives d’immigration massive et une minorité hégémonique.

7. Voir Chapoulie (1999) pour une présentation du schéma d’analyse de Park.

Jean-Michel Chapoulie Tous les sociologues qui ont enseigné longtemps ou qui ont été formés à l’Uni - versité de Chicago ne se rattachent pas à ce qui a été appelé «la tradition de Chicago». En 1927, l’université a recruté l’un des spécialistes en vue de l’usage 227 de la démarche statistique en sociologie, William Ogburn, dont la notoriété repose sur ses analyses des grandes évolutions sociales au moyen de séries statis - tiques. Le milieu des années 1930 marque la fin d’une sorte de domination de l’Université de Chicago sur la sociologie américaine, et le déclin d’un certain type de recherche qu’illustraient les monographies de l’école de Chicago. Une nouvelle source documentaire occupe une place croissante dans la sociologie américaine: les enquêtes par questionnaires conduisant à des exploitations statistiques. Cette démarche, qui est développée après 1940 par Paul Lazarsfeld à l’Université Columbia, passe pour la démarche d’avenir de la sociologie. L’usage d’une documentation variée et le contact direct avec les phénomènes – la démarche privilégiée par Robert Park – connaissent corrélativement un certain discrédit parmi les sociologues car suspectés de manquer de rigueur scientifique. Un nouveau centre d’excellence de la sociologie apparaît aussi après la guerre, à Harvard, autour de Talcott Parsons. Le département de sociologie de l’Université de Chicago reste cependant, après 1945, l’un des principaux producteurs de PhD en sociologie et un centre actif de recherche. Deux de ceux qui se considèrent comme les élèves de Park, Louis Wirth et Herbert Blumer, y enseignent jusqu’en 1950, et un troisième, Everett Hughes, jusqu’en 1961. Les deux derniers nommés apparaissent rétrospectivement comme des enseignants influents qui forment une troisième génération de sociologues – Howard Becker, Anselm Strauss, Eliot Freidson, Donald Roy, Joseph Gusfield, Erving Goffman, pour citer ceux dont des ouvrages ont été traduits en français. Leur approche, qui s’appuie sur une démarche ethnographique, est différente de celle des recherches des années 1930, mais une certaine continuité avec celle-ci est cependant évidente. J’utilise, après d’autres, l’expression «tradition de Chicago» pour dési - gner l’ensemble diversifié de ces recherches «autour» de l’Université de Chicago. Trois des élèves de Park ayant accédé à une notoriété nationale, Franklin Frazier, Everett Hughes et Herbert Blumer ont publié des analyses sur les rela - tions de races. Franklin Frazier, le premier sociologue afro-américain à être élu à la présidence de l’American Sociological Association, a insisté sur sa dette à l’égard de la sociologie de Park – y compris dans son allocution prononcée en S

1949 comme président de cette association (Frazier 1949). Quant à Everett E I

Hughes, il a consacré une monographie à une ville industrielle du Canada proche R O de la frontière linguistique, centrée sur les contacts entre anglophones et franco - G É T phones. Après 1937, il étudie – le sujet était alors nouveau –, l’introduction de A C

travailleurs noirs dans la grande industrie. Et l’essai qui conclut sa présidence de S E

l’American Sociological Association, en août 1963, à un moment critique de la D E

campagne pour les droits civiques, reprend le schéma d’analyse de Park (Hughes G A

1963). On voit que les travaux sur les relations de race qui reposent sur le cadre S U ’ analytique proposé par Robert Park ont fait durablement partie de l’actualité de L E

la sociologie américaine. D

Malentendus transatlantiques Examiner comment la sociologie française a accueilli ces recherches constitue donc un bon exemple pour mettre en évidence les conditions qui rendent possibles 228 ou impossibles les emprunts à une autre tradition nationale. Je partirai du premier contact attesté, en 1930, entre la sociologie française et la tradition de Chicago.

Maurice Halbwachs et la tradition de Chicago Maurice Halbwachs est, après 1918, le seul des élèves de Durkheim à s’inté - resser activement à la sociologie en tant que discipline associée à des enquêtes sur le monde contemporain. Avec cet autre durkheimien qu’est François Simiand, il est un fervent partisan de l’usage des statistiques en sociologie. Ses principaux centres d’intérêts portent à la fois sur la démographie, les villes – sa thèse de droit a pour sujet Les Expropriations et le prix des terrains à Paris (1860-1909) – et sur la classe ouvrière – sa thèse d’État ès lettres est consacrée à La Classe ouvrière et les niveaux de vie . À la sociologie de Durkheim, Halbwachs ajoute une attention aux différences de classe et on peut rappeler sa collaboration au journal socialiste L’Hu - manité avant 1914. Professeur de sociologie à l’Université de Strasbourg, il a fait un séjour de trois mois à l’Université de Chicago en 1930, sur l’invitation de William Ogburn. À Chicago, Halbwachs a rencontré Robert Park et Ernest Burgess. Un article sur la ville de Chicago publié à son retour (Halbwachs 1932) présente le développement de la ville et quelques-unes des caractéristiques pour lesquelles les recensements fournissent des statistiques – habitat, transport. Il décrit les propriétés spécifiques de différents quartiers en s’appuyant sur les mono - graphies des élèves de Park et Burgess, notamment leurs analyses écologiques. C’est la question de la composition ethnique de la ville qui a surtout retenu l’at - tention d’Halbwachs. Il faut rappeler que les ressources qu’offraient la sociologie de Durkheim pour étudier le contact de populations qui se considèraient comme différentes étaient limitées: la seule mention de la question se trouve dans une discussion, en 1905, où Durkheim propose une distinction entre État (groupe - ment politique englobant) et nationalité (communauté de civilisation) en remar - quant que pour la France les deux se confondent (Durkheim 1975: 178-186). Dans la dernière partie de son article, titrée «Chicago, ville d’immigrants», ainsi que dans la conclusion, Halbwachs s’interroge sur «l’assimilation» (il ne définit pas le terme) de ces différentes populations. Il s’appuie sur une comparaison avec Paris, examine «cette notion de race qui n’offre en somme rien d’irréductible», pour conclure que «plus que par la religion et la langue, les immigrants se distin - guent des Américains, et ils se distinguent entre eux, par leur situation ou leur niveau social». Ainsi, selon lui, l’hétérogénéité ethnique n’est qu’un phénomène superficiel qui dissimule les différences de classe: «Ce n’est par parce qu’étrangers, mais parce que ouvriers, surtout parce que manœuvres et ouvriers de la grande industrie, que la masse des immigrants, admise à résider, est cependant séparée de la vie urbaine, exclue du courant traditionnel et continu qui n’entraîne que les éléments vraiment “bourgeois”, ou en relation et en contact intime et familier avec la bourgeoisie» (Halbwachs 1932: 47).

Jean-Michel Chapoulie On comprend pourquoi Halbwachs a laissé de côté les monographies qui portent sur les relations de races, ainsi que les analyses de Park sur le même sujet. Une documentation exceptionnellement riche permet de connaître plus préci - 229 sément les réactions d’Halbwachs à ce qu’il a vu de la ville et des recherches des sociologues de Chicago. Christian Topalov a publié dans Genèses la série d’articles donnés presque anonymement par Maurice Halbwachs au Progrès de Lyon (Topalov 2005). On dispose également de la correspondance d’Halbwachs avec sa famille pendant son voyage. C’est sur ce matériel que s’appuie Topalov dans deux articles dont je reprends ici une partie des conclusions (Topalov 2006a, 2006b). Plusieurs éléments confirment que Maurice Halbwachs a cherché à rabattre la question des différences ethniques sur une dimension sociale qui lui était au contraire familière, l’appartenance de classe, comme elle l’était aux intellectuels français de sa génération et de son orientation politique. L’idée que les différences de classes sont l’élément essentiel de la structure sociale – celui qui détermine l’or - ganisation de la société –, que les divisions ethniques doivent en fin de compte se ramener à celles-ci, apparaît comme l’une des caractéristiques principales de la sociologie de Halbwachs que celui-ci partage avec une grande partie des spécialistes de sciences sociales de son temps, aussi bien en France qu’en Grande-Bretagne ou encore en Allemagne. Une autre possibilité d’interprétation est ignorée par Halb - wachs: le principe de structuration ethnique peut composer durablement ses effets avec les différences de classe, sans être réductible à celui-ci. C’est ce que suggérait, selon Hughes (1943), la situation d’une ville de la frontière linguistique du Québec, avec une classe supérieure francophone à côté d’une classe supérieure anglophone distincte de celle-ci par sa place dans la division du travail. On peut aussi relever que les différences de sexe sont ignorées par Halbwachs, tout autant que par les sociologues de Chicago de 1930 ou de 1960: plus encore que les diffé - rences ethniques, il aurait été difficile de les réduire à des différences de classe. Christian Topalov (2006a: 569) montre que les réactions d’Halbwachs reposent sur «l’élaboration savante d’opinions communes qui trouvent leurs sources dans des situations sociales que le savant partage avec d’autres», c’est-à-dire que ses obser - vations s’appuient sur des stéréotypes et des schèmes de raisonnements partagés avec la plupart des personnes de sa génération et de son milieu. Topalov conclut que les schèmes élémentaires de perception et d’interprétation du monde social de Halb - wachs ont fait écran à sa compréhension des travaux des sociologues de Chicago. S

Relevons que Maurice Halbwachs s’est peu intéressé aux méthodes de docu - E I mentation utilisées par les sociologues de Chicago. Il reproduit dans son article de R O

1932 la carte de la distribution de la ville selon des zones concentriques établie par G É T

Burgess. Halbwachs a ignoré les case studies , et plus encore l’observation et le A C

contact direct. Il a trouvé «idiote» la proposition de Burgess d’aller dans un S E

endroit où l’on pouvait rencontrer des assassins, et il s’est contenté de voir de l’ex - D E

térieur la ville de Chicago, les rues, les marchés, à la manière d’un touriste. G A

Le dépouillement des Annales sociologiques – qui prend la suite de L’Année S U ’ sociologique de Durkheim et dont Halbwachs est le secrétaire – montre que l’in - L E

térêt de celui-ci pour la tradition de Chicago ne fut pas durable. Peu d’ouvrages D

Malentendus transatlantiques qui s’y rattachent sont signalés et aucun ne bénéficie d’une note critique. À peu près aucun ouvrage américain consacré aux Noirs n’est mentionné, et la rubrique 230 bibliographique «Déplacements et migrations de population», parfois tenue par Halbwachs, est très peu fournie. Seule la monographie de Ruth Cavan (1928) sur le suicide fait l’objet d’un compte rendu d’Halbwach s 8. Ce dernier n’indique pas qu’elle s’insère dans un ensemble d’autres travaux et son appréciation est plutôt négative.

Les jeunes sociologues français après 1945 et la tradition de Chicago À peu près réduite à l’existence de trois ou quatre postes de professeurs de faculté et au centre de documentation sociale de l’École normale supérieure avant 1940, la sociologie connaît un nouveau développement en France, après 1945, avec le recrutement au CNRS d’une nouvelle génération de chercheurs (Chapoulie 1991). Ce sont pour une notable part des élèves ou protégés de Georges Fried - mann, professeur au CNAM en 1945, de Georges Gurvitch, professeur de socio - logie à Strasbourg, et de Gabriel Le Bras, professeur de droit canonique (pour les sociologues de la religion), et un peu plus tard de Jean Stoetzel (un agrégé de philosophie en contact avec les sociologues de Columbia, qui a introduit en France les sondages d’opinion) et de Raymond Aron. Intellectuellement, les jeunes sociologues sont détachés de l’héritage durkheimien dans le contexte idéo - logique de reconstruction nationale de la Libération. Gurvitch, qui a passé la période de la guerre aux États-Unis, entretient des contacts avec la sociologie américaine et publie en 1947, en collaboration avec Wilbert E. Moore, une version française d’un ouvrage paru deux ans plus tôt en anglais. Le titre La Sociologie du XX e siècle , indique le contenu: il s’agit d’une présentation de la sociologie telle que la définissent alors les départements de sociologie des univer - sités américaines. Parmi les contributions figurent celles de deux sociologues que l’on peut rattacher à la tradition de Chicago: Ernest Burgess, sur les méthodes de la sociologie; Florian Znaniecki sur les «Organisations sociales et institutions». Les autres articles viennent de représentants de courants très variés de la socio - logie américaine (Robert MacIver, Howard P. Becker, Talcott Parsons, Robert K. Merton, etc.). La place accordée aux recherches menées à l’Université de Chicago est réduite, ce qui correspond aux orientations de Gurvitch, peu sensible à la dimension empirique de la discipline, et à celle de W. E. Moore, un sociologue passé par Harvard qui se rattache au courant «fonctionnaliste». Une partie des jeunes sociologues recrutés au CNRS après 1947 – notamment Henri Mendras, Alain Touraine, François Bourricaud, Michel Crozier, Éric de Dampierre – ont fréquenté avant 1960 les universités américaines, d’abord les Universités Harvard et Columbia, et en deuxième rang, l’Université du Michigan (où se trouvent des psychologues sociaux alors au sommet de leur notoriété), et

8. Annales sociologiques , série C, fascicule 1, 1935: 181-182.

Jean-Michel Chapoulie l’Université de Chicago. Chacun de ces sociologues a utilisé à sa manière, en fonction de ses propres sujets de recherche, expériences antérieures, ambitions de carrière, ce qu’il a vu ou appris aux États-Unis. Aucun ne s’est intéressé durable - 231 ment aux recherches qui s’inscrivent dans la filiation de Park, alors représentée à l’Université de Chicago par Burgess, Wirth, Blumer et Hughes. La réaction d’Henri Mendras, l’un des jeunes chercheurs qui passa une année à l’Université de Chicago est dépourvue d’ambiguïté, dans la formulation tardive qu’il en donne dans ses mémoires: «J’arrivais avec l’intention d’apprendre les techniques du métier de sociologue, idées et théories me paraissaient inutiles pour un apprenti sociologue». Il évoque «le rare privilège de déjeuner avec Burgess», un «survivant de l’école de Chicago», l’accueil de Wirth qui espérait, écrit-il, qu’il apporterait «des idées», affirme qu’il y «a appris son métier comme [il] le souhaitai[t] et comme on ne pouvait pas le faire à Paris». Il poursuit: «J’ai eu la chance de participer à une enquête sur l’arrivée des Noirs dans un quartier voisin de l’université: construire le questionnaire et l’échantillon, aller de porte en porte poser les questions». Il ne mentionne pas le nom de Park, mais celui de Hughes: «ce dernier était alors inconnu en France; au milieu des années 1970, il fut redé - couvert par des sociologues de la tradition critique. Sous le nom d’ethnométho - dologie, sa démarche est maintenant glorifiée, à mon avis à mauvais escient: c’est trop souvent une justification pour se contenter de descriptions approximatives, une facilité pour ne pas faire de la recherche dure, une pente qui conduit droit à la sociolalie » 9. Mendras conclut son évocation des séminaires de l’anthroplogue Lloyd Warner (alors à Chicago) et de Hughes («sur des sujets qui [lui ]parais - saient folkloriques»): «tout cela ne paraissait pas bien sérieux à l’étudiant pari - sien qui avait l’habitude de s’asseoir devant une table, sur les bancs de bois de la Sorbonne, pour écouter le maître distiller son savoir» (Mendras 1995: 44, 45, 47-49, 54). Son appréciation est bien différente sur le Bureau of Applied Research de l’Université Columbia «le modèle de tout centre de recherche vivant en marge de l’université grâce à des contrats de recherche», un modèle dont il affirme qu’il a passé sa vie à essayer de le reproduire. Un autre sociologue français, Jean-René Tréanton, passa une année à l’Uni - versité de Chicago, et s’intéressa à la sociologie du travail de Hughes, longuement citée dans son article du premier numéro de la Revue française de sociologie (Tréanton 1960). Mais Tréanton ne devint pas, contrairement à Mendras, un S

entrepreneur de recherche important dans les années suivantes et la sociologie du E I travail de Hughes – aujourd’hui une référence fréquente pour les jeunes socio - R O logues français – ne retint pas l’intérêt jusqu’à la fin des années 1960. L’expé - G É T rience que firent les autres sociologues français de la sociologie américaine fut A C

évidemment variée, en fonction des lieux de séjours et de leurs propres expériences S E

biographiques et ambitions intellectuelles: par exemple, François Bourricaud et D E G A

9. Rappelons qu’il n’y a aucun rapport direct entre Hughes et l’ethnométhodologie qui s’est déve - S U loppée à partir du début des années 1960 autour de Harold Garfinkel, un ancien élève de Parsons ’ en poste à l’Université de Los Angeles. Il est également inexact que Hughes était inconnu en L E

France: il entretint durablement des relations avec Georges Friedmann. D

Malentendus transatlantiques Alain Touraine séjournèrent à Harvard, le premier traduisit des textes de Parsons, mais le second ne manifesta pas un enthousiasme excessif (Touraine 1977: 232 64-67); Michel Crozier (2002: 105) fut «ébloui» par les psychologues sociaux lors de son séjour à l’Université du Michigan. Les contacts ultérieurs furent surtout fréquents avec le Bureau of Applied Research et les chercheurs de l’Université Columbia. Comme le suggère Henri Mendras, c’est le modèle de la sociologie proposé par le Bureau of Applied Research de Columbia qui a retenu de manière privilégiée l’attention de la majeure partie des jeunes sociologues fran - çais. À partir de 1960, l’enquête par questionnaires avec traitement statistique selon le modèle de Lazarsfeld devient la méthode «scientifique» spécifiquement associée à la sociologie. Plusieurs facteurs contribuent à son succès: l’activité inlassable de propagandiste de Lazarsfeld, qui s’appuie sur les crédits de la fonda - tion Ford et a un relais administrativement influent avec Stoetzel; le développe - ment d’une demande d’enquête des administrateurs modernistes qui gravitent autour du Commissariat au Plan et sont sensibles à la rigueur statistique, qui fournissent les premiers financements de recherche pour la sociologi e 10 . Pour s’établir par rapport aux autres disciplines universitaires et acquérir une légitimité scientifique, les sociologues français sont attentifs à l’appui que peut fournir la statistique: les avantages du modèle de recherche de Columbia sur celui de la tradition de Chicago sont, sous ce rapport, évidents. Quelques socio - logues français ont fait du travail de terrain, notamment pour étudier le travail ouvrier, mais aucun de leurs ouvrages n’a acquis une grande notoriété, et cette démarche fut peu valorisée. Les sociologues de la tradition de Chicago ont été réticents quant à l’utilisation d’enquêtes par questionnaires. Herbert Blumer en est le premier et plus virulent critique, notamment dans son allocution de président de l’Association américaine de sociologie (Blumer 1956). Le principal successeur intellectuel de Park, Everett Hughes, initie à l’époque ses élèves au travail de terrain à la manière des anthro - pologues, et son enseignement se retrouve dans la grande majorité des monogra - phies d’anthropologie urbaine dont la notoriété croît à la fin des années 1960 (voir Junker 1960 pour le manuel issu de cet enseignement). On voit que le contexte disciplinaire de la sociologie en France et aux États- Unis, entre 1945 et 1965, ne favorisait pas l’orientation des jeunes sociologues français vers les apports en termes de démarche qui prolongeaient ceux de la sociologie de Chicago de la période précédente, ce qui n’encourageait pas à un intérêt pour les sujets substantiels traités par ceux-ci. Les publications, et notamment les traductions de l’anglais – il ne faut pas surestimer les compétences linguistiques des sociologues de ces générations – sont, à côté des contacts directs, une médiation éventuelle entre la sociologie américaine et la sociologie française.

10. L’un des signes de ce succès de la définition donnée par Lazarsfeld à la recherche sociologique se trouve dans la référence implicite à ce modèle qui caractérise le manuel de Bourdieu, Passeron & Chamboredon (1968).

Jean-Michel Chapoulie Les rares traductions d’ouvrages de sociologie publiées avant 1965 confirment ce que suggéraient les emprunts faits par la première génération de sociologues. Elles concernent un recueil d’essais de Parsons (paru en 1955) mentionné plus haut, un 233 autre de Merton (1965) traduit par Mendras, un recueil de textes de psychologie sociale qui connut une diffusion notable, et une série de volumes, versions fran - çaises du manuel de méthodologie de Lazarsfeld et Rosenberg (1957) dont le premier volume au moins connut une certaine diffusion (Boudon & Lazarsfeld 1965). Une seule traduction en français correspond à un ouvrage qui a un rapport avec la tradition de Chicago: celle du livre du philosophe pragmatiste George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and Society , parue en 1963. La traduction ne semble pas avoir connu une notable diffusion, de même que l’ouvrage de Franklin Frazier, Bourgeoisie noire , paru en français en 1955 avant une publication en anglai s 11 . Les séparations entre disciplines de sciences sociales ne sont pas, jusqu’en 1965, aussi marquées qu’elles le sont devenues par la suite. Les géographes français n’ont pas ignoré, après 1945, les travaux des sociologues de Chicago, et notamment ceux de Park et d’un de ses élèves, Mackenzie, sur l’écologie des villes (voir Sorre 1957: 142-156). Les migrations de population à l’intérieur des pays et des continents sont alors pour les géographes un sujet d’étude important, car leur définition de la géographie n’est pas essentiellement nationale et contemporaine (Sorre 1957). Les anthropologues n’ont pas non plus complètement ignoré ces travaux: un article de Claude Lévi-Strauss évoque «les travaux d’écologie urbaine [de l’école dite de Chicago qui] avaient suscité de grands espoirs, trop vite déçus», sans permettre de conclure que l’auteur en avait une connaissance précis e 12 . L’historien de Paris, Louis Chevalier, professeur au Collège de France, mentionne aussi occasionnellement et laudativement les travaux de «l’école de Chicago» (Chevalier 1978 [1958]). Dans la petite cohorte des premiers sociologues français, l’une des rares réfé - rences à la tradition de Chicago se trouve dans les travaux de Paul-Henri Chombart de Lauwe (1952) sur Paris, avec une comparaison du schéma de répartition de la population proposé par Burgess à partir de l’exemple de Chicago, et de la répartition spatiale de la population parisienne. Vingt ans plus tard, avec le développement de la sociologie urbaine à la fin des années 1960, la référence aux travaux de Park et Burgess sur les villes devient un peu plus fréquente. Mais il s’agit généralement d’une référence négative et presque routi - nière à un genre d’analyse qui est considéré comme relevant d’une orientation S

dépassée, appartenant à l’histoire des approches sociologiques. Les recherches E I françaises en sociologie urbaine sont alors tournées vers ce qui était un point R O aveugle dans les analyses de Park et Burgess, comme l’avait d’ailleurs relevé G É

13 T auparavant Franklin Frazier: les relations de pouvoir et la politique urbain e . A C S E

11. Quelques articles ont été traduits de l’anglais dans les Cahiers internationaux de sociologie entre D

1946 et 1965. Un seul, dans la livraison de 1947, traduction d’un article de l ’American Journal of E G

Sociology sur l’écologie humaine, émane d’un sociologue de la tradition de Chicago, Louis Wirth. A S

12. Lévi-Strauss (1958: 319). Le texte original avait été publié en anglais en 1953. U ’ 13. Voir par exemple Castells (197 2 ); et pour une analyse d’ensemble des orientations de ces L E recherches, Amiot (1980). D

Malentendus transatlantiques La traduction d’une partie des essais de The City , en 1979, semble clore cette période de contacts peu fructueux entre la sociologie urbaine et la tradition de 234 Chicago (Grafmeyer & Joseph 1979). Cet inventaire des relations entre les sociologues de la tradition de Chicago et les sociologues français de 1945 à 1975 laisse de côté les recherches sur le sujet central de Robert Park. Il montre cependant que les occasions de contacts n’ont pas manqué. Mais dans la phase d’institutionnalisation universitaire où elle se trouvait, la sociologie française se souciait d’acquérir une légitimité scientifique. Pour cela, la tradition de Chicago n’offrait pas de grandes ressources: elle ne proposait pas de modèle prestigieux en matière de démarche de recherche, ni un cadre conceptuel approprié avec sa focalisation sur les villes (et non sur un État- nation), ni par le public auquel elle s’adressait, les classes moyennes urbaines éclairées (et non les élites de l’administration et du gouvernement).

Les recherches françaises sur les contacts entre populations différentes J’examinerai maintenant le petit ensemble de recherches sociologiques françaises qui portent sur un sujet proche des relations de race. Cette expression est absente des Cahiers internationaux de sociologie , de la Revue française de sociologie , et des travaux que je vais évoquer – à l’exception d’un article cité infra . En France, le domaine qui lui correspond à peu près au moins par la définition des populations concernées est celui de l’étude des immigrés et éventuellement celui, emprunté aux géographes, des migrations de population à l’intérieur d’un territoir e 14 . La première étude sociologique sur l’immigration est celle d’une chercheuse du CNRS , Andrée Michel (1956), sur les Algériens en France – un sujet rencontré à l’occasion d’une étude antérieure sur les habitants des hôtels meublé s 15 . L’ou - vrage décrit, à partir d’une documentation administrative, complétée par une enquête par questionnaires et une autre par entretiens auprès des syndicats et des directions d’entreprise, les conditions de travail et d’habitat des travailleurs émigrés, ainsi que les causes de l’émigration et l’adaptation de ces travailleurs à leur situation ( ibid . : 62, 89). Une interrogation centrée sur le travail et le même type de ressources documentaires se retrouve dans un second ouvrage de socio - logie publié sur le sujet – issu d’une thèse de troisième cycle (Granotier 1970 ) 16 . La Revue française de sociologie a publié un article d’Andrée Michel sur les travaux américains consacrés aux relations de race (Michel 1962). L’auteur s’appuie sur un article critique de Blumer de 1958 qui examine les travaux dans le domaine, dont il reprend, pour une large part, l’appréciation critique. 14. Rappelons que ce sujet est à ce moment à peu près ignoré par les historiens: voir Noiriel (1984). 15. Avant cet ouvrage, la bibliographie sur le sujet se limite à deux thèses de géographie et de droit soutenues avant 1940: Mauco (1932); Ray (1938). 16. Aucun article sur l’immigration n’est publié dans les Cahiers internationaux de sociologie , mais la revue n’ignore pas l’analyse des situations coloniales, évoquées dans plusieurs articles de Georges Balandier et d’Albert Memmi. On ne trouve dans ces articles que très peu de références aux analyses américaines sur les relations de race.

Jean-Michel Chapoulie Elle évoque quelques études françaises, sans souligner qu’elles sont toutes signées par des géographes ou des anthropologues (Jacques Berque, Georges Balandier, Roger Bastide) et qu’elles portent sur des situations coloniales, et non sur la 235 France métropolitaine. Elle mentionne le recueil des esssais de Park et son « œuvre si novatrice», mais ne remarque pas que la perspective de Park, disparu dix-huit ans auparavant, n’est plus celle qui inspire les travaux sur le sujet qui retiennent alors l’attention aux États-Unis. Elle ne souligne pas la différence dans la définition du domaine: études des relations de races et de culture aux États- Unis en 1930, étude des émigrés comme travailleurs en France en 1950-1970. Une thèse un peu plus tardivement publiée, mais dont l’auteur, né en 1926, appartient donc à la génération des jeunes sociologues d’après-guerre, témoigne d’une connaissance précise des travaux des sociologues de Chicago. La Sociologie des migrations aux États-Unis (1974) de René Duchac repose sur des recherches menées aux États-Unis après 1967. L’auteur vise à rendre compte de l’état de la sociologie des migrations inter-urbaines et intra-urbaines et présente les travaux de Burgess et Park, mais aussi ceux de leurs successeurs des années 1950 et 1960, comme les statisticiens Otis D. Duncan, Philip M. Hauser. Hughes et Blumer sont, en revanche, absents de la liste des auteurs cités par Duchac, qui cherche à rassembler en un seul domaine deux des objets principaux de la sociologie de Park – la question des villes et celle de l’hétérogénéité ethnique de la population américaine et de ses conséquences. Son point de vue sur l’immigration reste celui des chercheurs français de la période: alors que Park considère les contacts entre race et culture comme un phénomène d’une grande généralité historique, Duchac les considère comme la conséquence d’une période d’immigration anté - rieure révolue, relevant du même cadre d’interrogation que les migrations des campagnes vers les villes ou que les mouvements de population entre régions des États-Unis. Ce cadre est exactement celui qu’utilise depuis sa fondation l’ INED 17 . Une contribution plus tardive de Duchac à un cahier de l ’INED (Duchac 1977) ne garde aucune trace de sa lecture de Par k 18 . Si l’étude de l’immigration n’a que peu de place chez les sociologues du CNRS ou de l’université, elle est au contraire l’un des sujets principaux de l ’INED , un institut rattaché au ministère du travail, après 1946, et qui a hérité en partie de la fondation Carrel créée sous Vichy. Ces travaux ont pour prédécesseur la thèse de géographie du sulfureux Georges Mauco, spécialiste des étrangers en France, S

passé du Parti populaire français de Jacques Doriot au Haut comité de la popu - E I lation française de la Libération, dont l ’INED publia les contributions. R O G É

17. On trouve chez René Duchac des remarques surprenantes, par exemple: «dans notre pays, T A l’immigrant est beaucoup plus reçu qu’appelé. S’il vient en France […] ce n’est jamais à la faveur C d’une propagande suscitée par les instances politiques du pays […] et qui l’inviterait à venir peupler S E le “désert français”…» (1974: 27). D E

18. Signalons aussi l’ouvrage de Charlotte Roland sur deux générations de juifs installés à Belle - G A

ville (1962), dont le préfacier Louis Chevalier souligne la similitude d’inspiration avec les travaux S U américains sur les groupes ethniques de Chicago. Relevant de l’histoire démographique à la manière ’ de son préfacier, publié dans une collection de livres sur le judaïsme, il semble n’avoir eu qu’une L E audience réduite et peu durable. D

Malentendus transatlantiques La question de l’immigration est présente dès la fondation de l ’INE D : elle fait l’objet d’un article du directeur de la revue, Alfred Sauvy, dans la première 236 livraison de Population . Il y affirme la nécessité pour la France d’une immigration importante, et souligne qu’il ne s’agit pas seulement d’une émigration temporaire de travailleurs: «L’admission sur notre sol de nouveaux étrangers ne doit pas être considérée […] comme une simple admission temporaire de travailleurs […] mais comme une véri - table immigration, de personnes appelées à rester et à faire souche» (1946: 97). L’article qui suit dans le même numéro de Population introduit un nouveau thème, promis à un long avenir: les facteurs comparés d’assimilation pour deux populations (les Russes et les Arméniens). Dans les années suivantes, en 1947, 1953 et 195 4 19 , les recherches sur l’immigration occupent trois volumes des cahiers de l ’INED . À l’arrière-plan de ces recherches se trouve toujours la question de la nécessité d’un apport de main-d’œuvre pour l’économie française. Les recherches portent sur les «attitudes» de la population autochtone et des popu - lations immigrées l’une par rapport à l’autre (pour les recherches d’Alain Girard et de Jean Stoetzel), et sur la question de l’assimilation des immigrés à la popu - lation française. L’avancée de cette assimilation est scrutée et considérée comme inéluctable, avec cependant une incertitude dans le cas des émigrations du Maghreb. La désignation de ces populations est hésitante: parfois des termes géographiques – «Nord-africains» et «Algériens», puisque les Algériens sont alors citoyens français et non soumis aux lois sur l’émigration si bien d’ailleurs que leurs déplacements d’un bord à l’autre de la Méditerranée ne sont pas bien connus – ; parfois des termes ethniques – Arabes, Berbères, Chleuh, dans un article qui estime leurs mérites différentiels en tant que travailleurs (Sanson 1947: 177-178) ; parfois encore une qualification religieuse (musulmans). Une autre hésitation significative de la terminologie, relevée par certains chercheurs, porte sur l’«assimilation», l’«adaptation», l’«intégration», etc., avec des quali - ficatifs comme «politique», «sociale». La notion centrale de Park, relations de race, n’est jamais utilisée. Ces difficultés d’élaboration d’une perspective de sciences sociales pour analyser l’arrivée sur le territoire français de nouvelles populations et leur avenir sont révé - latrices des représentations de base de la réalité sociale que les chercheurs français partagent avec les dirigeants politiques, et sans doute avec une grande partie des catégories intellectuelles de l’époque. Celles-ci apparaissent par exemple derrière cette remarque de Louis Chevalier, dans un texte, daté de janvier 1944, qui sert d’introduction au deuxième cahier de l ’INED (Chevalier 1947: 11-14), et se donne comme un préalable à une politique d’immigration de travailleurs:

19. Cf.: Louis Chevalier et al. (1947); Girard & Stoetzel (1953 et 1954) . Voir aussi deux courts articles: Poignant (1949) et Lecarpentier (1949). Une bibliographie exhaustive des travaux de l’ INED sur l’immigration se trouve dans le Cahier 79 de l’ INED (Institut national d’études démo - graphiques 1977).

Jean-Michel Chapoulie « […] ces étrangers ne doivent pas, par leur entrée massive en France et leur installa - tion sur notre sol, risquer de changer les valeurs physiques, spirituelles et morales auxquelles nous tenons […] ces étrangers ne sont pas destinés seulement à faire des 237 travailleurs, mais encore, par une assimilation qu’il restera à définir dans ses moyens, à faire des Français et à accroître les chances d’une continuation spirituelle et morale et d’un renouvellement spirituel et moral du pays». L’expérience sociale antérieure de l’émigration en France, que n’ignorent pas les chercheurs de l ’INED – l’existence d’une émigration importante, principalement belge et allemande depuis le début du XIX e siècle, qui s’est rapidement fondue dans la population française – fournissait évidemment une justification à la perception de cet avenir. Cette représentation de base repose sur la reconnaissance implicite d’un cadre national (relativement) immuable dans sa définition «morale» – en un mot conforme au modèle de la République selon les principes de 1789, c’est-à-dire une organisation de l’État sur un territoire avec une population homogène ou destinée à le devenir rapidement – et sur un mythe historique, celui de la constitution nationale du territoire et de la nation. On doit souligner que le cadre d’interroga - tion des sciences sociales, celui des démographes de l ’INED , comme celui des socio - logues au moins jusque dans les années 1970, est un cadre national. Tous se donnent pour objet de contribuer à une sociologie de la France. Dans le contexte des années 1945-1960, où par ailleurs la conception biologique des différences entre populations ne peut être avancée publiquement qu’avec prudence, notam - ment par les héritiers de la fondation Carrel, on comprend qu’il y ait eu place pour des études sur les émigrés comme population et sur leur avenir inéluctable comme assimilés, mais que les relations de race ou de groupes ethniques comme phénomène mondial récurrent soient occultées. Cette orientation laissait pourtant de côté des phénomènes alors visibles: les conséquences concrètes du passé colo - nial, ce qui va devenir les Départements d’Outre-mer, et la question de l’Algérie. On peut d’ailleurs remarquer que les chercheurs de l ’INED ont hésité sur la possi - bilité d’une assimilation des travailleurs d’origine africain e 20 : l’interrogation sur l’assimilation des Polonais et des Italiens est moins inquiète, et l’on peut trouver à l’occasion l’expression d’une nostalgie pour les périodes où l’on pouvait recruter des travailleurs nouveaux chez «nos fournisseurs» habituels nordiques, notam - ment les Belges et les Hollandais (Lecarpentier 1949). S

Jusqu’en 1980 au moins, la question de l’immigration est ainsi considérée par E I la sociologie française comme d’intérêt sectoriel: dans les deux ouvrages issus de R O colloques réunissant sociologues et économistes sur les évolutions de la société G É T A C S

20. Voir par exemple Ray (1949), ainsi que les formulations prudentes du Cahier 20 de l’ INED E (Girard & Stoetzel 1954) à propos de l’immigration familiale: «On ne recherche ici ni ses causes D E

ni ses composantes. On la considère comme un fait et l’on essaie de saisir si une adaptation des G A

familles musulmanes aux modes de vie français se fait ou non, dans quelle mesure et comment» S U

(p. 97); «Si l’on considère l’adaptation comme un processus qui ne transforme pas un immigrant ’ en un autochtone […], il semble que toutes solutions aux difficultés présentes, et aux tensions qui L E peuvent en résulter ne soit pas exclue» (p. 144). D

Malentendus transatlantiques française dans les années 1960 (Darras 1966; Reynaud 1966), la question n’ap - paraît à peu près pas; elle n’apparaît toujours pas, treize ans plus tard, dans le 238 colloque qui prolonge l’un des précédents (Mendras, ed. 1980 ) 21 . L’immigration est considérée comme une question marginale, qui concerne essentiellement le travail, et l’avenir attribué aux groupes d’immigrés est essentiellement une dilu - tion sans laisser de trace, l’assimilation, même si l’on s’interroge à l’occasion sur l’«assimilabilité» de telle immigratio n 22 . Cette conception s’oppose à celle des chercheurs américains de la génération de Park, comme des suivantes, où l’exis - tence de populations qui s’estiment et sont considérées comme différentes les unes des autres apparaît durable, sinon définitive, et où les conflits de races ont un caractère immédiatement visible dans la sphère publique.

Deux conceptions divergentes de la structure sociale On a vu les tentatives de Halbwachs pour réinterpréter en termes de différences de classes, les différences ethniques mises en avant par les recherches conduites autour de Park et Burgess. C’est probablement ce qu’aurait fait la plus grande partie des spécialistes en sciences sociales français, entre 1930 et 1970. Ceux-ci partagent la conviction qu’il existe comme éléments relativement stables dans le temps un ensemble de groupes sociaux distincts, définis par leur position écono - mique et qui sont associés à des intérêts et à des comportements spécifiques dans différents domaines. D’où l’introduction, dans toute enquête sociologique, d’une interrogation sur les conséquences potentielles des différences de classe. Il convient ici de ne pas attacher trop d’importance aux interminables débats sur la notion de classe alimentés par le personnel politique, le mouvement ouvrier et plus tardive - ment par les spécialistes en sciences sociales (voir Portis 1988 pour une vue d’en - semble). Les débats qui ont agité la sociologie – notamment dans les années 1950- 1970 –, ainsi que les références négativement ou positivement enflammées au marxisme, ont en partie oblitéré ce qu’il y avait de commun dans la conception de la structure sociale à laquelle se réfèrent les sociologues françai s 23 . Même s’il existe

21. Voir l’analyse convergente de Pierre-Jean Simon (1982-1983) qui porte aussi sur le cas de l’anthropologie. 22. C’est aussi ce que soutient Louis Chevalier dans sa préface de l’ouvrage de Charlotte Roland (voir supra ) : «Il n’y a jamais eu d’étude de l’intégration des groupes étrangers à la société française et plus spécialement au milieu parisien, parce que cette intégration n’a jamais posé de grands problèmes, et surtout parce que l’opinion n’y a jamais prêté attention: l’opinion la plus commune, celle de la rue, de l’atelier, de l’usine, mais aussi l’opinion la plus haute qui se reconnaît en général à ce qu’elle ne diffère guère de la première, sa principale qualité étant la mise en forme de ce que le bon peuple pense» (Roland 1962: 11). 23. Les numéros de 1965 des Cahiers internationaux de sociologie sont entièrement occupés par un débat sur le sujet avec des contributions de Raymond Aron, Henri Lefebvre, S. Mallet, etc. Voir aussi les cours de sociologie professés à la Sorbonne dans les années 1960 (publiés postérieu - rement) de Raymond Aron (1964) et Georges Gurvitch (1971); et, pour l’avant-guerre, Raymond Aron et al. (1939).

Jean-Michel Chapoulie des dé saccords sur les principes des distinctions, les observateurs s’accordent à peu près sur les grands groupes qu’il convient de distinguer, que l’on trouve déjà d’ailleurs dans Les Luttes de classes en France de Karl Marx pour la France de 239 1850: une vaste classe ouvrière, en face d’une bourgeoisie possédante, d’une paysannerie nombreuse, et de classes moyennes (au singulier ou au pluriel ) 24 . Pour ceux qui font des recherches empiriques, cette convergence des catégorisa - tions tient aussi à l’existence du code des catégories socioprofessionnelles ( CSP ) de l’ INSEE , et, plus profondément à la nécessité pratique de désigner des sortes d’agrégats de populations aux contours un peu flous, au moins pour certaines périodes, à partir de caractéristiques relativement visibles et donc pour partie institutionnalisées: la dimension économique occupe inévitablement une place importante dans cette caractérisation – et plutôt le métier que le patrimoine, moins accessible le plus souvent pour l’enquêteur (Chapoulie 1985). On peut relever que la notion de genre est absente des définitions de la structure sociale, tout comme celle de génération; celles-ci sont sans doute considérées comme des caractéristiques transversales à la structure sociale et secondaires. Une sorte d’écho de cette représentation se trouve dans le premier découpage des domaines à conquérir par la sociologie comme nouvelle discipline universi - taire. Henri Mendras, dans ses mémoires, évoque ce découpage à propos du choix de son sujet de recherche: «Surtout, comme toute ma génération, j’étais […] préoccupé par la question ouvrière, vers laquelle Friedmann nous avait tous orientés. Mais celui-ci me dit: “Mendras, Touraine c’est les ouvriers, Tréanton la ville, Crozier les fonctionnaires. Vous, vous comprenez quelque chose aux paysans et vous êtes le seul, alors, occupez-vous en”» (1995: 53). Ce découpage en domaines de recherches se distingue de celui que révèlent les thèses soutenues à Chicago dans les années 1923-1930 (la liste se trouve dans Faris 1970). Une seule thèse, consacrée au Japon dont son auteur était originaire, porte dans son titre le terme «classe sociale» ; en revanche, de nombreuses thèses ont pour objet les groupes ethniques: l’une sur l’assimilation des émigrés tchèques, une autre sur les émigrés suédois, une autre sur le ghetto juif, une thèse porte sur les mulâtres, enfin plusieurs sur les préjugés de race et sur les Noirs. La sociologie américaine entre 1920 et 1940 (et au-delà) est en effet toujours très attentive à la différenciation ethnique, mais elle ignore presque complète - ment les différences de classe. Dans la représentation de la société américaine, la S

différenciation principale correspond à l’existence de groupes définie par une E I origine (supposée) commune. Les emplois occupés par les membres de ces R O groupes dont l’existence est jugée durable ne sont pas des caractéristiques consi - G É T dérées comme pérennes, et un processus général de mobilité ascendante dans A C S E D E G A

24. Aron (1964: 80-82) remarque que la structure de classe selon l’analyse proposée par Lloyd S U

Warner pour les villes américaines s’applique assez bien à la ville du Havre telle qu’il l’avait connue, ’ c’est-à-dire – mais il n’attire pas lui-même là-dessus l’attention – selon la perception d’un professeur L E de philosophie de lycée qui s’appuie exclusivement sur des observations personnelles sommaires. D

Malentendus transatlantiques l’emploi concerne – ou plutôt est supposé concerner – une partie significative de leurs membres dans une société où les évolutions de l’emploi sont rapides. Par 240 ailleurs, l’histoire du mouvement ouvrier, avec une opposition durable entre travailleurs qualifiés anglo-saxons et nordiques réunis dans des syndicats de métiers, et ouvriers non qualifiés d’autres origines ethniques, longtemps dépourvus de représentation syndicale, ne favorise pas une perception de la struc - ture sociale dont la classe ouvrière serait l’un des éléments principaux. Robert Park ignore presque complètement la notion de classe sociale, dont il affirme à l’occasion qu’elle ne peut s’appliquer pour les États-Unis, même si on la trouve dans la surprenante phrase finale d’un de ses principaux essais sur les rela - tions de race en 193 9 25 . Park utilise une sorte de substitut à la notion de classe dans des analyses imprécises en terme de «statut». Comme je l’ai montré ailleurs (Chapoulie 2000), cette omission procède de plusieurs éléments. Park était poli - tiquement conservateur, et on trouve sous sa plume de nombreuses remarques qui suggèrent une adhésion au «rêve américain» de mobilité sociale – même si c’est l’héritage de son père qui lui permit de devenir enseignant en sociologie presque sans rémunération en 1913. Deuxièmement, le contexte politique des années 1919-1930 est particulièrement défavorable au mouvement ouvrier améri - cain, très affaibli à partir de la fin de la guerre, avec une période de prospérité économique exceptionnelle et un syndicalisme pourchassé jusqu’au New Deal. Évoquer le terme «classe sociale» était à peu près exclu pour un sociologue améri - cain des années 1920, et insister sur le fondement de celle-ci dans la place de la division du travail certainement peu susceptible de valoir un quelconque crédit à un chercheur (Gilkeson 1995 ) 26 . La notion de classe sociale, utilisée avant 1914 par le fondateur du département de sociologie de Chicago, Albion Small, retrouve une place dans la sociologie américaine après 1935, avec les études de commu - nautés américaines par l’anthropologue Lloyd Warner qui définit la notion à travers le système de relations sociales. On la trouve également chez Franklin Frazier et Everett Hughes (voir Hughes & Hughes-MacGill 1952). Cette réin - troduction prudente de la notion de classe sociale en sociologie accompagne une transformation des représentations de la société américaine associée à la crise, mais aussi à l’arrêt de l’immigration et à l’importance croissante du «problème noir». Dans ces conditions nouvelles, la mobilité collective des groupes d’immigrés est moins frappante qu’elle ne l’était précédemment. À l’explication antérieure de la délinquance comme associée à une étape dans l’installation aux États-Unis (typique des élèves de Park et Burgess), se substitue également une explication par la position sociale. Cependant, même après 1940, il existe encore des obstacles qui vont, dans les sciences sociales, à l’encontre d’un accent sur la structure de classe: un nouvel obstacle sociopolitique dans les années du maccarthysme, mais

25. Cet essai s’achève par la phrase «Les conflits de race dans le monde moderne seront, dans le futur, confondus et en fin de compte supplantés par les conflits de classe» (Park 1950: 116). 26. L’une des rares exceptions d’usage de la notion de classe avant la crise est l’ouvrage des Lynd (1929).

Jean-Michel Chapoulie aussi la grande diversité des villes à l’intérieur d’un vaste territoire comme celui des États-Unis qui rend difficilement comparable leurs populations. 241 ❖ Les traductions en nombre croissant à partir de 1980, ainsi que les références devenues fréquentes à des publications qui se rattachent à la tradition de Chicago, témoignent d’une diffusion tardive qui s’étend un peu au-delà des sociologues. Celle-ci semble être passée par deux canaux principaux. Le premier est l’intérêt, et parfois l’usage, des autobiographies en sociologie après 1968. Un rapport de recherche de Daniel Bertaux (1996), non publié, semble avoir été un intermédiaire. Un second canal est celui des travaux ethnographiques sur le travail, la médecine, la délinquance de la troisième génération de chercheurs de la tradition de Chicago. On ne peut être surpris que les analyses de ces derniers représentants de la tradition de Chicago, qui portaient sur des sujets d’actualité en France, aient connu une diffusion en France plus rapide que leurs devanciers, ni d’ailleurs de ce que les démarches de recherche – recueil de biographies, observation – aient constitué des étapes avant l’appropriation de certaines des analyses substantielles. Quant à la sociologie des relations de race de Robert Park, la partie la plus élaborée des analyses de celui-ci, elle est restée à l’écart de toute diffusion (et il existe après 1980, quand le sujet devient d’actualité en France, bien d’autres sources d’emprunts possibles dans les travaux récents). À demi oubliée aux États-Unis après 1965, elle a laissé la place à des analyses dont les éléments de base ne sont pas toujours très différents de ceux proposés par Park, mais qui sont associés aux interrogations publiques actuelles sur un sujet redevenu d’actualité. L’emprunt tardif des sources documentaires dont la tradition de Chicago illus - trait les usages montre qu’un filtre dans l’emprunt entre traditions nationales différentes réside dans la conjoncture intellectuelle et politique dans laquelle se trouve la discipline emprunteuse. Sa non-diffusion dans la période antérieure à 1980 ne s’explique pas, on l’a montré, par une simple ignorance: il y eut des contacts entre chercheurs qui pouvaient servir de canaux et des chercheurs pour lire attentivement les analyses de Park. L’obstacle a résidé en partie dans les diffé - rences de définition des problèmes publics auxquels sont confrontés les socio - logues des deux pays. Mais aussi, comme on vient de le voir, dans les différences S entre les représentations de la structure sociale sur laquelle repose l’approche E I de Park et celles, en termes de classes sociales, qui ont inspiré durablement la R O G

sociologie française. É T

Soulignons pour terminer qu’on a utilisé, sans le mentionner explicitement, A C

un troisième terme de comparaison: une comparaison entre la sociologie fran - S E

çaise de 1930-1980 et l’état actuel de la sociologie française, qui accorde doré - D E

navant une place conséquente aux études sur la présence de populations diverses G A sur le territoire national. Ce n’est en effet que dans une démarche comparative S U ’ que l’on peut trouver des ressources pour objectiver des propriétés qu’un examen L E isolé, si approfondi soit-il, des cadres d’analyse d’une discipline dans une période D

Malentendus transatlantiques donnée, ne peut révéler. Et ainsi apporter une contribution à l’analyse des caté - gories de base des sciences sociales, en précisant ce qui en fait des «semi-noms 242 propres» pour emprunter la terminologie de Passeron (2006 [1991]: 130), c’est- à-dire comportant «une référence tacite à des coordonnées spatio-temporelles».

Université Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne Groupe de recherche École, Travail, Institution, Paris [email protected]

MOTS CLÉS /KEYWORD S : histoire des sciences sociales/ history of social sciences – conceptualisa - tion – école de Chicago/ Chicago school – relations interethniques/ ethnic relations – relations de race/ race relations – Robert Park.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

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The Community-Study Method Author(s): Conrad M. Arensberg Source: The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 60, No. 2 (Sep., 1954), pp. 109-124 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2771896 Accessed: 12/02/2010 10:38

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Robert redfield et l’invention des « sociétés paysannes » par Christian DEVERRE

| Editions de l’EHESS | Études rurales

2009/1 - n° 183 ISSN 0014-2182 | ISBN 9782713222061 | pages 41 à 50

Pour citer cet article : — Deverre C., Robert redfield et l’invention des « sociétés paysannes », Études rurales 2009/1, n° 183, p. 41-50.

Distribution électronique Cairn pour Editions de l’EHESS . © Editions de l’EHESS . Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit. ROBERT REDFIELD Christian Deverre ET L’INVENTION DES « SOCIÉTÉS PAYSANNES »

n’y a pas d’« études paysannes » sans carac- térisation de la « société englobante » et de son évolution. La paternité de l’invention de la « paysannerie » comme concept d’analyse est difficile à attribuer, mais, parmi les auteurs auxquels on attribue fréquemment l’élaboration et la clarification de ce concept, j’ai choisi ici de privilégier la contribution de Robert Redfield, un des plus cités – et des plus critiqués – des pères fondateurs. Henri Mendras a souvent dit ce qu’il doit à Robert Redfield, « premier ARMI LES CONCEPTS FONDATEURS de la inventeur des paysans », qu’il qualifie, dans sociologie rurale, en France mais aussi un de ses derniers articles, de « charmant ethno- dans beaucoup d’autres pays, figurent logue » [Mendras 2000 : 540] ou d’« aimable P universitaire américain amoureux du Mexique » en bonne place ceux de « paysan », de « paysannerie » et de « sociétés paysannes ». Toute- [ibid. : 551]. Ces qualificatifs, quelque peu fois ces concepts n’appartiennent pas en propre cavaliers, renvoient peut-être à l’élégance ves- à la sociologie rurale car, à côté d’elle, on peut timentaire de Robert Redfield, dont témoigne identifier plusieurs courants – en sociologie, la photographie qui accompagne sa biographie en anthropologie et en histoire – qui en ont sur le site de la bibliothèque de l’Université 1 fait leur objet central d’analyse, courants que de Chicago , mais ils apparaissent quelque l’on peut qualifier d’« études paysannes » ou de peu décalés au regard des louanges ou des « peasant studies » (en témoigne par exemple virulentes critiques formulées à l’encontre de The Journal of Peasant Studies). Et, comme ses théories, en particulier dans le pays où il on va le voir avec Robert Redfield, il n’y a a mené la plupart de ses enquêtes de terrain, pas de superposition stricte entre ces courants à savoir le Mexique. et ceux de la sociologie rurale, même si, d’évi- Dans ce texte, je présenterai – trop rapide- dence, des passerelles existent entre eux. ment sans doute – la carrière et les travaux de Schématiquement, la sociologie rurale Robert Redfield ainsi que quelques-unes de ses s’attache prioritairement à décrire les spéci- analyses sur la place qu’occupent les sociétés ficités des sociétés rurales et considère la paysannes dans la société globale et dans paysannerie comme une catégorie historique l’histoire. J’évoquerai ensuite quelques-uns destinée à disparaître avec la modernité. des emprunts et critiques auxquels son œuvre Les « études paysannes », pour leur part, se concentrent davantage sur la question de la place de la paysannerie dans la société, à la 1. Voir http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/projects/centcat/ fois dans son ensemble et dans l’histoire. Il centcats/fac/facch24_01.html.

Études rurales, janvier-juin 2009, 183 : 41-50

5491$$ DE03 24-07-09 16:42:34 Imprimerie CHIRAT page 41 Christian Deverre

... 42 a donné lieu. Puis, à partir d’éléments biogra- autant de la vie quotidienne et sociale des phiques apparemment peu connus ou ignorés habitants que des dimensions symboliques de ses détracteurs, je tenterai de resituer son prétendument préhispaniques auxquelles étaient travail à la fois dans son époque et dans les attachés ses prédécesseurs. débats des milieux universitaires américains Par la suite, il a réalisé plusieurs autres dans lesquels il a évolué. monographies de communautés villageoises du Yucatan, comme celle de Chan Kom, Robert Redfield : carrière et travaux en compagnie de l’anthropologue mexicain Robert Redfield naît en 1897 à Chicago, où Alfonso Villa Rojas [Redfield et Villa Rojas il meurt en 1958 après y avoir fait toutes 1934]. En 1948, à l’occasion d’un nouveau ses études et toute sa carrière d’enseignant séjour à Chan Kom, il a inauguré la tradition (interrompue par plusieurs années de terrain, des « re-visites » anthropologiques, ce qui lui financées essentiellement par la Fondation a inspiré son ouvrage A village that choose Carnegie). On peut dire qu’il est un pur pro- progress [Redfield 1950]. Il est à noter que, duit de l’Université de Chicago, où il a sou- l’année suivante, l’anthropologue de l’Univer- tenu son PhD et enseigné, d’abord comme sité de Columbia, Oscar Lewis, effectuera, lui instructeur en anthropologie à partir de 1927, aussi, une « re-visite » à Tepoztlan, qui lui puis comme professeur et doyen de la Faculté permettra d’interroger la vision redfieldienne des sciences sociales de 1934 à 1946, avant de ce village. d’être titulaire, de 1952 à sa mort, de la chaire Si les ingrédients de la théorie des trans- Robert Maynard Hutchins (nom sur lequel je formations sociales de Redfield étaient déjà reviendrai plus tard). présents dans ses restitutions de terrain, ce Très engagé dans l’enseignement des n’est que dans la dernière partie de sa vie que sciences sociales dans la deuxième partie de l’anthropologue finalisera cette théorie dans sa carrière (c’était un adepte de la pluridisci- ses ouvrages Primitive world and its trans- plinarité), Robert Redfield fut aussi un cher- formations [1953], The little community [1955] cheur de terrain dynamique, effectuant de et Peasant society and culture [1956]. longs séjours au Mexique, où il a réalisé plusieurs monographies de village. The folk-urban continuum Sa première monographie, à l’origine de sa Quelle est donc cette vision redfieldienne du thèse, a porté sur un village proche de Mexico : changement social ? Et quelle place y occupe Tepoztlan [Redfield 1930]. Cette thèse a été la paysannerie ? Cette théorie a souvent été effectuée sous la direction de Fay-Cooper Cole, résumée par la formule du « folk-urban conti- un archéologue formé par Franz Boas à l’Uni- nuum » le long duquel il serait possible de versité Columbia. Cependant, en rupture avec situer les différentes sociétés, du passé comme la tradition muséologique boasienne, Robert du présent. C’est là un travail de modélisation Redfield a opté pour une insertion prolongée dans lequel l’aspect le plus développé par dans son terrain villageois, se préoccupant Redfield a été le modèle de la folk society,

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... parfois confondu avec celui de la « société À l’opposé, la société urbaine est une 43 paysanne », beaucoup moins élaboré dans ses société de grande dimension, dont les rapports travaux. La folk society peut être ramenée à entre les individus sont impersonnels, et qui 12 caractéristiques auxquelles s’opposent en est traversée par de nombreuses formes de creux celles des sociétés urbaines. On notera communication, notamment écrites, entre des au passage que nombre de ces caractéristiques individus mobiles. C’est une société diffé- seront reprises dans les travaux de sociologie renciée, dont les solidarités sont davantage rurale, notamment par Marcel Maget [1955] : assurées par la division du travail que par la ● La folk society est une société de petite taille, reconnaissance du semblable. Cette société basée sur l’interconnaissance de ses membres crée des interdépendances économiques. Elle et leur association sur le long terme. repose sur la loi, l’innovation et la sécularisa- ● C’est une société isolée, ayant peu d’échanges tion des rapports sociaux. avec l’extérieur. Rappelons qu’il s’agit d’une modélisation, ● C’est une société stable, notamment du point et que si les caractéristiques de la folk society de vue spatial. et de la société urbaine ne sont pas sans rap- ● C’est une société de communication orale. peler la dichotomie Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft Le savoir ne se transmet que directement entre de Ferdinand Tönnies [Tönnies et Leif 1977], les membres de cette société. ce qui intéresse Redfield, c’est moins d’oppo- ● C’est une société homogène dans ses savoirs ser des formes sociales que de positionner sur et ses valeurs. un continuum les sociétés concrètes qu’il a ● C’est une société solidaire, basée sur la étudiées. Ce qui l’intéresse, c’est le change- sympathie. ment social qui fait passer de la folk society ● C’est une société sans division du travail. – dont il affirme qu’il ne reste plus guère de ● C’est une société économiquement indépen- vestiges dans le monde–àlasociété urbaine. dante, qui ne consomme que ce qu’elle produit. Et c’est dans cette perspective qu’il situe, à ● C’est une société traditionnelle, avec des un stade intermédiaire, les sociétés paysannes, comportements spontanés, non remis en cause. produit non encore abouti de la décomposition La convention y est de règle. des folk societies sous l’influence des sociétés ● C’est une société qui ne connaît ni législa- urbaines. Les sociétés paysannes apparaissent tion ni développements scientifiques. avec la naissance des premières villes. Elles ● C’est une société basée sur l’intégration en sont distinctes mais non indépendantes. par les rapports de parenté. Le statut des indi- Elles ne sont que des part societies et non vidus est déterminé par leur place au sein de des sociétés à part entière comme les folk la famille et par la place de celle-ci dans la societies. communauté. Le travail de Redfield vise à repérer, ● C’est une société imprégnée de sacré, la dans ces formes intermédiaires, les tensions transgression des interdits faisant l’objet de auxquelles donnent lieu les chocs entre des fortes sanctions sociales. valeurs différentes dans ce mouvement de

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... 44 décomposition/recomposition. Les sociétés pay- en son temps un accueil très favorable, et sannes conservent certaines des caractéristiques ses ouvrages ont été fréquemment réédités. des folk societies (interconnaissance, poids On peut attribuer ce succès à sa position aca- des conventions, importance des rapports de démique, mais il ne faut pas sous-estimer le parenté), mais l’influence urbaine, en parti- caractère novateur du regard qu’il a porté sur culier via des individus pionniers ayant fait des sociétés qui étaient alors considérées par l’expérience de la ville, remet peu à peu en l’anthropologie comme d’une essence radica- cause les conventions et les connaissances en lement différente de celle des sociétés occiden- apparence immuables des folk societies. Les tales. Avec son continuum, Redfield proposait conditions de cette transformation peuvent à ses collègues et à ses étudiants de réintégrer varier, mais un des plus puissants facteurs la dimension historique dans leurs analyses et de changement semble être justement, à côté de ne pas se contenter de chercher des ves- de la mise en mouvement des hommes, de la tiges de sociétés disparues corps et biens. Il mise en circulation des biens et de la création ouvrait également en anthropologie la voie à des voies de communication, l’adoption de l’étude de sociétés dédaignées car trop « mar- nouvelles valeurs comme l’innovation. La sor- quées » par l’influence occidentale, telles les tie de l’isolement affecte peu à peu les bases sociétés caribéennes. de l’organisation sociale des folk societies, Son influence au Mexique a été considérable avec la division du travail et la diffusion de et s’est traduite par le projet « indigéniste » nouvelles techniques et de nouveaux savoirs. d’intégration des Indiens à la communauté C’est ce mouvement organisé autour de la nationale, projet incarné tout particulièrement transmission de nouvelles valeurs que Redfield par Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran. Médecin, ce a nommé « acculturation ». dernier fut formé à l’anthropologie en 1945 à Même si cela semble un peu paradoxal, la Northwestern University d’Evanston, près celui qui est souvent présenté comme le théo- de Chicago, par Melville Hertskovits – dont ricien des « sociétés paysannes » ne considère on notera plus loin les affinités intellectuelles ces dernières que comme des part societies avec Robert Redfield s’agissant de la mission de transition, dans lesquelles il s’est davan- de l’anthropologie. Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran tage attaché à repérer les forces de décompo- [1957] a théorisé une « acculturation » plus sition que les forces de reproduction. Pour symétrique : le métissage culturel plutôt que Redfield, il ne fait pas de doute que la société l’assimilation. Toutefois le levier de l’action urbaine et ses valeurs l’emporteront. Même politique qu’il a menée au sein de l’Institut s’il n’emploie pas l’expression « fin des pay- indigéniste mexicain – dont il assura la direc- sans », il annonce celle-ci comme inéluctable tion en 1971 – consistait à agir sur les valeurs, – et souhaitable. notamment grâce à l’éducation de jeunes issus des communautés indiennes, regroupés en Une théorie influente et controversée internat, loin de l’influence de leurs familles, Si l’évolutionnisme assez caricatural de Redfield puis engagés comme maîtres d’école dans leurs apparaît aujourd’hui comme suranné, il a reçu régions d’origine [Aguirre Beltran 1973].

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... Parmi les très nombreuses critiques dirigées résistance. Mintz [1974] décrira comment des 45 contre l’œuvre de Redfield, je ne retiendrai ici paysanneries se sont créées aux Caraïbes à la que celles qui lui étaient contemporaines, à suite de la disparition du système très urbain commencer, bien sûr, par celles d’Oscar Lewis, de la plantation esclavagiste. qui l’a attaqué sur son propre terrain [1951]. Si toutes ces critiques ne portent pas sur Notons que Lewis, qui avait travaillé à Puerto la « société paysanne » entendue comme part Rico avant de s’investir au Mexique, était un society liée de façon fonctionnelle à la société élève de Julian Stewart, professeur à l’Uni- urbaine, elles n’en remettent pas moins en versité de Columbia, haut lieu de l’anthropo- cause le continuum et l’inéluctable disparition logie américaine représenté par les figures du paysan. tutélaires de Franz Boas et Ruth Benedict. On Notons à ce propos que ce thème de la per- verra plus loin que le jeune Redfield s’était manence de la production paysanne dans la élevé contre ces figures lors de la publication, société capitaliste avancée sera repris en France avec Ralph Linton et Melville Herskovits, du dans les années 1960-1970 par les détracteurs « Memorandum on the study of acculturation » marxistes d’Henri Mendras. [1936]. Cependant, Julian Stewart était lui- même davantage évolutionniste que culturaliste, et ses élèves sont devenus des théori- Redfield dans son époque : un autre regard ciens de la paysannerie, fortement influencés sur sa construction théorique par le marxisme. Si Oscar Lewis a, lui, pré- Si l’on peut aujourd’hui partager bon nombre féré poursuivre ses recherches sur la misère de critiques formulées à l’encontre de Redfield urbaine, deux autres élèves de Stewart, Eric Wolf et Sidney Mintz, tout aussi pourfen- et même en ajouter d’autres, il me semble deurs de Redfield, se sont, eux, consacrés aux intéressant de resituer sa pensée dans l’envi- peasant studies. ronnement qui était le sien pour comprendre Lewis – et, à sa suite, Wolf et Mintz – pourquoi, à partir de travaux de terrain dont critique le fait que Redfield considère comme personne ne conteste la rigueur et la richesse, secondaire l’inégalité des rapports économiques il a développé cette théorie évolutionniste qu’engendre la domination des villes ; il lui et culturaliste de l’inévitable assimilation, par reproche également d’accorder autant d’impor- les sociétés paysannes, des courants et valeurs tance à la transmission des valeurs culturelles. de la société urbaine. Il relativise les succès de l’expérience urbaine Redfield – on l’a souligné dès le début – et met l’accent sur l’exploitation dont les pro- est un pur produit de Chicago, et, si ses ducteurs paysans font l’objet de la part des parrains en anthropologie venaient de l’École « innovateurs urbains ». Wolf et Mintz [1975] boasienne de Columbia, il a toujours eu une insisteront, pour leur part, sur le fait que grande proximité avec l’École sociologique les sociétés paysannes se reproduisent non seu- de Chicago, rejetant, dans sa pratique acadé- lement sous l’effet des mécanismes d’exploi- mique, le fossé établi par les Boasiens entre tation mais aussi grâce à leur capacité de « anthropologie » et « sociologie ».

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... 46 Or, l’un des fondateurs de l’École de Pour comprendre l’univers intellectuel et Chicago, que Redfield a nécessairement connu, politique dans lequel baignait Redfield, il faut William Isaac Thomas (1863-1947), est, avec citer un autre pilier de l’École de Chicago, Florian Znianiecki, l’auteur d’une gigantesque Robert Park (1864-1944), qui n’était autre que somme sur les paysans polonais en Europe son beau-père. Élève de John Dewey (encore et en Amérique, en 5 volumes publiés entre lui !) et de Georg Simmel auprès duquel il a 1918 et 1920 [Thomas et Znianiecki 1918, préparé son PhD à Heidelberg, Robert Park 1919, 1920a et 1920b]. Influencée par l’École avait été précédemment journaliste et s’était pragmatique de John Dewey, cette synthèse engagé précocement dans la critique du cherche à saisir les conséquences de la subjec- colonialisme, notamment au Congo belge, tivité des individus sur leur insertion sociale, puis s’était engagé auprès des mouvements au sein des communautés paysannes polonaises africains-américains. Il a, entre autres, sou- et dans l’immigration polonaise aux États-Unis. tenu l’Institut Tuskegee, fondé par Booker Les auteurs identifient, chez ces populations T. Washington pour permettre aux Noirs amé- polonaises, trois attitudes différentes : celle ricains d’accéder à l’enseignement supérieur. du philistin, conformiste, soumis à la tradition Le travail et l’engagement de Robert Park sociale ; celle du bohémien, au caractère [1952] s’inscrivaient dans un processus instable ; celle du créatif, ouvert au change- historique qu’il décrivait comme celui de la ment. Si le philistin est théoriquement bien civilisation « non seulement ici, mais aussi intégré dans une société paysanne stable (on ailleurs, qui étend le cercle de son influence est proche de la vision redfieldienne de l’indi- sur un cercle toujours croissant de races et vidu dans la folk society), il est incapable de peuples ». Et, pour lui, la ville de Chicago d’affronter les soubresauts que connaît cette représentait un microcosme de ce processus société et, a fortiori, l’épreuve de l’immigra- de civilisation à l’œuvre. tion en Amérique (nous sommes alors au C’est dans ce contexte d’engagement e début du XX siècle). Le bohémien, figure du assimilationniste-progressiste, celui de l’École migrant, ne peut que sombrer dans la démora- de Chicago d’alors, que doit se comprendre la lisation. Seule l’attitude créative peut permettre théorie de la paysannerie de Redfield. Ce qui l’assimilation. On retrouve ici un des ressorts illustre bien cet engagement, c’est l’initiative de l’École de Chicago, à savoir l’engagement qu’il a prise en 1936, en plein New Deal, au auprès des populations marginales – comme les hobos [Anderson 1993] – en vue de faci- liter leur participation au projet de la société 2. Notons également que William Isaac Thomas est, américaine du melting-pot. William Isaac selon R. Merton [1965], l’auteur du théorème dit de Thomas était notoirement un « radical », ce Thomas, connu sous le nom de « prophétie autoréalisa- qui lui valut, outre une arrestation par le FBI trice », selon lequel une représentation faussée peut avoir des effets réels sur la trajectoire des individus en 1918, le refus, par l’Université de Chicago, [Thomas et Thomas 1928]. Et si la théorie de Redfield, de poursuivre la publication de son travail comme celle de Mendras, n’était qu’une illustration de avec Znaniecki au-delà du tome 2 2. ce théorème ?

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... sein de l’American Anthropological Associa- Cette conférence a vu le jour grâce à l’ini- 47 tion, de publier, avec Ralph Linton et Melville tiative d’un autre ami de Redfield, Robert Herskovits, le texte intitulé « Memorandum Maynard Hutchins (1899-1977), président puis on the study of acculturation ». Dans ce texte, chancelier de l’Université de Chicago, de 1929 les trois anthropologues appellent leurs collè- à 1951, et qui finança, à partir de 1952, gues à ne plus se contenter de recueillir des la chaire occupée par Redfield. Réformateur échantillons de cultures en voie de dispari- humaniste controversé, fondateur de l’Encyclo- tion, mais les invitent à analyser en priorité paedia Britannica, Hutchins sera plus tard les processus de constitution de cultures glo- un farouche opposant au maccarthysme (il bales à partir des rencontres entre des tradi- publiera à cette époque Le Capital) et créera tions différentes. en 1959 à Santa Barbara le Centre pour l’étude Dans la pensée de Redfield, ces rencontres des institutions démocratiques, actif défenseur sont par définition asymétriques puisque le des droits des minorités et des femmes. C’est mouvement qui les favorise vient de la société à ce mouvement qu’a été appliquée, pour urbaine, dont les valeurs vont dissoudre celles la première fois aux États-Unis, l’épithète des sociétés paysannes. Toutefois, contraire- « New Left ». ment à la vision occidentalo-centriste maintes Cette recontextualisation du travail de fois reprochée à Redfield, cette asymétrie ne Redfield ne vise pas tant à réhabiliter une signifie pas que le processus de « civilisation » pensée dont les travers historiques sont évi- soit un processus homogénéisateur à l’échelle dents qu’à la resituer dans une époque où le planétaire. Si, dans sa théorie, Redfield qua- local n’était pas encore revalorisé comme il lifie les cultures folk et paysanne de « little l’est aujourd’hui. traditions », précisons que les « great traditions », à savoir les civilisations, sont plu- Conclusion rielles. En tant que doyen des sciences sociales à l’Université de Chicago, il lancera l’idée de La sociologie rurale, née au lendemain de la « civilization studies », reprise et développée Seconde Guerre mondiale, a repris en grande par Milton Singer, spécialiste de l’Inde et l’un partie le projet modernisateur du Robert de ses coauteurs [Redfield et Singer 1954]. La Redfield du New Deal et de l’École de résorption de la paysannerie conduit au ren- Chicago, lui en reconnaissant assez discrète- forcement de cultures d’un niveau supérieur, ment la paternité. De son côté, le courant des capables, par leur aptitude à communiquer et peasant studies, dans la lignée des anthropo- à légiférer, d’organiser le progrès. En accord logues de Columbia et, en particulier, d’Eric avec cette conception, Redfield participera Wolf, s’est de plus en plus intéressé aux en septembre 1945 à la Conférence pour le résistances des paysanneries face aux forces contrôle de l’énergie atomique, qui prône, dominantes intégratrices et exploiteuses. Les après Hiroshima, la constitution d’un gouver- anthropologues d’outre-Atlantique rencontrent, nement mondial pour garantir la paix entre chemin faisant, des historiens et sociologues les civilisations. européens, de tendance marxiste, comme

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... 48 Teodor Shanin [1971] ou Eric Hobsbawn l’Europe du passé ou sur des terrains du tiers- [1959]. Ces derniers, davantage dans la lignée monde, malgré les efforts de certains pour du courant populiste russe et d’Alexander les désenclaver. Chayanov [Thorner et al. eds. 1966] que dans Assez curieusement et malgré les critiques la tradition léniniste, voient dans ces formes à l’encontre de son évolutionnisme mono- de résistance paysannes un contreprojet de orienté, Robert Redfield reste une référence société plutôt que le refus de la modernité. des peasant studies. Les auteurs, en général, Les guerres et rebellions paysannes, celles du lui reconnaissent le mérite d’avoir forgé la passé comme du présent, en Occident comme notion générique de « société paysanne » 3. en Orient ou dans les colonies, donnent lieu à Une généricité et une universalité, originales une floraison d’études et d’ouvrages dans les pour l’anthropologie de l’époque, toute atta- années 1960 [Hobsbawn 1965 ; Moore 1966 ; chée à la mise en évidence des discontinuités Wolf 1969 ; Shanin 1972]. et irréductibilités culturelles dont il est urgent La paysannerie devient un « facteur poli- de recueillir les derniers vestiges. tique » [Shanin 1966] essentiel à la compré- hension historique, mais aussi à l’analyse du monde contemporain, et joue un rôle décisif 3. « La société et la culture paysannes sont en quelque dans les luttes contre les ordres coloniaux et sorte génériques. Elles représentent une sorte d’arrange- postcoloniaux. Les peasant studies restent ment de l’humanité qui présente des similarités dans le de ce fait essentiellement enracinées dans monde entier. » [Redfield 1956 : 25]

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... Chicago Press. — 1950, A village that choose pro- Thomas, William et Florian Znaniecki — 1918, The 49 gress. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. — 1953, Polish peasant in Europe and America. Tomes 1 et 2 : The primitive world and its transformations. Ithaca, Primary group organization. Chicago, University of Cornell University Press. — 1955, The little commu- Chicago Press. — 1919, The Polish peasant in nity. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. — 1956, Europe and America. Tome 3 : Life record of an Peasant society and culture. Ithaca, Cornell Univer- immigrant. Boston, Richard D. Badger. — 1920a, sity Press. The Polish peasant in Europe and America. Tome 4 : Redfield, Robert, Ralph Linton et Melville Hersko- Disorganization and reorganization in Poland. Boston, vits — 1936, « Memorandum on the study of accul- Richard D. Badger. — 1920b, The Polish peasant in turation », American Anthropologist 38 (1) : 149-152. Europe and America. Tome 5 : Organization and dis- Redfield, Robert et Milton Singer — 1954, « The organization in America. Boston, Richard D. Badger. Thorner, Daniel, Basile Kerblay et Robert Smith cultural role of cities », Economic Development and eds. — 1966, The theory of peasant economy by Cultural Change 3 (1) : 53-73. Alexander Chayanov. Homewood, R.D. Irwin (pré- Redfield, Robert et Alfonso Villa Rojas — 1934, sentation et traduction de l’ouvrage d’Alexander Chan Kom. A Maya village. Chicago, University of Chayanov de 1925). Chicago Press. Tönnies, Ferdinand et Joseph Leif — 1977 (1877), Shanin, Teodor — 1966, « Peasantry as a political Communauté et société. Catégories fondamentales factor », Sociological Review 14 (1) : 5-27. — 1971, de la sociologie pure. Paris, Retz CEPL. Peasants and peasant societies. Harmondsworth, Wolf, Eric — 1969, Peasant wars of the twentieth Penguin. — 1972, The awkward class. Political socio- century. New York, Harper and Row. logy of peasantry in a developing society. Russia Wolf, Eric et Sidney Mintz — 1975, « Haciendas 1910-1925. Oxford, Clarendon Press. y plantaciones en Mesoamerica y las Antillas », in Thomas, William et Dorothy Thomas — 1928, The E. Florescano ed., Haciendas, latifundios y planta- child in America. Behavior problems and programs. ciones en America latina. Mexico, Siglo XXI : 493- New York, Knopf. 531.

Résumé Abstract Christian Deverre, Robert Redfield et l’invention des Christian Deverre, Robert Redfield and the invention of « sociétés paysannes » “peasant societies” Souvent présenté comme le premier théoricien des Often presented as the first academic to build theories « sociétés paysannes », Robert Redfield a été un cher- about “peasant societies”, Robert Redfield spent time in cheur de terrain dynamique avant d’élaborer une modé- the field before he drew up an evolutionary model of lisation évolutionniste du passage inéluctable de la folk the inevitable passage from folk to urban society. In this society à la société urbaine. Dans ce cadre, les sociétés model, peasant societies are but a transitional phase, a paysannes ne représentent qu’une phase de transition, “part society” between two global societies. Nativistic une part society entre deux modèles de sociétés glo- movements in Mexico put this theory into practice for bales. Cette théorie, mise en pratique un certain temps a while, and it clearly exerted an influence on rural par l’indigénisme mexicain, et dont l’influence sur la sociology at its origins. Many criticisms have been sociologie rurale naissante est incontestable, a été aimed at it, in particular for underestimating the domi- l’objet de nombreuses critiques portant notamment sur nation of the peasantry by urban groups. However these

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... 50 le fait que la domination de la paysannerie par les criticisms do not take into account the context where groupes urbains a été sous-estimée. Cependant, ces cri- Redfield lived. He saw the disintegration of the peasan- tiques ne tiennent pas compte du contexte dans lequel try as the advent of civilizations bearing emancipation évoluait l’auteur, qui voyait dans la désintégration de and equality. la paysannerie l’avènement de civilisations porteuses d’émancipation et d’égalité. Keywords Chicago School of Sociology, “studies of the peasantry”, Mots clés evolutionism, history of anthropology, rural sociology École de Chicago, « études paysannes », évolution- nisme, histoire de l’anthropologie, sociologie rurale

5491$$ DE03 24-07-09 16:42:36 Imprimerie CHIRAT page 50 soctotogre qui s'écrtt et littérature ce qui se fait, ce qui se dit, ce I'occasion propos contradictions et' du même d'un anodin de sa femme, qu'il a le << nez de cæur même du monde tunisien des potentiels pour le travers >>, lui qui était persuadé que son nez étatt << un modèle coup, des allié, ttituutions.ou f"ttonnes) (p. deux mondes qui apparais- de beauté 9). ce fait minuscule va déclencher chez lui une couple. rorçant tà-tiuit séparânt " "n rend presque my s- séri9 d'interrogations et de doutes existentiels. Il se rend compte ,""f putt"ir iotui.-"nt-*oto.lle'initiale herméiiques' l' auteur des deux conjoints. et qu'il existe autant de versions de lui-même que de personnes térieuses I' attir-Jnc" lui-même vivait à qui le connaissent et qui se sont fait une idée de lui; versions l,absence de crise chezte nunateur lorsg}9 it fait app-araîqe.1éan; qu'il va s'efforcer de remettre en question : (< Que je me pro- paris, hors ae soi -ànO. originel. Mais les jeux très subtils qui posais de découvrir qui j'étais, tout au moins aux yeux de mes moins, avec r;;t^"rj" utuitE [ttéraire, (personnes, 6b3ets ou situations) proches, les "connaissances", comme on les appelle, et de me se jouent entre forces externes et comportementales) divertir à détruire rageusement le Moi que j'étais pour eux >> et forces intr*"îiàîtpotitions'^mentales I'histoire à agir, sentir et (p. Il se présente ainsi lui-même comme une personne par- et qui conduisent 19s protugonistes de ?+1. ticulièrement réflexive et méditative : penser comme ils le font"'

[...] j'avais déjà, dès cette époque, une tendance marquée à me perdre" pour : - un mot qu'on me disait, pour une mouche que je L'insoutenable unicité de l'être voler *itte, di Luigi Pirandellosa yoyais - dans des abîmes de méditations et de pensées qui me IJn, personne;;;;;l foraient et me bouleversaient I'esprit en tout sens, par un travail analogue à celui de la taupe dans sa taupinière, sans que rien en parût à I'extérieur n (p. 10-11). Qu,est.cequ,êtresoi?Est-onàchaqrremomentidentiqueà-Ui"n moments' avec ,oilême oo est-on différent en différents ?Est-il pôsiu1r^Ae voir, soi, de I'exté- différentæ prrrîn* ,se fou' [,a condition d'une telle disposition réflexive est à recher- nous voient ? Peut-on' sans paraître rieur, coflrme les autres cher du côté de sa situation sociale. Moscarda << ne nie pas que les autres ont à notre son modifier radicalement les attentes oisiveté (p. 11) liée à sa condition de riche ou plutôt, pour de nous à partir " égard étant d;;;; ;;q11' être plus précis, de fils de riche : << J'étais riche. Deux âmis nous'à-4iîiqi:^: ont vu jouer ? Est-il possible des rôles particuùei, qo'itt fidèles, Sébastien Quantorzo et stefano Firbo, géraient mes iaentitaires, stafitaires et dis- de résister uo* Jiutit.î n*utiôns affaires depuis la mort de mon père, lequel n'avait jamais impose le monde social ? voilà une positionnelles ô;i"r réussi, par la douceur, ni par la violence, à me faire mener à de I'identité individuelle et série de questions qui togTlautour bien rien de ce que j'avais entreprisn (p. 1l). Le narrateur est Aunt on monde différencié' que le de son irnprotîùJ unicité riche (il a hérité d'un patrimoine matériel et d'une banque), pirandello ( 1 867- 1 936).po1e romancier ituri* iuigi :l::lt::- mais il a hérité d'une condition sans vraiment entrer dans la personne et cent rnille' A travers son r""p or nn.r*. dans-(Jn, peau de celui qui conduit ses affaires, c'est-à-dire de réflexions très sociolo- sans avoir narrateur, il da;;ie ainsi'unà suite multiplicité des points construit les dispositions mentales et comportementales corres- giques sur f identité et ses variations, la et subjec- pgndantes. Il a àetegue immédiatement les postes de responsa- sur le monde, ft* t objectini*ttt de vue que nous bilité à deux amis qui, sans être les propriétaires de I'entrèprise, ru-ïàuiiæ, les fixarions"*ttto.iiôns dispolitionnelles tivisres o, de en sont toutefois les véritables directeurs et gestionnaires. Lui te monOe sociâI, la pluralité interne impose progi"rriu"*rrrt soi' Be contente de signer ce que ses amis lui demandent de signer socialement entretenue àe I'unité du l,acteur et l'illusion et ne veut rien entendre des affaires de la banque. L'acte de dénommé Moscarda Vitangelo,. est un Le héros.nu''ut"or, signature semble être le seul ans. Il découvre un jour, à engagement qu'il a vis-à-vis de la jeune to**Ë^Ë;irgt-huii ephère professionnelle. Le nanateur est donc un héritier qui n'a pas réussi à mener à bien le travail symbolique lui permettant ., des forces extérieures, Q' d'hériter véritablement I'héritage en faisant corps avec lui, en ; * *" dialectique des forces dispositionn.,T.i sociologiques' op' ctt"D' 56v-+Lr' ' s'y intéressant, en se prenant au jeu de la gestion de ses affaires B. Lerunr, Portraits Gallimard' L'Imaginaire'r.'Tmasini s4,L.prneNpello, (Jn, persorn, )iIi"i'mùie Qgz6), ^allimqr^ ou de la fructification de son capital. L'héritage matériel a bien Puis, 1982. 23r 230 ?6aV at o.t,e'q3w' v

qui se dit, ce qui s'écrit ce qui se faft, ce pour dis- mes b,ll" vite' rendais compte, je retirerais ;anitayl-:l par je me débârrasserais de cet argent, eulieuetestjuridiquementattesté,maispasl'héritageimma. sioer toute éq;i""ile, ou dispositions, compé- une Guvre de b ienf ai s ance' tériel, c,est-à-dii"]tt"tituge de touîes les ;i,t#dË;*T ;""yË'-';^i";4*t : d'analogue 1p' 177)' tences et aPPétences adéquates îoîr,i* .ttôse 'Y peut qu'apparaître pas pire que mon-e9tt Lui' du moins' perçue cette démarche ne << Mais n'étais-je ? $hi de l,extérieur, le bon fils féroce' Le fondements matériels et travaillait; *uiït*ïf qut faisais-je ?l'étais mettraii-ordinair.*.ni trs (et même bizanes) ; folle. Qui une identité sociale bon fils qui p*1u:it A. ,oi-tt. choses"étrairgères, sa (rô;i" foot refuser travers, ou bien de 1a sociaux de ffiâi > (sérieu- de la découverte de mon nez qui étaitte prenant.onrrirn.e de la < comédie banque de mon mal intériorisée ? en face oppote. i. ru iune, pend.1li qu:.tu tot:*:llt ie monde social' il sait continuait sement jouée) que repre"ntt père, grâce .* e,* ârir fidèles, Firbo et Quantorzo, jouent sans rire' sans associés de que lei autres ceux qui à travaillrr, i'piorperËi. n y-avait aussi quelques revanche - yétaient co-intéressés' moindre i,opoitân..; ltt dto,* amis fidètes consciencedujeu-nepeuventqu'êtrestupéfaitsparson poupe: sans que j'eusse à comme on ait,'!ï-àti uffait, le vent en comPortement : co-associés' de Quantorzo comme m'en or.up"rl chéri de tous mes en moi me frère; tous savaient qu'il était inutile l'inspiration fantasque qui s'étaillflumée un fils, oe riÀo co*rn un << En effet, d'insouciance au suffisait de me demander de temps **lo"t.s, un masque de me parler'"fl"i*tlét qu'il meuair on ,ojilÏffiËii préparait, alors c'êtait tout. Non, pas tout, car' f"".Ëiillgrt., qoi se en temps rn",iËnutuie. lé signais, visage, ,n uur^d.'ruiolllê0i", d'autres) un mot de recommandation 6'uu-pË"]' (et poùr combien parfois aussi, ;;Ëiq,;iuf venaii solliciter que pour ..,îolÀt ['on sort j. découvrais une fossette, qui tà sôrt de la banque' pour Firbo et Quaito rzo,-et.oi, lui ,unr de gruurrlîiJièts étaient *'i.oi que je plus accentuée certitude tenible 'e menton en deux p#ti.t inégales, I'une famille ; et la confirmatffê'ttitt divisait son de ma paraîuais fou > (p' 177)' que I'autre > (P. 84)' possédais déjà':;;; il;ileuituilr!..ntje inadmisiible ie transporte son << Il [son oir"]p'er.iïounlt soïs quel aspect ?) (ce cenge qu'il voyuit'* îoi' * Endilapidantsoncapitaléconomique:gildesactesdefolies gendre c'est-à-dire'td'ue hors de cette trèstohérents du point de vue de .l;âi,tHr d;;Ëî.-uii""ri"s^, économiqu.r q;i;;niË.p.nOant hors ,., laquelle lui, d'une pæt' harmoniser la repfsgl- .;;;;-r J. **ionn.ffe dans de son identité, Morcaroà entend donc consisranc. de la banqu. I'avaient ins- qu'il se fait de lui- sa fille de l,aurre, er rous les ;;;;i;s tation que les-Ltittt ônt de lui et I'image externes, qui le ;.ilé 180). même. Plutôt-O* dtteatt aux pressloni ';(p. i i.Ëpt"tte correspondt" à ce que I'on attend de homme qui n'a ffirsgr;é"t les fonde- Le narrateur se présente go1pe t" lui, il opte pour ià Oe**"he inverse et -àAin" une i::l:voie, à canaliser ses à la suite de son iamais nrui*ËnirËorri à choisir ments sociaux de son statut social. Considéré, puttiott unique. Les conditions intérêts, à les concentre, on" père,comme.unusurier,ilvadoncprocéderàladestructionde "n '""t pas sur lui une forte injonc- sous la forme d'une 6,"ïir-t"*e rr'imprit ce statut ,o.rJ qu;ii-"'; jamais intéïorisé matérie11., dy père n'a pas été t' don réaliste (même si l,inj;;Til-âi.cte partl- identité Personnelle : à opérer un choix absente) qoi i;inuit"rait néée*i**"nt de a;JnÀug"**t'^d'investissement je n'avais jamais été à mes propres' yeux' culier, mc*, i;tfi-ô uit' << Cet usurier que la situation luxueuse même aux yeux d'autrui; et je ;;n èn"'gi", it p!ui' danl j,entendai, pi"r riêtË, son temps et ;; puis 1a pers- il;'*iri. de tout ce qui composait l'âisance paternelle, serais plus, fût-ce au pnx a. iu ruine oue lui offrent, tout d'abord ne le s'éviter de faire des choix ma vie > (P. 165) Ëi,h#age de r.tq de ce métier d'usu- iï,# "ir"".", .. pouvais-jïïiui-rnt éprouver le remords exercer ? Je signais réalistes:<ouesafemme(comme! >' p' 170)' moindre (< plus O. C.ngi i'iiliË tt'it-Àutionn"ti") son beau-père) a de lui 233 232 sociologîe ce qui se fait, ce qui se dit, ce qui s'écrit et littérature vivre, par procuration, autres pussent me dépasser Sans accorder aucune attention à une multitude de vies (< vivre toutes les pro- vies >>, selon l'expression de Flaubert) la petità pierre qui, entre-temps, avait P-1s à mes yeux les Lorsque ?'on" montagne infranchissable, voire d'un monde son beau-père lui rend visite après qu'il a laissé clai- foitions rgryent penser qu'il allaitremettre àunr lequel j'aurais pu-m'installer tout à mon aise. J'étais donc en question sa situation maté- rielle et familiale, se met évoquêr demeurê inrmobile iur bien des routes, arrêté dès les premiers il à d'autres vies possibles qui pourraient s'ouvrir éventuellement pas, 1'esprit occupé de mondes, ou de cailloux' ce qui revielt.uu à lui. Face uu* qu.r- tions << réalistes >> du beau-père (" inêtn"rr^(p. 11). Là où les autres jeunes.essaient d'atteindre Et ma fille, qu'en fais-tu ? << Comment vivras-tu ? De quoi ? >>, un objectii et, par conséquent, sont amenés à négliger les cail- p. l7g), if apporte des grands pas réponses stupéfiantes aux yeux de quelqu'un qui nô peut loux >> rencontrés sur leur chemin pour avancer à ima- giner que soit remise en cause leurs études puis une carrière professionnelle, sur les une conàition âussi pïvilégiée tAans pour repartir sur les chemins incertains de j èhemins d'une ambition, etc.), lui prend au sérieux chaque l,étude - èeh signifie que je pourrais et même " détail de son parcours et s'interdit, par cette attitude trop - très vite - obtenir mon diplôme de médecine, par exemple, ou passer réflexive et perfectionniste, |'avancée rapide et la réussite aux mon doctorat ès lettres et philosophie (p. l7B). (< f'allais trop au fond des choses. Ce n'est pas un bon " De façon génêrale, le narrateur insiste sur sa propension ""u*"n,moyen de réussite que de trop approfondir >>, P' 179)' à refuser toute cristallisation, tout durcissement oej aiipositions Le narrateur déirit parfailemènt l'écafi qui le sépare de naissantes, toute stabilisation de ses goûts, de ses jeunes plus réalistes en continuant à filer les métaphores : manières, de ses opinions ou de ses idées. À ta différence '.. distancié, en piaffant comme de jeunes de ceux qui oni su C.rt"t', ils m'avaient << canaliser >> la vie dans << les affections et les devoiri >> qu'ils mais au bout de la route ils avaient rencontré une char- chevaux, << >>, imposés les < habitudes >> qu'ils se sont << >>, charrette. Ils s'y étaient laissé docilement atteler, :e lonl tracéles rette leur << jeté - il dit à I'eau >> et laissé emporter par le << grand tor- à présent, ils la traînaient derrière eux. Moi jt.l-9 traînais 9'ê-tre et rent de la vie (p. 222-223) : uoruit, charrette ; aussi n'avais-je ni brides, ni æillères ; j'y " certainement plus qu'eux ; mais je ne.savais où aller" ' > voyais < Par malheur, je n'avais jamais su couler ma vie dans un moule social propose ainsi aux hommes qui tp. 1I-L2). Le monbe déterminé. Je ne m'étais jamais affirmé avec fermeté, d'une raçon prêtes. En avançant ithabit.nt une multitude de charrettes toutes qui me fût personlel_le et particulière, soit parce que je n'avais I'adoles- sur les chemins de l'école et de la vie active, I'enfant, lamais rencontré d'obstacle qui suscitât en moi une volonté de de .ént puir le jeune adulte ferme progressivement l'éventail résistance et d'affirmation devant les autres et moi-même; soit à cause ses pbssiblesl de ses choix, se piiant contribuant à faire de cette disposition d'esprit qui me portait à sentir et àpenser -à -("t Ie contraire perdirer) la division sociale du travail. Le monde social offre de ce que, peu auparâvant, j-'avais pensé et ressenti; c'est-à-dire à analyser et à désagréger àont une multiplicité de voies possibles (et donc de sens à la en moi touie formation r"n- tale et sentimentale, par des iéflexions incessantes chacune constitue en même temps une sorte d'enfer- et souvent vie), mais contradictoires >> (p. 63). de cloisonnement, de resserrement de soi par à mement, l?pPoJt << Je n'éprouvais que trop I'horreur de m'emprisonner dans une l'étendue des expériences vécues durant l'enfance et l'adoles- forme^ quelconque (p. IBù. peut ressentir " cence. Pour Moicarda, aucune curiosité qu'il << cette incertitude en moi qui fuyait toute limite, qui refusait une n'est plus forte que les autres et il a donc du mal à imprimer tout soutien, et désormais se retirait instinctivement de ùute forme direciion à sa vie. Dans un univers social où l'école et le tra- consistante, comme la mer se retire du rivage, cette incertitude flot- vail constituent fortement les identités (en positif comme en tant dans mes yeux > (p. Zl4-2lS). négatif), Moscarda n'a réussi, ni dans un univers, ni dans Le père I'aitre,-à se constituer une identité personnelle relativement du narrateur décrit lui aussi cette inclination au mouvement, au refus de stable, et rassurante. Et l'on peut se demander si Moscarda n'est la fixation des idées et des pulsions : < Mais puisque pas une sorte d'incarnation àe la figure du romancier qui, dags - tu n'étais, et tu n'es encore, qu,un ôot... Our, un pauvre naiï sans cervelle, qui ses æuvres et à travers SeS personnages' peut se pennettre de t'en vas à la poursuite de tog

234 295 ce qui se fait, ce qui se dit, ce qui s'écrit sociologie et littérature pensées sans jamais en retenir une qui puisse te fixer... Jamais héros-narrateur essaie d'abord de tester aqprès d,amis tu ne prends une résolution sans en faire aussitôt le tour, et à Ie regard qu'ils portent sur son physique, puis ,ooËuit" force de la regarder, elle finit par t'hypnotiser, et le lendemain, d" pil;;il; fréquemment se retrouver seul pour ne plus au réveil, en la voyant devant toi, tu ne sais plus comment elle avoir à faire face représentations que les autres peuvent a p_u surgir en toi la veille, par ce beau soleil... (p. 3ux avoir oe rui.-rvrais 76-77). il rapidement compte que L'anecdote du << nez >> " :..rend la véritable soritude ne de travers fait toucher du doigt au s.'obtient pas nécessairement héros le décalage, qu'il perçoit en s,isotant a"s-auires, car chacun comme inquiétant, entré les d'entre nous est le produit représentations qu'il se de ses relations aux autres et les fait de lui-même et les diverses repré- rêveries dans lesquelles sentations nous nous laissons utt", nous ramè- que les autres se font de lui, y compris les plus nent irrémédiablemenr proc-lrgs pensée je dans le circuit J.;;;;"pporrs d,interdé- .(" lu que n'étais pas pour autrui tel què je pgndTge passés. ta me l'ét4s figuré jusqu'alors, me devint À manière de Mauriie Harbwachs, une vraie obsession tr, Pirandello met en p. tu._Cette prise scène res différentes rnËn,oir.s incorporées 14) de conscience de la vaiété des << images u que nous pouvons qui mobiliser ici dans nos rêveries _ circulent sur lui fait vaciller toutes ses certitudes sur ce-qu'il et qui - eveiiteËs font que << nous ne pouvons nous sentir est vraiment (< ma véritable personnalité >>, p. : seuls ,, (p. 34), 7l) hantés que nous sommes par r"r ièiutilïr^pursées avec re monde et les autres hommes (< < si je n'étais pas pour autrui celui que j'avais cru jusqu'ici être cette .onr.i"-nce, que nous croyons êrre notre pour moi, qui donc étais-je ? > (p.2t). bien Ie plus intim., n'.Jqu"lu pierl". à", autres en >>) << Donc, les autres voyaient en moi un être qui m'était inconnu, nous : ql'eux seuls pouvaient connaître en me regardânt du dehors, avec qui n'étaient pas << Demeurer compagnie {es .ye-u1 les miens; ils me prêtaient un aspect .en de vous-même, sans une présence destiné à me demeurer étrangère ? Belle toujours étranger, bien-qu'étant celui que soritud-e, en vérité I... è;;ors, dans votre je revêtais pour eux (par 6.moi',- mémoire, s'ouvr.e- conséquent, un qui m'échappait une petite fenêtre a iuquriË Jpparait souriante, enrre un por complètement); ils m'attribuaient une vie qui me demeurait iiripé- d'æilets et.un pot de jasmin, èerte riiioe:.0i, q"iiJ: nétrable. Cette idée ne me laissa plus de répit. Comment tolérefen cotait une écharpe de raine ioug., pareille à cerË lue porte au cou moi la présence de cet étranger ? cet étranger que j'étais moi-même I'insupportable vieux monsieut"d;ili;;, ù; ioo, uu., oublié pour moi ? > (p. 25). ah mon Dieu ! de donner - - un mot de recomÀandation pour Ie <, p.2l).'Enclin, voici ui.n oàsânérr, uou, enten- dg pT ses dispositions réflexives, à I'inierrogation approfôndie à à la'meditation, li diez chanter, presque tous lés ioirs, c9 vilrage n'avait pas jusque-là retourné flns de montagnes sur lui le regard réflexif qu'il portait ordinairement sur blotti sous les châtaigniers, où vous les choses et les autres. étiez alrér.ffior. cette chère Mimi, qui par la suiË épousa re vieux commanàeur Della venera, 236 237 sociologie et littérature qui s'écrit ce qui se faft, ce qui se dit, ce de moi, émanait de "Moscarda". (Mon ombre même était Mos- Cafda.) "MOSCarda", Si On le VOyait manger, "MOSCarda", Si On le ;ô;t fumer, ..Moscarda", s'il âttait à la promenade, "Moscarda", ainsi s'ii se mouchait. t...1 n me paraissait odieux et stupide d'être étiqueté, une fois pour toutes, et de ne pouvoir me donner un autre CequedécouvreprogressivementMoscarda,c'estqueder- no*, des noms àïolonté, pouvant tour à tour s'accorder avec les di soi, se cache une multiplicité de soi : phases de mes-sentiments et de mes actes ; mais rière l,unité upp*.næ àin.t.rt je àèsotmds, j" t. répète, habitué à ce nom depuis ma naissance, lesdifférentssoiquechacunreprése-nteauxyeuxdesautresvous et penser qrr'en défi- f" Uàp"tda de'l'un n'est pas le Moscarda de I'autre ; pouvais ne-pus y aitacher grande.importance, t.. qui est no^* n;étuit pas moi, mais simplement une appellation ser- O;oo Moscarda unique mais oui -, celui iritiu. iig,|,i;tp*t", - "e pu plus laide >> coilrmei/ous |e voyez' et n*t a me désign"r, iar belle, mais qui aurait être là devant vous, de telle et telle façon, parlez de cinq Moscarda (p' 73'74)' touchez alors que vbus - ''du nom d'hier ; que vous le ; << Plus de nom.,, Aujourd'hui,arrinrrrd'hrri nlplus aucun souveml vos compagnons, et qui constitue différents ; un pàoi rttu.un dô ni demain, de celui-d'aujourd;hui, puisque le nom détermine la et telle façon' comme à leurs yeux cet être unique, bâti de telle ôttor"; puirqu" un nom est, en nous, le concept de toute chose aussi les différents soi devient chacun le voit et le touche ,,, p. 93), mail pû;"'Ëotr àr nous. Sans appellation, toute conception << je croyais impré- qu,il découvre âir" pour fui+n.mé : Je le répète, ïmpossible, et la chose demeuie en nous, coilrme aveugle, seul de ce nom que j'ai porté parmi les hommes' que encore que cet d;g; étuit '.un" ; un ?uI yguT $e 19ys' cisè et confuse ; Mais bientôt mon grave, épigraphe funéraiie, sur I'image. qu'il garde. de ;6,,,r que je *r rôyuis un seul pour moi. chacun le des cent mille qo'î tu fais,^sJen paix, à jamais. Un nom n'est qu'une épi- atroce se comptiqua avec lu dé.ooverte r*1 ,t drame pour funéraire, il conv]ent aux morts. À qui a conclu. Je suis que:;ei"itià" seulement pour-les autres mais Ëi"ptt" Moscarda iiuànt, et je ne conclus pas. La vie ne conclut pas. Et elle ignore portant ce nom unique ât,Mlt:arda' cruellement moi, tous les noms >> (P.227-228). - corps (p' 22-23)' ffi, tous haËitant mon pauvre ?. l'apparente unité du corps Et l,illusion O" f *ite crêéepar grand moyen d'illusion que perçoit le niurateur est "tt Âagiqo"-ent unificatrice du Un autre biologique et làr la puissance le récit histJrique qui rend logiques, cohérents et certains des lui, n'avait ni nom ni état civil ; poyr- << nom >> : << d;;prii, qui n'ônt, de I'intérieur, jamais étê vêcus sur ce tout un mondt' mais^pour les événements tant il renfermait en lui [;"] mode et qui'n. poorraient jamais totalement l'être. Face à la autres,jen'étaispasce-mondeanonyme'intégral'indiviset vie inacheïée, jamais close, toujours incertaine et amblSue' e1 je portais en moi; au contraire, exté- pourtant .tungpurit,-qo" puttit chaotiquê et incohérente' le récit historique de faits qui à eux' je représentais un être rieurement, dâns leur univers i'enchaînent chronologiquement et logiquement est un moyen Moscardà, parèefle définie d'une unique, Aeteniine, i" nô,otné â'apaiser la conscienJe, mais aussi une illusion sociale de la incluse-hors de moi, dans la réalité qoi ,,'iâii'pÀ iu o*tln., : t' (p' Le retour cohérence Éalitê, des autrÀi"t upp"lée Moscarda -72)'- pal un hasard chez le nanateur plus reposant que I'His- ,u, tr-no* p.piô n'eit << Ah ! le plaisir de I'histoire ! Rien de réflexif I'ordinaire qui prend .on*.i"nô. àt l'abstrâction que constitue toire. Dans la vie, tout se transforme sans cesse SouS nos yeux' clôture' comment se unification des individus par le nom. Enfermement, Nulle certitude. Et cette anxiété incessante de savoir produire I'unité nominale' événements, se stabiliseront les faits qui vous cau- abstraction, voilà ce que contribue à dérouleront les personnages-par des noms tant d'angoisse et de trouble ! Dans I'Histoire, au contraite, Comme fuf*."1noo*i détignant ses sent un héros qui sou- tout est établil déterminé : si douloureuses qu'aient été les péri- de qualifi;tift, Piraniello metèn scène suivis de corps) peiitt, et si tristes les événements, les voici classés, tout au moils autant de noms que d'états (d'âme et haiterait avoir ixés entre les trente ou quarante feuillets d'un livre; les voici tels il se trouve Plongé : qu'uq malygil- O*t lesquels qo.ft ; jamais plus de changement, à moins 9ri!qu9 lant ne prt*.ïn malin plaisir à faire sauter cet échafaudage-idéal' si bien qu'on pouvait admirer ..[...]àsesyeux'cestraits.làc-aractérisaientunêtredistinct? Et où les d^ivers éléments s'ènchaînaient nommé Moscarda. Était-ce possible sa entre ptusi.ui, uot .i : le èn t*te quiétude comment chaque effet découlait docilement de actes, dans cet univers ignoré chacune O. r.r p*àiàt, .t u.un Oà ses 239 238 ce quî se fait, ce qui se dit, ce qui s'écrit sociologie et littérature

cause, avec une logique parfaite, et comment chaque événement se fois ? Il s'agit de.perc_er à jour l'effroyable bouffonnerie que déroulait, précis ei côhérent dans ses moindres détails' avec Mon- recouvre le vernis des relations quotidiennes, naturelles et sereines, >> celles qui vous seigneur lè duc de Nevers, Qui en tel jour de telle année, etc., etc. semblent les plus ordinaires et normales, et ce pai- 0. 114). sible aspect des choses que I'on nomme leur réalité, cette bouffon- lerig, qui vous fait crier avec irritation toutes les cinq minutes, à La réflexion sur ce que l'on croit que I'on est et sur ce que I'ami qui est à vos côtés : - Mais pardon ! Mais comment ne vois-tu pas cela ? Tu es donc les autres croient que nous sommes conduit, en fin de compte, aveugle ? Il ne voit pas cette chose, parce qu'il en voit une autre,-alors que vous croyez qu'elle à faire vaciller les èertitudes sur le réel. Le nuurateur tente ainsi lui apparaît telle qu'à vous, et sous le même angle. Il la voifau de faire douter les lecteurs de l'évidence des choses. Non pas contrairê selon sa vision personnelle, et pour lui, I'aveugle, c'est vous. cette qu'il présuppose qu'aucun d'entre eux ne comprenne ce qu'il bouffonnerie, dis-je, je I'avais déjà, moi, percée à jour> (p. dit, if i'etonne que les conséquences ne soient pas systé- 112). n it <<-Je me proposai de le déconcerter, non pius aveô brusquerie, tirées, qu" les doutes ne restent que partiels et . matiquement ainsi que je I'avais fai! fois précédente (en parlant et en^gesti- goûts varient d'une époque à Ja soient si peu systématisés. Nos culant comme un possédé, devant Firbo et lui),-mais, au contiaire, à des mêmes choses et I'autre, ainsi que nos sentiments l'égard pour. le plaisir de le voir battre en retraite, après qu'il était venu nos manières de donner sens à ces réalités : armé de résolutions bien anêtées; devant sabelliqueuse fermeté, I'envie me prenait de démontrer à nouveau - bien que cela fûi que ce soit vraiment affaire de goût, superflu- qu'un << Parce qu'il vous semble - rien suffirait à I'anéantir : un mot que ie dirais, le en doute d'opinion ou d'habitude, et vous ne mettez aucunement ton sur lequel je le dirais, seraient propres à le boulêueis., et à lui telle que la realite des choses aimées telle qu'elle vous apparaît, troubler les idées, et, avec ses idées, fàtalement, s'écroulerait toute quittez cette maison. vous avez plaisir à la toucher du doigt. Mais la solide réalité qui était la sienne, telle qu'à présent il la sentait en pour avec une âme Repassez dans trois ou quatre ans, la revoir lui, et qu'il la voyait er la rouchait hors de tùi > (p. 156- t57). difiérente de celle d'aujourd'hui; vous velrez qu'il en sera fini de Hou, voyez... C'est chambre ? votre chère, chère réa\itê. - ça,la Aux yeux de Moscarda, la réalitê semble en perpétuelle le jardin ? Et espérons que dans I'intervalle, il ne vous sera mort ça, construction et chacun perçoit que ce que son propre ào.on proche, parcè que alors tous vos chers cyprès vous feraient l'"n point de vue lui permet de voir. Emporté par un aussi ttffet d'ùn cimétière. Vous dites à présent que ce sont là des cônstructivisme radicalement subjectiviste, choses connues, que l'âme se modifie et que tout le monde peut se Pirandello inicrit dans les propos du nar- tromper. Vieille histoire, en effet. Mais je n'ai pas laprétention de rateur une réflexion sociologique autour de la question de rien ïous apprendre de neuf. Je voïrs demande simplement : - Et I'objectivisme (la saisie objeitive d'une vie â partir de alors, pourquoi, Seigneur, agir comme si on I'ignorait ? Pourquoi << données de faits n) et du subjectivisme (la signification que- la seule réalité, qui compte soit celle continûez-v-ous à croire variable que des événements ou des situations peuvent avoir en que admettez aujourd'hui ? > (p. 46). vous fonction du rapport que les individus qui la coïstruisent entretiennent à leur égard) : Moscard a alavolonté de dérouter de manière presque expéri- sur interlocuteurs, de rompre avec les évidences << mentale ses La même chose n'est pas pareille pour tous, elle peut même ses relations sociales, de décontenancer, de lesquelles reposent continuer à se transformer pour chacun àe nous, et, de iait, elle se << >> des décèvoir les attentes ou les anticipations raisonnables modifie sans cesse. Pourtant, la forme momentanée que nous attri- personnes de son entourage. I1 entend dévoiler les fondements buons à nous-mêmes, aux autres, et aux choses, conrtito. I'unique àu spectacle ordinaire de la vie, I'illusion de cette grande rfariyé: qui existe à nos yeux. La réaritê que je possède pout uôo, < comédie >> ou de cette grande << bouffonnerie >> que représente réside dans la forme que vous m'attribue?; mais c'est ûne réalité : à votre u-sage et non au mien celle que vous avez pour la vie sociale i ; moi consiste dans la forme que je vous prête, mais c'est uné rêalité à mon usage, < (p. 60-61). il est plongé : que né .,, À qu.ts faits voulez-vous faire allusion ? Au fait je sois de Richieri, dans << telle année, tel mois, tel jour, dans la noble ville Je connais Pierre. Je lui confère une réalité à ma façon, et monsieur Un Tel fondée la maison sise rue Une Telle, numéro tel, fils de sur la connaissance que j'ai de lui ; mais vous aussi, vous jours et de madame Une Telle, baptisé à l'âge de six en l'église connaissezPiene, et-celui qui vôus est familier n'est ..rt* pu, îà ans, même; métropolitaine, envoyé à six ans à l'école; marié à vingt-trois car chacun de nous le voit et lui confère une réalitè à sa pierre taille un mètre soixante-huit, roux, etc.' etc' f3gon. or,.pour lui aussi, possède auranr à; rè;liÉ, ;ir- Ce sont-là mes signes particuliers. Données de faits, dites-vous ? tinctes qu'il connaît d'individus, iar il se connaît d'une certaine manière Et vous voudriez en Oeduire ma têalité ? Mais ces données qui, dans ses rapports avec moi, d'une autre avec vous, et avec un tiers, et ainsi en soi, ne signifient rien, croyez-vous que chacun les apprécie iden- de suite. ce qui revient à dire que piene est en réarité' un être pour tiquement fEt même si elies suffisaient à représenter pour les moi, un autre encore pour vous, un autre pour un troisième, mon être intégral, où me situeraient-ils ? Dans quelle réa- et puis encore un autre poùr un quatrième, toui en uù.t ayant l'illusion, lité?> (p.91). lui aussi, lui surtout, qu'il est unique poo. toot lË monde (p. 88). .. À vàus qui habitez un taudis, cette maison vous semblera un " palais. À uooi qui avez un certain goût artistique, elle paraîtra fort ce que ressent ôrdinaire ; vous qui traversez à contrecæur la rue où elle se trouve, -- le narrateur, c'est que, d'une situation à regardez I'autre, sous I'effet parce qu'elle vout tuppelle un souvenir pénible, vous la de la variation de I'interaction .nt fruiu- àut. uuttsion; et vous, par contre' vous lui jetez un regard affec- lité des dispositions internes et pluralité des influences externes," tueux, parce que, je le sais, là-bas, en face, habitait votre pauvre nous pouvons changer nos comportements et même regrettei je un mère qui fut ùne âmie de la mienne. [...] Pour I'un serais ge que nous avons commis dans un autre état des relationJenffe j'ai laissé s'instituer directeur de imbéciie, parce que Quantorzo I'interne et I'externe. L'acteur n'est jamais engagé sur les dif_ la Banque, et Fiibo avocat-conseil; mais cette même raison me férentes scènes de la vie sociale o ôom-r ui Jeul homme >> ia considération d'un autre, en revanche, me taxera de (< vaudra QUi, J'ai déjà affirmé que vous n'êtes pas non plus celui que vous que je promène tous les jours la petite chienne de stupidité parce pqlé.rgntez pour vous-même, maii simultanément plusieurs mafemme, et ainsi de suite (P. 92). individus, selon vos " ctoyez différentes manières d'être poriibler, les << De votre fenêtre, vous regildez le monde. Vous le - cas-, les-rapports et les circonstances >>, p. gD. Ët torrqoé tel qu'il vous apparaît. En bas, les gens traversent la rue, infimes, im cadres de la vie sociale le forcent à vivré durâblement .oup*t le champ de votre vision qui,.de la hauteur où vous êtes, ùr une scène, il ressent plus ou moins confusément, voui semble vasie. Comment ne croiriez-vous pas à son étendue, en vivant p.rf;i; un malaise, que,tout son patrimoine puisqu'un ami, passant à ce moment, ne vous apparaîtra pa1, de dispositions, de ômpé-I -v1t tences et d'appétences à'auisi haut, plui grand que votre doigt ? Mai,s si vous aviez I'idée incorporées n'est pâs mobilisé : de l,appeler èt OJ tui démander : "Quel effet te fais-je, à cette < voilà le fâcheux, croisée ?" vous n'y songez pas, car vous ne réfléchissez pas à ou si vous ptéférez,le comique ; nous accomplissons un I'image qu'à ce môment les passants se font de votre fenêtre et acte ; nous croyons de bonne foi y etr. toui entier ; hélas, nous nous apercevons de vo-us-même qui y êtes appuyée; un effort serait nécessaire pour qu'il n'en est rien ei qu'; contraire I'acte.est toujours et uniquernent vous libérer de vos idées préconçues sur la têalitê des autres' - ceux commis par t'ori ors nombreux individus que nous incarnons de la fuo -, qui s'agitenf un instant dans le vaste champ de votre ou que nous sommes sus_ ceptibles d'incarner; s'il nous arrive, pil malheur, d'y oemeuièr vision > (p. 213-214). pour ainsi dire liés et pendus, nous nous apercevons qùe nous n'y sotnmes pas incl.us tout de entiers, et que par ôonséquent ce serait une Ainsi, non seulement il existerait autant de constructions atroce injustice d9 n-ous jyg.l sur ce faii unique, die nous y tenir liés qu'il existe de personnes qui nous construisent et pendus, Soi par autrui attachés à ce pilori, pour toute ta ïie, comme ii cette vie d'une manière ôomme d'une autre' mais chacun d'entre nous devait se résumer dans ôe seuiacte. de n'engage dans ses rapports avec les différentes personnes - Mais je suis aussi celui-là, et cet autre, et puis cet autre son entourage qu'une facette de Sa personnalité, ne se encore...

242 243 ce qui se fait, ce qui se dit, ce qui s'écrit porte, Plusieurs êtres, mais oui ; plusieurs, qui étaient étrangers à I'acte Ia le quelqu'un que vous êtes à ses ,"t:'::j:':':^'::::: .oÀ1ni* par I'un d'eux, et n;avaient rien à y voir, ou bien peu de commun avec celui que vous êtes ou cherchez à paraître aux yeux chose. Cè n'est pas tout, il arrive souvent que par la suite I'auteur du nouvel arrivant. Entre vos deux visiteurs, étrangers I'un à de I'acte, (autrement dit la réalité que nous nous sommes conférée I'autre, mais se témoignant force égards et peut-être même faits à un moment donné et qui seule est responsable), disparaisse pour s'entendre à merveille, point d'incompatibilité; elle n'exis- complètement, si bien que ie souvenir de cet acte ne demeurera plus tait qu'entre les deux individus que vous avez découverts en vous. nàot (à supposer qu;il demeure), qu'à l'état de cauchemar inex- [...] Et dans I'insoutenable embarras où vous mettait la décou- plicable."n tn âritt. être, dix autres, tous les autres qui cohabitent en verte de votre double personnalité, vous avez cherché un prétexte quelconque nous, surgrssent un à un pour nous demander des comptes que^nous pour vous débarrasser, non pas de I'un de vos visiteurs, n" ro-tnËs plus m"ru^t" de rendre. Réalités passées > (p. 88-89). mais d'un des personnages que leur présence vous conhaignait à "n simulait pas être en même temps. car vous renfermez << Je suisïéanmoins certain qu'elle [sa femme] ne [...] en vous-même, à pas avec son Gengé; elle se montrait à son Gengé telle-qu'elle pouvait votre insu, non "deux'n mais qui sait combien de personnages, une tout en vous croyant "un" (p.96-97). être pour lui, Traie et sincère. Mais - loin de lui -, elle devenait toujours > autre : cette autre dont elle jouait en ce moment le personnage, soit telle fur gont, soit par nécessité,-soit qu'elle se sentît véritablement Présentant le cas de Marco di Dio et de sa femme Dia- àux yeux d'Anna Rosa > (P. 198). mant, le narrateur entend montrer que << d'une minute à I'autre >> un individu peut changer, devenir autre que ce qu'il avait étê pluralité interne, Un bon test prouvant I'existence de cette jusque-là. Les deux personnages semblaient être << deux mal- Moscarda le trouve dans l'exemple de la présence' au sein du heureux )), ûe se lavant pas le visage tous les jours et rêvant même contexte, de deux amis dtun même individu habituelle- qu'ils pourraient << devenir du jour au lendemain million- *.nt fréquentés dans des cadres différents et qui ne se connais- naires >>. Marco di Dio se croyait inventeur et imaginait pou- sent pas èntre eux. D'un seul coup, la co-présence des deux voir, à la suite d'une invention, faire fortune. Accueilli dans personnes provoque une gêle, un embarras' car I'individu en I'atelier d'un artiste de renom, il commet une tentative de viol avec question prend cônscience alors qu'il.n'est pas le même sur un enfant << dont la responsabilité incombait à la bête surgie où liun et u*t I'autre. Comment donc gêrer une telle situation en lui sous I'influence d'une température torride >>. Mais les relations entretenues avec chacun des deux amis suppose- qu'était devenu << le bon jeune homme que son maître déclara iui.nt que soient mises en ceuvre deux versions différentes de avoir toujours connu > ? Etait-il désormais réductible à la soi-même ? << brute abjecte >> qu'on avait découverte le jour du drame ? Le narrateur soutient que non et sa réflexion sur la pluralité interne vous lisiez petit << Je suis heureux qu'à I'instant même où 9e et la variation des contextes d'action l'amène à évoquer I'inhi- depuis le. début, a livre, avec ce sourire iégèrement railleur, QUi, bition de certaines tentations, de certaines inclinations. En effet, lecturà deux visiteurs, se suivant de près, soient â.to1,'pugné votre après avoir évoqué la situation de Marco di Dio devenu brus- ill'improviste. Vous êtes encore tout irrité, mortifié, anivéi [...] quement autre, commettant un acte moralement répréhensible, de la piteuse *int que vous fîtes, en congédiant sous un prétexte il explique en quelque sorte que nous sommes tous porteurs futile ie vieil ami, peu après I'arrivée du nouveau : la présence d'un de dispositions ou de pulsions qui tiers vous avait rendu iniupportables sa vue, son rire et son langage' mèneraient à des actes similaires Mais quoi ? Le renvoyer âinsi, alors qgg.tantôt]ggs preniez plaisir si nous n'avions pas la faculté de les inhiber : << la vie des saints à .uurèr, à plaisanter avec lui ? Congédié qui ? Votre ami ? Vous abonde en tentations analogues (et même de plus basses). Les étoy"" réti.ïp..nt que c'est lui què vou-s avez renvoyê? [....] la saints les attribuaient au démon et en triomphaient par la grâce gêne, c'est vous qui l;avez éprouvée, et d'autant plus vive et into- divine. Et de même les freins que vous vous imposez répriment entre eux' Vous iétuUlt que vous ïoyiez un àccord -Maisparfait naître à I'ordinaire ces tentations et empêchent que s'échappe de vous, aussilôt. Pourquoi ? parcg que (vous obs- 58 I'avez rômpu à I'improviste, un voleur, voire un assassin >>. tinez,vous à ne pas I'admettrè ?), subitement, I'entrée du second ami vous arévélé une dualité en vous, deux êtres si différents, qu'à un certain moment, n'en pouvant plus, il vous a fallu en renvoyer 58. Toutes les citations entre guillemets de ce paragraphe sont tirées des un. Pas votre vieil ami, nôn, c'est vous-même que vous avez mis à pages 102-104. 244 i. 245 qui se ce qui se dit, ce qui s'écrit ce fait, sociologie et littérature prend I'exemple historique de Jules affectant de l'ignorer, Puis le héros-narrateur vous engagezdans cette même voie, vous César qui, hors de ses moments de < gloire impériale >> (p_. 104;, êtes les sages, et d'autant plus sages que vous ciezplus compagnons fort à vos pouvai[ être tout aussi peu glorieux que tout un chacun. S'adres- de route : Moi : - ? Moi ainsi ? c'est toi, l'aveugre, sant au lecteur, le héros-narrateur explique c'est toi, le fou >> (p. I l7-l t8). << La foule massée devant < Si Jules César n'était lui-même qu'aux heures où vous la porte reprenait en chæur ce même cri : Fou !... Fou I'admirez, où donc était-il le reste du temps ? Qui était-il ? Per- !... Fou... Pr.r que j'avais vouru sonne ? N'importe qui ? Et qui ? démontrer que je pouvais, pour les aumes aussi, ne pas être celui Il faudrait lè demànder à sa femme Calpurnie ou à Nicomède, roi qu'on croyait;, fË. igjl.- de Bithynie. Vous voilà donc forcé d'admettre qu'il n'existait pas Mais la folie de Julei César unique. Certes, il y avait un César, tel qu'il s'est est aussi un statut, c'est-à-dire une manière pour parties de sa vie et la valeur de celui-là dépas- le monde social montré en bien des ; o" .ontinu.t à" g*ori i, .*t ole des corps pas en tant_qle et des sait incomparablement celle des autres; toutefois esprits qui sont pas et risqueraient que le Jules 1e de le rêalité,je îous prie de le croire, car non moins réel mettre en danger. En |occurrence,"oùormes faire ,".o*uît l'être maniéré, blasé, rasé, aux vêtements p"ùrù"._ César impérial, était ment, officiellement, ra < folie > de tvtor.uiâu " lâches, infiOète à sa femme Calpurnie et à Nicomède roi de est, pour son elloyage, le moyen de le désaisir de son pouuoi, Bithynie. et de le mettre officiellement hors jeu. Jouant Le malheur, c'est qu'il fallait les confondre tous sous cette avec le mànde social et le met- tant en péril, le héros court appellation unique de Jules César; et que dans un seul corps mas- donc le risque oe voi, ce aerniei rL retourner contre lui et cuiin cohabitaient plusieurs êtres, dont une femme, qui, ne trouvant le mettre hors diétat de nuire , pas la possibilité de se manifester à sa guise dans son corps mal- de << J'appris ainsi qu'on ôulin, êut recours à des moyens anolrnaux et impudiques' avec voulait m'interdire, sous prétexte d,alié_ (P. nation mentale. Didà lui avait nombreuses récidives n 104-105). annoncé qu'on avait déjà recueilli et classé toures l1.npuve1 à r'appui,.uop.Ër àË rituo, de euanrorzo, de son père et d^e]e-mê.., pôot La folie le thème s'impose progressivement au cours du démôntrer uu., écrat mon état de - démence > (p. 197) roman - est I'état de celui qui, au lieu de croire aux << bouffon- neries >> de I'existence, de faire comme si le soi était toujours À force de détachement identique à lui-même ou de considérer la vaiétê des points de et d'ataraxie, le narrateur en vient à ne plus se reconnaître vue que portent les autres Sur Soi comme le produit d'erreurs ou aucune identité, à ; prus se sentir concerné par d'intérprètations mal fondées, en prend conscience et en tire le guglque réarité que ce soit : .i c'est que désormais tout ce qui offrait plus les conséquences. Elle est, en ce cas, un état un sens et une. valeur poui rut oi *'upp*uir_ complètement sait comme infiniment ô'hyper-lucidité au sein d'un monde social qui, pour fonc- lointain ; et no* rorlr-""fidt détaché de moi-même tionner, ne Supporte que les aveugles ou les malvoyants' ceul et de toute chose qui iut mienne, mais j'éprouvais l'horreur derester qui sont prêts, ians trop grimacer, à accepter les æillères qY:il quelqu_1".ei,ilL ce fût, en pos_ session de quoi que^ce lèur propose et à rendre un hommage pelmanent à I'ordre (dis- fûI..."?p. iZSl.[; irrt Aorr, au bour de.son parcours, curslf e[ institutionnel) du monde en acceptant d'investir avec à rêver d'une ,À, lànr.i"nce, d,une existence pure et sereine, "iirt"né" énergie et passion les rôles qui leur sont offerts : sans r" touÀ"ît-;; la conscience peut y introduire. Vivre comme un élémenfpili a'uut i. iu vie nafurelle, sans mémoire << Je continuais à avancer, comme vous voyez, tout à fait incorporé", ,ui" passé, tout", entier qui précisément celle dans le présent de |expérience conscient, sur la grand'route de la folie, était et des sensadôÀ : de ma réalitê, telle qu'elle s'étendait désormais devant moi, avec reflétées, et qui cheminaient << Ah ! ne prus les diverses images de moi, vivantes, avoir conscience d'exister, comme une pierre, comme une plante.-.. à mes côtés. \e plus même se rappeler son propre nom... j'étais fou, justement parce que j'en avais cette conscience Etendu là, sur I'herbe, les mains Mais nouées àî;Ë;r; regarder au ciet lucide et à multiples reflets, comme un miroir. Vous qui, en bleu les nuages, blancheurs ébrourssantes, qui voguent gonflés de

246 247 ce qui se fait, ce qui se dit, ce qui s'écrit sociologie et littérature

soleil; écouter le vent là-haut, entre les châtaigniers, comme une situation de I'observateur non participant, qui a le loisir de --rumeur de mer..." (P. 55). réfléchir à des problèmes sans aucun caractèrè d'urgence et de je je renais, neuf et lavé de sou- ; À chaque instant meurs et regarder la vie des autres sans y participer. Cet observateur non mon intégrité et vivànt, non plus en moi, mais en venirs ; dans engagé dans une vie sociale qu'il observe, décrit, raconte ou tt (p. 229)' toutes les choses extérieures réfléchit, c'est bien évidemment, dans I'esprit de pirandello, l'écrivain ou le philosophe, mais on est en droit aussi de penser Comme dans un raisonnement par I'absurde, Pirandello ima- à la posture du sociologue. Pour Pirandello, chaque individu est gine ce que serait une existence individuelle sociologique- - doublement saisi par le social et ne peut, quoi qù'il en pense et sans conversion-fixation dispositionnelle des irrnt inée}le - quoi qu'il fasse, y échapper : un saisissement intérieui (ra vie Une forme de vie qui.ressemb.lerait à celle du sociale intériorisée sous la forme de << racines ), d'habitudes, de "if-ti"nces. et résgmée par Michel Foucault en stiltus décrite par Sénèque souvenirs, de sentiments de rien, ou d'attitudes) et extérieur (le regard : << Le smltus-, c'est celui qui ne se souvient ces tennes que les - différents - autres portent sur soi). qui laisse sa vie s'écouler, qui n'essaie pas de.la ramener à une Le héros-narrateur, Mathias Pascal, s'est < enfui >> de chez en remémorisant c" qoi mérite d'être mémorisé, et qui ne rinité lui une dizaine de jours, las qu'il était de vivre avec une femme pas son attention, soin vouloir, vers un but précis et bien dirige sans- amour pour lui et une belle-mère acariâtre. Ce qui le laisse la vie s'écouler, change d'avis sans arrêt' fixé: I-e stultus conduit à s'éloigner un temps de sa famille et de son village, Su nià, son existence par conséquent, s'écoule sans mémoire ni c'est le double choc causé par la mort, le même jour, de sa mére De 1à, chezle stultus, le perpétuel changement-demode volonté. et de sa fille. Jusque-là, il gagnait chichement sa vie en tant que de ni"te. ,, En explorant expériméntàlement I'impossible, P.Iq- bibliothécaire de son village (dans la bibliothèque d'un cèr- rappelle, la^force du social qui s'exerce ordinai- àe11o tain Monseigneur Boccamazza, léguée en 1803 f la commune rement sur les "rivies "t"o^, individuelles. de Miragno). Il décide donc de parrir du domicile conjugal et se retrouve, par hasard, à jouer dans un casino de Monte- Carlo avec les 500 lires que son frère lui avait fait parvenir saisi par le social t Feu Mathias Pascal, L'individu poul couvrir les frais d'enterrement de leur mère, frais qui Pirandello m de Luigi avaient cependant été, déjà assurés en totalité par une tante (< capricieuse >> et << intraitable >>, qui se prénomme Scholas- Dans Feu Mathias Pascal, Pirandello nous parle du monde tique). Il gagne ainsi une petite forrune (8t000 lires) et décide en partant, comme à son habitude, d'un cas << étrange social de retourner chez lui, fier de son gain et bien décidé à snober différent au pius haut point (p. 6). Ce sont les mots du et " sa belle-mère. Mais dans le train qui le conduit vers son vil- héros-narateur qui, dans ù avant-propos' explique-pourquoi il l?9., apprend par un journal italien son décès officier par sui- décidé à éôrire son histoire personnelle peu banale, !l s'est -hi,s- cide. L'information est confirmée par Le Feuillet, journal local de celui qui est mort à deuf reprises. Ce que Pirandello toire de Miraglg dans lequel il peut lire sa nécrologie etl'explication veut mettre en évidence, c'est le pouvoir qu'a le monde social d'un suicide dû au chagrin causé par la double mort. ùn autre de faire exister ou de renvoyer au néant les individus, et ce que lui, dgnt le cadavre était en décomposition, a été pris pour plus qu'il s'appuie sor des institutions officielles (la loi àiautant ^Ii celui qui était recherché depuis sa disparition. refresentants). invite le lecteur à prendre conscience r"r Mathias Pascal, qui a déjà fait l'expérience du sentiment "t totii" d'un monde social qui détermine les à" ii-pàssible - d'enfermement et d'absurdité de I'existence à la lecture de cer- de toute part et lui assigne toujours une place ou un individus tains ouvrages philosophiques contenus dans la bibliothèque tout en suggérant que I'une des prises de recul pol- statut - Boccamazza't, voit dani ceite disparition officiellement attestée sibles, bien que tr-ù inconfortable, est celle que permet la

61.

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Quand Robert Park écrit « La ville » (1915). Essai de scientométrie qualitative par Pierre LANNOY

| Sciences Humaines | Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines

2004/2 - N° 11 ISSN 1622-468X | pages 157 à 184

Pour citer cet article : — Lannoy P., Quand Robert Park écrit « La ville » (1915). Essai de scientométrie qualitative, Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines 2004/2, N° 11, p. 157-184.

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Quand Robert Park écrit « La ville » (1915). Essai de scientométrie qualitative

Pierre LANNOY

Résumé La production sociologique est, comme toute autre activité sociale, une activité située et incarnée, assurée par des individus insérés dans des rapports sociaux concrets. L’hypothèse suivie ici pose que cette situation influe sur le contenu même des écrits savants et, par conséquent, que celle-ci peut en retour y être décelée. Ce point de vue nous a amené à découvrir dans l’article que le sociologue américain Robert Park rédigea en 1915 au sujet de la ville une préoccupation intellectuelle qui n’est pas celle communément identifiée aujourd’hui. Plutôt, en effet, que d’y trouver la présentation d’un programme de recherche, nous y avons décelé la réponse à une injonction contradictoire (enseigner une démarche de recherche, l’enquête sociale, dont Park doutait de la valeur) que seules la trajectoire et la position sociales de son auteur permettent de saisir pleinement. Sur la base de données biographiques précises, notre étude décrit la genèse de l’extériorité et de l’hostilité que Park entretenait vis-à-vis du mouvement d’enquête sociale, alors dominant dans la sociologie américaine, et montre que cette opposition explique largement la logique et l’originalité de son texte sur la ville.

Mots-clés : Robert Park – École de Chicago – Biographie – Enquête sociale – Réformisme américain – Sociologie urbaine.

Abstract : When Robert E. Park Wrote « The City » (1915). An Essay in Qualitative Scientometry Sociological production is a situated and embodied activity carried out by individuals inserted in actual social relations. It is here hypothesized that this feature has an influence upon the content of scholarly literature and that it can be revealed in the scientific text itself. This hypothesis is followed in order to shed a new light on The City, the famous paper written in 1915 by the American sociologist Robert E. Park. Generally presented as a manifesto for an autonomous urban sociology, our study shows that its conception was actually motivated by Park’s hostility and exteriority towards the social survey movement which dominated the American sociological field at the time and about which Park was asked to teach when he affiliated with the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago. Biographical evidences are presented in order to describe the genesis of Park’s animosity towards the social survey movement and its influence on the 1915 version of The City is carefully evaluated.

Keywords: Robert E. Park - Chicago School of Sociology – Biography – Social Survey – American Reform - Urban Sociology.

Revue d'Histoire des Sciences Humaines

« Lorsque nous rencontrons les mots dans l’écriture et dans l’imprimé, ce qui nous égare c’est l’uniformité de leur aspect. Car leur utilisation n’apparaît pas si clairement ».

WITTGENSTEIN, Investigations philosophiques.

L’article que le sociologue américain Robert E. Park publie dans le numéro de mars 1915 de l’American Journal of Sociology, sous le titre « The City : Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the City Environment », est généralement présenté comme le texte fondateur de la sociologie urbaine en général, et de la fameuse école de Chicago en particulier 1. S’il est en effet une constante dans les nombreuses études qui ont fleuri depuis les années 1970 au sujet des productions associées à la tradition sociologique de Chicago, c’est bien cette idée selon laquelle ce premier article de Park sur la ville doit être lu comme l’exposition d’un programme de recherche dont les études menées ultérieurement à Chicago ne seront en réalité que l’accomplissement. C’est sans doute Everett Hughes qui énonce pour la première fois ce récit dans son introduction à la réédition posthume des œuvres de Park : « Au moment où il arriva à l’Université de Chicago, Park rédigea et publia un long article intitulé "La ville : quelques suggestions pour l’étude du comportement humain dans l’environnement urbain". Les propositions qu’il contient devinrent le programme de recherche de Park lui-même, de ses étudiants et de nombreux collègues autant dans d’autres disciplines qu’en sociologie ; un programme réalisé en partie dans The Hobo, The Gold Coast and the Slum, The Ghetto, The Gang et d’autres études des types citadins et des espaces urbains. Ces suggestions n’ont pas été épuisées par près de trente-cinq ans de travail intense mené par une armée sans cesse croissante d’observateurs des villes et de la vie citadine » 2.

L’étude qui suit voudrait précisément démontrer que, contrairement à cette accep- tion commune, la logique qui présida à la rédaction originelle de The City relève moins de la présentation d’un programme de recherche sur la ville que d’une critique radicale d’une pratique dominante dans la sociologie de l’époque, généralement dési- gnée sous l’expression de mouvement d’enquête sociale, social survey movement en anglais3. L’idée selon laquelle Park tenait à prendre distance par rapport à ce courant sociologique n’est certes pas inédite ; différents auteurs ont mis en évidence le rapport ambigu qu’entretenait Park vis-à-vis de ce mouvement 4. Mais si tous trouvent des indices de cette ambiguïté dans les textes tardifs de Park (ceux publiés après la Première Guerre mondiale, et généralement après 1925, c’est-à-dire une fois établies la réputation et l’autorité académiques de Park), aucun n’a posé la question de savoir si sa position avait eu une influence sur la rédaction même de ses premiers textes et en particulier sur celle de The City. Répondre à cette interrogation exige cependant de rompre avec une conception symbolique de Park en terme de maître ou de figure de la sociologie 5 et d’admettre que la position qu’il occupait en 1914-1915 dans le champ de la sociologie américaine était objectivement une position marginale. Ce n’est

1 REMY, 1989 ; SAINT-ARNAUD, 1997 ; RAULIN, 2001. 2 HUGHES, 1952, 5-6. 3 Pour des présentations éclairantes de ce courant, cf. GORDON, 1973 ; LECLERC, 1979, 64-72 ; CUIN, GRESLE, 1992, 96-101 ; SAINT-ARNAUD, 1997, 73-78 ; CHAPOULIE, 2001, 51-56. 4 MATTHEWS, 1977 ; BULMER, 1984 ; BRESLAU, 1988 ; LAL, 1990 ; CHAPOULIE, 2001. 5 HUGHES, 1969 ; COSER, 1971.

158 Pierre Lannoy qu’une fois cette rupture accomplie qu’il est possible de rendre intelligible l’économie générale de la rédaction de The City – intelligibilité aujourd’hui perdue (au profit de ce récit en terme de programme) pour des raisons que nous mettrons également en lumière en comparant les deux versions de ce texte, parues à dix ans d’intervalle. En effet, l’évidence selon laquelle ce texte a un statut programmatique repose en partie sur cette idée fausse mais largement répandue selon laquelle ces deux versions seraient identiques 6. Or, on voudrait précisément montrer que les circonstances de la conception initiale de The City et celles de sa réédition une décennie plus tard, sous une forme modifiée, ne sont pas identiques et que, par conséquent, ces deux versions exigent chacune une lecture distincte pour saisir pleinement leur visée et leur portée respectives. Cette posture analytique suppose de considérer que l’écriture sociologique peut révéler tout à la fois le contexte social général dans lequel elle est produite et la trajectoire socio-biographique singulière d’un auteur7. Toute production savante est en effet une prise de position intellectuelle mais également sociale, c’est-à-dire qu’elle possè- de tout à la fois une dimension cognitive et une dimension pratique, précisément parce qu’elle positionne son auteur dans un faisceau de relations concrètes avec des autres producteurs de savoirs (par définition immatériels). On peut alors considérer une publication comme l’inscription matérielle de cette prise de position et y déceler la cartographie de ces relations telle que la dessine l’auteur lui-même. La tâche de ce qui pourrait être appelé une scientométrie qualitative consisterait alors à rendre intelligible cette inscription, à la décoder, à en (re)trouver la clé de lecture 8. Travail- lant sur un texte ou un corpus de textes limité, cette approche tente d’élucider les rapports qui existent entre son économie rédactionnelle (dont les thématiques, les citations, les emprunts conceptuels… sont les indices) et la trajectoire socio-biographique de son auteur (sur laquelle nous renseigne la recherche historiographique). Ne visant donc pas à dégager la logique d’une œuvre (qui est généralement celle d’une vie, ou du moins d’une carrière) mais bien d’une production savante précise, une telle posture cherche à éviter les biais interprétatifs qui guettent généralement l’histoire des seules idées pour mieux retrouver, au cœur même des textes scientifiques, « les interrogations et les préoccupations réelles des acteurs historiques » 9.

6 Dans la préface de l’ouvrage de 1925 où il fait paraître pour la seconde fois The City, Park précise qu’il s’agit d’une version modifiée du texte qui avait été publié antérieurement. Mais Hughes, dans sa réédition des œuvres de Park, est le premier à trahir ces précisions : il y propose la version de 1925 en affirmant qu’elle fut publiée dans le numéro de mars 1916 (sic) de l’American Journal of Sociology, puis rééditée dans l’ouvrage The City, sans signaler que les deux versions sont différentes. La réédition de The City que présente M. Janowitz en 1967 dans sa collection The Heritage of Sociology ne comprend pas la préface originale, mais une nouvelle introduction de l’éditeur, qui ne mentionne pas ce point de détail. LINDNER (1996, 50) recense les auteurs anglophones faisant preuve de la même imprécision. En France, le plus célèbre des ouvrages consacrés à l’École de Chicago, celui qui l’a fait (re)découvrir au lectorat francophone (GRAFMEYER, JOSEPH, 1990), situe lui aussi la parution de l’article de Park sur la ville en 1916 et contient également la traduction de la version de 1925, sans préciser qu’il s’agit d’une version modifiée. À l’heure actuelle, la traduction française de la version de 1915 n’a encore jamais été publiée. 7 LASLETT, 1991; KAESER, 2003. 8 Pour une présentation générale de la scientométrie, cf. CALLON, et al., 1993, et en particulier 22-24 pour l’esquisse d’un programme de scientométrie qualitative. 9 KAESER, 2003, 139. Deux pièges sont à éviter : le présentocentrisme interprétatif qui amène à juger de la validité ou de l’invalidité de travaux anciens à partir de critères épistémologiques actuels et de l’état présent des connaissances ; l’idéalisme réducteur qui fait voir le rapport des sociologues à leur objet

159 Revue d'Histoire des Sciences Humaines

Appliquée à l’étude du texte de Park sur la ville, cette démarche nous amène à dé- fendre la thèse suivante : celui-ci doit être interprété comme l’expression de la position de son auteur sur la question de l’enquête sociale, entendue comme pratique sociologique, bien plus que sur la ville en tant qu’objet sociologique. Park fut en effet dans l’obligation, en prenant ses nouvelles fonctions à Chicago, de prodiguer un enseignement sur l’enquête sociale, dont ledit texte sera l’expression académique. Mais la trajectoire socio-biographique de Park va l’amener à produire un texte décalé par comparaison aux autres productions de même statut publiées à l’époque sur cette question, trajectoire qui rend intelligible l’économie générale de la version initiale de The City. Le texte qui suit expose les étapes qui permettent d’étayer cette interpréta- tion. Dans un premier temps seront précisées les circonstances biographiques et institutionnelles dans lesquelles Park produira son article sur la ville – ou plus exactement sur l’investigation du milieu citadin, apanage des enquêteurs sociaux. Ensuite, on précisera les relations qu’entretint Park avec ses animateurs. Dans un troisième temps, le traitement que ce dernier réserve aux objets et aux acteurs de ce mouvement dans The City, au niveau cognitif si l’on peut dire, sera détaillé, sans entrer cependant dans un exposé pur de la théorie parkienne. Enfin, on s’attachera à montrer les diffé- rences qui existent entre la première et la seconde version de ce texte, parues à dix ans d’intervalle, à la fois en terme de contenu et de contexte. Cette comparaison viendra soutenir notre interprétation des motivations qui ont présidé à sa rédaction originale.

Les circonstances d’une production

Pour retrouver la logique qui présida à la rédaction de The City, il faut rappeler à quel point de sa trajectoire biographique se situait Park à ce moment précis mais éga- lement établir les responsabilités et obligations institutionnelles auxquelles il devait faire face et qui pesèrent d’un poids certain sur la genèse de son article de 1915.

Une étape dans la vie de Robert Park

Lorsque parut The City, en mars 1915, Park venait de fêter ses 51 ans (il était né le 14 février 1864). Il avait passé sa première année complète à l’Université de Chicago où il exerçait alors en tant que professorial lecturer au sein du Département de sociologie (titre qui s’apparente à celui de maître de conférence aujourd’hui). Il avait en effet quitté sa fonction antérieure dans le courant de l’année 1912, celle d’assistant, de conseiller et de chargé des relations publiques du leader noir Booker T. Washington, qu’il exerçait depuis 1905. En cette qualité, il avait partagé son temps entre le Normal and Industrial Institut fondé en 1881 par ce dernier à Tuskegee en Alabama et sa résidence familiale de Wollaston, une commune de la banlieue de Boston, où vivaient son épouse et ses quatre enfants. C’est à Tuskegee, lors d’une conférence internatio- nale sur la situation des Noirs organisée en avril 1912, que Park rencontre pour la première fois William I. Thomas, alors professeur au département de sociologie de l’Université de Chicago. Attirés intellectuellement l’un par l’autre, ils vont établir uniquement comme une question intellectuelle et non aussi comme un problème pratique, c’est-à-dire incarné et situé, engageant des valeurs, bien sûr, mais également des prises de positions scientifiques au sens symbolique, institutionnel et matériel du terme (BRESLAU, 1988).

160 Pierre Lannoy entre eux un commerce épistolaire intense qui va amener Thomas à proposer la candidature de Park à l’Université de Chicago. Son engagement se fait quelque peu attendre mais, alors que Park avait déjà signifié à Washington son intention de le quitter, il est invité à prononcer une conférence à la réunion de septembre 1913 de la Société Américaine de Sociologie. Intitulée « Racial Assimilation in Secondary Groups, with Particular Reference to the Negro », celle-ci sera ensuite publiée dans le numéro de mars 1914 de l’American Journal of Sociology (ci-après AJS), soit exactement un an avant The City. Pour Park, c’est le premier texte au statut académique qu’il publie et également le seul qu’il comptera à son actif lors de la parution de The City – à l’exception de sa thèse, rédigée en allemand et publiée en 1904, qui ne sera jamais traduite de son vivant (elle ne le sera qu’en 1972). Jusque là, il n’avait en effet publié que des articles (et des ouvrages, tous signés par Washington) de teneur journalistique, certains au ton dénonciateur en vogue à l’époque 10. Au contenu conceptuel plus que ténu, ils portaient tous sur la question du statut des Noirs, en Amérique ou ailleurs, et tout particu- lièrement de leur rapport avec le monde rural. Dans aucun de ces textes Park ne s’intéresse au phénomène urbain ou ne mentionne l’influence de la ville sur les sujets qu’il traite 11. En fait, son expérience de la vie métropolitaine remonte aux années où il fut journaliste et s’étend jusqu’à son retour d’Allemagne, où il séjourna de 1899 à 1903 pour rédiger sa thèse. Les dix années passées dans le sud rural aux côtés de Washington peuvent-elles alors être envisagées comme une simple parenthèse dans la vie de Park, au point de pouvoir considérer la rédaction de The City comme la traduction directe de son expérience journalistique antérieure en un langage sociologique ? Telle est la thèse développée par Park lui-même et qui sera communément admise par les historiens de la sociologie, en particulier par Rolf Lindner qui présente la sociologie de Park, notamment urbaine, comme le produit de son habitus de journaliste 12. Mais cette interprétation omet de répondre à deux questions fondamentales. La première est celle de savoir pourquoi Park publie un texte sur la ville en 1915, alors qu’il n’avait jamais traité ce thème auparavant. La seconde concerne l’identification des influences qui ont pesé sur la conception et la rédaction de cet article.

Un texte sur la ville pour fixer l’enquête sociale

Si Park fut repéré par Thomas à cause de l’originalité de son analyse de la question raciale, son recrutement à l’Université de Chicago le confronta à de nouvelles obligations, notamment en matière d’enseignement. Outre le cours intitulé « The Negro in America » qu’il donna dès 1914, Park fut chargé pour l’année 1915 de

10 Il s’agit du ton caractéristique du mouvement dit de muckraking (littéralement « raclage de boue » ou « déterrement des scandales ») qui transforma la pratique journalistique au cours de la première décennie du XXème siècle (SAINT-ARNAUD, 1997, 58-60). Il s’agit en fait d’un journalisme de dénonciation basé sur l’observation et la récolte de faits touchant aux problèmes sociaux et économiques du temps, et s’exprimant dans des journaux et magazines à grand tirage. On trouvera les principaux articles de Park écrits entre 1900 et 1913 dans le livre de LYMAN (1992). 11 Même dans sa thèse (PARK, 1972) on ne trouve aucune référence à la ville, que ce soit comme concept, milieu ou contexte des formes de l’action collective qu’elle cherche à définir d’un point de vue sociologique. 12 BAKER, 1973, 254 ; SHILS, 1991, 126 ; LINDNER, 1996.

161 Revue d'Histoire des Sciences Humaines trois autres cours : « Crowd and the Public », « The Newspaper » et « The Survey ». Les trois premiers correspondaient à ses centres d’intérêt : le problème noir aux États- Unis, auquel il avait déjà consacré une dizaine d’années de sa vie ; la question des comportements collectifs et de la distinction entre une foule et un public, qui fut le sujet de sa thèse défendue à l’Université de Heidelberg en 1903 ; l’analyse de la presse, dont il avait une connaissance interne, ayant travaillé comme journaliste pendant plusieurs années avant son séjour en Allemagne 13. Par contre, le thème (et la pratique) de l’enquête devaient lui être moins familiers. En effet, comme nous le montrerons en détail dans le paragraphe suivant, il semble non seulement que Park n’ait jamais réalisé d’enquête au sens plein du terme, mais en outre qu’il n’ait pas entretenu à l’époque beaucoup d’accointances avec les animateurs de ce qui constituait alors un véritable mouvement social. Toujours est-il qu’il se voyait dans la situation de professer ce cours sur l’enquête sociale et qu’il lui revenait de lui donner une structure et un support – ce que Park réalisa en écrivant The City. Cette interpréta- tion, inédite à notre connaissance, se fonde sur trois éléments factuels. Le premier élément se rapporte aux enseignements dont Park fut chargé à Chicago. Le tableau 1 fournit la liste des cours dispensés au département de sociologie de l’Université de Chicago pour la période où il y était professeur 14. On constate alors que l’enseignement de la sociologie urbaine fut monopolisé jusqu’en 1925 par Scott Bedford, année où il quitta l’Université. À partir de cette date, c’est Burgess, et non Park, qui prend en charge l’enseignement de la sociologie urbaine proprement dite. The City n’a donc pas pu servir à Park de support pour un cours de sociologie de la ville, puisque celui-ci ne fut jamais en situation d’enseigner cette matière, laquelle ne fut d’ailleurs pas constituée en discipline académique avant le milieu des années 1920. Par conséquent, si l’on suit l’idée que la rédaction de The City constitue néan- moins pour Park un « prolongement de ses activités d’enseignement » 15, elle ne peut être rapportée logiquement qu’à son cours sur l’enquête sociale.

13 LAL, 1990, 22-23. 14 Les données du tableau 1 sont reprises à HARVEY, 1987. 15 CHAPOULIE, 2001, 97.

162 Pierre Lannoy

Tableau 1. Enseignements relatifs à la ville et enseignements de Park au Département de sociologie de l’Université de Chicago, 1914-1933

Cours sur la ville et titulaire Cours donnés par Park Modern Cities – Bedford, 1914-1925 The Negro in America – 1914-1933 - n. disp. 1926-1939 Crowd & Public – 1915-1933 Urban Communities – n. disp. 1914-1917 The Newspaper – 1915-1933 Municipal Sociology – n. disp. 1918 The (Social) Survey – 1915-1933 - Bedford 1919-1923 - n. disp. 1921-1933 Urban Sociology – Bedford 1924-1925 Field Studies – 1917-1919, 1925-1931 - n. disp. 1926-1928 Research in Social Psychology – 1917-1928 Growth & the City – Burgess 1926-1932 Race and Nationalities – 1919-1930 Local Community Studies – Burgess 1925- Social Forces – 1920-1932 1936 Teaching Sociology in Colleges – 1921-1933 Study of Society – 1923 Human Ecology – 1925-1933 (McKenzie 1929) Human Migrations – 1926-1933 Modern German Sociology - 1926

Un deuxième argument en faveur de cette interprétation est fourni par les témoi- gnages des étudiants de Park. Helen McGill Hughes rapporte ainsi que « dans son cours "The Survey", il [Park] avait organisé ses théories du comportement urbain ; celui-ci fut bientôt rebaptisé The City » 16. Même si rien n’indique que cette dénomi- nation nouvelle eût jamais un caractère officiel, ce souvenir – le seul, à notre connaissance, à le faire en ces termes – établit clairement le recouvrement des deux problé- matiques dans l’esprit de Park. Le troisième élément sur lequel s’appuie notre interprétation concerne la forme même du texte de The City. Celui-ci est en effet composé de paragraphes théoriques alternant avec des listes de questions pouvant être posées dans l’optique proposée par l’auteur, ce qui incite à penser que Park les utilisa comme les questions typiques de sa propre démarche d’analyse de la vie citadine. Dans cette optique, la présence même de ces interrogations relève moins d’une logique de construction et d’élaboration d’un programme de recherche proprement dit que de l’obligation de fournir des éléments susceptibles de constituer une « enquête » (Park dira une « investigation ») censée servir de modèle aux étudiants ou aux lecteurs. Si certes les questions que posent Park sont largement différentes de celles que posent habituellement les enquêteurs sociaux, il n’en reste pas moins que la structure de son texte vise clairement à introduire à l’exercice de la recherche de terrain. Barbara Lal fait ainsi remarquer : « Pris conjoin- tement, les sujets que Park présentait comme étant susceptibles de nourrir l’investigation de la ville constituait le profil pour une étude complète de communauté. D’un autre côté, chaque sujet pris isolément pouvait être utilisé comme base pour l’étude d’un aspect spécifique de la vie sociale » 17. En d’autres mots, tout étudiant intéressé par la réalisation d’une enquête sociale (au sens où il pouvait l’entendre à l’époque) pouvait trouver son compte dans le texte de Park – même si ce dernier, comme nous le montrerons en détail, en avait complètement redéfini la signification et la portée.

16 HUGHES, 1980, 73. 17 LAL, 1990, 23.

163 Revue d'Histoire des Sciences Humaines

Tous ces éléments soutiennent l’idée selon laquelle Park, dans The City, traite bien de la question de l’enquête sociale et du rapport que la sociologie devait selon lui entretenir avec elle. Comme nous allons le montrer, Park était cependant largement étranger et hostile au milieu des enquêteurs sociaux, extériorité qui le plaçait face à une sorte d’injonction contradictoire, puisque fraîchement arrivé à Chicago, il se vit chargé d’un cours censé introduire les étudiants aux démarches et objectifs de la démarche de ceux dont il s’était progressivement détaché au cours de la période qui sépare son retour d’Allemagne en 1903 et son installation à Chicago en 1914.

Park et les enquêteurs sociaux : extériorité et concurrence

Si l’on veut comprendre pleinement l’économie rédactionnelle de The City, il faut prendre connaissance d’un certain nombre d’événements qui vont marquer la vie professionnelle de Park et, par là, qui vont influencer sa conception de l’investigation sociologique du milieu urbain et de la sociologie en général. Comme on l’a dit, celui- ci entre dans le monde académique à un âge avancé et sa véritable reconnaissance par le milieu sociologique ne sera pas gagnée avant 1921, date de parution de l’Introduction to the Science of Sociology, ouvrage magistral rédigé avec Ernest Burgess. Avant cela, Park sera plusieurs fois mis en concurrence sur le marché de l’emploi avec des producteurs établis du savoir – concurrence qui allait engendrer une distance définitive d’avec le mouvement d’enquête sociale. Fils de son temps, Park possédait pourtant un profil qui le destinait à entretenir la plus grande proximité avec le milieu des reformers et des social scientists dont les enquêtes de communautés urbaines étaient l’outil d’action privilégié. Travaillant comme journaliste au cours des années 1890 dans les principales métropoles améri- caines, il participe à l’élan réformiste de la presse à scandales et comme il le dira lui- même plus tard : « Je devins un réformiste » 18. Poursuivant cette orientation, il entre- prend une thèse à Harvard qui porte sur le public comme forme sociale, partageant comme nombre de ses contemporains cette conception selon laquelle le changement social passe par la formation d’une opinion publique éclairée et la généralisation d’une information de qualité 19. Mais sa thèse, ainsi que la vie académique, le déçoi- vent 20. Il s’engage alors dans la Congo Reform Association, dont il fonde la branche américaine en 1904, organisation typiquement réformiste visant à dénoncer et transformer la situation du Congo, alors propriété personnelle du roi Léopold II de Belgique. Il sort cependant déçu de cette expérience, découvrant assez naïvement les motivations inavouées de l’engagement des missionnaires baptistes dans cette cause. Cette expérience, qui pour la première fois fit naître en lui un sentiment d’aversion pour ceux qu’il appellera plus tard les do-gooders, ne fera cependant qu’annoncer une série non négligeable d’événements qui scelleront définitivement son opposition aux sociologues ouvertement réformistes. Le premier de ces événements concerne l’engagement de Park aux côtés de B.T. Washington, dont il devient officieusement le nègre (ghost-writer). Ce poste fut

18 BAKER, 1973, 254. 19 MATTSON, 1998. 20 C’est pour cette raison qu’il aurait décliné l’offre que lui fit Albion Small en 1904 de rejoindre le département de sociologie de l’Université de Chicago. Sur cet événement et ses sentiments à cette époque, cf. RAUSHENBUSH, 1979, 41.

164 Pierre Lannoy en fait initialement proposé à William E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), alors professeur de sciences sociales à l’Université d’Atlanta. Avant de devenir une figure emblématique de la lutte des Noirs américains pour la défense de leurs droits, Du Bois enseigna la sociologie et développa dans ce cadre un large programme d’enquête sociale portant principalement sur la ville, auquel il attribuait, tout comme ses contemporains, des vertus à la fois scientifiques et sociales 21. S’il refuse cependant le poste que lui propose Washington dès 1903, c’est non seulement à cause de ses divergences de vue avec le maître de Tuskegee, mais également parce que la fonction lui eût conféré très peu de prestige 22. Park, par contre, peu sûr de lui, accepte la proposition de Washington et taira son nom d’auteur pendant huit ans, malgré une production prolifique. Si le début de la carrière de Park à Tuskegee est marqué par cette concurrence avec une figure montante de la politique américaine, son interruption donnera lieu elle aussi à de vives contrariétés. Bien qu’au cours de cette période Park explora d’une manière toute journalistique mais passionnée les populations modestes aussi bien du Sud américain que d’Europe, il ne réalisa cependant aucune enquête au sens strict du terme, c’est-à-dire une enquête aux visées scientifiques. L’opportunité d’en mener une se présente néanmoins en 1912 lorsqu’il est pressenti comme étant l’homme le plus apte à effectuer une enquête sur la situation des écoles noires aux États-Unis, dont une donation du millionnaire blanc Anson Phelps Stokes à l’établissement de Booker Washington couvrira les frais. Malgré l’entier soutien de ce dernier, la direction de cette enquête est confiée au sociologue blanc Thomas Jesse Jones, formé par Giddings à l’Université Columbia de New York 23. Cette décision laissa Park plein d’amertume et nourrit son interrogation quant à la teneur scientifique des enquêtes sociales. Constituant une nouvelle déception personnelle quant à son engagement réformiste, elle fut surtout un adjuvant majeur dans sa décision d’accepter l’offre que venait de lui avancer Thomas. La connexion entre les deux événements est clairement établie par ce courrier que Park adresse à Washington le 3 décembre 1912 : « Je fus marqué, en parlant avec M. Stokes, par le fait que la raison pour laquelle je n’obtiendrais pas ce travail [i.e. la réalisation de l’enquête] ou aurais peu de chance de l’obtenir est que je ne semblais pas représenter la science. Peut-être y avait-il aussi une méfiance quant à la capacité de quelqu’un attaché à une école noire de réaliser un travail scientifique. Ceci supporte le bien-fondé de mon projet de connexion avec l’Université de Chicago. M. Thomas me l’a proposé. Ainsi, lorsque je voudrai faire du travail sociologique à partir de Tuskegee, j’aurai un titre et le soutien de l’Université » 24.

21 Cf. les études éditées sous la direction de Du Bois par les presses de l’Université d’Atlanta entre 1896 et 1906 (DU BOIS, 1968). Réalisées par ses étudiants, et avec très peu de moyens matériels, elles constituent les premières tentatives d’une exploration sociologique extensive de la communauté urbaine noire. Du Bois, auteur de The Philadephia Negro (1899), la première étude de communauté urbaine américaine, est l’initiateur d’une lecture de la ségrégation urbaine en termes à la fois économiques (selon les classes sociales) et ethniques, la population noire souffrant selon lui de l’addition des effets de ces deux facteurs (SIMON, 1991 ; SAINT-ARNAUD, 2003). 22 ST. CLAIR, 1983, 84 ; LINDNER, 1996, 45. 23 HARLAN, 1983, 201. Jones, auteur d’une thèse publiée en 1904 sous le titre The Sociology of a New York City Block, collabora également avec les frères Kellogg, auteurs de la célèbre Pittsburgh Survey et fondateurs de la revue The Survey. Comme le précise ODUM (1951, 15), « les Kellogg et Jones étaient [à cette époque] des "sociologues prometteurs" », contrairement à Park. 24 MARSHALL, 1994, 215.

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Si la concurrence new-yorkaise fut donc fatale à ses ambitions d’enquêteur, l’arri- vée de Park à Chicago, même si elle se présentait sous de meilleurs auspices, fut marquée par des circonstances qui auraient pu également tourner à son désavantage et qui, incontestablement, le mirent face à un certain nombre de défis. Chicago était à l’époque un centre extrêmement important en matière de production d’enquêtes sociales urbaines, tout autant sinon plus que New York ou Boston. C’est là en effet qu’était née la très prolifique tradition féminine d’enquête sociale, incarnée et stimulée par Jane Addams (1860-1935). Figure fondatrice et emblématique des mouvements fémi- niste et réformiste, Addams (qui recevra le Prix Nobel de la Paix en 1931) dirige et anime depuis sa création le settlement féminin dit de la Hull House situé sur un terrain mitoyen de l’Université de Chicago, où le travail des résidantes consiste notamment à enquêter, c’est-à-dire à récolter des données sur les conditions de vie des habitants de la métropole, notamment de ses populations les plus défavorisées, immigrés et gens de couleur 25. De cette entreprise collective naîtront en 1895 les célèbres Hull House Maps and Papers (un ouvrage en double volume décrivant très minutieusement les conditions sociales d’existence dans les quartiers les plus déshérités de Chicago) mais également, dans la même veine, une série imposante d’articles dans l’AJS, tous consa- crés à la description des différents quartiers et groupes sociaux de la ville de Chicago 26. Park, qui n’avait plus séjourné à Chicago depuis 1898, n’entretenait cependant aucun lien avec la Hull House et nourrissait d’ailleurs un dédain avéré pour les travaux émanant des « dames réformistes », comme il les nommait lui-même 27. De ce point de vue, il se distinguait des autres membres du département dont il venait de rejoindre les rangs. Qu’il s’agisse de Small, Henderson, Zeublin, Vincent ou même Thomas, tous en effet avaient tissé des liens intellectuels ou professionnels avec Addams et ses collaboratrices et reconnaissaient à des degrés divers l’apport de leur travail à la sociologie 28. Mais, pour Park, Addams n’était pas seulement distante en terme de réseau social, ce qui peut se comprendre par le fait qu’il venait d’arriver à Chicago ; elle était également une concurrente sur le marché académique. En effet, en 1913, quelques temps avant que Park ne se vît offrir un poste au département de sociologie de l’Université de Chicago, Jane Addams déclina la même offre que lui avait faite Albion Small, alors président du département, qui cherchait à remplacer Vincent, largement engagé dans l’action sociale 29. Il semble bien que ces deux offres aient été mutuellement exclusives : d’une part, dans une lettre adressée à Addams, Small se présenta lui-même comme étant confronté à l’obligation de choisir entre « un homme qui développerait son travail dans la lignée de la psychologie sociale » (c’était

25 Institutions de quartier, les social settlements (littéralement « établissements sociaux ») avaient pour but de développer au niveau local des formes nouvelles de solidarité et d’animation sociales (formations pour adultes, commerces et banques coopératives, centres culturels, bibliothèques, infrastructures récréatives, crèches, etc.) à destination des populations défavorisées, dont les enquêtes avaient pour but de déterminer les besoins (KELLOGG, 1934 ; CARSON, 1990). 26 Entre septembre 1910 et novembre 1915 paraîtront ainsi dix articles décrivant les conditions résidentielles à Chicago (« Chicago Housing Conditions »), tous étant signés par des femmes attachées à la Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy (école indépendante pour la formation des travailleurs sociaux qui deviendra en 1920 un département de l’Université) et qui fréquentaient la Hull House. 27 Park déclarera ouvertement son aversion pour l’œuvre des enquêtrices devant ses étudiants : « Le plus grand dommage fait à la ville de Chicago n’est pas le produit des politiciens corrompus ou des criminels, mais des dames réformistes » (cité in RAUSHENBUSH, 1979, 97). 28 DINER, 1980, 56 ; DEEGAN, 2000, 164. 29 DEEGAN, 2000, 81.

166 Pierre Lannoy le souhait de Thomas, qui soutenait la candidature de Park) et une personne qui « ferait glisser l’accent plus dans la ligne du service social » (c’était là la préférence de Small, qui voyait en Addams la personne idéale) 30 ; d’autre part, les difficultés de Small à engager Park aussi rapidement que Thomas l’eût souhaité 31 laissent penser que Small attendait effectivement la réponse d’Addams (qui ne vint pas). Toujours est-il que Park ne fut pas directement engagé comme professeur, mais comme professorial lecturer (un titre inférieur), alors qu’un poste de professeur (certes à mi- temps) fut bien proposé à Addams, qui était à l’époque une figure incontournable du paysage social et sociologique, contrairement à Park qui était inconnu 32. Elle aurait été la personne la plus habilitée à donner ce cours sur l’enquête sociale, elle qui était une pionnière de cette démarche aux États-Unis 33. Tous les éléments que nous venons de rassembler permettent de comprendre un peu mieux ce qui peut avoir poussé Park à produire un texte à la fois si proche et si différent de ce qui se faisait à l’époque. Traiter d’un débat brûlant dont les protago- nistes étaient pour lui à la fois des étrangers et des concurrents sur le marché de la connaissance était en effet l’injonction contradictoire à laquelle il fut confronté en arrivant à Chicago. Sa trajectoire spécifique l’autorisa cependant à répondre à cette charge d’une manière toute particulière : occupant une position objectivement marginale dans le champ académique, Park bénéficiait néanmoins d’une marge de manœu- vre qu’il devait précisément à son indépendance, tout à la fois intellectuelle et sociale, vis-à-vis des figures dominantes du monde académique du moment. Il était en mesure, d’une certaine manière, de choisir ses propres filiations et d’offrir un regard exté- rieur sur les pratiques établies de la recherche urbaine de l’époque.

Le texte sociologique comme inscription sublimée des rapports sociaux

Park ne pouvait cependant exprimer par écrit son aversion pour le monde des do- gooders et autres reformers, sentiment dont la genèse biographique vient d’être décrite. Sa position allait par contre s’inscrire de manière sublimée dans les formes de l’écriture académique. Ceci va se traduire au niveau intellectuel par différentes stratégies de traitement d’un objet, l’enquête sociale, dont la mise à distance est sa première préoccupation. En effet, à partir du moment où l’on considère The City comme un texte traitant, à sa manière bien sûr, de l’enquête sociale, on peut en opérer une lecture nouvelle qui dégage la conception qu’avait Park de cette pratique et, par là, qui éclaire également la théorie sociale générale qu’il était occupé à développer à l’époque. Le poids qu’ont pu avoir sur le développement de sa pensée son extériorité et son hostilité vis-à-vis du milieu des producteurs d’enquêtes sociales apparaît

30 DINER, 1997, 40. 31 RAUSHENBUSH, 1979, 75-76. 32 Park était parfaitement conscient du caractère marginal de son statut : « Je n’ai pas atterri à Chicago d’une manière régulière, mais comme maître de conférence [professorial lecturer], se souvient-il en 1927. Un maître de conférence était supposé posséder une connaissance spécifique. J’avais une connaissance spécifique au sujet du Noir, et j’avais écrit une thèse sur la psychologie collective » (BAKER, 1973, 259- 260). Il ne lui était donc reconnu aucune compétence spéciale ni en matière d’enquête, ni en matière de sociologie urbaine. 33 La description que fit Small à Addams de l’enseignement qu’elle aurait à assurer si elle acceptait un poste au département de sociologie précisait bien qu’il s’agissait de l’encadrement des étudiants dans la réalisation de travaux de terrain (DINER, 1997, 40 ; DEEGAN, 2000, 81).

167 Revue d'Histoire des Sciences Humaines d’autant plus clairement si l’on compare son article à d’autres textes produits sur cette question à la même époque. Cette comparaison met alors en évidence deux singula- rités de son texte : d’une part l’impasse qui y est faite sur les enquêtes urbaines existantes et, d’autre part, au niveau théorique, le recours non pas à la problématique d’a- nalyse du phénomène urbain répandue à l’époque mais à la seule problématisation qu’il maîtrisait parfaitement à ce moment, à savoir celle qu’il avait lui-même dévelop- pée au sujet des phénomènes collectifs et plus particulièrement des relations ethniques. Ces deux caractères vont nous permettre de déceler autre chose qu’une « intention programmatique bien arrêtée » dans son article de 1915 34.

Des citations et des omissions significatives

Si l’on part du niveau le plus pragmatique de l’écriture académique, à savoir celui du choix du vocabulaire et des références à d’autres travaux, on peut identifier le premier déplacement qu’opère Park par rapport à ses contemporains sur la question de l’enquête sociale. Tout d’abord, au niveau lexical, celui-ci évite soigneusement d’utiliser les expressions survey ou social surveys, qui désignaient un type bien défini de pratique sociologique. Sur les 36 pages de son article, il n’utilisera en effet le mot survey qu’à une seule reprise et de manière déictique, pour désigner certaines enquê- tes sociales entrant dans le type des pratiques de publicité sociale 35. À aucun autre moment il n’a recours à ce vocable ; il lui préfère celui d’« investigation » (qui, en plus de figurer dans le titre de l’article, sera utilisé à dix reprises) ou d’« étude » (utilisé à treize reprises). Ce choix de vocabulaire n’est pas le fruit du hasard mais bien d’une stratégie pratique de mise à distance d’une position tout à la fois intellectuelle et sociale. Il constitue une première modalité de réponse à l’injonction contradictoire à laquelle Park était confronté. Si l’on compare son texte à celui que publie Burgess un an plus tard, alors qu’il n’était pas encore attaché à l’Université de Chicago, et qui porte également sur l’étude sociologique des communautés urbaines 36, on voit que le mot survey, en plus de figurer dans le titre, est utilisé à 70 reprises, soit près de huit fois par page ! Cette négation de l’enquête sociale se marquera également au niveau de la syntaxe académique, et notamment des citations. Park fera très parcimonieusement référence aux enquêtes existantes et à leurs auteurs. Dans leurs modalités de citation, et aussi dans leur absence même, on peut lire la différence radicale qui caractérise Park par rapport aux autres observateurs de la vie urbaine. Les seules enquêtes sociales qu’il cite explicitement dans The City sont celles de Paul Kellogg sur Pittsburgh (publiées entre 1910 et 1914 et sans doute les plus célèbres à l’époque) et celles menées notamment par la fondation Russell Sage qui avait créé un département d’enquête en 1912 37. Park les présente comme « une forme supérieure de journalisme » ayant un « objectif pratique » cherchant à réaliser des « réformes radicales » ; autrement dit, ces enquêtes sont intéressantes moins par leurs contenus ou conclusions que par leur existence même en tant qu’incarnations de ce

34 SAINT-ARNAUD, 1997, 78. 35 PARK, 1915a, 605. 36 BURGESS, 1916. 37 BULMER, 1984, 66.

168 Pierre Lannoy mouvement – dit de « publicité sociale » (social advertising) – visant à exercer un contrôle social en modifiant l’opinion publique. Et de généraliser ensuite son propos : « C’est comme source de contrôle social que l’opinion publique devient importante dans des sociétés fondées sur les relations secondaires, sociétés dont les grandes villes sont un type » 38. On comprend mieux toute la distance qui sépare un tel propos de la conception commune du rôle et du statut des enquêtes de communauté telles que développées à l’époque non seulement, comme on l’a déjà vu, en comparant le style de Park à la manière dont Burgess, par exemple, s’exprime encore dans son article de 1916 sur l’enquête sociale 39, mais également en dégageant les raisons théoriques pour lesquelles Park leur confère un tel statut. Sa conception comporte en effet une dimension plus générale dans la mesure où elle redéfinit implicitement l’ontologie des phénomènes sociaux. Selon Park, les objets sur lesquels enquêtent les sociologues « engagés » ou « appliqués » ne valent pas pour eux-mêmes. L’investigation idéale n’a en effet pas pour but de produire des connaissances permettant d’agir sur eux ; l’objectif de la science sociale, selon lui, est de décrire le « comportement humain » et, par conséquent, les phénomènes sur lesquels enquêtent les « pathologistes sociaux » (comme dira Mills) ne doivent être envi- sagés que comme un accès à cette réalité fondamentale et générale de la « nature humaine ». Dans son paragraphe consacré à l’unité de voisinage, Park signale que les animateurs des « œuvres sociales » « ont développé certaines méthodes et une technique de stimulation et de contrôle des communautés locales », faisant une référence évidente, même si implicite, à l’enquête sociale. Il précise alors : « nous devrions mener, parallèlement à l’étude de ces organismes, l’étude de ces méthodes et de cette technique, puisque c’est bien la méthode par laquelle les objets sont contrôlés en pratique qui révèle leur nature essentielle, c’est-à-dire leur caractère prévisible » 40. Un peu plus loin, toujours au sujet des dispositifs développés par les travailleurs sociaux, il ajoute que ceux-ci « devraient être étudiés non seulement pour eux-mêmes mais aussi pour ce qu’ils peuvent nous révéler du comportement humain et de la nature humaine en général » 41. Park suggère donc un changement de focale dans l’observation des phénomènes urbains : plutôt que de les envisager comme des « problè- mes » sociétaux que la science sociale doit traiter, le sociologue devrait les considérer comme des expressions d’une réalité fondamentale, celle de la nature humaine et de sa dimension collective, dont il faut chercher l’essence nomologique. C’est là le sens qu’il donne également à l’idée de la ville comme laboratoire, idée développée et défendue par le mouvement d’enquête sociale, mais dont il transforme la signification. Si dès la fin du XIXème siècle les social settlements étaient présentés

38 PARK, 1915a, 605. 39 Cet article, écrit alors que Burgess était encore à l’Université d’Ohio, montre par comparaison toute l’originalité du texte de Park, surtout lorsque l’on sait le destin commun que partageront les deux hommes par la suite. Il s’ouvre sur cette phrase : « L’enquête sociale de communauté est l’étude scientifique de ses conditions et besoins dans le but de présenter un programme constructif pour le progrès social [social advance] » (BURGESS, 1916, 492). On y retrouve bien ce qui constituait les ingrédients de la sociologie « urbaine » de l’époque : la volonté de science dans le but de l’action sociale. En outre, Burgess fait référence à un grand nombre d’enquêtes urbaines effectuées avant lui : celle de Booth sur Londres, celle de Rowntree sur la pauvreté, celle de Addams sur Chicago, ou encore la Pittsburgh Survey de Kellogg, avant de signaler ses propres expériences au Kansas et en Ohio. 40 PARK, 1915a, 581. 41 Ibid., 582.

169 Revue d'Histoire des Sciences Humaines comme des « laboratoires de la science sociale », c’est parce qu’ils offraient un accès, selon leurs animateurs, à un microcosme de tous les problèmes sociaux. L’expression est reprise par les sociologues académiques et acquiert un pouvoir attractif auprès de la clientèle étudiante considérée comme avide d’intervention sociale 42. Park, de son côté, substitue à cette conception « la vue qui ferait de la ville un laboratoire ou une clinique dans lesquels la nature humaine et les processus sociaux peuvent être étudiés de la manière la plus aisée et la plus profitable » 43. Il ne s’agit pas d’étudier la ville pour y intervenir (but de toute « enquête » à l’époque), ni même d’étudier la ville pour elle-même (Park ne cherche pas encore à fonder le programme d’une sous-discipline sociologique, comme il le fera plus tard avec ses collègues Burgess et Wirth), mais de profiter de la ville comme lieu d’expression, d’incarnation, d’observation privilégiées des réalités sociales et humaines fondamentales 44. Le laboratoire, c’est le monde social et la nature humaine en réduction, à portée de main, placé sous la loupe, dans un environnement d’observation exceptionnel. Le recours à la notion de laboratoire ne peut donc se comprendre uniquement par référence au contexte général qui en faisait une idée du temps ; il s’explique aussi, et peut-être d’abord, par référence à la conjoncture dans laquelle se trouvait Park et qui le contraignait à traiter de ce mouvement social dont il ne partageait pas les orientations. Confronté à cette sorte d’injonction contradictoire, Park use alors de la notion tout en en modifiant radicalement la signification. Il en va de même avec la notion de « voisinage » (neighborhood) et pour la référence que fait Park à une conférence prononcée sur ce sujet par un des animateurs du settlement movement les plus en vue à l’époque, Robert Woods. Ce dernier était en effet, au même titre que Jane Addams par exemple, un pionnier du mouvement aux États-Unis ; il avait fondé le renommé South End Settlement de Boston ; et c’est lui qui, le premier, définit les settlements comme des laboratoires de la science sociale 45. On pourrait donc en déduire que, à l’instar de ses contemporains, Park cherche en citant le travail de Woods à s’inscrire dans la lignée du mouvement d’enquête sociale. Or, il se fait que Park entretint un rapport particulier avec Woods, ce qui confère une autre connotation à cette référence. Il semble d’abord plus que probable que Park connaissait Woods au moins depuis son installation dans la banlieue de Boston en 1904. En effet, il obtint de l’Université de Harvard et au profit de John Daniels une bourse de résident dans la South End House pour les années 1905-1906 afin que ce dernier y étudie la population noire de Boston (Daniels était, comme Park, un journaliste et un prosélyte blanc de la cause de B.T. Washington ; il succéda également à Park au poste de secrétaire de la Congo Reform Association). Cette étude déboucha en 1914 sur la publication d’un ouvrage intitulé In Freedom Birthplace dans lequel Daniels exprime sa gratitude envers Woods et Park respectivement 46. D’autre part, durant les dix années passées à Boston, l’épouse de Park, Clara Cahill, qui était une artiste ainsi qu’une militante socialiste et féministe, s’investit activement dans le

42 KURTZ, 1984, 60 ; LECLERC, 1979, 68 ; SAINT-ARNAUD, 1997, 85. 43 PARK, 1915a, 612. 44 La même année, en 1915, Park publie un ouvrage intitulé The Principles of Human Behavior (PARK, 1915b). 45 MEYERAND, 1934 ; CARSON, 1990 ; WOODS, « University Settlements as Laboratories in Social Science » (1893), cité par DEEGAN, 2000, 35. 46 DANIELS, 1968, v.

170 Pierre Lannoy travail social au profit des Bostoniens les plus défavorisés, fréquentant ainsi intensi- vement le milieu des travailleurs et enquêteurs sociaux de la ville 47. Il semble donc peu vraisemblable que les actions et productions de ce Woods n’étaient pas déjà connues de Park à cette époque. Enfin, les deux hommes en vinrent à se rencontrer lors de la huitième réunion annuelle de la Société Américaine de Sociologie qui se tint à Minneapolis en septembre 1913. C’est à cette occasion que Woods prononça sa conférence sur « le rôle du quartier dans la reconstruction sociale » et que Park exposa ses idées au sujet de « l’assimilation raciale dans les groupes secondaires ». Ce dernier, fréquentant dorénavant, comme Woods, le milieu sociologique académique, se vit donc pour la première fois dans la situation de pouvoir faire référence à un de ses écrits. C’est pour cela que le seul représentant de la « sociologie appliquée » que mentionne Park dans The City réside bien à Boston et non à Chicago (ville dont Park n’avait plus de connaissance intime depuis qu’il y avait séjourné en 1897-1898) et qu’on peut affirmer qu’il y figure pour des raisons non pas philosophiques ou politiques mais bien conjoncturelles ou biographiques. C’est d’ailleurs pour le même type de raisons que Park passe sous silence les travaux de Addams, Du Bois ou Jones, pourtant connus de lui et pertinents par rapport à l’objet de son article.

Une problématique proprement parkienne mais pas spécifiquement urbaine

Le second trait qui caractérise en propre la version originale de The City concerne ses aspects épistémologique et théorique. Si le paragraphe précédent a décrit la mise à distance de l’enquête sociale qu’opère Park en recourant à une stratégie rédactionnelle d’évitement, celui qui suit va détailler la manière dont ce dernier traite les principales préoccupations qui animaient les enquêteurs sociaux. Tout d’abord, au plan épistémo- logique, Park insiste sur la nécessité d’étudier les matériaux sociaux issus de l’investigation de manière « désintéressée » 48. Il délivre explicitement cette consigne à la fin du paragraphe qu’il consacre à la politique locale et où il traite du phénomène des « boss » urbains et des « machines » qu’ils ont mises en place dans toutes les grandes villes américaines. Or, cette machinerie politique est précisément ce que combattent les acteurs du mouvement réformiste, et notamment les activistes en matière de social settlements, grands producteurs et consommateurs d’enquêtes sociales. On voit clairement que Park enjoint ses lecteurs à ne pas adopter l’attitude de ces derniers, en tant qu’elle nuit, selon lui, à la qualité d’une investigation véritablement scientifique. Certes, cet appel à la neutralité axiologique n’est pas complètement inédit au moment où Park publie son article ; plusieurs de ses collègues académiques avaient déjà souligné l’importance d’une approche froide ou dépassionnée des problèmes sociaux les plus « chauds » du moment. Mais pour eux, cette attitude devait permettre, en der- nière instance, un meilleur traitement de ces problèmes, bien plus qu’elle ne promet- tait des avancées en matière théorique 49. Park opère quant à lui un déplacement conceptuel qui s’inscrit dans le prolongement des débats de son temps tout en les dépassant. En effet, ce que les réformistes en général et les social scientists en parti-

47 TRAVERSO, 2003. 48 PARK, 1915a, 604. 49 Cette attitude s’exprime clairement dans des articles comme ceux de RILEY, 1911 ou BURGESS, 1916, qui appellent non à rompre avec la pratique de l’enquête mais à la mener « scientifiquement » et à confier cette tâche aux sociologues universitaires.

171 Revue d'Histoire des Sciences Humaines culier défendaient comme idée nouvelle était le fait que les « problèmes sociaux » relevaient moins de la responsabilité morale des individus pris comme personnes que de facteurs structurels tels que le cadre de vie, l’organisation politique, la division du travail, etc., toutes dimensions désignées de manière générale sous le vocable d’environnement. Ceci les amenait donc à déplacer le débat du registre moral vers une lecture plus systémique des phénomènes sociaux. Selon eux, l’amélioration des infrastructures (équipements collectifs, urbanisme…) et des structures (politiques, écono- miques, administratives…) élèvera la moralité des individus et donc de la société en général. S’inscrivant dans cette vision des choses, Park, plutôt que d’opposer ou de privi- légier un de ces pôles, avance l’idée qu’ils sont indissociables et qu’ils s’influencent mutuellement, et pour l’exprimer propose pour la première fois une paire conceptuelle distinguant « structure physique » et « ordre moral », « organisation morale » et « organisation physique ». L’idée de cette distinction, ainsi que la réflexion sur leurs rapports mutuels, s’inspire implicitement mais indubitablement des travaux d’un célèbre intellectuel du mouvement de réforme de l’époque, Frederic C. Howe, longtemps engagé dans la politique locale à Cleveland 50. Celui-ci avait publié en 1905 un ouvrage, précisément intitulé The City, dans lequel il proposait cette distinction. Il la présentera à nouveau dans un article paru en 1912 dans l’AJS consacré aux effets « socialisateurs » (entendez moralisants) de « la base physique de la ville ». Park ne reprendra pas seulement à Howe, sans le citer cependant, le titre de son livre ainsi que celui de son article (« The city plan » figure dans le titre du premier paragraphe de The City) ; plusieurs thématiques qu’il aborde peuvent également être directement rapportées aux textes de Howe, notamment celles relatives à l’importance des infrastructures urbaines, au caractère non planifié de l’urbanisme, au vote populaire. Mais l’originalité de Park, par rapport à Howe et à ses contemporains, consiste à utiliser le qualificatif « moral » sans connotation éthique, comme concept permettant de dési- gner un ordre de réalité tout aussi objectif ou « naturel » que les éléments physiques de la ville. Dans The City, est désigné par le qualificatif « moral » non ce qui touche au Bien ou au Mal mais tout ce qui relève des folkways (Park fait ici référence à Sumner mais adoptera plus tard la notion de culture), des « habitudes », des « traditions », ou encore des « passions », des « goûts » ou des « intérêts » qui réunissent les individus en milieux sociaux caractérisés ; en d’autres mots, il s’agit de tout ce qui concerne les mœurs (mores) entendues comme habitudes culturelles. Une « région morale » est alors définie par Park comme un espace « dans lequel les pulsions vaga- bondes ou refoulées, les passions et les idéaux s’émancipent de l’ordre moral dominant », un espace « dans lequel prévaut un code moral divergent » 51. Autrement dit, Park opère un double déplacement épistémologique, d’abord en appelant à la neutra- lité axiologique du sociologue et, ensuite, en faisant de la notion de « moral » un usage non plus normatif mais descriptif, ce qui le distingue des social scientists qui inscrivaient toujours leurs travaux dans une visée d’éthique sociale. Les pratiques sociales doivent être considérées comme des « matériaux » de la recherche, et non comme des « problèmes » qu’il faut traiter en fonction de critères éthiques. À cette substitution épistémologique de l’investigation des « régions morales » aux enquêtes sur les facteurs de l’immoralité correspond une interprétation théorique

50 LUBOVE, 1977 ; MATTSON, 1998, 32-41. 51 PARK, 1915a, 610-612.

172 Pierre Lannoy au travers de laquelle la pratique de l’enquête sociale devient elle-même un objet de la recherche. Il ne suffit pas, selon Park, de considérer les problèmes sociaux comme des expressions critiques de la réalité sociale ; il faut également admettre que le phéno- mène des enquêtes sociales est lui-même une expression et une incarnation des dimensions constitutives de la société contemporaine. La rédaction de The City va être en fait pour Park l’occasion de préciser, d’exposer et d’illustrer sa théorie générale sur la spécificité du social moderne, axée selon lui autour des phénomènes d’affaiblisse- ment des appartenances sociales primaires au profit d’une régulation des relations par signes conventionnels et par l’opinion publique dans une société structurée autour de groupes secondaires, d’individualisation des comportements et de mobilité spatiale et sociale 52. Dans cette optique, le reformer et le boss représentent deux types d’acteurs politiques, l’un fonctionnant sur des relations secondaires, et l’autre sur des relations primaires. Leur opposition n’est plus alors celle du bien et du mal, de la vertu et du vice, mais celle de deux ordres différents de construction du lien social dont la coexis- tence représente en réalité une étape historique dans la substitution de l’un à l’autre. Le caractère novateur généralement attribué à ce texte ne doit cependant pas nous empêcher de voir qu’il reprend en grande partie les schèmes interprétatifs que Park avait développés au sujet d’autres phénomènes que la ville. À l’exception du premier paragraphe où sont traitées les questions qui préoccupent les enquêteurs sociaux et qui constitue le seul endroit de son texte où Park fait des références explicites et implicites à leurs travaux, la plupart des autres passages sont en effet consacrés à des phénomènes qui avaient déjà précédemment attiré son intérêt académique : la foule, l’opinion publique, l’action collective, la presse, la bourse, mais également la « secon- darisation » des relations sociales, hypothèse que Park avait présentée un an plus tôt dans son texte sur l’assimilation raciale 53. La nouveauté que représente The City par rapport aux productions antérieures de Park est de présenter la ville comme le lieu d’incarnation privilégié de ces phénomènes, perspective qu’il n’avait jamais évoquée par écrit précédemment. Néanmoins, tout indéniable que soit l’originalité de l’interprétation ainsi présen- tée, une reprise aussi évidente mais surtout aussi fidèle de son cadre théorique anté- rieur témoigne non seulement de la distance qui séparait Park du paradigme socio- académique de l’enquête sociale mais également du caractère relativement improvisé ou immature de sa conception théorique du phénomène urbain. Outre l’absence de références à des travaux déjà publiés sur cette question – élément qui soutient lui aussi l’idée que The City s’attaque plus à l’enquête sociale qu’à la question de la ville en elle-même –, on soulignera le fait que la définition de la ville comme institution, présentée en ouverture de l’article, disparaîtra complètement dans la version révisée de 1925, au profit d’une caractérisation en termes écologiques. Autrement dit, en écrivant The City en 1914, Park n’avait pas de théorie de la ville, mais bien une théorie du social contemporain. Avoir été chargé d’un cours sur l’enquête sociale fut en fait pour Park l’occasion d’appliquer à la réalité urbaine le paradigme interprétatif

52 GRAFMEYER, JOSEPH, 1990 ; MARTUCCELLI, 1999. 53 Park affirme emprunter la distinction entre groupes primaires et secondaires à Cooley. Pourtant, si Cooley utilise pour la première fois la notion de « relations primaires » en 1909 dans son ouvrage Social Organization, il n’utilisera par contre jamais le qualificatif « secondaire » pour désigner les relations non- primaires ; il parlera de « groupes nucléés » (nucleated groups) dans son livre Social Process de 1918 (HINKLE, 1980, 161). Serait-ce Park qui a introduit la notion pour la première fois ?

173 Revue d'Histoire des Sciences Humaines de la société contemporaine qu’il était en train de construire, tout en répondant aux demandes (mais sûrement pas aux attentes) de l’institution à laquelle il appartenait désormais. On peut en effet affirmer que de sa conférence de 1913 sur l’assimilation à la parution de l’Introduction to the Science of Sociology en 1921, Park est animé de cette volonté de définir un cadre théorique général et du comportement collectif et du social contemporain. La rédaction de The City s’inscrit dans cette quête intellectuelle et ne peut être qu’incomplètement comprise en dehors de ce contexte. L’Introduction de 1921, où apparaissent les linéaments de sa théorie écologique des phénomènes sociaux, articule ces deux préoccupations dans un exposé magistral, dont Park ne modifiera ni n’abandonnera jamais la structure générale 54. Mais cette théorie, qui par ailleurs aura une portée indéniable 55, traduisait avant tout au niveau conceptuel la distance sociale et axiologique qui séparait son auteur du milieu des social scientists de l’époque.

La ville re-présentée

En exprimant cette distance dans The City, Park définissait sa propre conception de la sociologie et de la recherche sociologique, bien plus qu’il ne cherchait, du moins en 1915, à établir une nouvelle spécialité disciplinaire. Au plan paradigmatique, comme on l’a vu au paragraphe précédent, son article suggère une posture innovante pour l’investigation du « comportement humain » en alliant les vues des sociologues spé- culatifs de la génération précédente (qui réfléchissaient sur les fondements généraux, « naturels », de l’ordre social) et l’orientation empirique de la nouvelle génération intra- et extra-académique 56. D’un point de vue social, cette innovation s’exprime dans la mise à distance, par la critique ou le silence, des productions d’une certaine communauté de social scientists, auxquels la mémoire sociologique académique accorde aujourd’hui encore peu de place 57 – destin qui n’est sans doute pas sans rapport avec l’entreprise que Robert Park et ses plus jeunes collègues développeront après la Première Guerre mondiale.

Les circonstances d’une reproduction

Les circonstances qui sont à la base de la révision et surtout de la réception de la seconde publication de The City sont en effet radicalement différentes de celles qui expliquent sa genèse initiale. Les États-Unis sont sortis victorieux du conflit 1914- 1918 et ont acquis depuis lors le statut de première puissance mondiale. Les années 1920 sont une période de grande prospérité économique, ce qui transforme profondé- ment les aspects matériels et culturels de la vie quotidienne et fait considérablement

54 Il est intéressant de noter que l’Introduction contient presque la totalité du texte des Principles of Human Behavior de 1915, ainsi que deux passages de sa thèse (qui date de 1904) et quatre extraits de The City, dont un seul est renseigné dans l’entrée « ville » de l’index, ce qui témoigne de l’intérêt avant tout théorique que Park voyait dans son propre texte. 55 MARTUCCELLI, 1999. 56 Double inscription intellectuelle qui se marque concrètement dans les références que fait Park d’une part à Sumner (la première citation du texte) et d’autre part à Thomas (notamment la note 2, 596). 57 Dans la littérature francophone, une figure comme celle de Jane Addams est totalement absente, alors que l’œuvre de Du Bois n’est évoquée que très marginalement (SIMON, 1991 ; SAINT-ARNAUD, 2003).

174 Pierre Lannoy augmenter la quantité de ressources et d’utilisateurs du système universitaire. C’est également une décennie marquée par la professionnalisation et la spécialisation des expertises relatives à l’espace urbain, aussi bien dans les matières techniques que sociales 58. Le mouvement réformiste, que Park présentait en 1915 comme « sport national », perd sa consistance sous le coup de ses différentes évolutions, tandis que la réalisation des enquêtes urbaines se voit monopolisée par les universitaires 59. Au département de sociologie de l’Université de Chicago, le décès en 1915 de Charles Henderson, sans doute le professeur le plus actif en matière d’enquêtes sociales, amène l’engagement de Burgess, lequel va entrer fortuitement mais durablement dans une relation de collaboration avec Park 60. L’immédiat après-guerre est quant à lui marqué par le départ forcé de Thomas en 1918, événement malheureux qui profite involontairement mais indéniablement à Park qui devient en quelque sorte le nouveau leader intellectuel de la sociologie à Chicago. L’Introduction to the Science of Sociology qu’il publie en 1921 connaît un énorme succès de librairie, tandis que le rapport qu’il dirige sur les émeutes racistes de 1919 à Chicago est particulièrement remarqué. Par contre, son article sur la ville passe inaperçu dans la période qui suit immédiatement sa publication. Le premier auteur à y faire référence dans l’AJS est McKenzie dans sa série d’articles sur l’étude d’un quartier de Columbus, dont le premier paraît en 1921. Park, quant à lui, citera à plusieurs reprises son propre texte dans l’Introduction. Bien sûr, The City a dû être lu par ses étudiants, qui à partir de 1921 cependant n’avaient plus l’occasion de suivre un cours sur l’enquête sociale (Park avait décidé d’abandonner cette charge) mais bien une introduction aux « études de terrain » dont la philosophie se distingue explicitement de celle des enquêtes sociales 61. Plusieurs thèses portant sur la ville de Chicago sont ainsi entreprises sous la direction de Park à partir des années vingt, qui devient très apprécié des étudiants, notamment au travers de la création en 1920 de la Society for Social Research où étudiants et enseignants de Chicago échangeaient à propos des recherches en cours 62. Mais c’est sous l’impulsion du politologue Charles Merriam, particulièrement bien intégré dans les réseaux sociaux chicagolais, que va être fondé, en 1923, le Local Community Research Committee, structure de recherche autonome interdisciplinaire, qui depuis sa fondation jusqu’à la Seconde Guerre mondiale sera généreusement fi- nancée par des fondations privées, principalement le Laura Spelman Rockfeller Memorial, du nom de l’épouse du fondateur de l’Université de Chicago 63. Toujours en 1923, Park non seulement acquiert le titre de professeur mais lance également une collection aux presses de l’Université (The University of Chicago Sociological Series) dans laquelle seront publiées les monographies urbaines qui feront la réputation de l’École de Chicago. C’est dans ce contexte que les sociologues vont préparer un ou-

58 LUBOVE, 1965 ; LANNOY, 2003. 59 LASKER, 1922 ; BULMER, et al., 1991 ; PLATT, 1996. 60 Burgess, en entamant ses nouvelles fonctions à Chicago, prend d’abord contact avec Scott Bedford, qui était alors professeur associé (soit un titre plus élevé que celui que portait Park à l’époque), spécialisé en matière de problèmes urbains et chargé d’un cours d’introduction à la sociologie, et ceci afin d’obtenir des conseils de sa part en matière pédagogique. Bedford lui refuse toute aide et toute collaboration ; Burgess se retourne alors vers Park, qu’il ne connaissait pas. De leur association intellectuelle naîtra en 1921 la fameuse Introduction to the Science of Sociology (RAUSHENBUSH, 1979, 81). 61 PALMER, 1926. 62 CHAPOULIE, 2001, 139. 63 BULMER, 1980 ; MATTHEWS, 1977.

175 Revue d'Histoire des Sciences Humaines vrage collectif présentant leurs perspectives de recherche qui paraîtra en 1925 sous le titre The City, titre de l’article de Park de 1915 (mais aussi de l’ouvrage de Howe, comme on l’a vu). La même année, Park est nommé président de la Société Sociologique Américaine et propose la ville comme thème de la réunion annuelle 64, dont les actes seront publiés par Burgess sous le titre The Urban Community. Ces deux ouvrages témoignent des changements survenus depuis 1915 dans le champ académique et reflètent la position que Park y occupe dorénavant.

La programmation d’un récit

En chapitre introductif de The City, on trouve l’article de Park du même nom paru dix ans plus tôt, mais sous une forme modifiée. La révision que l’auteur y apporte consiste principalement en deux points. Premièrement, il supprime sa définition de la ville comme institution, et donc élimine la référence à Sumner, et propose un cadre théorique articulé autour des notions de culture et d’écologie, donnant ainsi une por- tée conceptuelle à sa distinction originelle (mais pas originale, on l’a vu) entre « organisation morale » et « organisation physique » de la ville. Park s’appuie dorénavant sur Spengler et Boas pour introduire la notion de culture, laquelle prend sens dans son opposition à ce qui est qualifié de « naturel », principalement les aires urbaines 65. C’est le « point de vue » développé « récemment » sous le nom d’« écologie », écrit Park, qui permet de décrire les forces qui définissent l’ordre naturel de la ville 66. Park reprend ici l’approche proposée pour la première fois un an plus tôt par McKenzie dans un article de l’AJS, et qui constitue le troisième chapitre de The City. Ce recours au vocabulaire écologique va permettre la désignation d’un paradigme nouveau ainsi que l’identification même d’une « École de Chicago » 67. La deuxième modification que Park apporte à son texte est moins d’ordre conceptuel que d’ordre rhétorique. Celui-ci va d’abord introduire l’idée que son texte doit être lu comme un programme de recherche. Il conclut ainsi son introduction, laquelle est entièrement neuve, par cette phrase : « Les observations qui suivent ont pour but de définir un point de vue et d’indiquer un programme pour l’étude de la vie urbaine : son organisation physique, ses occupations et sa culture » 68. De même ajoute-t-il un passage inédit à la fin du paragraphe II où il écrit : « La ville, et particulièrement la grande ville, (…) est au sens propre un laboratoire pour l’investigation du comportement collectif. (…) Les questions qui suivent pourront peut-être suggérer des pistes d’investigation qui pourraient être suivies avec profit par ceux qui étudient la vie urbaine » 69. En faisant ces précisions, Park propose une lecture

64 PARK, 1925a. 65 Les notions de « culture » et d’ « aire naturelle » sont totalement absentes du texte de 1915. Park y utilisa à une occasion l’expression « aire citadine » [city area], qui se retrouve également dans la version de 1925 (PARK, 1915a, 583 ; 1925b, 11). 66 PARK, 1925b, 1. 67 ALIHAN, 1964 ; SAINT-ARNAUD, 1997, 81. Le premier auteur à utiliser l’expression « École de Chicago » est Jessie Bernard (une femme !) qui, dans un texte de 1929, présente la caractéristique de cette « école » comme étant l’usage intensif de « la méthode de l’enquête locale » [local survey method]. Ironie du sort pour Park (qui voulait tant se distancer de l’enquête sociale), à qui n’est d’ailleurs reconnue aucune paternité, les initiateurs cités étant Thomas et Henderson (BERNARD, 1929, 25-26). 68 PARK, 1925b, 3. 69 Ibid., 22.

176 Pierre Lannoy nouvelle de son propre texte : devenu entrepreneur et directeur de recherche, reconnu par ses pairs et entouré de collaborateurs et d’étudiants industrieux et dévoués (Bedford quitte l’Université en 1925, et Park se retrouve seul sur les questions urbaines avec Burgess, Wirth, Palmer, et ses étudiants), il est en position de présenter un texte qui peut et qui doit dorénavant apparaître comme un programme de recherche, mais qui n’en était pas un à l’origine. L’autre modification rhétorique d’importance est le recours au qualificatif « urbain » : outre son apparition dans le titre (où l’expression urban environment est substituée à celle de city environment), Park en fait un usage systématique dans tous les nouveaux passages qu’il introduit dans son texte. Ainsi écrit-il autant de fois urban dans son introduction de 1925 (qui fait trois pages) que dans tout son texte de 1915. Comme l’a bien noté Lindner 70, ce changement lexical témoigne de la volonté des sociologues urbains de marquer la spécificité sociologique de leur objet par rapport à ce qui est qualifié de rural, et par là même de rivaliser avec la sociologie rurale, spécialité déjà largement établie et institutionna- lisée à l’époque, contrairement à la sociologie urbaine. Toujours est-il que ces divers investissements (institutionnels, conceptuels, rhétoriques) assureront à Park et ses chercheurs une prise forte sur ce « laboratoire » qu’était déjà depuis longtemps Chicago mais les placeront également en position dominante dans le champ des productions relatives à l’analyse de l’urbain, reléguant les enquêteurs extra-universitaires au rang de précurseurs pré-scientifiques, de sociologues appliqués ou d’observateurs amateurs. Park ne sera pas seulement un protagoniste central de cette « histoire naturelle » de la recherche sociologique, et plus particulièrement de la sociologie urbaine ; il en sera également le premier narrateur. On trouve déjà dans l’Introduction de 1921 cette idée selon laquelle les enquêtes sociales constituent, au même titre que le journalisme dénonciateur, une étape historique dans le développement de la science sociale, dont la sociologie est l’étape ultime : « L’intérêt social pour la ville fut stimulé initialement par les polémiques au sujet des désordres politiques et sociaux de la vie urbaine. Il y avait ceux qui voulaient détruire la ville en vue de remédier à ses maux et de restaurer la simplicité de la vie campagnarde. La sociologie recherchait une base plus sûre pour solutionner les problèmes en étudiant les faits de la vie citadine. Les statistiques démographiques produites par les administrations gouvernementales fournissent des chiffres sur les conditions et les tendances. Les enquêtes de communauté ont traduit dans une forme compréhensible une masse d’informations au sujet des aspects formels de la vie de la ville. Assez naturellement, des images compatissantes et étonnantes de la vie citadine ont été proposées par les résidents des établissements sociaux [settlements], comme par Jane Addams dans Twenty Years at Hull House, par Robert Woods dans The City Wilderness, par Lillian Wald dans The House on Henry Street et par Mademoiselle Simkhovitch dans The City Worker’s World » 71.

Si ces enquêtes ne fournissent que des « images compatissantes », c’est parce que leurs auteurs ne dépassent pas la réflexion de sens commun, précise Park un peu plus loin. Dans le chapitre consacré aux forces sociales, on peut lire en effet : « L’idée qu’il y a des forces en action derrière les manifestations de la nature physique et de la société est une notion qui émerge naturellement de l’expérience de l’homme ordinaire. Les historiens, les réformistes sociaux et les observateurs de la vie

70 LINDNER, 1996, 50. 71 PARK, BURGESS, 1924, 331.

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communautaire ont utilisé ce terme au sens que lui donne le langage du sens commun afin de qualifier des facteurs qu’ils reconnaissaient dans des situations sociales, mais ils n’arrivèrent pas à le décrire ou à le définir. (…) Les sociologues ont fait franchir à l’analyse une étape supplémentaire » 72.

Dans un article destiné aux travailleurs sociaux publié en 1924 dans le Journal of Applied Sociology, Park expose la même idée : « Si le service social doit étendre ses activités en vue de rencontrer tous les besoins [fondamentaux de la nature humaine], cela exigera un type d’étude de communauté très différent de ce qui existait dans le passé. Mais ces formes nouvelles d’étude sociale sont en train d’apparaître. Si je parle d’études réalisées à Chicago, c’est parce que ce sont celles qui me sont données de mieux connaître. Une étude du type auquel je songe est celle de Nels Anderson sur le "Hobo" » 73.

Mais c’est dans son article de 1929 intitulé « La ville comme laboratoire social » que Park donne la version la plus explicite et la plus complète de son récit sur l’évo- lution de la recherche urbaine. Il y décrit « les premières études locales » comme étant de caractère « pratique plutôt que théorique » ; et il inclut parmi celles-ci les Hull House Maps and Papers de Addams, The City Wilderness de Woods, les ouvrages de Booth et de Rowntree, la Pittsburgh Survey ainsi que la série d’articles publiés entre 1910 et 1915 dans l’AJS par l’équipe des enquêtrices de la Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy. Après avoir souligné les apports de ces études en termes de quan- tité de matériaux récoltés, Park signale néanmoins qu’elles « n’offrent pas de généra- lisations de portée large ou générale ». Et de préciser dans le paragraphe suivant, celui où est décrite la situation présente de la recherche sur l’urbain, que cette préoccu- pation comparative et généralisante « est le thème central d’une série d’études spéci- fiques de la communauté urbaine de Chicago, certaines ayant déjà été publiées, d’autres étant encore en cours d’élaboration » 74. Il s’agit, on l’aura compris, de toutes les recherches menées sous sa direction et qui constitueront les contributions considérées aujourd’hui comme constitutives de « l’École de Chicago » 75. En apportant les modifications à son texte de 1915, tout comme en diffusant ce récit sur l’évolution de la recherche urbaine, Park écrira donc bien, à partir de ce moment, un chapitre de l’histoire de la sociologie, fournissant délibérément à des gé- nérations ultérieures de sociologues un programme d’investigation et offrant explicitement à ses contemporains comme aux historiens de la discipline une représentation téléologique de sa genèse. Sans doute nulle autre histoire naturelle n’a-t-elle été aussi socialement construite que celle-ci.

Conclusion

La production sociologique est, comme toute autre activité sociale, une activité située et incarnée, assurée par des individus insérés dans des rapports sociaux concrets. L’hypothèse que nous avons suivie consiste alors à penser que cette situation influe sur le contenu même des écrits savants et, par conséquent, que celle-ci peut en

72 Ibid., 435-437. 73 PARK, 1924, 267. 74 PARK, 1929, 5-9. 75 COULON, 1992.

178 Pierre Lannoy retour y être décelée. C’est ce point de vue qui nous a amené à découvrir dans l’article que Robert Park rédigea en 1915 au sujet de la ville une préoccupation intellectuelle qui n’est pas celle communément identifiée aujourd’hui. Plutôt que d’y trouver la présentation d’un programme de recherche (dont l’auteur aurait eu en quelque sorte la prescience), nous y avons décelé la réponse à une injonction contradictoire que seules la trajectoire et la position sociales de son auteur permettent de saisir pleinement. Débarquant à Chicago affublé d’un statut professionnel secondaire, et devant y enseigner une démarche qu’il n’avait jamais pratiquée dans les formes reconnues de l’époque, Park répond à ses obligations avec toute la latitude que lui autorisait, précisément, son statut d’outsider. Mais si, comme on l’a vu, en écrivant The City Park prenait position (et distance) par rapport à la question de l’enquête sociale (laquelle constitue, en ce temps, le point de convergence d’un mouvement social et d’un courant dominant de la sociologie), il ne le faisait pas seulement pour des raisons intellectuelles. Son texte peut en effet être considéré également comme l’inscription, dans les formes académiques de l’écriture sociologique de l’époque, de sa trajectoire sociale et plus particulièrement de son opposition grandissante (parce que nourrie d’événements biographiques) à la pratique de l’enquête sociale telle que conçue avant la Première Guerre mondiale. En d’autres mots, il y a une homologie dynamique entre la position interprétative défendue par Park et la position qu’il occupe dans le champ des productions intellectuelles. Ceci signifie que les interprétations qu’il avance, et la manière dont il les formule, peuvent être mises en rapport avec les relations objectives qu’il entretient avec les autres producteurs de savoirs, et notamment les promoteurs des enquêtes sociales, milieu lui-même fragmenté mais duquel Park est largement étranger, suite à son long séjour à Tuskegee au côté de Booker Washington, et ce malgré les affinités intellectuelles et sociales qu’il entretenait indéniablement avec lui une décennie plus tôt. La seconde version de The City offre quant à elle une représentation renouvelée de la recherche sur la ville autant qu’elle témoigne de la trajectoire de son auteur et de la modification de son statut dans le champ des producteurs de savoirs. Jouissant d’un statut bien différent de celui dont il bénéficiait en 1915, Park se retrouve en 1925 au centre d’une entreprise collective de recherche performante dont il est le moteur autant que le bénéficiaire, le contexte intellectuel, académique, matériel et culturel ayant largement changé depuis la fin du premier conflit mondial. Son article sur la ville est alors présenté comme un programme de recherche « révolutionnaire » préci- sément parce qu’ayant rompu avec les pratiques du « passé ». Tout ceci ne signifie pas que l’écriture sociologique soit purement circonstancielle et puisse être réduite à son contexte de production. Les formes mêmes dans lesquelles doit s’exprimer la production sociologique pour être reconnue comme telle (et qui varient elles aussi à la fois dans l’espace et dans le temps) ouvrent en effet la possibi- lité que se transforment les significations des mots et des références en même temps que se modifie le contexte dans lequel elles sont perçues. Il se peut alors que les préoccupations personnelles qui alimentent l’économie rédactionnelle d’un auteur perdent leur visibilité au fil du temps, sans pour autant que les textes de celui-ci ne perdent leur pertinence pour les générations postérieures. Il est néanmoins indéniable que les circonstances qui affectent la trajectoire sociobiographique d’un savant, jouent une part non négligeable dans le processus d’innovation intellectuelle, et que parmi ces circonstances, il faut compter les relations personnelles qu’entretient un auteur

179 Revue d'Histoire des Sciences Humaines avec ses contemporains. Leur identification, qui suppose un travail minutieux à la fois du point de vue d’une histoire des idées et d’une historiographie sociale, autorise cependant une sorte de sociologie compréhensive de la production sociologique (ce que nous avons appelé une scientométrie qualitative) qui fait apparaître cette dernière comme une forme de vie soumise aux mêmes contraintes et aux mêmes forces que celles de toute autre entreprise humaine.

Pierre LANNOY Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgique) [email protected]

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184 Recadrage par rapport à l'émission le jeu de la mort :

(Si certains voient leur vie défiler devant leurs yeux au moment de la mort, moi j'ai vu mon cours du lendemain s'afficher à l'écran du poste de télé!).

Sacrée mise en miroir : expérience sur la soumission à l'autorité, film de Claude Lanzmann sur Jan Karski sur Arte ensuite.

− Marshall MacLuhan : « le message, c'est le media » ( Pour comprendre les médias , 1968). Le contenu importe moins que le canal de diffusion (l'autorité/la légitimité qu'on lui confère).

− Influence sociale et mass media/communication de masse : nous le verrons après la présentation de Milgram. − Rappel de la critique sur les mass media et de la culture de mass e qui s'est faite jour avec la montée des blocs idéologique ( e.g. S.Kracauer, De Caligari à Hitler : sur le cinéma) et qui s'annonce sous une forme apparemment apolitisée : Théorie Critique, Ecole de Francfort (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse et son « homme unidimensionnel »). − Lien de cette critique avec les travaux menés sur la « personnalité autoritaire ».

− Malgré les effets spectaculaires – musique de « Clockwork Orange », plans sur des villes américaines et des stades nord-coréens ( sic ) – qui auront nuit à la démonstration de l'expérience (nécessité de la production?), l'émission rate son objectif : que la télévision ait une influence sur les représentations et les comportements est a priori peu douteux, et la critique de l’obéissance aveugle, qui est au fondement de l’expérience de Milgram, apparaît comme une cause sympathique à première vue. − L’expérience de Milgram portait sur l’autorité. Or, sa transposition télévisée ne démontre pas l’existence d’une “autorité” télévisuelle, mais plutôt la soumission au dispositif . Confusion entre l'entreprise de la description d'un phénomène psycho-sociologique – l'influence sociale, la soumission à l'autorité – et un réquisitoire porté à l'encontre de la télévision. Une émission est une machine dont le déroulement réglé s’impose, non sans violence, au participant (cf. Bourdieu, Sur la télévision ). Elle implique la mobilisation d’un appareillage coûteux, d’une équipe de plusieurs personnes, de locaux spécialement disposés réservés à cet effet, etc. Bousculer ce dispositif, une fois qu’on a accepté d’y prendre part, n’est guère envisageable, et reviendrait approximativement à prendre les commandes d’un Boeing après le décollage. Au-delà de questions de légitimité ou d’autorité, il y a la simple réalité qu’un participant est toujours étranger au dispositif, dont il est un usager temporaire, et dont il n’est pas responsable. Ces questions n’ont jamais été abordées pendant le documentaire, dont la doctrine revenait à poser que la lourde machine d’un jeu télévisé avec son public était équivalente à une expérience de psychologie réalisée dans des locaux universitaires. − Par ailleurs, l'émission de télé aura continuellement confondue le pouvoir et l'autorité ( i.e. le charisme et un système légal-rationnel (Weber)). Ce qui a conduit à des amalgames tels que l'obéissance à un « ordre » et à une « injonction » - il n'y a pas d'ordre car il n'y pas pas de système répressif qui plane au-dessus de la tête des agents. L'émission a eu une vision tronquée de l'obéissance – on obéit parce qu'on craint mais aussi parce qu'on désire (cf. Durkheim à propos du « fait moral ») : la soumission n'est pas uniquement l'effet de pression coercitif d'un système vis-à-vis d'un agent isolé ; la soumission doit plutôt être comprise dans un sens bilatéral de coopération entre l'agent, les autres agents avec qui il interagit, et le système (idée de servitude volontaire). − La transposition brute de l’expérience de Milgram au contexte télévisé est un projet dont le fondement paraît des plus fragiles. Même en reprenant les catégories du film, je ne pense pas du tout que LA télévision a une autorité équivalente ou même comparable à celle de LA science (qui a en réalité des “autorités” très variables). Son influence – bien réelle – passe par l’imposition d’images et de récits, des systèmes de répétition et de normalisation plus élaborés et plus sournois que l’injonction d’avoir à se conformer à un protocole. On peut supposer que n’importe quelle autre situation imposant à un quidam de s’asseoir aux commandes d’une machine lancée à pleine allure produirait un registre de réactions adaptatives semblables, qu’on soit à la télévision, dans une gare ou sur un chantier. − Situation de « double contrainte » ( double bind ) selon le réalisateur de l'émission : certains candidats seraient allés jusqu'au bout parce qu'ils n'y croyaient pas, ils n'imaginaient pas que la télévision puisse aller jusqu'à la mort : ils se seraient en fait trouvés cet argument pour soulager leur conscience 1. − L’obéissance fait partie de la vie sociale, soit. La télévision – comme la presse, le cinéma, la radio… – est un de ces systèmes d’emprise par conformisme au consensus général, sans conteste. Qu’a montré à cet égard Le Jeu de la Mort ? Rien de plus que l’idée reçue. Certainement pas le fonctionnement de la normalisation par l’image, tel qu’il s’impose dans la durée, et dont l’Italie berlusconienne apporte aujourd’hui le plus triste témoignage ( cf . Videocracy , d’Eric Gandini, diffusé tout récemment). Dans la France (de moins en moins) sarkozyste, un petit coup d’épingle critiquant le processus d’obéissance à l’autorité ne peut pas faire de mal et a certainement fait réfléchir Tania Young (mais pas Christophe Hondelatte, cf. Libération du 17 mars). Cela posé, plutôt que la démonstration attendue, on n’a eu qu’un spectacle de plus. − Dernier point : dans une conclusion torchée (on dirait un étudiant pris de court à la fin d'un examen!), Jean-Léon Beauvois (un très bon psychosociologue au demeurant), a repris cette idée reçue de l'influence massive, brute de décoffrage de la télévision (argument déjà dépassé par l'Internet et les réseaux sociaux?). Or, les études de sociologie de Lazarsfeld, Katz, Merton et alii. démontraient justement le contraire! L'influence des médias ( i.e. la diffusion d'information) n'est pas unilatérale : ce n'est pas une seringue hypodermique (hypodermic needle , H.Lasswell) qui inocule de l'information (voire de l'idéologie si on se montre parano, sinon critique, dans la main-mise politique et économique des médias) ; l'information se distribue dans et par la structure sociale du groupe le plus proche et de la société : passant par tout un réseau social d'agent (occupant une fonction, ayant un rôle, un statut, un pouvoir propre à ce réseau/à cette structure) il n'est donc pas certain que l'information diffusée à l'écran soit identique à celle reçue par les membres de tel ou tel groupe social après discussions, disputes. Bref, si influence de la télévision il y a, ce n'est pas tant le message « brut » qui compte que son inscription/traduction dans la société. http://liberalisme-democraties-debat-public.com/spip.php?article112 http://www.rue89.com/tele89/2010/03/17/pourquoi-le-jeu-de-la-mort-ne-denonce-pas-grand-chose- 143215

1 Il existe une anticipation du jeu de la mort , c'est le film de Yves Boisset, « Le prix du danger » (1983). On en a fait un remake US, « The Running man », avec Schwarzie. Le comble de la télé-spectacle : le documenteur « Punishment Park » (1971) de Peter Watkins (lire à propos son manifeste Mediacrisis ).

PRAISE FOR THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

“A wonderful, entertaining and demystifying portrait of the father of six degrees and small worlds. Milgram, without doubt the most influential social psychologist of the last century, fully deserves this great interpretive biography.” —Albert-László Barabási, author of Linked, and Emil T. Hofman Professor of Physics, University of Notre Dame

“With literary flair reminiscent of Milgram himself, Blass marries scholarship and journalism in his intimate portrayal of the man and his creative mind. This is a major work that will help define and preserve the Milgram legacy.” —David G. Myers, author of Social Psychology

“A sparkling biography of Stanley Milgram, one of the most brilliant, playful, and controversial social scientists ever. I was truly moved by this book—by its affection for its subject, and by the way it brings Milgram to life in technicolor vividness. Some parts are poignant, some are intellectually riveting, and some are just laugh-out-loud funny.” —Steven Strogatz, author of Sync

“Among the best biographies of psychologists. . . . Highly recommended.” —Library Journal

“Blass provides a valuable examination of Milgram’s work. . . . An important contribution to the field of science history.” —Publishers Weekly

“[An] excellent, entertaining, and informative biography. . . . Recommended to professional and general readers alike.” —Metapsychology

“Milgram . . . was a far from ordinary scientist. And Thomas Blass is also a far from run-of-the-mill biographer . . . [an] excellent biography.” —John Darley, Times Literary Supplement “An important book. It makes a sympathetic sweep through the life of [a] remarkable man.” —Curled Up With a Good Book

“[The] descriptions of Milgram’s research, especially of the obedience experiments, are exquisitely compelling. . . . A revealing glimpse into both the world of academia and the mind of a gifted scientist.” —Jerusalem Post

“The book tells us much more about Milgram, the man, than anyone (except perhaps his widow Alexandra) had previously known or understood. . . . He would have appreciated Blass’s clarity, comprehensiveness, empathy, and evenhandedness in assessing the life and work of the man variously described here as ‘complex,’ ‘enigmatic’ . . . and ‘one of the outstanding scientists of his generation.’” —Alan C. Elms, PsycCRITIQUES

“Because of Stanley Milgram’s nerve, we know things about ourselves that we never wanted to admit. And because of Blass’ meticulous, highly readable book, we can look back at how this door was opened.” —The Buffalo News

“No person knows more about Stanley Milgram than Thomas Blass. . . . Virtually every characterization Blass gives of Milgram seems very close to my memory of him.” —Arthur Miller, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences

“The book comes alive with the drama of the obedience experiments and the quieter innovation of his later work, such as the ‘familiar stranger’ experiment.” —The Lamp

“I have read dozens of biographies of psychologists . . . and I cannot recall one I enjoyed as much. . . . This book is a gem, full of humor and intelligent insights into the life of the psychologist ‘who truly shocked the world.’” —The College Board AP Central “Blass is knowledgeable and painstaking in his attempt to portray Milgram; this book is absolutely authoritative in its sources and documentation.” —Personnel Psychology

“[A] compelling new biography of Milgram.” —Sunday Telegraph (London)

“Marvelously succeeds in bringing new attention to the man whose work . . . has the power to change the way we view our very social world.” —Behavioral Science Book Service

“A well-written biography . . . captur[ing] much of this difficult man as I remember him. . . . Social scientists involved in experimental ethics, obedience, and other Milgram topics will find this book a rewarding read.” —Thomas Pettigrew, Social Forces

“Blass paints an endearing portrait of a razor-witted, mercurial man; at times a prima donna, and by many accounts a genius.” —Psychology Today

“An extremely readable book . . . a lively and interesting biography. Highly recommended.” —Choice OTHER BOOKS BY THOMAS BLASS: Contemporary Social Psychology: Representative Readings Personality Variables in Social Behavior Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm THE MAN WHO

SHOCKED THE WORLD

The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram

THOMAS BLASS, PH.D.

A Member of the Perseus Books Group New York To ANNE

Text excerpts throughout. Figures 4 and 6, Experiment 5, from Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View by Stanley Milgram. Copyright © 1974 by Stanley Milgram. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.Various quotes and Figures 6.1(b), 8.3, and 14.4 from The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments (2nd edition) by Stanley Milgram. Copyright © 1992, 1977 by Alexandra Milgam. Reproduced by permission of the McGraw-Hill Companies.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016-8810.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover as follows: Blass, Thomas. The man who shocked the world : the life and legacy of Stanley Milgram / Thomas Blass.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index ISBN 0-7382-0399-8 1. Milgram, Stanley. 2. Social psychologists—United States—Biography. 3. Authority. 4. Obedience. 5. Social psychology. 6. Social psychology— Experiments. I. Title.

HM1031.M55B57 2004 302'.092—dc22 203023841 Paperback ISBN: 978-0-465-00807-0 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xiii

Prologue xvii

1 The Neighborhood with No Name 1

2 Making the Grade at Harvard 17

3 Norway and France 31

4 From the “Princetitute” to Yale 55

5 Obedience: The Experience 75

6 Obedience: The Experiment 93

7 Aftershocks 111

8 Return to Academic Eden 131

9 City Psychology 163

vii viii CONTENTS

10 Center Stage 197

11 Vexations, Cyranoids, and the Declining Years 231

12 Milgram’s Legacy 259

Afterword to the Paperback Edition 293

Appendix A: List of Milgram’s Doctoral Students at CUNY, with Year and Title of Dissertation 301

Appendix B: Sample Quotations and Content Analysis of Reviews of Obedience to Authority 303

Appendix C: The Stability of Obedience Across Time and Place 309

Notes 313

References 347

Credits 357

Index 359 PREFACE

During the summer of 1944, the Nazis, under the direction of Eichmann and with the assistance of their Hungarian allies, were in the process of rounding up the Jews of Budapest for deportation to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Budapest is split by the Danube River into two parts: Buda and Pest. One day during the roundups, a Jewish mother and her two-and-a- half-year-old child were taking the trolley from Pest, where they had been visiting relatives, to Buda, where they had recently found an apartment. Unlike most of her fellow Jews, this woman believed the rumors about what “resettlement for work in the east” really meant. So rather than remaining in Pest, she obtained forged Christian identity papers and moved to Buda, which was largely non-Jewish. The trolley was crossing the bridge between the two parts of the city when the rhythmic clatter of the car’s wheels was interrupted by the insistent sound of the child’s voice: “Mommy,” he asked, “why don’t I wear a cap like other Jewish boys?” This was within earshot of many of the other passengers, including members of the Nyilas, the Hun- garian Nazi militia. With a resourcefulness spawned by desperation, the mother quickly turned to her child and said, “This is our stop,” grabbed his hand, and got off the trolley—right in the middle of the bridge, quite a distance from their destination. Miraculously, no one stopped them. I was that little boy on the bridge. As I grew into adulthood, my mind would occasionally drift back to that precarious moment on the trolley— when time seemed to stand still, enabling my mother to act quickly—and I would ask myself: What was special about that moment? Surely, if I had

ix x PREFACE made the same remark before the war, my mother would not have taken evasive action. So why did she feel so threatened then? It was only after my training in social psychology broadened my perspective on human behavior that I came to the realization that my question, in a more general form, was one of the primary psychological puzzles underlying the mass destruction of European Jewry: What psychological mechanism transformed the average, and presumably normal, citizens of Germany and its allies into people who would carry out or tolerate unimaginable acts of cruelty against their fellow citizens who were Jewish, resulting in the death of six million of them? It was during graduate school that I first learned about Stanley Milgram and his remarkable exploration of the human tendency to obey authority, which was to become the most famous social-psychological research of all time. In the opening paragraph of his first journal article about that research, Milgram explicitly embedded it in the Holocaust. This wasn’t surprising, given that the question of how apparently normal people could so readily turn into brutal killers is first and foremost a psychological one. In- deed, psychology had been trying to explain the Holocaust since the end of World War II, and by the time Milgram’s research appeared in print in 1963, a number of psychological works pertaining to the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis had already been published. What set Milgram’s contribution apart was his use of a scientific laboratory experiment to help shed light on the perpetrators’ behavior. In adopting an experimental approach, Milgram achieved two goals that at first might seem incompatible. He brought a degree of objectivity—relative to other forms of inquiry—to a topic that did not lend itself easily to dispassionate analysis. At the same time, by bringing the demonstration of destructive obedience closer to home, both in time and place, Milgram made it more difficult for those who learned about the experiments to distance themselves from their bale- ful implications. Milgram conducted his obedience studies when he was an assistant professor, fresh out of graduate school. They marked the beginning of one of the most productive, eclectic, and innovative careers in psychology. Mil- gram would go on to research topics as wide-ranging as the small-world PREFACE xi problem (also known as “six degrees of separation”), the lost-letter technique, and mental maps of cities. Several decades ago, I became curious about the human being behind the scientist and, through my research, discovered in Milgram a personality as unusual and multifaceted as his research. This book is the product of my twenty-year immersion in Milgram’s eye-opening and sometimes troubling research. Clearly, my harrowing experiences in Nazi-dominated Hungary gave me a special appreciation of the value of his most widely known work—the obedience experiments. But I wrote this book because I believe that we all stand to gain from Milgram’s work, which sheds light on the most basic of human interactions and has the power to change the way we view our very social world. This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I met Stanley Milgram only once—at a convention of the American Psy- chological Association in the early 1970s. We only chatted brieﬂy, but that encounter left a lasting impression on me. He was standing in front of the book exhibit of one of his publishers. I recognized him from photographs I had seen in psychology textbooks and went up to him to introduce myself. He knew my mentor and thesis advisor, Aaron Hershkowitz. Aaron had been in New Haven, running a post-doctoral program in social psychology at the local Veterans Administration Hospital, when Stanley was conducting his obedience experiments at Yale. When I introduced myself to Mil- gram, I noted my connection to Hershkowitz. He replied, “You know, I learned a lot from Aaron Hershkowitz,” which astonished me. He had already achieved a good measure of fame—at the convention, as I recall, he gave a talk that drew about 1,000 people—and still had the humility to acknowledge his intellectual debts. In the process of researching this book, I came to learn that that personal quality was only one piece—and not even an especially representative one—of a complex and sometimes puzzling personality. There are many people who helped me, directly or indirectly, to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Although I received help from dozens of people, a few deserve special mention. First, I want to express my deep appreciation to Sasha Milgram. I ﬁrst met Sasha in the spring of 1993, spending two enchanting afternoons in her apartment, as she recalled for me the details of her life with Stanley.

xiii xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Over the next 10 years there would be more visits and countless phone calls during which she gave generously and good naturedly of her time to provide me with further information and insights about Stanley. In addition, she shared with me her personal collection of papers and memorabilia, without which the story of Stanley Milgram would have been incomplete. My deep thanks also to Stanley’s siblings, Joel Milgram and Marjorie Mar- ton, who provided me with vital information, especially about Stanley’s childhood. The Milgrams’ children, Marc Milgram and Michèle Marques, have helped round out the picture of Stanley as father and family man. Francois Rochat, a Milgram scholar from Switzerland, first informed me of the existence of the Stanley Milgram papers at Yale, and he has been a true friend whose constant encouragement helped to keep me focused whenever I felt overwhelmed. Harold Takooshian, one of Milgram’s students, takes genuine pleasure in helping others attain their goals. Beginning with arranging for my invitation to address the American Psychological As- sociation’s convention in 1993 about Milgram, his helpfulness has continued to benefit me over the course of the past ten years. When I first began thinking seriously about writing this book, Samuel Vaughan, who was then a senior editor at Random House, provided me with the needed reassurance that it was a worthwhile undertaking and the confidence that I could do it. Diane Kaplan, archivist at Yale University library, masterfully converted 90 boxes of papers donated by Sasha Milgram into the organized collection of the Stanley Milgram Papers, and I thank her for her helpfulness during my many research trips to New Haven. Thanks also to staff at the Harvard Uni- versity Archives and the Archives of the History of American Psychology (AHAP) in Akron, Ohio. The visit to AHAP was facilitated by my receiving the J. R. Kantor Fellowship for 1998–1999, an annual award by AHAP. Closer to home, thanks are due the staff at the UMBC library, especially Michael Romary, for the valuable assistance they have provided for many years. And I want to express my deep appreciation to my department chairman, Carlo DiClemente, for his supportiveness during both the research and writing phases of the biography. I have been fortunate to have the services of two talented people, my agent Theresa Park and my editor Amanda Cook. Both shared my vision of ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xv the biography and helped turn it into reality. Amanda’s enthusiasm, combined with her exacting standards, made her the ideal editor for the book. And many thanks to Michael Denneny, who worked tirelessly in helping me with needed revisions to the manuscript. A vital part of the research for the book was the information and insights provided by dozens of people—Milgram’s colleagues, students, and others—during the course of interviews and conversations, in person or by telephone, and in a few cases via e-mail. At the risk of forgetting a few, I want to thank the following individuals: Robert Abelson, Scott Armstrong, George Bellak, Arthur Asa Berger, Sidney Blatt, Norman Bradburn, Joseph Brostek, Roger Brown, Jerome Bruner, Robbie Chafitz, Stephen P. Cohen, Lane Conn, Tom Cottle, Rosamond Dana, Florence Denmark, Alan Elms, Paul Errera, Kenneth Feigenbaum, Roy Feldman, Hilry Fisher, Eva Fogel- man, Bernard Fried, Harry From, Sam Gaertner, Joan Gerver, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, Paul Hollander, Ronna Kabatznick, Irwin Katz, Herb Kelman, James Korn, Nijole Kudirka, Howard Leventhal, Leon Mann, Brendan Maher, Elinor Mannucci, Robert McDonough, Murray Melbin, William Menold, Hedwin Naimark, Robert Palmer, Robert Panzarella, E. L. Pattullo, James Pennebaker, Tom Pettigrew, Sharon Presley, Salomon Rettig, Eleanor Rosch, Robert Rosenthal, John Rothman, Pat Sabena, John Sabini, Ann Saltzman, John Shaffer, Vincent Sherman, Leonard Siger, Maury Silver, Chas Smith, Saul Sternberg, Phil Stone, Hans Toch, Judith Waters, Arthur Weinberger, Rabbi Avi Weiss, Walter Weiss, Herb Winer, David Winter, Ed Zigler, and Philip Zimbardo. And last but not least, I want to acknowledge the assistance of my wife, Anne. Thanking one’s spouse has become almost cliché. But it is literally true that this book would not have happened without Anne’s loving and devoted assistance. She was the one who first suggested turning my interest in Milgram’s life and work into a biography, and it was her gentle but insistent prodding that finally made me decide to undertake this project. It was her unflagging good cheer and support, both in spirit and substance— which included help with word processing at odd hours of the day and night—on top of her own daytime job and taking care of our children, that made a daunting task immeasurably less so. This page intentionally left blank PROLOGUE

A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority. . . . This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.

—STANLEY MILGRAM, 1974

Stanley Milgram entered the public consciousness—with a jolt—in the fall of 1963. Newspapers around the country were reporting a startling discovery he had made in his psychology laboratory at Yale in conducting what became known as “the obedience experiments.” He found that average, presumably normal, groups of residents of New Haven, Connecticut, would readily inﬂict very painful, and possibly harmful, electric shocks on an innocent victim whose actions did not merit such harsh treatment. As part of an experiment supposedly dealing with the effects of punishment on learning, subjects were required by an experimenter to shock a learner every time he made an error on a verbal learning task, and to increase the intensity of the shock in 15-volt steps, from 15 to 450 volts, on each subsequent error. The results: 65 percent of the subjects continued to obey the experimenter to the end, simply because he commanded them to.

xvii xviii PROLOGUE

These groundbreaking and controversial experiments have had—and continue to have—enduring significance, because they demonstrated with stunning clarity that ordinary individuals could be induced by an authority figure to act destructively, even in the absence of physical coercion, and that it didn’t take evil or aberrant individuals to carry out actions that were immoral and inhumane. More generally, Milgram’s findings have sensitized us to our malleability in the face of social pressure, reshaping our conceptions of individual morality. While one might think that when confronted with a moral dilemma we will act as our conscience dictates, Milgram’s obedience experiments taught us—dramatically—that, in a concrete situation containing powerful social pressures, our moral sense can readily get trampled underfoot.

…

Social psychology is the branch of psychology that studies the way our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are affected, directly or indirectly, by other people. Since most of our daily activities involve interacting with other people, a typical social psychology course covers a wide range of normal behaviors, such as first impressions, attraction, hostility, group pressure, and helpfulness. The field has a long past and a short history. It is as old as human beings’ attempts to understand and predict others’ behaviors. Ancient writings are filled with insights about social behavior that have withstood the test of time. For example, the following statement is found in the Talmud, the compendium of Jewish scholarship written thousands of years ago: “Do not look at the container, but at what is in it.” This advice was based on a tru- ism, repeatedly verified by modern experimental research: that a person’s acceptance of an argument will be affected by the persuader’s attractiveness, race, or gender—all irrelevant to the argument. In spite of its ancient roots, social psychology as an experimental science is very new—just over 100 years old. The first experiment in social psychology is credited to a psychologist named Norman Triplett, whose study appeared in the American Journal of Psychology in 1897. Triplett demon- PROLOGUE xix strated by means of a laboratory experiment that subjects performed a manual task (winding fishing reels) faster when they were in direct competition with another person than when they worked alone. Stanley Milgram began his professional career in the 1960s, when American social psychology was in its ascendancy, a trajectory that had begun after World War II. Social psychologists in the postwar years possessed unbounded self-confidence about their ability to develop theories and methods that would provide new insights about social behavior. Social psychology’s favorable self-image in the early 1960s had two sources. First, many social psychologists had found their skills put to good use during World War II in such areas as morale, propaganda, survey research, and programs of attitude and behavior change—for example, getting consumers to change their dietary habits and eat unpopular but nutritious foods in an effort to conserve scarce resources. Even more important was the influence of Kurt Lewin, a prewar refugee from Nazi Germany, who is generally considered to be the father of experimental social psychology. During much of the first half of the twentieth century, American aca - demic psychology was dominated by behaviorism, a movement that was pi- oneered by John Watson, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins University. Wat- son attempted to create an objective, experimental science of behavior. Dismissing attempts to study inner experience as pseudoscientific, he launched behaviorism in 1913 in an article in the journal Psychological Re- view. The article, which has come to be known as “the behaviorists’ manifesto” began as follows:

Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. . . . Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientiﬁc value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness.

Watson’s manifesto was an attack on the prevailing view of the appropriate subject matter and primary method of experimental psychology, traceable to Wilhelm Wundt, who founded the first psychological laboratory, at the University of Leipzig in 1879. For Wundt, the goal of psychological ex- xx PROLOGUE perimentation was to study the contents of the mind, or consciousness, through the method of introspection. Although becoming an introspec- tionist required intensive training, the technique turned out to be unreli- able, with psychologists in different laboratories obtaining different results even though they used the same methods. Although Watson’s critique was a needed corrective, he went overboard in dismissing subjective experience as beyond the pale of scientific inquiry. The most important heir to Watson’s behaviorism was B.F. Skinner, who made reinforcement a central concept of his own radical form of behaviorism. For Skinner, when a behavioral response to a stimulus was followed by reinforcement—a rewarding consequence—a bond was created between the stimulus and the response. For example, if a pigeon in a cage finds that pecking (the response) on a red disc (the stimulus) would deliver food in a tray below it (the reinforcement) but pecking on a green disc would not, it will learn to repeatedly peck on the red disc and ignore the green one. Behaviorism’s grip on American psychology during the first half of the twentieth century encompassed the subdiscipline of social psychology. The first textbook establishing social psychology as a standard course, Floyd Allport’s Social Psychology, published in 1924, embraced behaviorism. It emphasized the role of learning and conditioning in social behavior. For the behaviorist, there was nothing distinctively “social” about social behavior. Social psychology was still a psychology of the individual in which other people were merely another class of stimuli—social stimuli— that, in a manner similar to physical stimuli, would produce learned responses. As John Dashiell, an adherent of this approach, wrote in 1935 in a chapter reviewing social-psychological research conducted between 1914 and 1934, “Particularly is it to be borne in mind that in this objective stimulus-response relationship of an individual to his fellows we have to deal with no radically new concepts, no principles essentially additional to those applying to nonsocial situations.” His chapter covered experiments that examined the effects of the presence of other people on an individual’s performance on mechanical tasks, verbal tests, and puzzles. These kinds of experiments were relatively simplistic and sterile and failed to capture the richness and complexity of real-life social interactions. PROLOGUE xxi

It took the ingenuity of Kurt Lewin and his students to apply the experimental method to socially significant behaviors. In doing so, they played a major role in ending the dominance of reinforcement theory in social psychology. Lewin was a Jewish psychologist who emigrated to the United States from Germany in 1933. After Hitler became chancellor of Germany in Jan- uary 1933 and restrictive laws against Jews began to escalate, Lewin fore- saw that no Jew could continue to live in Nazi Germany. He resigned his faculty position at the University of Berlin, preempting his imminent dismissal by the Nazis, and left Germany. After spending two years on the faculty of Cornell University, in 1935 he took a position at the University of Iowa, where he spent the next nine years. Lewin had already been recognized as an innovator in both theory and research during his tenure at the University of Berlin and had attracted students from abroad, including the United States. When he moved to Iowa, a new crop of students came to study with him, some of whom were to become leading figures in social psychology. At Berlin, Lewin’s research had dealt with such topics as motivation, memory, personality, and child development. After his move to Iowa, his interests shifted to social psychology. This shift came in the form of a series of experiments on leadership styles, first reported in 1939, which one historian of social psychology has described as “path-breaking in their procedural audacity.” As a refugee who had experienced the contrasting social climates in Germany and the United States, Lewin was acutely sensitive to the effects that different kinds of leaders could have on the people they govern. Along with his students Ronald Lippitt and Ralph K. White, he created an experiment to study the effects of three leadership styles: democratic, authoritarian, and laissez-faire. The three researchers created clubs of eleven-year-old boys who met once a week to engage in various activities, such as making masks. The groups were led by adults who role-played the different styles of leadership. The authoritarian leader always made decisions unilaterally, without input from the group. He generally remained aloof from the members of the club, and he praised or criticized them without explaining his actions. In contrast, under democratic leadership, all decisions were made by the group, with the leader, xxii PROLOGUE who was always friendly, providing encouragement and guidance. He always gave reasons for his evaluations of the boys. The laissez-faire leader provided no active guidance. Although friendly, he was a passive resource person who provided information only when the boys requested it. Leaders were rotated so that each club experienced all three styles of leadership. Continuous, systematic observations were made of the boys’ behavior. Among other things, Lewin’s team found that although productivity was roughly equal in the democratic and authoritarian groups and higher than in the laissez-faire groups, club members showed the greatest preference for democratic leaders, and they were most aggressive under an authoritarian leader. Lewin introduced several pivotal ideas that became, through the influence of his students and his own contagious enthusiasm, defining elements of contemporary social psychology. First, it was possible to concretize even apparently intangible features of social interaction (such as leadership style) and thereby examine their effects in the laboratory. Second, questions of social importance could be answered via the application of the experimental method. One of the most important social psychologists to emerge from Lewin’s circle of students was Leon Festinger, who introduced the theory of cognitive dissonance in 1957—a theory based on the idea that holding inconsistent beliefs is an unpleasant state from which a person will seek relief, much like hunger or thirst. Festinger and his students developed high- impact laboratory experiments to test various predictions derived from the theory. Milgram and many other social psychologists of his generation were also influenced by Lewin and his students, absorbing the sense of limitless possibilities of social-psychological inquiry and the use of powerful experimental manipulations. A third idea introduced by Lewin led to the defining theoretical stance of contemporary social psychology—situationism. According to Lewin, behavior was a function of what he called the “life space.” The life space consists of all the potential forces operating on an individual in a concrete situation in the “here and now.” Edward E. Jones, an important social-psychological theorist and experimenter, highlighted an important implication of Lewin’s emphasis on contemporaneous, situational determinants, as expressed in his concept of the “life space”: PROLOGUE xxiii

[Lewin] conceived of a person as a point in psychological space, constrained to move in certain directions by the ﬁeld of forces operating in that space.... A view of a human being as the product of long developmental history emphasizes the uniqueness and the distinctiveness of his or her responses to a common environment. On the other hand, a view of a human being as a point at the intersection of environmental forces emphasizes the contemporaneous perceptions and related actions he or she shares with others in that same position. Through experimentation, one hopes that such common action patterns can be determined.

Like most social psychologists, Milgram was a situationist—a strong believer in the power of the immediate situation in affecting a person’s behavior. But what made him stand out as one of the most important social scientists of the twentieth century and made his research so original was his ability to go beyond the visible situational forces and demonstrate the unexpected power of certain invisible features of situations. A unifying theme of Milgram’s research—and of this book—is that the intangibles of situations, the unverbalized social rules and norms operating within them, have a more powerful effect on our behavior than we might expect. We will see how he made those unseen and unverbalized norms visible in original experiments ranging from having a young man asking an older passenger on a New York subway train for her seat to studying the temptation to steal from a charity box after observing a similar act on a specially produced TV program. He invented new, sometimes playful, methods—such as the lost- letter technique and the small-world method—to unearth those rules and norms, revealing in often startling ways that our intuitions are not always reliable predictors of our own and others’ actions. Milgram was a complex individual whose personality and actions were sometimes enigmatic, resulting in polarized reactions of either affection or disdain from others. But the traits that made him one of the outstanding scientists of his generation and worthy of our attention were a voracious curiosity and the creativity that enabled him to satisfy it. Milgram’s curiosity led him to expand the boundaries of social psychology by exploring uncharted territory such as mental maps of cities and the xxiv PROLOGUE

“familiar stranger.” It also resulted in a rare achievement: the discovery of two universals of behavior, transcending both time and place—people’s extreme readiness to obey authority, and the parsimonious interconnectedness of points in very large networks via only “six degrees of separation.” Milgram’s relentless curiosity made him willing to live on the edge sci- entifically and to take risks, especially with his groundbreaking and controversial research on obedience. As the reader will see in this book, not only have those experiments hopped the usual disciplinary fences—they have been discussed in fields as wide-ranging as law, business ethics, and medicine—but they have stirred the dramatic imagination as well, resulting in several movies and plays, and their influence on contemporary life can be seen in the head-spinning variety of writings that have drawn on Milgram’s work in one way or another. This is the story of Stanley Milgram: his life, his inventive brand of science, and its far-reaching impact on public life. CHAPTER 1

THE NEIGHBORHOOD WITH NO NAME

TANLEY MILGRAM WAS born in the Bronx on August 15, S1933, to Samuel and Adele Milgram, both Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. They met in the United States and were married in Feb- ruary 1931. Like so many thousands of Jews before and after them, their families had undoubtedly been drawn to America by its idealized reputation as the Goldene Medina—the land of golden opportunity. Samuel, an expert baker and cake decorator, emigrated from Hungary in 1921 after World War I and returned briefly to Europe a few years later to apprentice in Germany. Stanley recalled that his father seemed “especially sturdy, his heavy-boned arms strengthened by years of kneading dough in the shops, his face reflecting both Jewish warmth and, in his high chiseled cheek- bones, traces of his Magyar birthland.” He was 5’8”, and Stanley thought he looked a bit like Marshall Tito of Yugoslavia. Adele was born in Romania in 1908 and came to the United States at age five with her mother. She was petite, short, and gentle. She radiated cheerfulness, and it was easy to make her laugh. Adele was everyone’s favorite aunt, the family sage to whom all turned for advice and for arbitration in family disputes. Samuel and Adele moved frequently. During the Depression, landlords engaged in a competition to draw and retain tenants. They offered various “concessions” or inducements, such as free gas and electricity or a month’s rent. Concessions could save tenants a lot of money, and when their lease was up, they could often find a better offer from another landlord. The

1 2 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

Milgrams, like so many others, found themselves packing up their belong- ings every few years, sometimes to move just a block or two away. When Stanley was born, the family was living in a small apartment building at 1020 Boynton Avenue, in a section of the South Bronx, bounded on the west by the Bronx River, where it starts its meandering curve eastward, and on the south by Bruckner Boulevard. As late as 1925, the area still contained some farmland. This section of the Bronx did not have an agreed-upon name, but it did possess a cohesive neighborhood feeling, and the streets pulsated with the energy and drive of people who were trying to improve their situation. Years later, Stanley would describe it this way:

The neighborhood was always abuzz with people: plump, animated women, in patterned cotton dresses and aprons, sunning themselves on bridge chairs in front of the apartment houses, knitting in splendid self- containment or exchanging gossip while distractedly rocking their baby carriages. There were plenty of children running around, and always a mother shouting through an open window for “Sey . . . mour” or “Ir . . . ving” in that long drawn out sing-song that was their maternal call. It was a mixed neighborhood of immigrants—but not greenhorns—who came mostly from Jewish Eastern Europe. Many of them worked in small shops or owned them. A few clerks, secretaries, and school teachers lived here too, elevating the prestige of the neighborhood. ...These bakers, printers, clerks, and housewives were fueled by aspirations, if not for themselves then for their progeny, who played stick ball in the streets, and thought of the local candy store as the outer limit of their world.

Stanley was Sam and Adele’s second child. His sister Marjorie was born a year and a half earlier. Stanley was named after a deceased grandfather named Simcha—Hebrew for joy, a feeling apparently lost on his sister, who, sensing that she would now have to vie with the new baby for her parents’ attention, demanded: “Throw him into the incinerator.” She was constantly tossing things into Stanley’s crib, forcing Adele to spread a screen over it to protect him. And Marjorie was constantly being reprimanded for hitting the baby. The Neighborhood with No Name 3

A younger brother, Joel, was born five years later. Stanley’s first recollection of the imminent arrival of his new brother was sitting with his sister on the marble steps in the vestibule of their apartment house on Boynton Av- enue, speculating about the new baby: “We knew that Mom would be going to the hospital to get the baby. Margie insisted that it be a baby girl; I wanted a baby brother. We argued, but we knew the matter was not up to us; it would depend on whatever the hospital decided to give out.” When Joel was old enough, he became a willing accomplice in his brother’s pranks, which continued well into their teens. This shared mis- chief not only enlivened those years, but helped cement the bonds of brotherhood, which held fast for life, no matter how far apart they lived. In one such incident, Stanley and his buddies decided to try to convince another friend, named Wex (short for Wexelbaum), that he had telepathic powers. To prove it, Stanley brought Wex to his own room in the apartment and told him that he was thinking of a number, which he had written on a slip of paper and put in a lockbox under his bed. Wex should read his mind and say what the number was. After Wex said a number, Joel, hiding under the bed, quickly wrote the number on a piece of paper and slipped it into the lockbox. In another incident, Stanley and Joel were having a friendly tussle on the living room floor. Among the room’s furnishings was a round, ornate French provincial coffee table with four curving, baroque legs. It was recessed in the middle and covered by a clear glass disc, about 30 inches across. They bumped the coffee table, breaking the glass top. To hide their misdeed from their parents, the brothers spread a piece of cellophane tightly across the top. The substitution went undetected for a few weeks, until one day a guest placed a cup and saucer on the table that quickly sank toward the floor. For the children of the Neighborhood With No Name, the center of their lives was the local elementary school, PS 77, on Ward Avenue. Its main entrance was flanked on both sides by two white columns, their state- liness serving to forewarn those about to enter the building of the supreme importance of what went on inside. The building’s symbolic import was abetted by a dress code: Boys had to wear white shirts and ties. Through the third grade, it was a red tie; after third grade, it was a blue tie. There was a similar school “uniform” requirement for girls, who had to wear some type 4 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD of white blouse and a red—then blue—sash, bow, or ribbon around the neck. The uniforms served as a simple but effective social and economic leveler. The school’s principal believed that wearing them would make all children feel equal. Adele loved the dress code, because it took the daily decision about what the children should wear and the hassles associated with it out of her hands. A pretty flower garden separated the school building and the sidewalk. Adele once told little Stanley that babies came from tulips. After that, he would periodically inspect the tulips in the school’s garden, waiting for tiny life forms to emerge. It was at PS 77 that Stanley’s superior intelligence became visible to those outside his immediate family. When Stanley was in kindergarten, he would often stand next to his mother at night as she helped his sister with her homework. One evening, the discussion focused on Abraham Lincoln. The following day, when Stanley’s kindergarten teacher asked her class to tell what they knew about the great president, little Stanley raised his hand and proceeded to repeat what he had overheard from his mother the night before. His teacher was so impressed that she had the principal take him around from class to class to recite his speech about President Lincoln. Indeed, Stanley was remembered by his elementary school teachers as an outstanding student. Although as an adult Joel would be proud of his brother’s achievements, during their childhood years Stanley’s school performance made Joel, a disinterested student who got marginal grades, look even worse. Joel’s third-grade teacher, Mrs. Stiller, had been Stanley’s third- grade teacher five years earlier. Once, expressing her disappointment while returning a paper to Joel with a low grade, she made it a point to tell him how much better his brother had done in her class. Most of the boys in the neighborhood spent much of their free time playing ball in the schoolyard and in the streets. Stanley was not very adept at sports, so he did not participate much in those activities. Instead, he developed an early interest in science. An older cousin gave him a chemistry set, and he found himself tinkering with it in his spare time. Occasionally he got some of his buddies to participate in his experiments, one of which involved lowering a large flask containing sodium into the Bronx River. When the “sodium bomb” exploded, fire engines and worried mothers The Neighborhood with No Name 5 rushed to the site. He was always doing experiments. “It was as natural as breathing,” he once told an interviewer, “and I tried to understand how everything worked.” Among Stanley’s childhood experiences, two are especially noteworthy, because they turned out to be harbingers of concerns that would later dominate his professional life. The first involved the power of groups. In Stan- ley’s own words:

On [a] summer day, after a child had been knocked down by a passing car, the neighborhood demanded that Boynton Avenue be turned into a one- way street. A crowd of protesters gathered on the sidewalk with crudely fabricated signs. The crowd started to chant, “Sit down strike! Sit down strike!” A barricade of milk crates was formed across the width of the street and protesters sat on the crates preventing trafﬁc from moving through. Police arrived, some words were exchanged and the incident came to an end. ...I suppose if I had grown up in a more genteel place this kind of thing would not happen. But this was the Bronx in the thirties. It was not a neighborhood of patsies. We got our one-way street.

The second incident occurred when Stanley was four or five years old. His cousin, Stanley Norden, a year and a half older, who lived in the same neighborhood, had come over to play. (The two Stanleys were named after the same grandfather.) They were playing in the bedroom, with cousin Stanley sitting on the floor between two beds. According to Milgram: “I decided to ‘measure’ the distance between the beds by stretching a belt from one bed- post to the other. The belt slipped, and the buckle, with its sharp spindle, fell on Stanley’s head causing a small flow of blood. Stanley began to cry and ran to Aunt Mary [his mother] who was chatting with Mom in the kitchen.” Milgram was soundly scolded by his mother, making him cry. He felt miserable about his misdeed, even though it was an accident and he hadn’t meant to hurt his cousin. “Still, to be blamed for such things was a burden. But whether I learned my lesson remains unclear. For many years later, was I not again to become an object of criticism for my efforts to measure something without due regard to the risks it entailed for others?” 6 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

Samuel Milgram was a proud father. His children were the smartest and the most beautiful. He always referred to them as his “treasures.” Marjorie was his Hungarian princess, and he often boasted about his four-year-old son, Stanley, who could recite the Pledge of Allegiance and Mother Goose rhymes by heart. Stanley identiﬁed strongly with his father, even idolized him:

To any child, who views things from two feet off the ground, all fathers must look big and strong, but Sam seemed especially sturdy. . . . What intense joy we experienced jumping on Dad’s chest as he lay on the rug of our apartment, sliding down his knees.... When, many years later, I had children of my own, I recall how on Sunday mornings, they would jump all over me in bed, balance themselves on my forked knees, enact little circus performances in which my legs became the stable platforms from which they giggled through their antics and I thought of my father and the deli- cious joy of jumping on his accommodating chest.

It was a special source of pride to Stanley that everyone said he looked like Sam. Later, Stanley’s wife would comment:

He resembled his father very much physically. . . . His nose looked like it was ﬂattened at the tip, and I never said anything when I ﬁrst met Stanley. But when I saw the photo of Stanley’s father, I thought, Oh! He resembled his father so much that the story goes when Stanley was a little boy playing in the park, and some family members on his father’s side came from Europe, and were looking for where the house was, they saw Stanley and recognized him as Sam’s son.

One of Stanley’s fondest and most vivid childhood memories was accompanying his father as the family moved to a new apartment on Ward Avenue, on the other side of the elevated train tracks running along Westchester Avenue:

After most of the furniture had been packed into a moving truck, Dad wanted to take over some clothing and small items to the new apart- The Neighborhood with No Name 7

ment.... He ﬁlled [a] cart with clothing, lamps and other household para- phernalia and probably against Mom’s objection—she had a stronger sense of decorum—was going to transport the items three or four blocks to the new house. To my great joy I was invited to get into the cart and go along for the ride.... It was not a pushcart type of neighborhood: black Chevys and Buick sedans lined the streets. Perhaps the sight of Dad pushing the wagon up Boynton Avenue struck onlookers as eccentric. But I had just turned ﬁve. No captain of a frigate could have surveyed the passing chan- nels with greater pride, as I sat atop the bundles of clothing, moving north- ward on Boynton Avenue toward our new place, the vessel powered by my very own father, strong as Hercules.

…

When the United States entered World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Milgrams lived at 1239 Ward Avenue, only two blocks from their previous home on Boynton Avenue. One side of the block was made up of virtually identical brick two-family houses with postage-stamp-sized front lawns. The Milgrams occupied the upstairs apartment of one such house. It was larger than their previous apartment, and they had moved there soon after Joel was born to accommodate the needs of a growing family. As the country mobilized for war, Sam felt the need to take steps to ensure that he would not be drafted. He was now forty-three, which made conscription unlikely. But he had fought in World War I—had even been a POW—and he did not relish the thought of having to repeat the experience. So in late 1942 he moved his family temporarily to Camden, New Jersey, to train and work as a welder in the shipyards. Having a job that was crucial to the war effort would protect him from the draft. Although he undoubtedly could have found a war-related job closer to home, he believed that if the Germans were ever to attack the U.S. mainland, New York would be a prime target. He was knowledgeable enough—he thought—about the advanced state of German war technology to believe they had the ability to launch long-range rockets that could reach the 8 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

United States. Stanley was very much aware of his family’s worries about Nazi Germany. His father had family living in Europe, and he and Adele followed developments there closely on the radio. The Milgrams were not religiously observant, although their cultural iden- tiﬁcation was strong and their home resounded with the melodic cadences of Yiddish whenever uncles and aunts came to visit. The religious holidays— such as Passover and Rosh Hashanah—were observed, but more as an occasion for family gatherings than for their religious signiﬁcance. Stanley attended afternoon Hebrew school for a few years until his Bar Mitzvah. When it came time for thirteen-year-old Stanley to give a little speech at his Bar Mitzvah celebration, which took place the year after the war ended, he showed a concern over recent events:

As I come of age and find happiness in joining the ranks of Israel, the knowledge of the tragic suffering of my fellow Jews throughout war-torn Europe makes this also a solemn event and an occasion to reflect upon the heritage of my people—which now becomes mine. I do not know whether I shall be able to cherish this heritage in the same way as my parents did throughout their lives. But I shall try to understand my people and do my best to share the responsibilities which history has placed upon all of us. This is a period of transition—when the whole world undergoes tremendous changes. Perhaps this 13th year of my life will be even more significant as marking the beginning of a new era for the Jewish people, an era of justice and liberty and a homeland Eretz Yisroel. . . . May there be an end to persecution, suffering and war and may Israel be established in Zion bimhareh beyomanu [speedily in our day]. Amen.

In early 1945, as the end of the war drew near, the family returned to their Bronx neighborhood and rented a ﬁve-room apartment at 1214 Wheeler Avenue. Sam resumed working in a nearby bakery that he had bought with his brother-in-law, and the children resumed their schooling at PS 77. In the fall of 1947, Stanley entered James Monroe High School, located a couple of blocks from his home. Bernard Fried, a classmate and one of Milgram’s closest boyhood friends, remembers the school as a beautiful but The Neighborhood with No Name 9 functional building, with excellent facilities and laboratory equipment. It had been constructed in 1925 as a model school, and everything about it was huge and impressive. In Milgram’s time its student body numbered between 3,500 and 4,000, and it was reported to have the largest stage of any school in New York, second only to Radio City Music Hall. William Pitt’s maxim, “Where law ends, tyranny begins,” was chiseled into a marble sign above the entrance. The school used a tracking system in which the students with the highest IQ and grades were placed in honors classes. Milgram, with an IQ of 158, the highest of all his classmates, was placed in such a class. He ﬁnished high school in three years, accelerating his progress by taking summer courses and an extra class or two each semester. Among the students who graduated the same year as Stanley was Philip Zimbardo, another future social psychologist and a future president of the American Psychological Association, who would become famous for conducting the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which ordinary college students would undergo dramatic behavioral changes after being randomly assigned to the role of prisoner or guard in a mock prison. Zimbardo remembers Mil- gram as one of the smartest students in his year—the kind of kid who read the New York Times, while most others would be reading the Daily News. At Monroe, Stanley was a member of Arista, the honor society. He became editor of the Science Observer, a school newspaper, and worked on stagecraft for theatrical productions. He was also on the staff of his gradu- ating class’s yearbook, charged with writing the rhyming couplets that appeared below each graduate’s photograph. He wrote the following about Phil Zimbardo, who had been one of the most popular students in the class:

Phil’s our vice president tall and thin, With his blue eyes all the girls he’ll win.

And he wrote this whimsical couplet about himself:

The strangest event of our time, I’m writing my own little yearbook rhyme. 10 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

He did not date at Monroe—nor did his clique of fellow honors students, virtually all of whom went on to successful careers in professions such as law, medicine, and academia. Milgram’s buddy, Bernard Fried—who is now Professor Emeritus at Lafayette College, capping a career as a world- renowned parasitologist—explained:

If you were going to go on to college and if you were going to make something of yourself, if you were going to be a professional, your best bet [was] to stay away from women until [you were] ready to manage that sort of thing.... You didn’t get that involved with the other sex.... It would dis- tract from what your purpose in life would be.

The bakery Sam and his brother-in-law bought was highly successful but short-lived, because a dispute broke out between them, ending the partnership. In 1947 Sam bought his own bakery, in the Richmond Hill section of Queens. It took three trains and an hour and a half to get there, so Sam stayed at a boarding house during the week and came home only on the weekends. Adele also worked there, but she took the train there every day, coming home late at night. Joel would sometimes wait for her, waiflike, by the subway station. This proved to be an extremely difficult arrangement, and in 1949 the family moved to 109th Street in Richmond Hill, only a few blocks from the bakery. Stanley did not change schools, instead commuting daily from Queens until he graduated from James Monroe High School. The move to Queens had also been motivated by a second factor. As Joel approached adolescence, he was becoming a street kid and started hanging out with friends who would occasionally get into trouble. At one point, Joel got into trouble with them, breaking some car windows and getting picked up by the police. Adele feared that if they remained in the neighborhood, she would end up with a juvenile delinquent on her hands. But the family’s troubles continued after the move. Soon after Sam bought the bakery, the business collapsed, because of some duplicity on the part of the former owner. The sales agreement had included a provision that the previous owner could not open another bakery within a twenty-block area, but he managed to circumvent that agreement by opening one in the The Neighborhood with No Name 11 neighborhood under his wife’s name—effectively depriving Sam of the customers he was counting on. The family’s financial situation was further worsened by a bad investment. One of Sam’s brothers had told him to in- vest in sugar, because its price would soon rise. Adele had managed, with great difficulty, to save up $8,000 to enable them to buy a house of their own. Sam, confident that his brother’s prediction would materialize, asked Adele for the money. She gave it to him reluctantly, but without a word. The price of sugar plummeted, wiping out Sam’s investment. In the fall of 1950 Stanley enrolled at Queens College, a choice dictated largely by the fact that it was close to home and that, like all the other colleges in the City University of New York system, it was tuition free. When Stanley attended, it was a relatively small school, consisting primarily of six compact buildings—previously a reform school—surrounding a grassy quad. There was only one new building, Remsen Hall, which had been built specifically for the college. Marjorie, who also attended the school, remembers it as “the closest thing to going to a city college and feeling that you did have a campus.” But convenience aside, Queens College was a good choice academically. In 1953, the Ford Foundation had ranked it second in the nation in the humanities and tenth in the social sciences. People called it the Harvard of the City University system. During Stanley’s precollege years, the hard sciences—mainly chemistry and biology—had dominated his interests and preoccupations. At Queens College, however, the “softer” side of his intellect came to the fore. He majored in political science but also took courses in English literature, music, and art—and, in fact, minored in the latter. He excelled academically: He received the School Award in Political Science and the Certificate of Ex- cellence in Forensics, qualified for membership in the National Political Science Honors Society, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He was active in extracurricular activities, becoming president of the International Relations Club and vice president of the Debating Society. He tried his hand at music, collaborating with a classmate on Broadway-type musicals, and he attempted to write poetry. In the summer of 1953, after his junior year, Stanley toured France, Spain, and Italy on a motorized bicycle. In early September, he wound up at the American Consulate in Genoa with only two dollars in his pocket. 12 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

Pleading poverty, he received a little financial help from the maternally minded vice-consul, a kindly woman in her late forties. To return home, he approached the crew of a German ship bound for the United States, hoping they would allow him to come aboard. At first they refused, but he was persistent—an attribute that would serve him well later in life. They finally agreed to let him come on board—putting him to work as a radio commu- nicator—and even provided him with a comfortable room. Of the three countries he visited that summer, he spent the most time in France. From July 15 to August 14, he enrolled in a French language course at the Sorbonne, which helped him master the language. He eventually attained such fluency that after he became a well-known figure and would periodically appear on French television, people thought he was French. That summer he fell in love with a French girl, Francine, his first love. He also fell in love with the country, and he would return to France many times during his lifetime. Later that year, on the night of December 11, 1953, Sam Milgram died in his sleep from a coronary thrombosis. He had been sharing a bed with Joel: Sam would sleep in it during the day and get up late at night to go to work in the bakery, and Joel would then use it during the night. On the night of December 11, Joel heard his father’s alarm go off, but Sam did not come out. Adele and the family suffered terribly. Aside from the emotional blow, Sam’s death left them virtually penniless: He had taken out a life insurance policy but had depleted it to enable him to buy the bakery. But Adele was a resourceful and resilient person who did not let adversity overwhelm her. With her past experience helping Sam in the bakery, she found a job before long working in another bakery. For Stanley, the financial impact of his father’s death was softened by the fact that his schooling was free and that he had received a New York State Regents Scholarship amounting to $1,400 for the four years he was in college. Marjorie had recently begun teaching in an elementary school and was able to help her mother briefly, until her own marriage the following year. One effect Sam’s death had on Stanley was to give him a resolve to protect his own future family from financial disaster in the event of his own death, which he worried would also be premature. In fact, during their first year of marriage, Stanley told his wife that he expected to die by age fifty- The Neighborhood with No Name 13

ﬁve—a prediction completely at odds with his perfect state of health at the time. She recalled:

He kept saying he would live to be fifty-five, and I just looked at him. Stanley was one of the healthiest persons I knew, physically and emotionally.... If he had a cold, he’d just keep going and it would go away. So when he would say he’d live to be fifty-five, I’d say, ‘Your father was a different person than you.’

Milgram graduated from Queens College, receiving a B.A. with honors. His studies in political science had led to an interest in a career in the For- eign Service. In the spring of 1952, his sophomore year, he corresponded with the Board of Examiners at the State Department, asking about the educational qualifications needed by a candidate for the Foreign Service and requesting their booklet of sample questions from their entrance examination. During his senior year he applied to, and was accepted by, the graduate program at Columbia University’s School of International Affairs. But then a number of events came together that would result in a major shift in Milgram’s life. Stanley’s boyhood friend, Bernard Fried, had entered New York University the same year that Stanley began at Queens College. Bernard was majoring in biology, but, as he was still considering the possibility of graduate studies in psychology, he also took a minor concentration in psychology, which gave him a strong background in the field. Fried has a distinct memory of “spending a full day with Stanley” during their senior year, “basically giving him lectures on . . . what I knew about psychology.” He believes that this meeting influenced Milgram’s decision to switch to psychology. By this time Milgram had also become increasingly disenchanted with political science. Being as much a doer as a thinker, he was dissatisfied with the largely philosophical approach that characterized political science at the time. One day, early in the spring semester of 1954, a dean overheard him giving a speech in a senior Social Science seminar, was very much impressed, and asked Milgram if he had considered graduate studies in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard. Milgram had never heard about the program, and he sent for the catalogue. Reading the catalogue was an enlightening experience. He learned, for the first time, that it was possible to take an empirical, scien- 14 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD tific approach to many of the group phenomena that political scientists were interested in—for example, leadership styles and mass persuasion—and that it was social psychologists who were at the forefront of this approach. He sent off an application to their Ph.D. program in Social Psychology. During the 1950s, the Behavioral Sciences Division of the Ford Founda- tion had a fellowship program to encourage young people who had majored in other fields as undergraduates to move into the behavioral sciences. The fellowships provided stipends of $1,800 for one year of graduate school. Stan- ley applied, and in April 1954 he received a telegram notifying him that he had been selected as one of the recipients. That year the fellowship program had received applications from 103 students at fifty-seven different schools. Milgram was one of twenty-two award winners, and among them, one of eight students who elected to go into Harvard’s Social Relations program. Adele was bursting with pride about what she saw as a special, groundbreaking achievement. He was the first Jew to win a Ford Foundation fellowship, she told the family. This would have been especially noteworthy, since Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, had been a vocal anti-Semite. Both Joel and Marjorie recall her making such a remark, but, as it turns out, she was wrong: The list of twenty-two fellowship recipients for 1954–1955 contains a number of students with typically Jewish names, some from schools in the Eastern United States. Most likely the basis for her statement was an actual “first” that had been transformed through the lens of Adele’s ethnic pride: Milgram was the first student at Queens College to win a Ford Foundation fellowship. Milgram’s success with the Ford Foundation was not matched at Har- vard. His application was rejected because he lacked adequate preparation—he had not taken a single psychology course as an undergraduate at Queens. In a letter to the Social Relations Department dated May 30, 1954, he expressed his great disappointment at being rejected and noted the inherent contradiction involved in this action: If he had had the relevant background preparation in psychology, he would not have qualified for the Ford fellowship, which was specifically created for students whose undergraduate education was in fields other than the behavioral sciences. He indicated that he planned to remedy his “defective preparation” over the sum- The Neighborhood with No Name 15 mer by taking a five-day-a-week psychology course at Columbia University that was equivalent to a full-year course in general psychology, as well as an intensive regimen of reading, directed by the chairman of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Queens College. He received a reply from Gordon Allport, chairman of the Social Rela- tions Department’s Committee on Higher Degrees—in effect, the head of the graduate program. Allport doubted that the summer preparation Mil- gram planned would be sufficient for admission as a regular full-time student in the department in the fall. He suggested that Milgram apply to Harvard’s Office of Special Students, to be admitted as a special student for the coming year to make up his deficiencies, and that he tell them “that this Department has advised you to apply.” In the fall, Allport would direct him in the selection of courses. Then he “might apply for regular standing for the year following.... Meanwhile your summer plans are certainly all to the good.” Milgram followed Allport’s advice and was admitted by Har- vard’s Office of Special Students on June 30. Although Allport’s letter was unambiguously encouraging about the prospects of Milgram’s admission as a regular student after a year of preparation, it implied that Milgram’s preparatory year would need to consist of undergraduate courses. But Milgram had another plan. If he could take graduate courses in the fall that were required of regular students in the Ph.D. program in social psychology, even as a special student, he would not be losing a year. If he did well that first year and achieved regular standing the next year, he could probably petition to have his first-year courses used to fulfill program requirements retroactively. So he drastically altered his summer plans. He enrolled in six undergraduate courses—five in psychology and one in sociology—at three different colleges in the New York area: Brooklyn, Hunter, and New York Uni- versity. He took two courses at each school. At Brooklyn College he signed up for Psychology of Personality and a course titled An Eclectic Approach to Social Psychology; at Hunter he enrolled in General Psychology and Gestalt Approach to Social Psychology; at New York University he audited two courses—Child Psychology and Language and Society, a sociology course. He completed each of the four graded courses with As. 16 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

During their correspondence, Milgram concluded one of his letters to Allport by offering “his sincerest expression of appreciation for the generous consideration and advice which I received from you and the Depart- ment. I look forward to a pleasant and profitable association with both.” And Allport ended one of his letters to Milgram by telling him to come to see him when he arrived in Cambridge in the fall and then “we can discuss a plan for the year that will best advance your interests.” This initial exchange of letters set the tone for their future relationship as student and mentor. Allport was to become the most important person in Milgram’s academic life and a constant source of encouragement. He had a bemused admiration for Milgram’s limitless drive and persistence in the face of obstacles. And when Allport felt that Stanley needed prodding, he knew how much pressure to apply without provoking resistance. Stanley, in turn, was always deferential enough to Allport to get his way without seem- ing to be too pushy. Later, several years after Allport’s death, Milgram reflected on him with fondness and appreciation: “Gordon Allport was my longtime mentor and friend. He was a modest man with a pink face; you felt an intense loving quality about him.... He gave me a strong sense of my own potential. All- port was my spiritual and emotional support. He cared for people deeply.” Milgram’s move to Harvard was a pivotal juncture in his development. It would help him extract a particular career path from among his many interests. He would form close friendships, some of which lasted a lifetime. Although he had been interested in a number of women at Queens, they had remained largely infatuations. The greater self-confidence he would develop at Harvard would lead to more mature relationships with women. But he couldn’t predict any of this in the summer of 1954. For the moment, he was just happy to leave behind a lonely existence in Richmond Hill. He found the other young men in his neighborhood dull, ignorant, and boorish, and he was hungry for intellectual companions. Pursuing further studies would also allow him to extend his student deferment and avoid the draft. He was more than ready for Harvard. But was Harvard ready for him? CHAPTER 2

MAKING THE GRADE AT HARVARD

HEN MILGRAM ARRIVED at Harvard in the fall of 1954 Wto begin his graduate studies, the Department of Social Relations was a thriving, burgeoning enterprise. The program had been established in 1946 with the aim of integrating the four disciplines of social psychology, clinical psychology, social anthropology, and sociology. Its founding fathers were four outstanding individuals in those fields, respectively: Gordon All- port, Henry Murray, Clyde Kluckhohn, and Talcott Parsons. They all shared the grand vision of uniting these disciplines under one intellectual and administrative roof, but it was Parsons, the sociologist, who was the most vigorous and unswerving proponent of the fusion. Their vision was no mere mirage; it was an accurate reflection of the productive teamwork that had taken place during World War II among members of different behavioral and social disciplines under the sponsorship of various federal agencies to help with the war effort. For example, social psychologist Kurt Lewin had worked with anthropologist Margaret Mead on a government project to change the public’s food consumption habits, helping to conserve scarce resources, and on another that set up a training school for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. Gordon Allport was a pioneer in social psychology as well as in the study of personality. Early on, in 1935, he had identified the concept of “attitude” as central to social psychology, and most contemporary textbook definitions

17 18 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD of attitude are based on his. He made original contributions to the study of prejudice and of religious belief, introducing a measurable distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic religious orientations—between those with a deep attachment to the core values of their faith and those who use their religion to attain other goals such as status and the approval of others. Henry Murray, who made seminal contributions to personality psychology, is best known for creating the Thematic Apperception Test (the TAT), one of the projective tests that clinical psychologists still use today as a diagnostic tool. Clyde Kluckhohn had studied and written extensively about the culture of the Navajo Indians for more than forty years, drawing on that research for insights about human behavior in general. Talcott Parsons’s life goal was to unify the social sciences, and in his writings and teaching he tried to provide an overarching theory and a common language to facilitate the task. Although not without his critics, he achieved wide recognition as a leader in his ﬁeld and was elected president of the American Sociological Society in 1949. The rationale behind the founding of the Social Relations Department was spelled out in an article in the April 1946 issue of the American Psy- chologist announcing the establishment of the program:

While [academic] departmental lines have remained rigid, there has been developing during the last decade, a synthesis of socio-cultural and psychological sciences which is widely recognized within the academic world in spite of the fact that there is no commonly accepted name to designate the synthesis. We propose that Harvard adopt, and thus help establish, the term Social Relations to characterize the emerging discipline which deals not only with the body of fact and theory traditionally recognized as the subject matter of sociology, but also with that portion of psychological science that treats the individual within the social system, and that portion of anthropological science that is particularly relevant to the social and cultural patterns of literate societies.

The interdisciplinary aims of the department were to be fostered by two means. First, a Laboratory of Social Relations would be created to facili- Making the Grade at Harvard 19 tate research collaboration among the members of the four different disciplines. Second, specific course requirements were written into the curriculum to ensure that all students, regardless of their specialization, would be knowledgeable about the content and methods of each of the four social sciences constituting the department. During their first year of graduate study, all students took four “qualifying” or core courses, one in each of the department’s subdisciplines. To demonstrate concretely the interdisciplinary possibilities provided by the field of social relations, some of the classes in two different qualifying courses would meet jointly. So, for example, during Milgram’s first semester more than one-third of the lectures in the two core courses, Problems and Concepts of Social Anthropology and Problems and Concepts of Clinical Psychology, were conducted as joint sessions. To verify their competence in each of the four core areas, students had to take and pass a qualifying exam in each. Another course in the curriculum that was meant to facilitate cross-fertilization was Social Relations 201, in which different lecturers, in turn, would convey their perspectives on each of their disciplines. Their guiding vision notwithstanding, the program’s founders were not blind to the realities of the job market, which operated in terms of the traditional academic and professional distinctions that were still the norm in the world beyond Harvard Yard. Although the program offered an undergraduate concentration and degree in social relations, this was not the case for graduate studies. Despite the integrative philosophy of the program, graduate students would specialize in, and end up with a Ph.D. degree in, social anthropology, clinical psychology, social psychology, or sociology. This bold experiment in interdisciplinary cooperation ultimately failed. It ended in 1970, when the sociologists walked out. But the seeds of its eventual demise were planted at the program’s conception by a potentially problematic feature of its organizational structure. While sociology moved intact into the Department of Social Relations in 1946 and ceased to exist as an autonomous department, the creation of the new program resulted in a drastic change in the Psychology Department. It split into two, with the social-science-oriented psychologists—social psychologists, personologists, and clinicians—migrating to Social Relations and leaving their colleagues 20 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD from the natural science side of psychology behind—that is, those specializing in learning theory, sensation and perception, and physiological psychology. This was an immediate source of instability for the newly created Social Relations Department, because it made for ambivalence and luke- warm commitments among younger social psychologists, such as Roger Brown and Jerome Bruner, whose broad and varied interests defied pigeon- holing and who had some research interests in common with the psychologists who remained in the Psychology Department. But Stanley arrived during Social Relations’ “golden age,” when individual misgivings were overshadowed by a pervasive atmosphere of optimism. The program received hundreds of applications each year, many more than the number of students it could accept. In Milgram’s entering year, he was part of a group of about 110 students in the program. This degree of pop- ularity was especially noteworthy for a graduate program that was still in its infancy—less than ten years old. It had received votes of confidence from evaluating committees commissioned by the Ford Foundation in 1954. And, as the founding fathers of the department had envisioned, its members were actively involved in interdisciplinary collaborations. A prime example was the book Personality in Nature, Society, and Culture, which was obligatory reading for generations of students in psychology and other social sciences. One of its chapters contains the following memorable epi- gram, which despite its bare bones simplicity, conveys a deep truth about human nature.

Every man is in certain respects: (a) Like all other men; (b) Like some other men; (c) Like no other man.

During his subsequent years at Harvard, Stanley would thrive on the rich intellectual stimulation provided by its diverse faculty, and the social relations program helped develop in him a wide-ranging interest in the social sciences. He, in turn, left his imprint on the program. Roger Brown, one of Milgram’s mentors and a lifelong friend, recalled: Making the Grade at Harvard 21

When Stanley Milgram was a graduate student at Harvard, I was an assistant professor, and we had several seminars and reading courses together. The only thing I can now recall from a term-long seminar in psycholin- guistics is Stanley’s presentation. Instead of leading yet another bookish discussion, he brought in an audio tape he had made of many kinds of psy- cholinguistic phenomena: slips of the tongue, rhetorical flourishes, a child’s first few words, a stretch of psychotic speech, all wittily edited and assembled and presented to us as things to be appreciated first and then, perhaps, explained. And the only reading course I remember was the one with Stan- ley on crowd behavior in which he did no reading at all for some time, but, instead, went all over Boston joining crowds of every kind and bringing back snapshots of curious group formations.

During his first year at Harvard, Milgram lived in Perkins Hall, a graduate dormitory. At that time, students did not have their own telephones in their rooms. There was a pay phone in the hallway, which was used by the residents on that floor both for making and receiving calls. Often the phone would ring endlessly before someone would drag himself out of his room to answer it and then find the person the caller was looking for. Answering the phone was a chore, because the call could be for anybody on the floor and it wasn’t clear who should answer it. What was needed was some sort of rule, and Milgram came up with one. He wrote it on an index card that he posted next to the phone:

To share equitably the burden of answering this phone, students should answer the phone two times for each call they receive. (This is to take account of those occasions when a call is received for you, and you are not in.)

He had created a norm, a guideline for appropriate conduct, in what previously had been a behavioral vacuum. Five years later, in 1959, he was back at Harvard after spending two years abroad in Norway and France conducting his doctoral research. One day he had occasion to use a pay phone in another dormitory and, as he picked up the receiver, he noticed an index card next to the telephone: “To share in the burden of answering this tele- 22 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD phone, it is traditional for students to answer the phone two times for each call he receives . . .” etc. He found that the notices had spread throughout the campus.

…

The Social Relations Department was headquartered in Emerson Hall, in the northeast corner of Harvard Yard. Its rectangular shape and terra-cotta ornamentation projected subdued elegance; its only pretensions of architectural grandeur were the giant brick columns flanking its entrances. The Biblical verse, from the Psalms, “What is man that Thou art mindful of him?” inscribed in stone across the top of the north entrance was a silent reminder of the building’s beginnings as the headquarters of Harvard’s social gospelers. During its early years, brilliant philosophers such as George Santayana and Alfred North Whitehead taught in its classrooms, as did William James, one of the founding fathers of American psychology. In the late 1800s James had founded the Psychological Laboratory within Harvard’s philosophy department and produced the first Ph.D.’s in psychology in America. When Gertrude Stein was at Radcliffe, she took an introductory philosophy course with James in Emerson Hall. According to Harvard lore, during the final exam she wrote on her test booklet, “I don’t want to take this exam; it’s too nice out,” and she picked herself up and left. Supposedly, when William James returned the exam book, he had written on it, “Miss Stein, you truly understand the meaning of philosophy, ‘A’.” Allport’s office was located in Emerson Hall, along with the other administrative offices of the department. On September 27, soon after Mil- gram arrived in Cambridge for the fall 1954 semester, he met with Allport for advisement about which courses to take. The program of study that emerged from this initial conference and subsequent consultations with Allport would put Milgram on an equal footing with regular first-year students by the end of that academic year. While the curriculum for Ph.D. students allowed for some individual variations, all students, no matter what their area of specialization, were required to take the four qualifying courses Making the Grade at Harvard 23 during their first year. Passing the final exams—which served as the qualifying exams—in each of those courses was a requirement for the Ph.D. degree. Milgram was able to take the qualifying courses in social anthropology and clinical psychology in the fall semester and in sociology and social psychology in the spring semester. A letter from Gordon Allport dated June 9, 1955, informed Milgram that “the Department had voted you have passed the Qualifying requirements for the Ph.D. degree in Social Psychol- ogy” and that his grades in the four courses were B+, A, A–, and A, respectively. He also attained A’s in three other courses he completed that first year. Given the fact that the first-year curriculum was especially grueling, this was a noteworthy accomplishment. As a result of his outstanding performance, he was allowed to become a regular full-time student in the department, beginning with the 1955–1956 academic year. All vestiges of his special student status in 1954–1955 were eradicated in the fall of 1956 when the graduate school gave him credit for the courses he had taken that first year—in effect retroactively applying them to meet the requirements for his Ph.D. degree, as he had anticipated. One of the courses Milgram took during his first semester was Cognitive Processes. The course was taught by Jerome Bruner, who—along with Gor- don Allport and Roger Brown—was to become one of his important advis- ers and lifelong friends. Bruner’s work in the 1940s and 1950s helped launch the “cognitive revolution” in psychology, effectively displacing the dominant influence of a mechanistic behaviorism in American academic psychology. Bruner had sent a progress report on the eight Behavioral Sci- ences Fellows who chose to go to Harvard in 1954–1955 to Robert Knapp, the administrator of the program. Bruner reported that Milgram was “doing outstanding work” and that, in fact, he was his best student in his Cognitive Processes course and an “excellent logician.” The objective indices of Milgram’s achievement were matched by his feeling of immense satisfaction. By the end of that first year, he had taken courses with the likes of Gordon Allport, Roger Brown, Talcott Parsons, and Jerome Bruner. For Milgram, they opened a new window on the world, framed by the guiding message that social reality—not just physical reality—had an underlying structure and that there were tools with which to 24 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD grasp it, such as the controlled experiment, survey research methods, and self-report measures of personality and attitudes. His courses not only exposed Milgram to new ideas, they also stimulated him to create his own. By the end of that first year, he was bubbling over with a dozen or so different lines of research he was ready to pursue. More important, he set his sights on a career in social psychology. Robert Knapp had sent a questionnaire to all the recipients of the Behavioral Sciences Fellowships. One of the questions in it was: “Do you have any long-range plans involving a career in the behavioral sciences?” Milgram wrote: “Yes. This year I really fell in love with the discipline and, if possible, will continue working in it. I hope to follow through to a Ph.D. in Social Psychology and then, probably, secure a position with a psychology faculty of a fair sized university, where I would teach and engage in research.” However, for a stretch of time, there was a real possibility that Milgram’s newfound love might remain unrequited. In the spring of 1955, Milgram applied to the Ford Foundation for an extension of his fellowship for a second year. Much to his dismay, he was informed by Robert Knapp that, although Ford was very pleased with his outstanding academic performance, as a matter of policy, the Behavioral Sciences Fellowships were one-year, nonrenewable awards. Toward the end of the semester, the Social Relations Department recommended him for a full scholarship, based on his excellent track record for the year, but Harvard’s Central Scholarship Committee did not accept that recommendation. Without financial assistance, Milgram could not continue his graduate studies, and if he left school he would lose his student deferment from military service, and there was a strong possibility that he would be drafted the following year. Military service would not help advance his academic career, since the GI Bill of Rights—and the educational benefits it provided—had been discontinued after the end of the Korean War, in July 1953. This was not the first time Milgram had confronted the prospect of entering the armed forces. In the fall of 1951, an Air Force Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program was established at Queens College, and Milgram joined it. When the Korean War began in the spring of 1950, the U.S. government reinstated the draft as well as the GI Bill of Rights, both Making the Grade at Harvard 25 of which had been discontinued at the end of World War II. Although there are no records to tell us—and no one in the Milgram family knows— why he joined, most likely it was a way of making the best of the inevitable. With the country in the midst of a war, Milgram would be eligible for the draft once he graduated. With the completion of the ROTC program, he would have the advantage of doing his military service as a commissioned officer, not as just another draftee. Completion of ROTC training required taking an ROTC course every semester until graduation. As it turns out, Milgram never completed the requirements. After completing the equivalent of six semesters of ROTC courses by the end of his junior year in 1953, he only had two courses left to take in his senior year. Although he did sign up for the ROTC course, Aviation Science 13, in the fall of 1953, the first semester of his senior year, he withdrew from the course on November 16 without completing it. Two main factors, undoubtedly, led to this decision: The Korean War had ended the previous spring, diminishing the odds that he would be drafted, and by this time he had decided to go to graduate school. At the beginning of the summer of 1955, Milgram was still without any financial support for the upcoming academic year. Desperation clouded his thinking, because on June 6 he sent off another letter to the Behavioral Sci- ences Fellowship office, reiterating his earlier request for an extension of his fellowship—despite the fact that he had already been told that it was a “firm policy” that the fellowships were not renewable. This time, Knapp’s negative, though empathetic, reply had even greater finality: The Directors of the Ford Foundation had decided to discontinue the fellowship program altogether. He had survived—and bested—the rigors of the first-year curriculum and the chronic state of anxiety engendered by impossibly long reading lists and terrorizing three-hour qualifying exams. Now, all that work appeared for naught. Despite the successes of the past year, self-doubt began to en- velop him. Who was he? Where was he heading? He found himself in a no-man’s land of self-definition. He took a summer job at the Commodore Hotel in Manhattan, although it would not pay nearly enough to cover his school expenses for the next semester. It was more a reenactment of a sum- 26 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD mer ritual, a way of grounding himself in uncertain times. He had worked almost every summer, including the previous summer, when he had worked at the Commodore as a night clerk, which had enabled him to study for his six college courses on the job. When he wasn’t working, he was at home in Queens, reading psychology books and doing sleep-learning experiments on himself. This was patently aimless busy work, but it did prevent him from hearing despair knocking at his door. It wasn’t until the middle of the summer that Milgram had cause for optimism about the coming year. On July 21, he received a reassuring letter at home from Mrs. Eleanor Sprague, Allport’s highly knowledgeable secretary. She wrote that Milgram was high on the list of applicants for financial assistance, and the chances of his receiving it looked very good. “We are almost certain to need more assistance in psychology courses,” she wrote, “where you could fit in easily. I wouldn’t worry too much about work for the fall—either teaching or research should be available.” As she had predicted, Milgram received a graduate assistantship for the fall as well as the spring semester. (The following year he was again awarded assistantships for both semesters.) But Milgram’s appointments in 1955–1956 did much more than solve his financial problems of the moment. They had an immeasurable long-term significance, one that more than adequately compensated for the stressful summer of uncertainty. The faculty member he was assigned to that fall—Solomon E. Asch—was to become Milgram’s most important scientific influence.

…

Solomon Asch was widely admired for his ability to combine a deep concern about philosophical issues with an inventive, uncluttered experimental style that enabled clear-cut conclusions to be drawn from his research. He was on the faculty at Swarthmore College and came to Harvard’s So- cial Relations Department as an invited visiting lecturer in the 1955–1956 academic year to take the place of Jerome Bruner, who would be spending the fall semester on sabbatical in Cambridge, England. Both Making the Grade at Harvard 27

Bruner and Allport agreed that this would be a good opportunity to bring in Asch. Allport assigned Milgram to be Asch’s assistant for the year. In the fall, Milgram served as Asch’s teaching assistant for Social Relations 107, Psy- chological Foundations of Social Behavior, and in the spring he continued as Asch’s research assistant. Asch was very pleased with Stanley’s work and said so in a letter to department chairman Talcott Parsons. An important consequence of the letter was that it assured Milgram that he would be provided with assistantships for the rest of his stay at Harvard. One of the things that had made Asch famous was the invention of an elegantly simple but powerful experimental paradigm to study conformity. Asch’s interest in conducting research on conformity was stimulated by his dissatisfaction—and vigorous disagreement—with a prevailing view of human beings that had “almost exclusively stressed the slavish submission of individuals to group forces [and] has neglected to inquire into their possibilities for independence and for productive relations with the human environment.” Asch had a more optimistic view of human nature: Rather than a passive reaction to social pressures, a person’s social behavior, he argued, was typically a more rational process, the end product of an active and rea- soned weighing of the behavioral alternatives available. This view represented a drastic departure from the prevailing mechanical approach to the social influence process, which was grounded in behaviorism. For behaviorists, reinforcement or reward played a central role in the learning and maintenance of new behaviors. We yield to social pressures, they argued, because in the past whenever we conformed to other people’s opinions some rewarding consequence would typically follow. In the stimulus-response language of behaviorism, because of past reinforcements, another person’s opinion serves as a stimulus that automatically evokes a conforming response. Asch’s more rational perspective on social interaction supplemented the role played by Kurt Lewin and his students in freeing social psychology from the grip of behaviorism. The essence of Asch’s experimental procedure to study conformity was to put an individual into a group situation in which he discovers his judg- 28 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD ments to be in direct conflict with those of everyone else. Roger Brown referred to this experimental paradigm as an “epistemological nightmare” for the experimental subject. Specifically, in Asch’s classic experiment on independence and conformity, when a participant arrived at the laboratory for his scheduled appointment, he would be directed to join seven other participants who were already seated at a table. Asch explained that the purpose of the experiment was to study perceptual judgment. On each of eighteen trials, Asch would present different sets of four vertical lines to the group. On each trial, the subject’s task was the same: to match the length of one line with one of three other lines of varying lengths. Each member of the group, in turn, was to announce his judgment publicly. Although the experiment seemed absurdly simple at the beginning, one subject would very quickly find himself saddled with a dilemma. His predicament was made possible by the fact that he was the only naïve subject: The other seven participants were secretly in cahoots with Asch. These “confederates,” as they are called, were trained to announce incorrect matches on twelve of the eighteen trials (these twelve are referred to as the “critical” trials). On the first two trials, things generally proceed smoothly, with all members of the group announcing the same correct matching line. On the third trial, the third line is the correct match, and the naïve subject waits for his turn to say so. The first “subject” announces “line 1.” Then the second person says “line 1.” Something’s terribly wrong here, the real subject might think to himself as each of the other participants in turn gives “line 1” as his answer. By the time it is his turn, the puzzled subject finds himself trapped in a conflict that demands immediate resolution: Should he trust his own judgment or should he go along with the unanimous majority? Asch found, to his surprise, that subjects went along with the bogus majority’s answers about a third of the time. Asch went on to conduct a number of variations on this basic procedure, in order to identify the factors that lead to lesser or greater amounts of conformity. For example, in different experiments he examined the effects of the size of the bogus majority, the difficulty of the perceptual task (by varying the length differences among the three possible matching lines), and the importance of a non-unanimous majority (where a member Making the Grade at Harvard 29 of the false majority was instructed to deviate from the others and also give correct answers).

…

No longer shackled by financial worries and buoyed by a renewed self- confidence, Milgram felt freer to be himself in his second year at Har- vard. He unveiled an unbuttoned persona, marked by spontaneity, imaginative whimsy, an uninhibited sociability, a wry sense of humor, and sometimes cockiness. Contrary to Harvard norms, he conversed on a first-name basis with younger faculty such as Richard Solomon and George Mandler, with whom he took the Pro-seminar in Social and Clinical Psychology in the fall of 1955. He would get his friend John Shaffer to join him in little improvisational skits and parodies. He would readily start conversations with strangers in the street. Sometimes he sat in his dorm room for an hour or two, eyes closed, creating and watching richly textured movies in his head. He used peyote with a small group of classmates. One of these was Robert Palmer, who went on to become a clinical psychologist. Palmer remembers the accentuated sensory experience that peyote created. He recalls driving through the streets of Cam- bridge with colored lights becoming extremely bright and vivid, and walking through a room and seeing the colors red and green float onto the surface of a white linoleum floor. In the spring semester of 1956, while working as a research assistant to Asch, Milgram signed up for four courses. On February 21, three weeks into the semester, he received a note from Mrs. Sprague informing him that he had exceeded the maximum number of courses (three) that students could take when they had assistantships. He wrote back to her, con- testing her interpretation of the rules and telling her that, if she was correct, he planned to petition the dean, adding dryly: “In anticipation of the correctness of your view, I am already looking for a scribe to write out my petition in the form of an illuminated manuscript—and in Latin—that will certainly have its effect.” Eleanor Sprague—who was a walking repository of departmental rules, both written and not, was right, of 30 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD course. Milgram’s appeal to the dean was turned down, and he had to drop one of the courses. When he wrote to Frederick Mosteller, the acting dean of the Commit- tee of Higher Degrees, about taking two summer courses, the letter was tinged with chutzpah: He ended his letter by saying that “since it appears to me unlikely that your ofﬁce will object to my program, I shall regard it as considered satisfactory by the Department unless I am informed otherwise.” Despite his cockiness—or perhaps because of it—he must have been “informed otherwise,” because his transcript shows that he took only one course that summer. CHAPTER 3

NORWAY AND FRANCE

HE TOPIC MILGRAM chose for his doctoral dissertation was T“national character”—those traits that distinguish one culture from another. Milgram first became fascinated with cross-cultural differences during the summer of 1953, when he traveled through France, Spain, and Italy. When he came to Harvard, this interest took on a more disciplined and systematic guise. He did an analysis of national stereotypes for All- port’s social psychology qualifying course in the spring of 1955. A year later, he took a reading course on national character with Roger Brown in which he covered about a hundred articles and books related to the topic. Milgram’s exposure to Asch’s group pressure experiments when he served as his teaching and research assistant during the 1955–1956 academic year gave him the experimental tools to extract a specific researchable question from the sprawling, unruly domain of cross-cultural inquiry: How did two or more nationalities compare in their degree of conformity? He wanted Allport to be his dissertation supervisor, since they had already established a warm relationship and the study of cultural differences and intergroup relations was one of Allport’s diverse research interests. Per- haps most important was Allport’s mentoring style, which would give Mil- gram a good deal of latitude in the development and implementation of his research ideas. As Tom Pettigrew, another Allport student, put it, “A firm believer in the uniqueness of personality, Gordon practiced what he preached with his doctoral students. He let us follow our own pursuits and methods....”

31 32 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

Milgram’s plan was to complete virtually all of his course requirements for his Ph.D. degree in social psychology during the 1956–1957 academic year and then conduct research for his doctoral dissertation in 1957–1958. He needed to obtain financial support for it—especially since the research he had in mind would need to be done abroad. In the fall of 1956, he made some inquiries and found that a research training fellowship offered by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) seemed a like a good fit for his needs and qualifications. Allport had been out of the country since the spring of 1956. Milgram was reluctant to bother him during his travels, but SSRC’s deadline for fellowship applications was January 7, 1957, and Allport wasn’t scheduled to return to the United States until the beginning of December. So, on Octo- ber 17, Milgram sent a lengthy letter to Allport—who was then in Italy— asking him to be chairman of his dissertation committee and describing his research idea:

I am very sorry to impose on your stay in Europe with matters that ordi- narily should be conﬁned to Emerson Hall, but time has a bearing on the matter I would like to discuss. . . . I would like to write my thesis in 1957–58, on the subject of national character, and with you as my thesis director.... There is no other person in the Harvard community I would prefer to work with. I know of other staff members for whom national character is a more central interest than it appears to be for you, but I see my approach as far more congruent to your sympathies—as expressed, say, in chapter six of [Allport’s book] The Nature of Prejudice, titled “The Sci- entiﬁc Study of Group Differences.” I anticipate differing views here and there but within a clear context of extensive accord.

He told Allport that in his immersion in the writings on national differences, he found them largely speculative and impressionistic, with very little grounded in objective, scientiﬁc research involving the direct, systematic observations of concrete behavior. The speciﬁc experimental technique he had in mind was one he had become intimately familiar with when he served as Asch’s assistant. He would conduct a cross-cultural replication of Norway and France 33

Asch’s conformity experiment in three countries—England, France, and Germany. It would be a variation of the original procedure in which the task of distinguishing between a pair of acoustic tones would be substituted for judgments of length of lines. This modification would make the procedure more economical, since he could prerecord the “pressure group’s” incorrect responses, eliminating the need to use confederates. In concluding his letter to Allport, he noted that although his own enthusiasm for the project “has been enduring and high . . . I do not presume it to be contagious. Still, you may not think it too bad an idea, and perhaps you will consent to be my thesis director.” In his letter of reply from Rome, Allport expressed his general approval of the proposed area of research and its value for the reasons Milgram stated. He was glad that Milgram was interested in the topic of national character and that he had already done intensive reading on it. And he agreed to be Milgram’s thesis supervisor, provided that the project they would work out would be mutually satisfactory. But the experiment itself concerned him: “The design you outline is not feasible, I fear. Chiefly, the difficulty is your overly optimistic view of facilities, availability of subjects, European collaboration. These are serious problems and you would experience endless frustration.” Allport told Milgram to “hold the problem over” until his return to Cambridge in early December when they could have a conference to pursue it further in person. The meeting with Allport after his return to Harvard resulted in a streamlining of Milgram’s research plans into a more realistic and workable project. From a three-way comparison of conformity, it was modified to a two-country comparison between the United States and Norway. Allport had suggested Norway because the Institute for Social Research in Oslo seemed ideally suited for cross-cultural research. It had served as the initia- tor and central office of one of the few cross-cultural studies conducted up to that point that had used experimental methods—a multination study of the consequences of deviation from group norms, conducted by a short- lived group, the Organization for Comparative Social Research (OCSR). The institute had staff members who had interests in cross-cultural investigations, such as Ragnar Rommetveit and Stein Rokkan. It seemed likely 34 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD that the institute and its staff would be hospitable to Milgram and his intended research. Allport wrote Rommetveit and Rokkan, with a copy of the proposal Milgram was sending to the SSRC, asking whether it was feasible for Mil- gram to do the research at the institute and whether they would be able to provide any necessary help once he was there. Allport added that “Milgram himself is a young and zealous fellow, full of drive, responsive and friendly, about 23 years of age. I think you would like him.” In their replies to All- port, both men expressed a genuine interest in Milgram’s project. They referred Milgram to the appropriate personnel who would help him work out the technical details, both at the Institute for Social Research and at its af- filiate, the Psychological Institute (the Department of Psychology) at the University of Oslo. Milgram’s application to the SSRC for the Research Training Fellowship went out during the last week of 1956. On March 26, 1957, he was informed by a letter from the SSRC that his name was placed on a short list of alternates; the possibility of his being awarded a fellowship was contingent on some awardees turning down their offers. Apparently that did in fact happen, because only two weeks later, on April 10, he was awarded a fellowship—a sum of $3,200 for a twelve-month period. Unfortunately, two months later, Milgram received a letter from Allport informing him that “at its meeting on June 6th, this Department voted that you fail [sic] the examination in Statistics.” As a requirement for the Ph.D. degree, students had to pass several special exams demonstrating their com- petencies in various areas, one of which was statistics. It was given only once a year, in the spring, so Milgram could retake it the following year at the earliest. When Allport informed Elbridge Sibley, the executive director of the SSRC, about this unexpected development, Sibley was “considerably distressed,” since mastery of statistical techniques was necessary to enable Mil- gram to do the data analyses involved in his dissertation research. Milgram wrote Sibley that despite the fact that he managed to bungle the statistics exam, he felt—and he had been told—that his level of competence in statistics, attained in part by an honors course in statistics in the summer of Norway and France 35

1956—was more than adequate to meet the needs of his research project. But if Sibley was not satisfied by this affirmation, Milgram proposed to prepare a detailed “statistical monograph” containing a precise description of the data-analytic techniques he would use in his research—and he would do this before his departure for Norway. After receiving assurances about Milgram’s competence from Allport and Fred Mosteller, Sibley told Mil- gram that he could move ahead with his research plans without additional statistical preparation. The reassurance from Mosteller was especially compelling, since he was a leading expert in the field of statistical techniques. Milgram started receiving the monthly installments of his fellowship stipend in July, which he used to carry out pretesting of his research procedure with Harvard students over the summer. One final hurdle had to be cleared before Milgram could sail for Nor- way. He needed to get formal approval of his thesis proposal from his thesis committee at a meeting convened for that purpose. Since most of the committee members were away during the summer, that meeting could not take place before September 23, the first day of the fall semester, when all of the faculty would be back in Cambridge. Milgram’s meeting with his thesis committee took place on September 24. Although the committee offered some suggestions and criticisms that they wanted Milgram to take into account—not an uncommon feature of thesis proposal conferences at most universities—they approved the proposal. In a follow-up letter, Allport summarized the points raised by the committee at the thesis meeting and concluded with what amounted to a vote of confidence in the soundness of Milgram’s judgments:

Let me repeat that we know change will be needed in the design and we hope you will prove ﬂexible in handling the new situation and the advice of your Norwegian colleagues. At the same time don’t change your subject to the “Norwegian Herring Market” without consulting us!

You have our best wishes for a very ﬁne year.

Cordially yours, Gordon W. Allport 36 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

On October 5, Milgram departed from New York aboard the Oslo- bound ocean liner Bergensfjord, a sleek new acquisition of the Norwegian- American Line. The ship docked in Oslo on an uncharacteristically sunny day. The autumn air was brisk and the city was suffused by the light of the mellow October sun. People were bustling about energetically engaged in their everyday business. In a letter to a female friend a few days after his arrival, Milgram joked that his hosts at the Institute for Social Research had sent a cute blonde secretary to meet him, but they had missed each other. He observed that Oslo was much more like an American city than Paris, Rome, or Madrid, with big cars plying the streets and people dress- ing much like in Minneapolis or Podunk. The girls were very attractive and very tall, most of them “tower[ing] over little Stanley.” Still, he noticed that there were enough of his size, and he was looking forward to getting to know them. He noted that Oslo “clearly lacks the charm of Copen- hagen. In fact, it more or less lacks charm.” Over the course of the year, that glib judgment would be displaced by a more nuanced view that included a greater fondness for the city and its people. In fact, about a month later, he wrote to Allport: “I have great respect for what the Norwegians have created from a land none too generous in its natural offerings. On the other hand, someone might tactfully suggest to some of our modern Vikings that Grieg does not exactly rank with Bach, nor Ibsen with Shakespeare.” Although Milgram’s host organization was the Institute for Social Re- search, it turned out that the institute did not have a room available that would be suitable for Milgram’s experiment. But his hosts were able to help him get one in the basement of the Department of Psychology of the University of Oslo, with which they had a close working relationship. In fact, his primary mentor and adviser in Norway, the social psychologist Ragnar Rommetveit, had a joint appointment at both places. In addition to the help provided by the faculty and staff at the institute and the department, Milgram could seek out the advice of two prominent American social psychologists—Irving Janis, of Yale University, and Daniel Katz, from the University of Michigan—who happened to be there as visiting Fulbright scholars. Norway and France 37

Milgram’s first month in Oslo was devoted to the intricate technical details of setting up his experimental procedure—from drilling holes and hooking up electrical connections to tape-recording instructions, pairs of tones, and the voices of the persons who would serve as the pressure group. A final preparatory step was to do a dry run with some pretest subjects. In order to conduct the experiment in the subjects’ native language, Milgram had hired Guttorm Langaard, a doctoral student in psychology. His was the voice of the Norwegian experimenter, and he helped with the recruitment of subjects and other details. By the middle of November, Milgram had a well-oiled experimental setting and routine in place, ready to receive subjects. To enhance the generalizability of his findings, he made sure all the regions of Norway would be represented among his sample of student subjects. This would be easy, because the University of Oslo was the only full-fledged university in the country at the time, and its student body came from all over—from the Oslo area in the South to the Nord-Norge region beyond the Arctic Circle in the North. Whenever an appointment was made with a subject, the importance of promptness was stressed, since he would be one of six people participating at the same time, and the session could not begin until everyone was present. When a subject arrived at the lab, he was asked to put his coat on a bench, which was already piled high with other outer garments. A series of six numbered doors lined the laboratory, and the subject was taken to the one marked “Subject 6” in Norwegian. These and other details were meant to create the impression that all the other subjects were already there. The door was opened, revealing a small booth. The subject was seated in the booth, earphones were fitted over his head, and he was handed a microphone. The experimental task involved judging which of a pair of short acoustic tones was longer, the first or the second. There were thirty trials. On each, a different pair of sounds would be heard through the headphones. The subject would be the last to give his judgment, after hearing the voices of the other five subjects, one after the other, giving their judgments. The other five voices, of course, were the voices of Milgram’s confederates. On 38 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD sixteen of the thirty trials, interspersed throughout the series, the confederates unanimously gave the wrong answer. On those sixteen critical trials, Milgram’s subjects confronted a troubling conflict, similar to the one Asch’s subjects had faced: Should they maintain their independence of judgment or yield to group pressure and announce the same incorrect answer? The subject also did not know that the others constituted a “synthetic group” that was not physically present in the lab. Each subject heard only the voices of the group, which Milgram had prerecorded on tape and deftly synchronized—so deftly, in fact, that Milgram had a hard time convincing many a subject, after the experiment was over, that he had been the only “live” subject in the lab. Milgram had an irrepressible sense of humor—with almost a life of its own—that refused to be tethered by common conventions of appropriate- ness, such as that dissertations should be written with a straight-ahead, and sometimes unintendedly soporific, seriousness. So, in his dissertation, he explained one of the practical benefits of an imaginary pressure group as follows: “The group is always willing to perform in the laboratory at the experimenter’s convenience, and personalities on tape demand no re- play royalties.” In the first experiment, subjects conformed to the bogus majority—that is, gave the wrong answer—on 62 percent of the critical trials. After each experimental session, Milgram conducted individual interviews with the participants to gather qualitative information, after which he revealed to them the true purposes and details of the experiment. Almost all subjects completely denied or underestimated the majority’s influence on their own answers. Although Milgram gradually attained a serviceable mastery of Norwegian over the course of his year in Oslo, during the early experiments he worried that he did not know the language well enough to conduct the interviews in the subjects’ native language. He quickly discovered that this was a needless worry because he could conduct the interviews in English. “It is hard to convey,” he wrote with a palpable sense of wonder, “how uniformly competent these subjects were in expressing themselves in English.” Not a single one of the 150 university student participants had to exclude himself from the interview because of insufficient knowledge of English. Norway and France 39

In a second experiment, Milgram wanted to see if putting a premium on answering correctly, by suggesting the students’ behavior would have serious consequences, would make the students less conforming. He did this by telling them (as well as the subjects in subsequent variations) that information gleaned from the experiments would be applied to the design of safety signals on airplanes. This information did reduce the level of conformity to 56 percent, but the difference between this figure and the 62 percent conformity rate in the first experiment, referred to as the Baseline condition, was not statistically significant. Even though Milgram had jacked up the consequences of responding in- accurately in this second experiment—the Aircraft condition—people were still yielding to peer pressure more than 50 percent of the time. While the Baseline and Aircraft conditions differed in how motivated subjects were (or should have been) to answer accurately, both required a public response that could be heard, or so the subjects thought, by the others. Milgram wondered: Would eliminating this feature free the subjects to act more independently, or was their propensity to conform so deeply ingrained that even if their answer would not be heard by others, they would yield to group pressure? In the next experiment, another group of subjects was given the same test as the subjects in the Aircraft experiment, with one important difference: After hearing the answers of the other “subjects” over the intercom, they were asked to write their answers on paper rather than announce them publicly for the group to hear. In this Private condition, the rate of conformity dropped further, but not as precipitously as one might have expected. Subjects still conformed to the majority almost 50 percent of the time. Milgram’s initial dissertation research proposal called for a Norway-U.S. comparison. He planned to return to the United States after he completed the Norwegian data collection phase and put a comparable group of Amer- ican college students through the same experimental procedures, completing both parts of the research in one year. In the research proposal accompanying his application to SSRC, he had hypothesized that Americans would conform more than Norwegians. This expectation was based largely on impressionistic reports—it was more an educated guess than a deeply 40 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD held conviction. Milgram’s main goal was to harness the enlightening power of the experimental method to provide objective evidence of behavioral differences between cultures. He was more interested in whether or not such differences could be identified than the specific direction those differences would take. This approach was a departure from the prevailing view among postwar social psychologists, who believed that theory-based research aimed at testing directional hypotheses was the royal road to scientific purity, a legacy inherited from the “harder” sciences. There was also an unspoken and largely unconscious motivation: To develop a hypothesis and then have it verified in an experiment would be evidence of one’s scientific acumen and prescience. Although Milgram identified solidly with social psychology, he disagreed with its heavy emphasis on hypothesis-testing:

It is a common fallacy of social psychology that the most important function of experimentation is to verify hypotheses. Sometimes there is a good reason to guess the outcome of an experiment, but often such a guess is neither warranted nor desirable. In this study, the group pressure experiment was conceived as a tool for controlled observation and measurement. At this stage of cross-national research, when even simple, objective descriptions of national groups have not been attained, an experiment is no more in need of an hypothesis than is a thermometer. The utility of a measuring instrument does not depend on the guess we make about its reading.

It did not take Milgram long to discover—through the high conformity rates he was seeing in his lab, discussions with his subjects and others, and his own direct observation of life in Oslo—that his hypothesis about Nor- wegian individualism crashed head-on with the realities of Norwegian behavior and values. He observed a society pervaded by an egalitarian ethos where group solidarity and cohesiveness were valued and where standing out from the crowd, being conspicuous, and drawing too much attention to oneself were frowned upon. Milgram’s Norwegian colleagues introduced Norway and France 41 him to the Janteloven, or the “Jante Laws,” whose ten “commandments” embody, and perhaps help maintain, the norms of group solidarity found in Norway and other parts of Scandinavia. Three of these commandments are:

Thou shalt not believe thyself better than us. Thou shalt not believe thou knowest more than us. Thou shalt not think thou art wiser than us.

Milgram had sent Allport a detailed progress report after the completion of the first three experiments. He noted that the general pattern of scores he found among his Norwegian subjects was very similar to those of his American subjects in his pretests at Harvard, effectively invalidating his hypothesis regarding Norwegian-U.S. differences: “My guess that Norwe- gians would be impressively more independent than Americans appears to be contradicted by the experimental results.” Furthermore, he concluded that “one need not live here too long before being convinced that Norwe- gians more closely resemble Americans in temperament, outlook, and way of life than any other European people. The problem of finding experimental differences between national groups is imposing enough without jeopar- dizing the outcome by choosing an unpromising comparison nation.” This development forced Milgram to think about which country might in fact be a promising substitute for the United States as a comparison to Norway. France came immediately to mind. His experience living in Paris during the summer of 1953 suggested that France was a country marked by far less social consensus than Norway, a country with a tradition that seemed to prize critical judgment and diversity of opinion. “France seems to me to be a very good bet,” he wrote Allport. “It takes me from the Nordic to Latin system; Norwegians and Frenchmen regard themselves as very different (and probably inter-sterile) breeds of men.” The intriguing and unexpected findings of the first few conditions convinced Milgram of the need for additional experimental variations, beyond the few planned originally, to test the limits of Norwegian conformity. There was also the gnawing question of generalizability. No matter how many additional experiments he conducted with his sample of university 42 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD students, he could not be sure his findings were representative of the population at large. Even though his subjects came from all over Norway, at that time only one out of 1,000 Norwegians attended the University of Oslo. Thus, Milgram felt it would be important to repeat at least a couple of the conditions with a non-university sample. Allport was delighted with Milgram’s progress. He found the rationale for his modified plans reasonable and convincing, and he gave them his blessing. The change of plans meant that Milgram would have to extend his stay in Norway. It was now mid-February. He estimated that he could complete the additional Norwegian experiments by the end of May, a month before his fellowship year was up and the monthly stipends would end. It was clear that, regardless of which comparison country he and Allport agreed on, he would need funding for another year. As he was mulling over this problem, he received, “with the expediency of a Biblical miracle,” a letter from Elbridge Sibley informing him that the SSRC had just begun a Completion of Doctoral Dissertation fellowship program that would provide him with the financial support to continue his doctoral research into a second year. Besides completing an application form spelling out his research plans, he needed a confidential evaluation from someone familiar with his work so far. In a letter to Sibley, Allport readily provided a strong recommendation: “Since Milgram is a very bright person and making such excellent progress, I hope you will find it possible to back him an additional year.” Milgram was notified that he had been awarded the one-year extension on March 20, 1958. He then went about designing some additional experiments with Nor- wegian college students. In one, Milgram wanted to test his subjects’ sensitivity to audible criticisms. So he taped comments from his confederates— such as “Trying to show off?”—which, by means of a separate tape recorder, Milgram would inject immediately after a subject gave a correct response that contradicted the majority’s erroneous responses. This kind of censure from peers—the Censure condition—caused the conformity rate to jump to 75 percent. The last experiment with his student population was aimed at ruling out an alternative explanation for the findings in the previous experi- Norway and France 43 ments. In postexperimental interviews, some subjects claimed that they matched the majority’s judgments because they were unsure of their own accuracy. But if they had been able to overcome their doubts, they would have remained more independent. To explore the validity of this claim, Milgram modified the laboratory procedure to enable subjects to request—by ringing a bell that would be heard by the experimenter and, supposedly, by the other “subjects”—that a pair of tones be presented again so they could reexamine them before giving their answers. The rate of conformity dropped somewhat to 69 percent. Even more telling was the fact that only five out of the twenty subjects in this Bell condition requested a repetition. The fact that a majority of the subjects did not avail themselves of the opportunity to hear the tones again provided strong verification that the subjects’ yielding responses were indeed indicators of their conforming tendencies and not merely their doubts about the accuracy of their answers. To verify that the levels of conformity he had obtained so far were not aberrations, limited for some reason to college students, Milgram tested a group of factory workers at the Elektrisk Bureau, the Norwegian equivalent of General Electric or Westinghouse. With the meticulous attention to detail that made his experimental dramas so credible, Milgram made a new set of tapes of this phony majority, using employees from the same factory so that the naïve subjects would hear genuine working-class accents similar to theirs. Milgram replicated two experiments—the Aircraft and Censure conditions—with this group. He found that the workers were more independent than the students. In the Aircraft condition, their conformity rate was 49 percent, compared with the student rate of 56 percent. In the Censure condition, they yielded to the majority on 68 percent of the critical trials, compared with the students’ yielding rate of 75 percent. These differences were not statistically significant, however; that is, they were within the range that could be due to chance. For all practical purposes, then, the level of conformity among both groups was about the same, enabling Milgram to conclude that, in their to- tality, his results were broadly indicative of an important Norwegian behavioral characteristic. 44 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

To obtain subjects’ reactions to the ethical issues pertaining to the experiment, Milgram distributed a questionnaire to his Norwegian student subjects about two months after their participation. One question asked subjects how they felt immediately after the experiment. Most of them expressed annoyance with themselves because they hadn’t ﬁgured out what was really going on. A second question asked, “Do you feel now that the experiment was ethical or unethical?” with four response options: Very unethical, unethical, ethical, and neither ethical nor unethical. Of the 91 subjects who responded to this question, no one rated it very unethical, 8 judged it unethical, 14 as ethical, and the majority—69 subjects—rated it neither ethical nor unethical. A third question asked: “How do you feel now about having been in the experiment?” There were ﬁve response options, anchored by “I’m very glad to have been in the experiment” at one end and “I’m very sorry to have been in the experiment” at the other. No one selected this last option. Only one out of 93 respondents said he was sorry, and a majority—70 subjects—said they were glad or very glad to have been in the experiment. This is a question Milgram would employ again in later years as his experiments grew increasingly controversial. Milgram ended his presentation of the postexperimental results with some observations about them:

It appears that most subjects were glad to have participated, despite the trickery involved. The reasons for this seem to be: First they understood that any deception used was not primarily for personal gain, but for the advancement of knowledge. They appreciated that they were informed of the true character of the experiment as soon as possible. They understood that whatever their performance may have been, we placed them in a position of trust by revealing the true purpose and methods of the experiment, and they knew that the success of the experimental project depended on their willingness to support this trust. If for twenty minutes, we abused their dignity, we reafﬁrmed it by extending to them our conﬁdence.... Most subjects accept the necessity of deception in this experiment and do not Norway and France 45

condemn it morally. That is not to say they should have the last word on the matter. No action is divested of its unethical properties by the expedi- ent of a public-opinion poll; nor is the outcome of such an inquiry irrelevant to the issue.

This degree of attention to the ethics of experimentation was unusual at the time among psychological researchers. A notable exception was Asch, who in his various reports about his conformity experiments addressed the ethical issues connected with his research. For example, in one of his reports he noted that “the circumstances [of the experiment] place a special responsibility on the experimenter and obligate him to surround the procedure with proper safeguards. It has been the writer’s experience that far more important than the momentary pain or discomfort of the procedure is the way in which the experimenter deals with the subject.” Milgram had read those reports, but in describing his ethics questionnaire to Allport, he did not reference Asch. Rather, he credited discussions by another social psychologist, Richard Crutchﬁeld, and unspeciﬁed others about the ethical problems associated with conformity experiments as sources for the idea. However, it seems reasonable to assume that contact with Asch, through his writings and as his assistant at Harvard, played an important role in the development of Milgram’s ethical sensitivities.

…

Although the experiments absorbed most of Milgram’s time and attention during his stay in Norway, and then later in France, he found time to develop a social life, cultivate friendships, become part of the local student culture, maintain an active correspondence with family and friends back in the United States, and take trips to other European countries during vacation breaks. In a letter to a friend in New York, he bragged that word had reached him from Harvard that his doctoral research was being lauded as one of the most important studies being conducted by a member of the department. But he admitted that this was not as impressive as it might sound, 46 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD because he was the one who had circulated the rumor in the first place. In addition to sending letters to his mother, Joel, and Marjorie, he would sometimes send them souvenirs. Once, after sending some carved wooden Norwegian figurines for Joel, he confided that they were actually carvings of himself: “It’s amazing how a change in climate and diet affects alteration in appearance and character.” He would keep his mother informed about the progress he was making in his work. She would, in turn, write chatty letters expressing her pride in his accomplishments and about her new little car, the movies she had seen, and the like. And she was the caring Jewish mother, in the best sense, asking him to be especially careful driving in his Volkswagen; gently suggesting that he buy a good suit or two for a planned trip to England, “but only what you will be proud to wear back home”; wishing before a subsequent trip to Eng- land that he wouldn’t go because of a flu epidemic; admonishing him for overdrawing his checking account; and wondering if he ever met any nice Jewish girls. But Milgram’s letters home could also be somber. One, written to his Harvard schoolmate, John Shaffer, has a prophetic poignancy, in light of his later preoccupations:

My true spiritual home is Central Europe, not France, the Mediterranean countries, England, Scandinavia, or Northern Germany, but that area which is bounded by the cities of Munich, Vienna, and Prague. . . . I should have been born into the German-speaking Jewish community of Prague in 1922 and died in a gas chamber some twenty years later. How I came to be born in the Bronx Hospital I’ll never quite understand.

Among Milgram’s most memorable activities in Norway was skiing, which became one of his true joys. He found himself drawn irresistibly to the sport by the glistening beauty of the snow-covered hills of Nordmarka surrounding Oslo, and he was glad to have succumbed. As he wrote Mrs. Sprague, “I did not know how to ski when I arrived in Oslo; I did not exactly know how to ski when I deserted from Oslo, but somewhere in the middle Norway and France 47

I remember gliding down long, quiet mountain trails in the early evening, and the sun lighting up a cloud of snow powder thrown up by flying skis.” What made his Norwegian experience even more pleasurable was finding some female companionship. In January 1958, he met a British girl, Rosalind, who became his steady girlfriend for the next three months until she had to return home. On Saturdays they would go skiing together and then cook dinner in his apartment. Although Stanley didn’t fall in love with her, he was very fond of her, and her constant company made him happy and contented. During his stay in Oslo, Milgram shared an apartment with a group of Norwegian students in the Studentbyen, the student residences on the hills surrounding Oslo. One of his apartment-mates was Arne Olav Brundtland, who was engaged to a future prime minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland. Stanley had never seen five people living in such close quarters getting along so well. A sense of camaraderie and community developed within the group, which made parting at the end of the school year a genuinely sad experience. Milgram’s warm feelings about the Norwegians he came to know were in stark contrast with his reactions to the physical surroundings. Writing to a Norwegian friend after he had left the country, he recalled that this was “the damp season in Oslo, when the skies pour down their waters on the urine colored walls of the older parts of the town. It is the season for pneu- monia, sinusitis and despondency. The season of mud. But when the sun does shine, it has an agreeably thick quality to it, and the sunlight washes everything in its amber fluidity.” Milgram ended up staying in Norway longer than he had planned. Al- though he had completed the experiments with the student population in late March, locating a non-university subject population for the last part of his research proved difficult. It took till the middle of May to line up the workers at the Elektrisk Bureau, and it was the middle of July by the time he had completed the two experimental conditions with them. He stayed in Oslo for another month to use the computing facilities at the institute— punching his data onto IBM cards—and to analyze them and draft a pre- 48 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD liminary write-up of his results. He then traveled to Paris, arriving there in mid-August. Stanley’s acclimation to life in Paris occurred more quickly and more easily than in Oslo. Things didn’t appear to have changed much over the five years since the summer of 1953. He was captivated by the city’s physical beauty:

Paris is the city I like best in the world. It is especially beautiful . . . in the autumn, when the tan and gold maple leaves ﬂoat by the classical marble statuary in the Jardin du Luxembourg, when the air is fragrant with autumn smoke, and the Seine captures the tan, crimson, and orange colors of the season. Oslo is a town, Copenhagen a city, New York a metropolis, and Paris a civilization....

He had mixed feelings about the people of France, however. Not long after his arrival he expressed his pessimism in a letter to a Harvard classmate, Saul Sternberg, about the prospects of getting the kind of cooperation he had received in Oslo: “There is so much selﬁshness, dishonesty and pettiness in this country. These damned alcoholic frogs are about as cooperative as megalomaniacal mules.” On the other hand, in a letter to another friend a couple of months later, he wrote that he felt constantly attuned to the city of Paris: “If I am feeling depressed here, I need only walk through the crowded marketplace or the bustling narrow streets or noisy squares and before I know it I am aglow with the feeling of being part of humanity. There is something about the French that is poignantly human. They laugh, they shout, they scowl, joke, cheat, cry, sing, bargain, argue, smile, explode, repent in a way that lets me know they are my species....” Milgram’s acclimation to Paris included becoming informed about its temptations. Recalling his Paris experience in a letter to a close friend in the United States, he wrote:

When my girl ‘friend’ left Paris I started appraising the price of French meat. Very high. The girls must be unionized. 1500 francs buys you a fair to mediocre ‘companion’ in Paris. If you’re willing to spend 5,000 francs ($12.50 Norway and France 49

at the then current exchange rate, black market of course) we American boys, who spoke good French could arrange with a stunning French slut on the Champs Elysees. Of course I was in no position to throw away 5,000 francs (Ye gads, I lived on that for my last three weeks). In Seville, the situation is much less agonizing and a piece of choice Spanish meat could be had for $1.10 (44 pesetas). Kosher meat can’t be had anywhere....

As in Oslo, he immersed himself in the local student scene. He had found living accommodations in one of the many university student residences associated with the University of Paris, Fondation Victor Lyon, located on Boulevard Jourdan. He paid $20 a month for a private modern room with a charming ﬂoor-to-ceiling window providing a panoramic view of a classical garden. He was able to obtain a French government meal subsidy that kept him well fed for less than sixty cents a day. He conﬁded in a letter to an American friend that his entry into the Victor Lyon residence was gained fraudulently. While the letter contains no further explanation, most likely living in one of the student residences as well as qualifying for the meal subsidy required being a university student in Paris, and he passed himself off as one. His stay at Victor Lyon was almost cut short by the dictatorial director of the residence. In December 1958, she threatened to evict him for staying up until all hours typing and getting up late in the morning, which she deemed dissolute behavior inconsistent with the rather rigid rules of conduct she expected the students to follow. He managed to stay on, but his troubles with “La directrice” came to a head when he wrote an article, in perfect idiomatic French, for Le Journal de Victor Lyon, a newsletter put out by the student residents of Victor Lyon—a biting criticism of the director for creating an oppressive atmosphere:

To Madame the Director, the most important thing in our Fondation is neither a book of science, nor a sketchbook ﬁlled by an art student, nor the writings of a resident, but the little notebook that the night guard keeps with jealousy, and in which he reports the name of every student who comes back after 1:00 A.M. ...This notebook ..., secretly looked at, is for me a symbol of what is wrong at Victor Lyon. 50 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

Although other writers expressed similar sentiments in the newsletter, she was so enraged by his article that she sent a complaint to his department at Harvard. The matter ended up a mere tempest in a carafe after some local administrators came to Milgram’s defense. The Committee on Higher De- grees of the Social Relations department took up the matter at a meeting but decided to take no action given the supportive letters Talcott Parsons had received from a couple of administrators of the student residences. One wrote: “Thanks to the newsletter, the students have gotten most of the requests that they were asking for. All of the facts cited in the various articles are completely true. By his [Milgram’s] frankness, his good humor and general friendliness he has the appreciation of all his fellow students.... In all matters he has behaved in a responsible manner.” The letters laid the matter to rest for good, although a brief notation on the discussion about him in the meeting of the Committee on Higher Degrees remained in his graduate record.

…

Milgram’s pessimism about getting assistance in France—a pessimism shared by Allport—turned out to have some basis. It wasn’t until mid-Oc- tober, about two months after his arrival in Paris, that he found an appropriate location to set up his lab to conduct his experiments. Jerome Bruner had contacted Professors Robert Pagès and Daniel Lagache of the Social Psychology Laboratory at the Sorbonne on his behalf. As a result of their help, he obtained the use of two rooms within a large student housing complex located in Antony, a small town four miles south of Paris. An important advantage of this setting was the ready availability of a large pool of potential subjects residing within the housing complex who could be approached by door-to-door solicitation. Since the residence housed students from all parts of France, his subjects represented a broad geographic distribution, as in Norway. Other than the fact that the experiments were conducted in French, Milgram made sure that they were as similar as possible to those conducted in Norway. As an example of Milgram’s meticulous attention to detail, he used the same stim- Norway and France 51 ulus tapes he had used in Norway—spliced into the French recordings— played on the same tape recorder, “and as it worked on 50 cycle synchronized operation both in France and Norway, we have every assurance that very close tolerances in tape speed were maintained.” As in Norway, Milgram carried out ﬁve experiments: Baseline, Airplane, Private, Censure, and Bell conditions. Some readers might wonder: If Mil- gram’s main purpose was to provide a direct behavioral comparison of conformity and independence in Norway and France, why did he do so many variations in each country? Wouldn’t repeating the same single experiment in both countries be sufﬁciently informative? Here is how Milgram explained the rationale for multiple experiments in both countries:

It would have been superﬁcial to conduct a single experiment in Norway, one in France, and then draw conclusions. . . . If we are concerned with studying national differences, we should be less interested in the simple in- cidence of conformity in two nations than in a comparison of the patterns of measures stemming from the several experiments. Various uncontrolled factors may raise or lower the absolute level of conformity from one country to the next, but within a nation these factors are likely to affect measures in a uniform way and not upset the relationships among them.

So, how did the French students compare with the Norwegians? On average, the French subjects yielded to the majority less often—about 50 percent of the time—than their Norwegian counterparts, who conformed on 62 percent of the critical trials, and the difference was statistically significant. Moreover, there was a remarkable consistency underlying this overall difference: The French subjects conformed less than the Norwegians in each of the five experimental conditions (see Table 3.1). Furthermore, while conformity levels were higher among the Norwegian than among the French subjects, the pattern of fluctuations among the conditions was similar in both countries (see Figure 3.1). For example, both groups of students conformed less in the Aircraft condition than in the Baseline condition; in both countries, censure from peers resulted in a greater tendency to yield to them, and so on. 52 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

TABLE 3.1 Percentage of Critical Trials That Were Pro-Majority for Five Experimental Conditions in Norway and France Percentage of Critical Errors Norwegian French Condition Students Students Baseline 62 50 Aircraft 56 48 Private 50 34 Censure 75 59 Bell 69 58 Average Percentage 62 50

100

Critical trials that were pro-majority (percent) pro-majority Critical trials that were 10

0 Baseline Aircraft Private Censure Bell KEY: French = darker bar; Norwegian = lighter bar

FIGURE 3.1 Differences in Levels of Conformity Among the Five Conditions in Norway and France. Norway and France 53

Some additional findings point up the pervasiveness of French-Norwe- gian differences in their tendency to yield to group pressure: In the Bell condition, in which the subjects were given an opportunity to listen to the tones again before giving their judgment, only five of the twenty in the Norwegian group reexamined the tones, whereas a majority of the French students, fourteen out of twenty, did so. Also, all but one of the French subjects resisted the group at least once, whereas among the Norwegian subjects, 12 percent yielded to the majority on all the critical trials. The French students also expressed their stronger individualism by being more reactive, and sometimes temperamental, in the experimental situation. In the Cen- sure condition, more than half of them made some kind of retaliatory comment in response to the other “subjects’” criticisms—in two cases quite explosively. In Norway, however, this rarely happened. Milgram had also contemplated testing French workers for comparison with his Norwegian workers. However, he needed adequate time to prepare for the statistics exam in May, and he was concerned that adding a factory sample would unduly prolong his research and interfere with his studying. Milgram’s cross-cultural experiment had broad, groundbreaking significance. It represents a major milestone in the transformation of the topic of national characteristics from armchair speculation to an object of scientific inquiry. In reflecting back on his experiments, Milgram was struck by the compatibility of his findings with features of each country’s culture observable in daily life outside of the laboratory, providing additional validation of his results. Norwegians, he noted, have a strong feeling of group identity and social responsibility. “It would not be surprising,” he observed, “to find that social cohesiveness of this sort goes hand in hand with a high degree of conformity.” French society, in contrast, is marked by much less unity and a greater diversity of opinions, which could help immunize the individual against social pressures. France, he also noted, has a tradition of dissent. Its citizens place a high value on critical judgment, a tendency that, in Milgram’s opinion, “often seems to go beyond reasonable bounds.” This in itself, Milgram argued, could help explain the relatively low degree of conformity he found among his French subjects. 54 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

Milgram completed the conformity experiments with his French student subjects in late February and planned to return by ship to the United States in March, but his return trip was delayed a few weeks as he waited to ﬁnd out whether his French girlfriend was pregnant. “Each time something like this happens,” he wrote to a Norwegian friend, “I resolve to abandon the ir- responsible practice of sharing my pillow, but alas!” An inﬂuential chapter in Milgram’s life had ended. Milgram’s year-and- a-half sojourn in Europe no doubt played an important role in his becoming a man of unusually broad and eclectic interests. One of his graduate students, Leon Mann, recalled:

Stanley was quite international and European in his interests and sensibilities—cities, cinema, theater, literature, philosophy, history, social and political movements. There was a very cultured European style about Stanley: Softly spoken, inquisitive, curious about a wide range of . . . topics, gestur- ing with his hands. He was both a scholar and intellectual.

But even more important was the professional growth he experienced. His conformity study was pioneering research. It was the first time an objective technique was used to study cross-cultural differences in behavior. He now knew that he was capable of doing original research that would provide new insights about human behavior. It was an accomplishment that made him aim high and not settle for the mundane in his future career as a scientific researcher. Those experiments also had more specific carryover effects. The benign responses he received from his Norwegian subjects in the postexperimental questionnaire he had given them unquestionably lifted some of the ethical doubts that might later have prevented him from pursuing controversial research using deception. Indeed, the idea for Milgram’s obedience experiments, which grew out of his conformity work, would begin to take shape soon after his return to the States. CHAPTER 4

FROM THE “PRINCETITUTE” TO YALE

FTER RETURNING FROM Europe, Milgram was brimming Awith self-conﬁdence. He had single-handedly created and carried out a highly ambitious piece of research that broke new ground in cross-cultural studies. He even passed (with “distinction”) the statistics exam he had failed before leaving for Europe. His success on the exam was due in part to his experiences applying statistical techniques to the data produced in Norway and France. As a result of his European research and three intellectually stimulating years with some of the best minds in the social sciences at Har- vard, he was now sure of what he wanted to do with his life—to have an academic career that would enable him to do original research. It felt good to be back in Cambridge after an absence of two years. He spent a lazy summer enjoying its delights and reconnecting with classmates and old girlfriends, but making only minimal headway working on his dissertation. After an exhausting search, he found a beautiful apartment and planned to spend “a final, beatific year in Cambridge” completing his dissertation. He also spent some of his summer at home in Queens. It was during such a visit, toward the end of the summer, that he received a letter from Asch, then at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, that resulted in a drastic change of plans for him. Since 1947, Asch had been on the faculty at Swarthmore College, but he was spending 1958–1960 at the Institute for Advanced Study as a Visiting

55 56 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

Member. Located on an idyllic campus adjacent to a large nature preserve, the institute was founded in 1930 by philanthropists Louis Bamberger and Caroline Bamberger Field as a setting for pure intellectual inquiry. The choice of a tranquil and remote spot was deliberate, to facilitate scholarly activity without distractions. Asch had contacted Milgram to invite him to help edit a book Asch was writing on conformity. The job would run through June 1960 and came with a salary of $4,200. Milgram agonized over the pros and cons of accepting Asch’s invitation. On the one hand, he felt it would be folly to turn down an invitation from someone of Asch’s stature and potential clout as a job reference. Besides, the money would certainly come in handy. On the other hand, having already worked for a year for Asch at Harvard, he could see no further intellectual benefit from any additional apprenticeship with him. Milgram ﬁnally accepted Asch’s offer. He decided that perhaps the qui- etude of Princeton—as compared with Cambridge—would make it easier to concentrate on his own dissertation writing. In addition, he successfully petitioned his department to accept his work with Asch as a substitute for a Topical Seminar in Social Psychology, a requirement for the Ph.D. that he had not yet fulﬁlled. While still in high school, on March 1, 1949, Milgram had begun a diary notebook he titled “Thoughts.” Over the next eleven years, he would use it sporadically for introspective musings. Milgram’s entry for October 2, 1959, provides a blurry snapshot of his state of mind as he was preparing to leave for Princeton:

Tomorrow I shall abandon my full breasted mistress, Cambridge, for the glitter of the Princetitute. I don’t know what’s happening, but I trust the deep sources of instinct that guide me in such decisions. Is it too soon to say that a great growth has occurred? Europe was its seedbed, but the fruits are appearing now.... The summer was generally unproductive, yet pleasant. There was satisfactory contact with women, and deep sexual satisfaction from renewed episodes with Enid [a girl he ﬁrst met in the summer of 1956. She was then a math major at Barnard, attending Harvard summer From the “Princetitute” to Yale 57

school]. I have yet to ﬁnd the woman of my life, and a stable routine of productive labor is far from established; nor is the way to an integration of artistic and academic needs in sight. But new strains of conﬁdence say it is all possible. The mood may pass in an hour, but it is pleasant to support at the moment. Perhaps the hot chocolate of several hours ago is at the root of it.

He had accepted the job with Asch with the expectation that he would be permitted to spend part of his time writing his dissertation, that housing near the institute would be arranged for him, and that he would have some kind of formal affiliation with the institute that he could put on his résumé—although it is not clear how many of these things were made explicit. As it turned out, not only was the latter expectation not fulﬁlled, but Milgram was never made to feel at home at the institute—even the use of a sheet of paper or an ink blotter was apt to become a major issue. No housing arrangements were made for him, and he had to settle for a cramped rented room in a private rooming house on Wiggins Street in Princeton. Bureaucratically, Milgram was an invisible man: his name does not appear in any of Asch’s correspondence with the administration of the institute. Milgram was able to work on his dissertation, but Asch begrudged him the time it took away from assisting him with the book. Milgram ended up having to do his own writing in the evenings and on weekends. At one point, the conﬂicting pressures became so unbearable that Milgram wrote a letter of resignation to Asch and placed it in his mailbox—only to retrieve it at the last minute. It turned out to be a very stressful and demoralizing year for Milgram. The dissertation did get completed on time, and so did Asch’s book, but on a sour note. Milgram felt that because of the quality of his editorial work, he deserved some citation on the title page of Asch’s book—not a coau- thorship, but something that would have been of more professional value than a mere “thank you” in the preface. He met some resistance from Asch on this matter and, out of frustration, came up with the following suggested wording in a letter to Asch (which he also ended up not sending): 58 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

INDEPENDENCE AGAINST CONFORMITY by SOLOMON E. ASCH In spite of S. MILGRAM

There were a few bright spots, however. There were stimulating meal- time conversations with some of the most outstanding people in their ﬁelds, such as Louis Fischer, an expert on foreign policy, George F. Kennan, the historian and diplomat, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, the atomic scientist and, at the time, the director of the institute. Gazing out at the beautiful milewide expanse of grass in front of the institute’s main building provided Milgram an occasional respite from brooding over his situation. But the more prevailing mood was one of despondency, which he expressed in pitiful letters to friends:

My only pleasure is to sit on a curbstone and watch the sky for an occasional bird ﬂying south for the winter. I am not used to being so very much alone, and I can think of a few sweet faces with whom I wouldn’t mind sharing my pillow when the hour for sleep comes around.... I’m listless, uneasy, dissatisﬁed, bored and fed up. I suffer from status insecurity, incipient mononucleosis, and sexual privation. I’m the little man looking around for some totalitarian movement I can join.

One night, to break up the monotony of his isolated existence, he im- pulsively drove into New York and ended up in a coffeehouse in Greenwich Village. He struck up a conversation with a stranger sitting nearby, unbur- dening himself about his work. That stranger turned out to be the singer and actor Theodore Bikel. Meanwhile, life went on for the other members of his family. Adele continued working in a bakery and maintaining an apartment in Queens, now by herself, since all the children had moved away from home. Milgram’s sister, Marjorie, had earned a teacher’s degree from Queens College and taught first grade only briefly before marrying a Long Island businessman From the “Princetitute” to Yale 59 in 1954, the year Stanley entered Harvard. Now, she kept busy as a house- wife raising a family. In 1956, his brother Joel entered the Coast Guard to prove his manhood, but hated it almost from the first moment, leaving after just six months. In 1957, with Stanley’s encouragement, he began college at the State University of New York (SUNY) in New Paltz. He got married in 1960, a year before he graduated. One of the few things that helped keep Milgram emotionally afloat during that difficult year was Allport’s constant support and confidence in his judgments as he began writing his dissertation. On November 4, 1959, Milgram wrote Allport: “I have dropped all pretensions to writing a classic and am deep into the writing of my thesis.... I am not satisfied with my level of writing. Given the time I can turn felic- itous sentences, but at the present rate of advance there is just enough time to make sure that all sentences contain the required parts of speech.” All- port replied: “Your progress report really pleases me. The Table of Contents seem to be efficiently designed, and to promise a work of high quality. . . . No one ever writes a classic by setting out to do so. One says what’s on one’s mind as well as one can; and, lo, sometimes a classic results. But locally we’ll settle for a sound and solid regulation-type thesis.” On January 16, 1960, Milgram reported to Allport that “the dissertation has been pushed forward since my last letter, though not to the point advertised therein. I had planned to have the first draft completed by early Janu- ary, but this has not been accomplished. I am sending you the outline and have checked off what has been done. As you can see, all fourteen experiments have been written up.” Allport wrote back: “Your progress reports are always masterpieces of conviction. (The fact remains that I haven’t seen a single word of your thesis!) But I can see that you are well occupied. I am hoping that I can see the thesis or most of it before the final submission [deadline of ] April 1. But even this matter I leave to your convenience.” On February 29, 1960, Milgram sent Allport a draft of a chapter, noting that it was “an intermediate version of one of the experimental chapters.... How enviable a position you have as thesis advisor. It’s like working as night editor for the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor and Man- chester Guardian all at once.” Allport: “Perhaps I’m slipping but I cannot 60 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

find any nasty editorial remarks to make about Experiment five. It is clearly written, pointed, economical.” Milgram completed his dissertation and sent it to Allport during the last week of March, making the April 1 deadline. On May 3, he received a letter from Leonard Doob, a social psychologist and one of the senior members of the Yale Psychology Department, informing him of an opening for an assistant professor of social psychology and inviting him to visit the department to discuss it if he was interested in the position. Milgram wrote back promptly, telling Doob that the position he described was “of definite interest” but that he had already been offered an excellent position at Harvard for the coming year, and he would have to deal with that situation before he could consider himself free to weigh alternatives. He told Doob that he would get back to him the next week to arrange for a meeting. Milgram was not playing hard-to-get. He did have a position lined up for the fall—as a Research Fellow in Cognitive Studies in the newly formed Center for Cognitive Studies, headed by Jerome Bruner and George Miller, another highly respected cognitive psychologist. The meeting with Doob resulted in an offer from Yale, which—after some indecision and consultation with friends—Milgram accepted. He would be an assistant professor with a starting annual salary of $6,500. De- scribing to Allport how and why he decided in favor of Yale, Milgram wrote:

It was a very hard decision that no one seemed willing to make for me, so I let the mist swirl round and round until a vague imbalance inclined my step toward Yale.... I conducted a public opinion poll among my eminent friends—Mike Wallach, Asch, Roger Brown, Dick Crutchﬁeld, and the polls favored Harvard. Then I realized how useless such a procedure was, and tried to feel my way through to a preference. The thread of a motive must have latched on to something that Yale offered. What was it?—status, challenge, a chance to leave ‘home’ and work up a good set of credentials on my own?

Allport had been trying to help Milgram find an academic position since the spring, even before he had completed his dissertation, so he was delighted that his protégé had landed a position at Yale. Milgram would be From the “Princetitute” to Yale 61 joining three other Harvard graduates on the psychology faculty there. All- port told Milgram that he felt like “a proud rooster” because all of them were his former students. After Allport received Milgram’s completed dissertation, he asked two members of the department to serve as readers, which was the department procedure. They read and critiqued the thesis and suggested some changes. One of the readers was Herbert Kelman, a social psychologist who had received his graduate training at Yale. He had worked closely with Carl Hovland, a pioneer in the study of persuasion and attitude change, who had chaired his doctoral dissertation. He joined the Social Relations Depart- ment in 1957 as a lecturer in social psychology, moved to the University of Michigan in 1962, and then returned to the department in 1969 as Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, a chair first held by Gordon All- port. Although he has made a variety of contributions to social psychology, he is best known for his writings on research ethics. Through his criticism of the widespread use of deception in experimentation, he sensitized his fellow social psychologists to the ethical dilemmas their work sometimes poses. Although he made extensive comments and criticisms of Milgram’s dissertation, Kelman judged it to be “an excellent study both in its conception and execution . . . [and] of great potential significance.” On June 1, Milgram sent Allport a revised version of his thesis in which the readers’ criticisms had been addressed. Allport replied with a letter letting him know that he had received the revision by the required deadline, and he concluded with the following comment:

If I did not previously tell you so, my judgment is that your thesis is very good indeed, and written with an elegant professional touch that augurs well for your career. And for this career you have all my warm wishes—even at Yale.

Cordially yours, Gordon W. Allport

Milgram knew that to succeed in academic life he would have to come up with an important and distinctive program of research with which to 62 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD make his mark. He told Roger Brown that he hoped to ﬁnd a phenomenon of great consequence, such as Asch had done, then “worry it to death.” By the end of his year in Princeton, he knew what that program of research would be: the study of obedience to authority. Milgram’s interest in obedience was rooted in his early identiﬁcation with the Jewish people and his determination to fathom the Holocaust. He made the connection between the Holocaust and his obedience research explicit in his book The Individual in a Social World:

[My] laboratory paradigm . . . gave scientific expression to a more general concern about authority, a concern forced upon members of my generation, in particular upon Jews such as myself, by the atrocities of World War II.... The impact of the Holocaust on my own psyche energized my interest in obedience and shaped the particular form in which it was examined.

The idea for the speciﬁc experimental technique—which enabled him to transform his broad concerns about authority into concrete plans to study it—came to him during the spring or early summer of 1960, during his last few months in Princeton working for Asch. The idea was grounded in Asch’s conformity experiments. Here is how Milgram described the connection between the Asch experiments and the invention of his experimental technique for studying obedience:

I was trying to think of a way to make Asch’s conformity experiment more humanly signiﬁcant. I was dissatisﬁed that the test of conformity was judgments about lines. I wondered whether groups could pressure a person into performing an act whose human import was more readily apparent, perhaps behaving aggressively toward another person, say by administering increasingly severe shocks to him. But to study the group effect . . . you’d have to know how the subject performed without any group pressure. At that instant, my thought shifted, zeroing in on this experimental control. Just how far would a person go under the experimenter’s orders? It was an incandescent moment.... From the “Princetitute” to Yale 63

When exactly that “incandescent moment” took place cannot be pin- pointed, but it can be narrowed down to a period of time between March 2 and the end of June 1960. In a letter to Allport dated March 2, Milgram listed a number of research projects that he would be interested in pursuing, and the study of obedience was not among them. Milgram worked for Asch until near the end of June. Asch told an interviewer that he first learned about Milgram’s plans to study obedience when they parted. Interestingly, on May 11, Israeli agents abducted the former Nazi official Adolf Eich- mann from his home in a suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and flew him to Israel to stand trial for his role in the murder of six million Jews. It’s certainly possible that this was the event that crystallized the obedience research in Milgram’s mind.

…

Milgram arrived in New Haven in early September 1960. Classes would not begin until late in the month, and he used the time to plan his courses and to ruminate about designing the boldest and most significant research possible. He had heard that New Haven was a dreary place, so he was pleasantly surprised to find the city in the midst of a vigorous program of urban renewal and beautification. However, Yale’s architecture did not fare particularly well in his eyes, especially since his yardstick of beauty was Harvard’s expansive campus with its lawn and trees. He regarded Yale’s neo-Gothic (or pseudo-Gothic, as he called it) aesthetic ponderous and confining, an alien import out of kilter with the mainstream of American architectural history. Still, he found some consolation in the exquisite courtyards hidden behind some of the heavy brick walls. His favorite of these, where he often loved to sit, was a beautiful classical garden decorated in high Romanesque style right in the middle of the cathedral-like Sterling Memorial Library. When the semester began, Milgram’s responsibilities included teaching a Tuesday afternoon seminar on the psychology of the small group and advising ten students who were writing their senior honors theses. After the pressure-cooker year at the Institute for Advanced Study, he luxuriated in 64 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD the freedom of academic life: He could do as he pleased six days a week; he could conduct his seminar in whatever manner he chose, and the research he conducted could be guided solely by his own interests. Yet Harvard still was and would continue to be the embodiment of academic Eden for him. As he wrote to Allport early in the semester:

The transition from Cambridge to New Haven has been exceedingly smooth, and life at Yale is very nice. It is true that here one is sometimes confronted with the question: “Are you a psychologist or are you doing human research?” But deep down you know that all is tempered by the tolerance beﬁtting a great university. Harvard, it goes without saying, is just noticeably greater.

Milgram was renting a three-room furnished apartment on the second ﬂoor of a brownstone on York Square Place. It had the twin advantages of being affordable, since he had rented it from the university, and in close proximity to both the main campus and the Yale New Haven Hospital on Cedar Street, where the Psychology Department’s ofﬁces and some of its labs were located. Whatever its advantages, Milgram thought it was a dump. The color of the apartment’s walls was a nameless, dreary refugee from the color spectrum, and he was ready to trash its contents from the moment he moved in. It had clumsy furniture that he told a friend he would have submitted to a public burning had it not belonged to the university. One day, when he could no longer look at the shabby living room carpet, he rolled it up, dropped it into a rental car he was using, and left it there when he returned the car to the rental agency. Although Milgram already had plans to study obedience as he was leaving Princeton, the first research he set out to conduct at Yale was altogether different and reflected a fusion of his artistic sensibilities and his scientific interests. It also allowed him to continue his occasional dab- bling in drugs—such as when he and a small group of friends sampled peyote as graduate students at Harvard—but now under the cloak of academic legitimacy. From the “Princetitute” to Yale 65

On October 7, 1960—less than two weeks into the semester—Milgram submitted a small grant proposal to the American Council of Learned So- cieties requesting $2,000 to test the effects of mescaline on aesthetic judgments of art. This was merely a side interest, he assured Allport when he wrote to him for a letter of support, and he was not abandoning social psychology. Besides his own experience with drugs at Harvard, his interest had been stimulated by reading Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception as well as the deﬁnitive text on the subject, Heinrich Klüver’s Mescal. Perhaps not surprisingly, his request was turned down. However, his interest in testing mescaline’s behavioral effects persisted, so he did some self-experimentation with the drug. And in February 1963, with a colleague and a graduate student, he conducted an informal experiment demonstrating that ingest- ing mescaline could improve one’s accuracy in a dart-throwing game. Over the years, he occasionally used other drugs—marijuana socially, and amphetamines and cocaine to help him overcome writer’s block. He claimed that he could tell by looking at a piece of his writing which drug he had used when he wrote it. Different drugs had distinct effects on him, which he felt he could recognize in the way he expressed himself. Even as he applied for a grant for the mescaline research, however, his main focus was on obedience. As he told Allport in a letter dated October 10:

Next year I . . . plan to undertake a long series of experiments on obedience. While this series will stand by itself as an independent study, it is also preparation for the project on German character—in which comparative experimental measures of “obedience to authority” will play an important part.

In October and November, Milgram sent preliminary letters of inquiry to three governmental agencies about the prospects for grant support for his planned research on obedience. The ﬁrst went out on October 14 to Luigi Petrullo, the head of the Group Psychology Branch of the Ofﬁce of Naval Research, which was then in the forefront of supporting group-related social- psychological research. For a preliminary inquiry, the letter was quite long, and in fact portions of it ended up in the formal proposal he submitted a few months later. In its six pages, Milgram made a case for the importance 66 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD of studying obedience and outlined the experimental procedure he planned to use.

Obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to. Every power system implies a structure of command and action in response to the command. The question is not so much the limits of obedience. We know that given certain general circumstances, such as the situation of an army in war, men can be commanded to kill other men and will obey; they may even be commanded to destroy their own lives and will comply. Thus it is by no means the purpose of the study to try to set the absolute limits of obedience. Within a laboratory situation we cannot create the conditions for maximum obedience; only the circumstances of real life will extract the highest measure of compliance from men. We can, however, approach the question from a somewhat different viewpoint. Given that a person is confronted with a particular set of commands “more or less” appropriate to a laboratory situation, we may ask which conditions increase his compliance, and which make him less likely to comply. Ideally, the experimental situation should be one in which a subject is commanded to perform a speciﬁc set of acts. The acts should bear on important themes in human relations and should be of personal signiﬁcance to the subject.... Subjects [in the planned experiments] believe they are performing in an experiment in human learning.... [The subject] operates a control panel, consisting of a series of switches set in a line. The switch at the left is labelled “1-Very Light Shock”; . . . the switch at the extreme right is labelled “15-Extreme Shock: Danger.” This control panel allows subject A [the naïve subject] to administer a graded series of shocks to subject B [the victim]. . . . It goes without saying that subject B, the victim, does not in reality suffer, but is a confederate of the experimenter. Subject A is unaware of this and believes that he is actually administering shocks to subject B. . . . As the learning experiment proceeds the subject is commanded to deliver increasingly more potent shocks. Internal resistances become stronger, From the “Princetitute” to Yale 67

and at a certain point he refuses to go on with the experiment. Behavior prior to this rupture we shall consider as obedience, in that the subject complies with the commands of the experimenter. The point of rupture is the act of disobedience.

Milgram also described several possible variations on this experiment, but he added that “it would be foolish” to make a firm commitment to a specific set of experiments at this time. That was a prudent qualification: Of the four possible experimental variations he described in the letter, only one—a condition in which the naïve subject is part of a team of “teachers”—bore any resemblance to those he later conducted. Milgram concluded his letter with a brief biographical sketch, which included his work with Asch. He expressed his intellectual debt to Asch, but at the same time he noted a fundamental difference in their concerns: “[Asch’s] influence is certainly apparent in my work. I particularly admire his technique of systematic experimental variation. We differ in that he is concerned with judgments, cognitions, and the realm of thought. My own interests center on the social act as the crucial observational focus.” Appended to Milgram’s letter to Petrullo was a rough sketch of a rudi- mentary version of the shock box that was to be used in the experiments. This sketch turned out to acquire special importance the following year, when an aggression researcher, Arnold Buss, came out with his own shock machine. The sketch helped Milgram substantiate his priority in creating such a machine, or at least their independence. Milgram suspected that Buss had copied his machine, and while an exchange of correspondence between them allayed Milgram’s suspicions, it did not completely eliminate them. In mid-November, Milgram sent out letters of inquiry to two other grant prospects, the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Sci- ence Foundation (NSF). By now he was immersed in preparations for his pilot studies, which he referred to in these letters. He planned to include his results in the formal grant proposal to strengthen it. These pilot experiments were carried out by members of his Psychology of Small Groups class. Having gone through the research literature on small groups with his students, Milgram wanted them to get some hands- 68 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD on experience conducting research. After discussing various possibilities with them, the choices were whittled down to two: One was a pilot version of the obedience experiment; the other was a study of communication patterns in groups. Milgram left the ultimate choice up to them, removing himself from the classroom so they could take a private vote. When he returned, the students told him that the obedience experiment had won—by a small margin. Milgram gave his students a drawing of the shock generator that would be needed, and within a week the students capably turned the conception into the real thing. The pilot studies were conducted in the elegant Interac- tion Laboratory located on the first floor of Linsly-Chittenden Hall. The Sociology Department, which owned the laboratory, allowed Milgram and his class to use it. The class conducted the experiment during five different sessions in the lab in late November and early December. Although Mil- gram gave a condensed description of the procedure in his written report of the pilot research, the basic laboratory techniques seem to have been very similar to the one he outlined in his letter to the Office of Naval Research. Milgram described the results as follows.

Before an experiment is carried out it is often hard to visualize exactly what its flavor would be. Thus, there was a certain amount of excitement and anticipation as we awaited the first subject. The study, as carried out by my small groups class under my supervision, was not very well controlled. But even under these uncontrolled conditions, the behavior of the subjects astonished the undergraduates, and me as well. Audiences who view films of the obedience experiment sometimes find themselves laughing nervously. This occurred in amplified form among the undergraduates who were observing the experiment behind the one-way [mirror] rooms. This may seem an unseemly response but it happened and I report it as such. I do not believe that the students could fully appreciate the significance of what they were viewing, but there was a general sense that something extraordinary had happened. And they expressed their feelings by taking me to Mory’s Tavern when we had finished with our work, a locale then off limits to mere faculty. From the “Princetitute” to Yale 69

The replies Milgram received from all three agencies indicated that each of them was receptive to considering the kind of research he had in mind. But the prospects at the National Science Foundation seemed most promising. So on January 27, 1961, he sent the NSF a formal application, “Dy- namics of Obedience: Experiments in Social Psychology,” requesting $30,348 for a two-year period from June 1, 1961, to May 31, 1963. The grant proposal included a description of the pilot research and its findings, accompanied by some photographs depicting some of the subjects’ behavior. The small sample size—twenty Yale undergraduate subjects— precluded a quantitative presentation, so Milgram gave a qualitative description of the results. This was sufficiently effective, for not only did the pilot studies demonstrate that Milgram had a laboratory procedure in place to study obedience, but also they uncovered some unexpected and troubling behavior. In essence, Milgram found that people would obey commands even when those commands were contrary to their deeply rooted standards of behavior. Equally important, the subjects readily accepted the reality of the experiments; they believed they were giving extremely painful electric shocks to another person (who acted as if he was receiving shocks but in reality was in cahoots with Milgram and his students and received no actual shocks). The subjects also showed signs of tension. One subject nervously pulled his hair, gripped his chair, and repeatedly rubbed his face. Another wiped his sweating palms numerous times and shook his head in dismay, as if trying to communicate to the “learner” that he regretted what he was doing. Many subjects were willing to administer the most extreme shocks in response to the experimenter’s commands. But when they were asked if they would be willing to sample the shock they had just given, they refused. Milgram’s main, grant-funded series of experiments built on the pilot studies but differed from them in a number of ways. First, the shock machine used in the main experiments was a more refined version of the shock box used in the pilot studies. The control panel of the first consisted of two rows of six voltage switches labeled in 30-volt increments. To enhance the experiment’s credibility, the second one had a more professional look. It consisted of a single row of thirty switches, with each switch marked 15 volts higher then the previous one. Second, in the pilot studies the “learner”—the 70 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD person supposedly being shocked—was on the other side of a silvered glass window, through which the “teacher” (the subject) could dimly see him. In the main experiments, in most conditions the two people were separated by a wall, permitting the learner to be heard, but not seen. In a few of the conditions, the learner was seated near the teacher in the same room. Third—and this was an important difference—whereas the naïve subjects in the pilot studies were Yale undergraduates (and in Milgram’s grant proposal he indicated that he would use Yale students), in the main series he ended up using adult volunteers between the ages of twenty and fifty from New Haven, Bridgeport, and surrounding areas. Looking back after the main body of experiments was completed, Milgram was glad he had made this change, because it strengthened his argument that his findings were generalizable to normal, everyday people. But the original impetus for a change in the subject population was based on two factors. The first was a colleague’s criticism, which Milgram took to heart. After hearing Mil- gram describe his pilot studies and its findings, the colleague dismissed it as having no relevance to the ordinary man in the street. Yale students, he asserted, were so aggressive and competitive that they would step on each other’s necks with little provocation. The second factor had to do with timing. Milgram’s grant proposal to NSF was approved on May 3, 1961. As soon as he received notification, he was eager to get started. But the 1960–1961 academic year was almost over, and students would not return to campus until September 20. So, in order to start in the summer, he began recruiting adult community residents with a display ad in the June 18 issue of the New Haven Register and by direct mail solicitations. By the end of the month he had a pool of 300 potential subjects. Throughout the summer he would add to this pool with mailings to people selected randomly from the telephone book. By the time the fall semester started, he had completed the first four experiments. An unusual feature of Milgram’s grant proposal was a section titled “Re- sponsibility to Subjects.” When Milgram was planning and conducting his obedience studies, he was operating in an ethical vacuum. There were no formal ethical guidelines for the protection of the human subjects in experiments. Researchers tended to use their own judgment about whether their From the “Princetitute” to Yale 71 research posed an ethical problem. At most, they might ask for their colleagues’ informal opinions. In deciding whether or not to conduct a study, ethical questions—if they were considered at all—took a back seat to scientific value. Here is what Milgram wrote in that section of the grant proposal:

A ﬁnal but important note must be added concerning the investigator’s responsibility to persons who serve in the experiment. There is no question that the subject is placed in a difﬁcult predicament and that strong feelings are aroused. Under these circumstances it is highly important that measures be taken to insure the subject’s well-being before he is discharged from the laboratory. Every effort will be made to set the subject at ease and to assure him of the adequacy of his performance. . . .

Milgram’s expression of concern for his subjects’ well-being in the grant proposal did not diminish the extreme stress many of them experienced during the experiment. Nor did it lead, in practice, to a uniformly thorough “debrieﬁng” for all subjects—although at a minimum, subjects left the lab knowing that the “victim” was not hurt. Nonetheless, Milgram was, generally speaking, ahead of his time in giving this kind of explicit attention to the subjects’ welfare in the planning of an experiment. The NSF review process included a site visit to Yale on April 13, 1961, by Henry Riecken, head of the NSF Ofﬁce of Social Sciences, accompanied by Richard Christie, a social psychologist, and James Coleman, a sociologist. In the “Diary Note” of that visit, Riecken observed somewhat critically that it was “clear that Dr. Milgram neither has nor plans to have an elaborate a priori theory.” A site visit is not always part of a grant review process. Riecken’s committee came to New Haven out of concern for the subjects. Milgram’s answers to their questions relieved the committee’s anxiety. Nonetheless, the committee raised the question with their general counsel of who would be responsible—the National Science Foundation or Yale—for any negative effects on the subjects. The lawyer thought that Yale would be legally responsible. 72 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

The NSF final panel rating was “Meritorious.” In the panel discussion notes, the proposal is described as “a bold experiment on an important and fundamental social phenomenon.” Although panel opinion on the merits of the proposal had been divided, the final judgment was to recommend support. Milgram was notified of approval on May 3, 1961, for a sum of $24,700 for a two-year period beginning June 1. This was about $5,600 less than Milgram had requested. The reduction was based on the committee’s belief that Milgram had been too cavalier about the problem of “subject contamination”—especially if he used community residents. Information about the details of the experiment would quickly spread, and Milgram’s potential pool of subjects would be exhausted faster than he thought. The committee therefore recommended reduced funding to reflect a lower cost of payment for fewer subjects. (Paying subjects for their participation was, and still is, a common practice in psychological research.) Awaiting a funding agency’s decision on a grant proposal can make even the most seasoned of scientists anxious. Foundations invariably receive more applications than the amount of money available, so the outcome can never be assumed. For Stanley, something happened around the time he submitted his grant proposal that undoubtedly helped divert his attention. At the end of January 1961, he met Alexandra (Sasha) Menkin at a party in the Inwood section of Manhattan. There were some similarities in their backgrounds. Sasha was also a child of European Jewish immigrants. Nei- ther set of parents was religiously observant, though they spoke to each other in Yiddish, especially when they didn’t want the children to understand what was being said. Sasha’s father was born in Geneva, Switzerland, her grandmother having moved there from Russia to study at a university, since higher education was virtually out of the question for a Jewish woman in pre–World War I Russia. Eventually, Sasha’s father and his family emigrated to the United States, where he went on to become an engineer. Sasha didn’t remember her father, though, because he died when she was very young. Her mother had emigrated from Russia to the United States, where she had met and married her husband. Like Stanley, Sasha was born in the Bronx. Her mother was a dancer, performing professionally and teaching. From the “Princetitute” to Yale 73

Sasha had graduated from Hunter College in Manhattan and—taking after her mother—had an interest and training in dance, but at the time she met Stanley she was doing ofﬁce work. She was 5’5”, petite (Stanley was only 5’7”) and vivacious, and she was easy to talk to. They discovered that they had a mutual interest in art and travel, and Stanley hardly left her side that night. From her perspective, the chemistry was all there, and by the end of that ﬁrst evening, she knew that he was the one for her. As he drove Sasha home to her Greenwich Village apartment the night they met, he blurted out something that suggested he was already thinking about a future together. Turning to her, he said, “You know, I’d make such a terrible husband.” Sasha looked at him, surprised at such candor, and asked, “Well, why?” He replied, “Well, sometimes I work late at night. It’s terrible; I get involved and I can’t stop.” To which Sasha answered, “Whoever would marry you would love you for the way you are.” Despite the mutual attraction, it took Stanley a couple of weeks to call her for a date. In wasn’t long before he was driving down to see her virtually every weekend. Howard Leventhal, his closest colleague at Yale, provided an intriguing and insightful perspective on their courtship:

He was very impressed with Sasha, because she was a dancer as I recall, and appealed to him as she would appeal to anyone, because she was attractive as a person, a warm person. And I think a very strong appeal to Stanley was her aesthetic quality. She was statuesque in a way—in many ways she appealed to him like a piece of art.... She brought a kind of aesthetic quality to life.... People who are able to do that are rare, and I think that was a very powerful factor in the attraction in that relationship. . . . She lent a certain grace to everyday activities.

Their mothers had opposite reactions to the match—rooted, at least partially, in the same reason: Sasha was four and a half years older than Stan- ley. Stanley’s mother was initially concerned about this (although she came to like Sasha), although Sasha’s mother was ecstatic about Stanley. At age thirty-two, Sasha had ﬁnally found the right man—someone who was bright and well educated and had a clear sense of direction. 74 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

David Sears, who was then a graduate student in the Yale Psychology Department, and who Stanley thought was more experienced in such matters, told him, “It’s impossible to maintain such a relationship from New Haven. Eventually, you either have to drop it or marry her.” Stanley decided to marry her. They were married in a small ceremony on December 10, 1961, at the Brotherhood Synagogue in Greenwich Village, attended primarily by their immediate families. Ever the keen observer, Stanley would recall that the cantor wore his galoshes during the ceremony. Milgram’s life was changing in more ways than one. He was about to enter one of the most productive—and challenging—periods of his academic career. The obedience experiments would draw on everything he had learned at Harvard and Princeton, as well as his European experiments, and would catapult him into the limelight. The reverberations would be felt for decades to come. CHAPTER 5

OBEDIENCE: THE EXPERIENCE

S SOON AS the National Science Foundation notified Milgram Athat his grant was approved in May 1961, he sprang into action, turning his attention to the many details that needed to be worked out in preparation for the experiment. It took him two full months, June and July, to fine-tune them to his exacting specifications. Subjects were recruited, a false shock machine was built, laboratory procedures were worked out, scripts were written and practiced, and a research team was assembled. Pretest subjects were “run” through the procedure until all the kinks were worked out. Finally, on August 7, the laboratory doors opened. Subjects were scheduled at hourly intervals, Monday through Friday from 6:00 P.M. to 11:00 P.M. and the whole day on Saturdays and Sundays. When a subject arrived for his scheduled appointment at Linsly-Chittenden Hall, located on High Street on Yale’s Old Campus, he would first enter a re- markably ordinary building, easily overshadowed by the magnificent clock- arch nearby, straddling High Street at Chapel Street. The only thing noteworthy about Linsly-Chittenden Hall was its dubious architectural pedigree, an improbable combination of Gothic and Romanesque styles. Milgram began recruiting potential volunteers for his experiment with a display ad in the June 18 issue of the New Haven Register. He solicited volunteers for what was ostensibly a study of memory. They would be paid $4.00 plus 50 cents for carfare. In the early 1960s, $4.00 per hour was well above minimum wage and 50 cents was sufficient for round-trip bus fare to

75 76 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD and from most parts of New Haven. Before placing the ad, he first cleared it with the department chairman Claude Buxton to make sure there wasn’t anything objectionable in it. The subjects ranged in age from twenty to fifty years of age. In all conditions but one, they were males. To ensure the generalizability of his results, Milgram made sure that all occupational levels, from unskilled workers to professionals, were represented. People had volunteered for Milgram’s experiment for a variety of reasons. Some came out of curiosity about psychology experiments, others to learn something about themselves, and some because they had a special interest in the subject of memory. Still others were simply drawn by the opportunity to earn $4.50 for an hour’s work. At the door of the lab, the subject would be met by the experimenter, a short, somewhat stern-looking, gaunt-faced man in a gray lab coat, who introduced himself as Mr. Williams. Milgram had the experimenter wear a gray—rather than white—lab coat, because he didn’t want subjects to think that Williams was a medical doctor and thereby limit the implications of his findings to the power of a medical authority. The subject would then be introduced to a Mr. Wallace (actually a man named James McDonough), another participant in the memory experiment, who smiled broadly, but seemed somewhat nervous. Milgram’s primary assistants remained with him from the beginning of August 1961 to the end of May 1962. They were John Williams, who played the role of the experimenter, and James McDonough, who served as the learner. Neither was a professional actor, but they had some natural talents that, with the help of repeated rehearsals, enabled them to play their roles with chilling realism. Both had regular day jobs. Williams was a thirty-one- year-old high school biology teacher, and as the experimenter, he projected a stern aura of technical efficiency. The role of learner, or victim, was played by McDonough, a somewhat pudgy forty-seven-year-old Irish-American with a pleasant, unassuming manner, who was the head payroll auditor of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad. His employers were not very happy about one of their executives working a second job, but as a father of nine children, he needed the extra income. In addition, those extra evening hours, and more on weekends, actually seemed to energize him. The Obedience: The Experience 77 experiment was an interesting diversion from his daytime job, and Milgram seemed pleased with the work he did. In his interview notes, Milgram wrote: “This man would be perfect as a victim—he is so mild mannered and submissive; not at all academic . . . Easy to get along with.” Williams made out the promised check for $4.50 to each of them, which they were told was theirs to keep no matter what transpired in the experiment. The purpose of this unconditional prepayment was to short-circuit the possibility that the money might make subjects feel obligated to comply with the experimenter’s wishes. Williams (hereafter referred to as the Experimenter) then continued: “I’d like to explain to both of you now about our Memory Project. Psychologists have developed several theories to explain how people learn various types of material.” Then, pointing to a book on a table nearby, he said, “Some of the better-known theories are in that book, The Teaching-Learning Process, by Cantor. One theory is that people learn things correctly whenever they get punished for making a mistake. One kind of application of the theory would be when a parent spanked a child for doing something wrong. The expectation being that the form of punishment will teach the child to remember better, teach him to learn more effectively. But actually we know very little about the effect of punishment on learning because almost no truly scientific studies have been made of human beings. For instance, we don’t know how much punishment is best for learning, and we don’t how much difference it makes who is giving the punishment, whether an adult learns best from an older or younger person than themselves, or many other things of this sort. So what we’re doing in this project is bringing together a number of different occupations and ages. We’re asking some to be teachers and some to be learners. We want to find out just what effect different people have on each other as teachers and learners, and also what effect punishment will have on learning in this situation. Next, I’m going to ask one of you to be the teacher and the other to be the learner. And the way we usually decide is to let you draw one of two pieces of paper here. . . .” He then placed two pieces of folded paper in the palm of his hand and had the subject and “Mr. Wallace” ( James McDonough, hereafter referred to as the Learner) each take one. 78 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

He then continued: “Could you open them and tell me which of you is which please?” “Teacher,” said the subject. “Learner,” said McDonough.

…

Social psychologists in the 1960s practiced a sleight-of-hand science, which earned them both the envy and scorn of other social scientists. A well-exe- cuted social psychology experiment often owed as much to dramaturgy and stagecraft as to the tenets of the scientific method. Specifically, within the first few minutes of entering the “Memory Project” lab, a subject would be led to believe several things which were not, in fact, true: First, the experiment was not about punishment and learning. Second, as noted earlier, Mr. Wallace was not a volunteer participant as the subject was, but actually James McDonough, the mild-mannered accountant playing the role of the learner. Third, the drawing was rigged—both slips of paper said “teacher”— to ensure that the subject would always land the role of teacher and the confederate, McDonough, would always end up the learner. Fourth, the shock machine, which had a central role in the laboratory proceedings, was an authentic-looking, well-crafted prop, but it did not actually deliver shocks to the learner. The first thing Milgram attended to after being notified of the NSF grant approval was the construction of an improved shock machine. Com- mercial sources he contacted told him that such an instrument could not be built before December. So he pushed ahead on his own. He had a clear conception of the kind of instrument he wanted and had a good working knowledge of electrical circuitry, enabling him to order the necessary components from various suppliers. However, the actual construction of the machine involved several others. For example, the final wiring was done by a technician employed by Yale, and the front panel was produced by professional industrial engravers to ensure that the shock machine would appear genuine. He was reassured on this point when two electrical engineers examined the instrument and did not detect that it was merely a prop. The new, improved simulated shock generator was a box-shaped instrument, 3 feet long, 15½ inches high, and 16 inches deep. A label in the Obedience: The Experience 79

FIGURE 5.1 Simulated Shock Generator. (From the film Obedience © 1965 Stanley Milgram; © renewal 1993 Alexandra Milgram.) upper left-hand corner of the box read, “SHOCK GENERATOR, TYPE ZLB, DYSON INSTRUMENT COMPANY, WALTHAM, MASS. OUTPUT 15 VOLTS – 450 VOLTS.” The box had a metallic front panel whose main feature was a series of thirty lever switches set in a single row. Above each switch was a voltage label, beginning with 15 volts and continuing in 15-volt increments to 450 volts (see Figure 5.1). In addition, below groups of four switches were the following labels, from left to right: SLIGHT SHOCK, MODERATE SHOCK, STRONG SHOCK, VERY STRONG SHOCK, INTENSE SHOCK, EXTREME INTENSITY SHOCK, DANGER: SEVERE SHOCK. The last two switches were simply and ominously labeled XXX (see Figure 5.2). When a switch was pressed, the box emitted an electric buzzing sound, a small circular light above the switch turned bright red, a blue light labeled “voltage energizer” flashed, various relay clicks could be heard, and the dial on the “voltage meter,” located in the upper right-hand corner, swung to the right. Connected to the shock machine was an apparatus that automatically 80 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD 30 VOLTS X X 29 435 450 VOLTS 28 420 27 405 26 390 25 375 VOLTS SHOCK SHOCK SEVERE SEVERE DANGER DANGER 24 360 23 345 Obedience to Authority: An 22 330 21 315 SHOCK SHOCK VOLTS EXTREME EXTREME INTENSITY INTENSITY 19 20 285 300 18 270 : Milgram, S. [1974]. [1974]. S. Milgram, : 17 255 VOLTS SHOCK SHOCK INTENSE INTENSE SOURCE 15 16 225 240 14 210 13 195 VERY VERY VOLTS SHOCK SHOCK STRONG STRONG 11 12 165 180 10 150 9 135 VOLTS SHOCK SHOCK STRONG STRONG Schematic Diagram of Control Panel. ( Panel. Schematic Diagram of Control 5 75 VOLTS SHOCK SHOCK MODERATE MODERATE 234 678 30 45 60 90 105 120 1 15 VOLTS SHOCK SHOCK SLIGHT SLIGHT FIGURE 5.2 FIGURE . New York: Harper and Row.) York: New ViewExperimental . Obedience: The Experience 81 recorded not only the shock levels, but also the duration and latency of each shock to 1/100th of a second. Careful attention was also given to other details to maximize the appearance of authenticity and, more generally, to create the intended effects and perceptions. For example, at the beginning of each experimental session, the subject (teacher) was given a sample shock of 45 volts via electrodes attached to the machine. And finally, the learner’s pitiful screams and insistent demands to be let out were prerecorded on tape and coordinated with specific voltages, and his responses followed a preset pattern of right and wrong answers.

…

“OK, now we are going to set the learner up so he can get some punishment. Learner, could you please come with me? Teacher, you can also come and look on,” said the experimenter. Williams now led Wallace to a smaller room, partitioned off from the main part of the lab. It was furnished with a straight-backed metal armchair, facing a counter with a set of four switches sitting on it. Williams asked the learner (Wallace) to sit down and to roll up his right shirtsleeve. Williams then strapped his arms down on the arm- rests “to prevent excessive movement during the experiment” and attached an electrode to his right wrist. Williams then methodically applied some electrode paste, explaining that it would provide a good contact “to prevent blisters or burns.” Williams added that the electrode was connected to the shock generator in the adjacent room. This was the ﬁrst time during the procedure that the experimenter stated explicitly that the punishment he had referred to earlier would be in the form of electric shock. The full implication of this connection would become distressingly clear once the subject began the teaching task. Undoubtedly many a subject already found the prospect of using electric shocks troubling, but not a single subject ever refused to at least begin the shock procedure. Glued in place by the commitment he had made, he would continue to watch and listen as Williams explained the procedure to “Wallace.” 82 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

Experimenter Now, Learner, let me explain exactly what’s going to happen, what you’re supposed to do. The teacher will read a list of word pairs to you like these: “STRONG arm, BLACK curtain . . .” and so forth. You are to try to remember these pairs. The next time through, the teacher will read only the first word of the pair. For example, he would say: “STRONG.” And then he will read four other words, such as “back, arm, branch, push.” Now, your job is to remember which one of these four other words was originally paired with STRONG. Now you indicate your answer by pressing one of these four switches. Can you reach them? That’s fine. Now if the first word I read, “back,” had been paired with STRONG, you would press lever number 1 to indicate to the teacher that you thought it was the first word. If you thought it was the second word, “arm,” you press the second lever, and so forth for the third and fourth words. Okay, now remember originally the teacher will read you the correct pair “STRONG arm.” So he later reads to you “STRONG: back, arm, branch, push.” You would press this one— Learner The second lever. Experimenter Right. Learner Press the lever for “arm.” Experimenter Right. Now you will follow the same procedure for each of the phrases the teacher reads to you.... Now if you get it correct, fine. If you make an error, however, you will be punished with an electric shock. So, of course, it is to your advantage to learn all the word pairs as quickly as possible. Now do you have any questions before we begin?

The learner paused for a moment to look apprehensively at the electrode attached to his wrist, turned slowly to Williams and replied:

Well, I think I should say this. When I was in West Haven V.A. Hospital a few years ago, they detected a slight heart condition. Nothing serious—but as long as I’m getting these shocks—how strong are they, how dangerous are they? Obedience: The Experience 83

Williams quickly replied in a conﬁdent, slightly dismissive tone that while the shocks may be painful, they’re not dangerous. Williams now takes the subject back into the larger room and tells him to sit down in front of the shock generator. The learner, seated in the smaller room, is not visible to the subject.

Experimenter All right, now listen carefully to the instructions. First of all, this machine generates electric shocks. Subject Um-hmm. Experimenter Now, when you press one of the switches all the way down, the learner gets a shock. Subject Um-hmm. Experimenter When you raise it, the shock stops. Like that. Subject Um-hmm. Experimenter The switch will remain in the middle position after you’ve released it to show you which switches you’ve used on the board. Subject Uh-hmm. Experimenter All right, the machine is on. To give you, the teacher, an idea of how much shock the learner is getting, it’s only fair that you receive a sample shock yourself. Are you agreeable to this? Subject Okay.

Giving the subject a sample shock was meant to strengthen the subject’s belief that the shock generator was genuine. It was the only real shock that was given during the experiments. Williams placed an electrode on the subject’s wrist.

Experimenter I’m going to ask you to close your eyes and estimate the number of volts you receive in this sample shock. Do not open your eyes until I tell you to do so, please. Subject Um-hmm.

Williams presses the third switch, and then tells the subject to open his eyes. 84 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

Experimenter Okay. Now would you use the voltage scale here or the verbal designations—Light, Moderate, Strong, and so forth—and estimate for me the number of volts you received in the sample shock? Subject Oh, I’d say about 195. Experimenter No, actually it was 45. Here. (The experimenter points to the switch he had used.) Subject Oh. [Laughs] Experimenter Although it may seem a little stronger because of the electrode paste. That provides a perfect contact, you see. Subject Uh-huh. Experimenter All right, let’s go on to the instructions. We will begin with this practice lesson. You will read each pair of words in the list once to the learner until you have read through the entire list. Subject Um-hmm. Experimenter Direct your voice toward the microphone, as the rooms are partially soundproof. Subject Okay. Experimenter Now, after reading through this list once, you go on to the next page. Subject Right. Experimenter And here, starting from line A, you will read the word in large letters along with each of the other words in the line. For example, on the ﬁrst line you’d read “STRONG: back, arm, branch, push.” Subject Um-hmm. Experimenter Now, after you’ve read the four choices, the learner pushes one of his switches and the number he has chosen lights up in this box: 1, 2, 3, or 4. [The experimenter points to the answer box sitting on top of the shock generator.] Subject Oh, I see. Experimenter Now, if he gets the correct answer, you say “correct” and go on to the next line. The correct answer is underlined. . . . Subject Oh, yeah, uh-huh. Experimenter If he gives the wrong answer, you say “wrong” and then tell him the number of volts you are going to administer. Obedience: The Experience 85

Subject Um-hmm. Experimenter Administer the punishment, read him the correct word pair once and then go on to the next line. For example, if he indicated 3 for STRONG . . . [This corresponded to “branch,” a wrong answer; the correct answer was 2, corresponding to “arm.”] Subject Uh-huh. Experimenter You would say “wrong, 15 volts,” push the switch, read “STRONG arm,” and then go on to the next line. Subject Okay. Experimenter Now, each time he gives a wrong answer, you move up one switch on the shock generator. Subject Um-hmm. Experimenter Okay. It’s important that you follow the procedure exactly. Subject Okay, I’ll try to. Experimenter I would suggest you read the list and the test at a brisk pace. Keep it moving. Do you understand? Subject Uh-huh. Experimenter Okay. Do you have any questions? Subject Uh, I don’t think so, no. Experimenter [Speaking into the microphone in front of the subject] Okay. Attention, learner, the teacher is about to begin the practice lesson. Try and remember the word pairs. Ready, begin.

As the subject would soon find out, when he pressed the first switch, the machine sprang to life, like a stalking cat whose prey had finally come within his reach: The light above the switch turned bright red, accompanied by an electric buzzing sound. The flashing blue light labeled “voltage energizer” was activated, the dial on the “voltage meter” swung to the right, and the relay clicks sounded. The experimenter had a prepared set of four prompts to be used in sequence whenever the subject indicated his reluctance. The first was: “Please continue” or “Please go on.” And the last was: “You have no choice, you must go on.” If the subject still refused to continue after this last prod, the experiment was discontinued. 86 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

The practice phase consisted of ten word pairs and was meant to help the subject get the hang of the procedure.

Experimenter [After the conclusion of the practice session] All right, that completes the practice lesson. Now, we’ll go on to the regular lesson. Subject Um-hmm. Experimenter The procedure here is exactly the same as before. Subject Okay. Experimenter Except that we use a new list. Subject Um-hmm. Experimenter Now, we will begin with 15 volts— Subject Um-hmm. Experimenter And move up one switch, of course, each time he gives a wrong answer. Subject Um-hmm. Experimenter Ready? Begin please. Subject BLUE girl. NICE day. FAT neck. GREEN ink. RICH boy. FAST bird. BLUNT arrow. SOFT hair. COOL cave. GOLD moon. HARD head. WET duck. BRAVE woman. WHITE horse. SAD face. SHORT time. SHARP needle. SLOW dance. RED sunset. LOW noise. NEW book. QUIET evening. TAME bear. SWEET taste. TRUE story.

The subject continued now with the test part of the procedure.

Subject BLUE: boy, girl, grass, hat. BUZZ. [A buzzing sound indicates the learner has answered by pressing one of the four response switches.] That’s correct. NICE: day, sky, job, chair. BUZZ. That’s correct. FAT: man, lady, tub, neck. BUZZ. That’s wrong. ZZZT [the sound which accompanied pressing a voltage lever], 15 volts, FAT neck. GREEN: grass, hat, ink, apple. BUZZ. Wrong. ZZZT. GREEN ink. RICH: boy, cake, man, girl. BUZZ. False. 45, ZZZT. RICH boy. Next, FAST: bird, car, train, plane. BUZZ. That’s correct. BLUNT: knife, stick, word, arrow. BUZZ. False. ZZZT. BLUNT arrow. SOFT: rug, pillow, hair, grass. BUZZ. False. 75. ZZZT. SOFT hair. Obedience: The Experience 87

Learner Ugh! Subject COOL: day, shade, water, cave. BUZZ. False. ZZZT. COOL cave. Learner Ugh! Subject GOLD: dollar, necklace, moon, paint. BUZZ. That’s correct. HARD: stone, head, bread, work. BUZZ. False. ZZZT. Learner Ugh! [Louder] Subject HARD head. WET: night, grass, duck, cloth. BUZZ. False. ZZZT. Learner Ugh! Hey, this really hurts. Subject WET duck. BRAVE: woman, soldier, dog, horse. BUZZ. False. ZZZT. Learner Ugh!! Subject BRAVE woman. WHITE: cloud, horse, rock, house. BUZZ. False. ZZZT. Learner Ugh!!! Experimenter! That’s all. Get me out of here. I told you I had heart trouble. Subject WHITE horse. Learner My heart’s starting to bother me now. Get me out of here, please. My heart’s starting to bother me. I refuse to go on. Let me out. Subject [Turning toward the experimenter] Keep going? Experimenter Keep going. Go on, please. Subject SAD: face, music, clown, girl. BUZZ. That’s correct. SHORT: sentence, movie, skirt, time. BUZZ. False. ZZZT. Learner [Shouting] Ugh! Let me out! Subject SHORT time. SHARP: axe, needle, stick, blade. BUZZ. False. ZZZT. Learner Ugh! Subject SHARP needle. Learner [Shouting] I can’t stand the pain. Let me out of here! Subject SLOW: walk, dance, truck, music. BUZZ. False. ZZZT. Learner Ugh! Let me out of here. Subject SLOW dance. Learner Let me out of here. My heart’s bothering me. Let me out of here! Experimenter Go on, please. 88 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

Learner You have no right to keep me here! Let me out! Let me out of here! Subject RED— Learner Let me out! Let me out of here! My heart’s bothering me. Let me out! Let me out! Subject Brick, rose, sunset, wagon. BUZZ. False. ZZZT. Learner Ugh! Subject RED sunset. Learner Experimenter! Get me out of here. I’ve had enough. I won’t be in the experiment any more.

The subject became visibly more nervous as the shocks increased in intensity and the learner’s complaints became more and more pitiful and demanding. Yet, he generally ignored those cries of pain. His face was etched with determination to continue. He appeared to be unwilling to upset the experiment by stopping. To standardize the procedure, the learner’s complaints had been prerecorded on tape. During the experiment, McDonough played it back on a tape-recorder in a stop-and-go fashion so that his various screams would be phased in with speciﬁc voltage levels of “punishment.”

Subject NEW: house, pet, book, name. BUZZ. That’s correct. QUIET: song, party, child, evening. BUZZ. That’s correct. TAME: wolf, bear, dog, cat. BUZZ. False. ZZZT. Learner Ugh! Subject TAME bear. SWEET: candy, girl, taste, pickle. BUZZ. False, 255. ZZZT. Learner Ugh! Get me out of here! Subject SWEET taste. TRUE: story, hero, speech, report. BUZZ. False. ZZZT, 270 volts. TRUE story. Learner Oowww! Let me out of here. Let me out of here. Let me out of here. Let me out. Do you hear? Let me out of here. Subject Should I start all over now? Obedience: The Experience 89

Experimenter Yes. Subject BLUE: boy, girl, grass, hat. BUZZ. That’s correct. NICE: day, sky, job, chair. BUZZ. False. ZZZT. Learner [Agonized scream] Subject 285. NICE day. FAT: man, lady, tub, neck. BUZZ. False. ZZZT. Learner [Agonized scream] [Sometimes the subject would hesitate before uttering the next test word, as if he had trouble getting the words out. But when the learner gave the wrong answer, there was no hesitation in giving him the shock. On the few occasions when he questioned the experimenter, he would immediately obey his instruction to continue.] Subject FAT neck. Learner I absolutely refuse to answer any more. Get me out of here. You can’t hold me here. Get me out. Get me out of here. Subject Nothing will happen to him, will it? Experimenter Please continue. Subject GREEN: grass, hat, ink, apple.

The learner didn’t answer. No buzzing sound is heard. No number has lit up on the answer box.

Experimenter If the learner doesn’t answer in a reasonable time, about 5 seconds, consider it wrong. Subject Um-hmm. Experimenter And follow the same procedure as you have been doing for a wrong answer. Subject 315, ZZZT. Learner [Intensely agonized scream] I told you I refuse to answer. Subject RICH— Learner I’m no longer part of this experiment. Subject Boy, cake, man, girl. [No answer.] 330, ZZZT. Learner [Intense and prolonged heart-rending scream] Let me out of here. Let me out of here. My heart’s bothering me. Let me out, I tell you. 90 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

Subject FAST: bird, car, train, plane. Learner [Hysterically now] Let me out of here. Let me out of here. You have no right to hold me here. Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out of here! Let me out! Let me out!

The subject knitted his brow as if he were in pain.

Experimenter Go on, please. Subject Push it? Learner Yes. Subject ZZZT. FAST bird. BLUNT: knife, stick, word, arrow. [No answer.] ZZZT, 360. BLUNT arrow. SOFT: rug, pillow, hair, grass. [No answer.] ZZZT. SOFT hair. COOL: day, shade, water, cave. ZZZT. He’s not answering any more. Experimenter Please go on. [The subject made a face, as if to show his reluctance, but continued anyway.] Subject GOLD: dollar, necklace, moon, paint. [No answer.] ZZZT. GOLD moon. HARD: stone, head, bread, work. [No answer.] HARD head. ZZZT. WET: night, grass, duck, cloth. [No answer.] WET duck. ZZZT. BRAVE: woman, soldier, dog, horse. [No answer.] ZZZT. BRAVE woman. What do I do now? I’m at the end. Experimenter Continue using the last switch on the board. Subject I don’t hear nothing from him any more. Experimenter Please go on.

If a subject continued to 450 volts, the experimenter had him repeat that switch another two times to conﬁrm that he was being completely obedient.

Subject WHITE: cloud, horse, rock, house. [No answer.] ZZZT. WHITE horse. SAD: face, music, clown, girl. [No answer.] ZZZT. SAD face. SHORT: sentence— Experimenter Excuse me, teacher, we’ll have to discontinue the experiment. Obedience: The Experience 91

…

At the conclusion of the experiment, the experimenter conducted an assessment and debrieﬁng procedure, consisting of a number of components: obtaining personal data, such as age, occupation, marital status, religion, education and military service; having the subject answer questions about his experience, such as how nervous he had been and how painful he thought those last few shocks he administered to the subject had been; de-hoaxing the subject and having him meet “Wallace” face-to-face to show that he was unharmed. Here are excerpts of the dialogue with this subject, containing this latter feature of the postexperimental proceedings:

Experimenter Let me tell you this, that this man wasn’t really being shocked. We were really interested in your reactions in having to inﬂict pain, you know, on a person you didn’t even know. Subject Um-hmm. Experimenter You see, he actually works with us as a team. Subject Oh. Experimenter And he wasn’t really getting these shocks. Subject Oh, I see. Experimenter We’re very interested in studying your reactions. Now we’re not trying to fool you in any way. Subject Yeah, I know. Experimenter We have to set it up this way so we can get true reactions from people. You really thought you were shocking somebody? Subject Yes, I did.... And when I didn’t hear anything else I was worried. Experimenter Yeah. What did you think when you didn’t hear anything else? Subject I thought maybe he was just making believe he was quiet so I’d stop, you know what I mean? Maybe he’d passed out or something. Experimenter Did you think he’d passed out? Subject I didn’t think he did. I had a thought in my mind that he could have passed out. I was worried about it. Experimenter Well, you understand why we have to do it this way. You see, it’s very similar to a situation a nurse ﬁnds herself in when she has to ad- 92 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

minister a needle to a patient, you know. She may be reluctant to do this. She may not want to hurt the patient, but the doctor tells her to, so she goes ahead and does it. But this is a similar situation, where you have to inﬂict a little pain, you see, on another person. Subject Oh, I didn’t like it. Experimenter Well many people don’t. Anyway, you’ll receive a report of this project when it’s over in a couple of months and until that time we’d like to ask you not to say anything about it . . . Subject Okay. Experimenter ...because you may talk to people who are going to be in it . . . and it wouldn’t do any good if they know ahead of time. . . . How do you feel about having come down and done this. Now that you know— Subject Well now I know the truth.... I don’t mind now ... Experimenter Jimmy, why don’t you come in and say hello to Mr. ______before he leaves. Mr. McDonough. Subject ...now that it’s all over. Learner (McDonough/Wallace): You don’t feel too bad, now, do you? Subject No, I don’t feel too bad. Learner (McDonough/Wallace): That’s good. Experimenter Well, let me thank you very much for coming down. We certainly do appreciate you giving us your time. Subject I’ve only had about three cigarettes. Experimenter [Laughs.] We certainly do appreciate you coming down. We think you’ll ﬁnd the report very interesting. CHAPTER 6

OBEDIENCE: THE EXPERIMENT

HE OBEDIENCE EXPERIMENTS presented a disturbing Tview of human behavior. Milgram, his colleagues, and later the public were surprised by the sheer power of an authority to compel someone to hurt an innocent person, despite the absence of any coercive means to back up his commands. Although Milgram had no all-encompassing theory to guide his obedience project, specific experiments did provide enlightening answers to particular questions. The first four experiments Milgram carried out during August and Sep- tember 1961 constituted a set of experimental conditions designed to determine whether varying the physical and psychological distance between the teacher-subject and the learner would affect the degree of obedience. The question grew out of an observation Milgram made during the pilot studies carried out with his Small Groups class toward the end of the fall 1960 semester. In those studies, the learner sat on the other side of a silvered glass window, which allowed the subject to discern his gross movements. Milgram found that subjects typically were reluctant to look at the victim and often turned their head to the side to avoid seeing the “painful” consequences of their actions. This recurring behavior suggested to Milgram that the remoteness of the learner might have influenced, to some extent, the subject’s actions. The “four-part proximity series” was designed to test this idea systematically by creating four experimental variations that progressively reduced the dis-

93 94 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD tance between teacher and learner, making it increasingly difficult for the subject to minimize in his own mind his role in punishing the victim. At one end of the continuum was the Remote condition. The setup and cover story were as previously described: Under the guise of an experiment on the effects of punishment on learning, the teacher-subject, seated in front of the shock machine, was instructed to give increasingly painful shocks to the learner, who was seated in an adjacent room and not visible to the subject, each time he made an error on the word-matching task. In this variation, however, no vocal complaints were heard from the learner. His responses, which followed a predetermined pattern of three incorrect answers to one correct one, were transmitted to the teacher by the lit-up number in the answer box on top of the shock generator. The first time the learner protested was after he had received the 300- volt shock. He pounded on the wall loud enough for the subject to hear. After this, no more responses appeared in the answer box. At this point, subjects usually turned to the experimenter to find out how to proceed. He told them to treat no answer as a wrong answer and to keep on increasing the shock level each time this happened. The learner pounded on the wall one more time at 315 volts. Afterward, total silence. No subject stopped obeying the experimenter’s commands before 300 volts—the first time the learner pounded on the wall—even though this level was past the set of switches labeled “Very strong shock” and was in the “Intense shock” zone. Of the forty subjects in this condition, 5 refused to go beyond this point, and 14 defied the experimenter at some point short of the final 450 volts. But the majority of subjects, 26 out of 40, or 65 percent, were fully obedient, continuing to the maximum shock on the voltage scale, beyond the “Danger: Severe Shock” zone and into the ominous “XXX” zone. We did not need Milgram to tell us that we have a deeply ingrained propensity to obey authority. What his findings revealed is the surprising strength of this tendency—strong enough to override a moral principle we have been taught since childhood—that it is wrong to hurt another person against his will. Although this experiment, the Remote condition, was only the first in an interrelated set of experiments, the four-part proximity series, he published Obedience: The Experiment 95 it separately in 1963 in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, making it the first published results from the obedience series. Its remarkable, groundbreaking findings merited its publication by itself, but Milgram also wanted to publish a detailed description of his procedure quickly for priority purposes. To underscore the power of his findings, he would periodically demonstrate how unexpected they were. He would provide a detailed description of the experiment to various groups—Yale seniors, middle-class adults, a group of psychiatrists—to predict how they or others would perform in the situation. Invariably the predictions were wide of the mark. For example, the Yale seniors predicted that, of 100 persons, only 1.2 percent would end up giving the strongest shock. In February 1962, Milgram carried out the prediction exercise with a group of psychiatric residents at Yale before lecturing to them. He described the results in a letter to the social psychologist E.P. Hollander: “The psychiatrists—although they expressed great certainty in the accuracy of their predictions—were wrong by a factor of 500. Indeed, I have little doubt that a group of charwomen would do as well.” The second experiment was the Voice-Feedback condition. The learner was still in a separate room out of sight of the teacher, but now prerecorded complaints of increasing stridency, corresponding to increased voltage levels, were added. The schedule of protests was much like the one in the dialog presented earlier, except that here the learner did not mention anything about a heart condition. This addition of vocal complaints resulted in a slight decrease in the rate of obedience, as compared to the Remote condition. Here, 25 out of 40 subjects, 62.5 percent, continued to the 450-volt maximum. In the third experiment, the Proximity condition, the distance between teacher and learner was reduced further. Instead of being placed in a separate room, the learner was seated a couple of feet away from the teacher, so the learner had to act out his part each time. The learner used the same schedule of protests as in the previous condition, but now the teacher also saw his bodily reactions to the increasingly painful shocks. Now the teacher had both vocal and visual evidence of the learner’s suffering. This narrow- ing of the teacher-learner distance resulted in a further, more precipitous, 96 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD drop of the obedience rate to 40 percent: only 16 out of 40 subjects progressed to the final shock. The fourth and final condition in the series, the Touch-Proximity condition, essentially reduced the teacher-learner distance to zero. Like the third condition, the victim sat near the teacher, but with one important difference: To receive a shock, the learner had to place his hand on a shock plate. At 150 volts, he refused to do this, so the experimenter ordered the subject to force the victim’s hand onto the plate to receive the subsequent punishments. Although the results of the first three conditions had already re-educated Milgram about the limits of obedience, when it came to this final condition, in which the teacher would need to use physical coercion, he predicted that, at most, one or two subjects would be completely obedient. To his as- tonishment, 12 out of 40, or 30 percent, went through to the end. “It is a very disturbing sight,” Milgram noted, “since the victim resists strenuously and emits cries of agony.” Milgram described in detail the behavior of one of the obedient subjects in this condition, a thirty-seven-year-old welder, “Bruno Batta.” In response to the experimenter’s instructions, he presses the learner’s hand onto the shock plate.

The learner, seated alongside him, begs him to stop, but with robotic im- passivity, he continues the procedure. What is extraordinary is his apparent total indifference to the learner; he hardly takes cognizance of him as a human being. Meanwhile, he relates to the experimenter in a submissive and courteous fashion. At the 330-volt level, the learner refuses not only to touch the shock plate, but also to provide any answers. Annoyed, Batta turns to him and chastises him: “You better answer and get it over with. We can’t stay here all night.”...The scene is brutal and depressing: his hard, impassive face showing total indifference as he subdues the screaming learner and gives him shocks. He seems to derive no pleasure from the act itself, only quiet satisfaction at doing his job properly. When he adminis- ters 450 volts, he turns to the experimenter and asks: “Where do we go from here, Professor?” His tone is deferential and expresses his willingness to be a cooperative subject, in contrast to the learner’s obstinacy. Obedience: The Experiment 97

30 . 25 . . 20 .

Mean maximum shock 15

0 Remote Voice Proximity Touch Feedback Proximity Increasing proximity Experimental conditions

FIGURE 6.1 Mean Maximum Shocks in Four-Part Proximity Series.

Figure 6.1 gives a visual presentation of the gradual decline in obedience from the Remote to the Touch-Proximity conditions. Although the primary and clearest quantitative indicator of a subject’s degree of obedience was the highest shock he ended up administering, Mil- gram’s apparatus provided two subsidiary measures of a subject’s responses to the authority figure’s commands: It automatically recorded the latency and duration of each shock to 1/100th of a second. The latency measure— a subject’s hesitation before administering the shock—did not yield any useful information. However, the measure of shock duration yielded two interesting results that complement the main findings. These results are depicted graphically in Figure 6.2 for the first three conditions. (Shock duration measures could not be obtained for the Touch-Proximity condition because of the way the shock plate had been wired into the shock generator.) The graph shows, first, that shock duration decreased with increasing prox- 98 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

33 30 . Obedient subjects 25 . . 20 Defiant subjects. 15 .

10 .

5 Mean duration of shock (hundreths of a second) Mean duration of shock (hundreths

0 Remote Voice Proximity Victim Feedback Increasing proximity Experimental conditions

FIGURE 6.2 Duration of Shock in Proximity Experiments. imity between teacher and learner. Second, overall across experimental conditions, the duration of shocks given by obedient subjects was longer than those administered by deﬁant ones.

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The first person Milgram had hired to help him with the obedience experiments was Alan Elms, who served as his research assistant during the summer of 1961. Elms was a scrawny student from Kentucky who had just completed his first year of graduate studies in the Psychology Department at Yale. He first met Milgram toward the end of the fall semester in 1960. Obedience: The Experiment 99

First-year graduate students were required to attend a weekly seminar in which one or two faculty members would talk about their research. Mil- gram talked about his research interests in obedience, and Elms found it fascinating. But he was drawn to Milgram’s enthusiasm as much as the research itself. The work of Lawrence Kohlberg, another junior faculty member, on moral development also sounded interesting, but whereas Milgram exuded excitement about his work, Kohlberg’s presentation had a depressive quality to it. At the end of his ﬁrst year, Elms went home to Kentucky for a month before beginning his assistantship with Milgram in July. Toward the end of the month he received a letter from Milgram. Although written in a ban- tering style, it suggests that Milgram already had an intuitive sense of the broader signiﬁcance of the work he was embarking on:

Dear Alan: I hope you have spent a pleasant month of leisure and have recuperated from the stresses of ﬁrst year graduate life.... The advertisement was placed in the New Haven Register and yielded a disappointingly low response. There is no immediate crisis, however, since we do have about 300 qualiﬁed applicants. But before long, in your role of Solicitor General, you will have to think of ways to deliver more people to the laboratory. This is a very important practical aspect of the research. I will admit it bears some resemblance to Mr. Eichmann’s position, but you at least should have no misconceptions of what we do with our daily quota. We give them a chance to resist the commands of a malevolent authority and assert their alliance with morality....

Milgram conveyed a similar sense—in a more serious tone—in a letter to Solomon Asch written on the same day, June 27, in which he brought him up to date on the obedience project: “Certainly, obedience serves numerous productive functions, and you may wonder why I focus on its destructive potential. Perhaps it is because this has been the most striking and disturbing expression of obedience in our time.” The letter to Asch reflects the continuing evolution of Milgram’s relationship with him. As the passage of time made the stifling experience at the In- 100 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD stitute for Advanced Study recede to the back of Milgram’s memory, his pre- Princeton respect for Asch resurfaced. In this letter, Milgram solicited Asch’s opinion about the planned project, and just a few days earlier, on Sunday, June 25, he had taken Sasha to Swarthmore to introduce her to Asch and his wife Florence. Throughout his professional career he would refer to Asch as his main scientific influence. When the American Psychological Association (APA) awarded Asch one of its Distinguished Scientific Contributions awards in 1967, Milgram sent him a congratulatory letter, telling him, “No one deserves it more or has been a greater inspiration to his students and colleagues.” He paid tribute to Asch and his conformity research in an invited talk, titled “Ten Variations on a Theme by Asch,” at the annual convention of the Canadian Psychological Association in 1969. He even wrote the APA nominating Asch for a special APA award, their Gold Medal award. It took only a couple of months for those tentative expectations about his project’s significance, expressed to Elms and Asch before the start of the proximity series, to harden into more explicit—and far darker—conclusions. In a letter to Henry Riecken, head of Social Sciences of NSF, dated September 21, 1961, he wrote:

The results are terrifying and depressing. They suggest that human nature—or more speciﬁcally, the kind of character produced in American society—cannot be counted on to insulate its citizens from brutality and inhumane treatment at the direction of malevolent authority. In a naïve moment some time ago, I once wondered whether in all of the United States a vicious government could ﬁnd enough moral imbeciles to meet the personnel requirements of a national system of death camps, of the sort that were maintained in Germany. I am now beginning to think that the full complement could be recruited in New Haven. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act, and without pangs of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority.

The four-part proximity series revealed an unwelcome truth about human nature. Together, the experiments showed just how unexpectedly strong is our Obedience: The Experiment 101 readiness to obey authority—strong enough to make us violate our moral principles. But the series was important in another respect as well. Beginning in the late 1960s, a lively debate raged among personality and social psychologists—“the trait/situation controversy.” Stirred up by a provocative book, Personality and Assessment, written by Walter Mischel, the debate centered on the following question: Which is the stronger determinant of a person’s behavior, his personality or the situation he ﬁnds himself in? Mischel argued that the traditional conception of personality traits as the broad underpinnings of behavior was wrongheaded and that an individual’s actions were much more a product of the immediate situation than the personal characteristics he brought to it. As the debate unfolded in the 1960s and 1970s, “sit- uationists” would often use Milgram’s four-part proximity series as strong ammunition. They would point to the fact that obedience varied as a function of a situational characteristic—teacher-learner proximity—overriding differences in personality. Milgram himself was sympathetic to the situationist perspective. “The social psychology of this century,” he wrote, “reveals a major lesson: often, it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he ﬁnds himself that determines how he will act.”

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There were many different paths to obedience, perhaps as many as there were obedient subjects. The subject whose laboratory session was presented in Chapter 5 did not like what he was told to do. Nonverbal aspects of his demeanor—constantly swallowing hard and moistening his lips—external- ized his inner conﬂict. Nonetheless, he proceeded with his assigned task smoothly, with only an occasional prompt from the experimenter. Other obedient subjects were more vocal in their attempts to resist or in communicating the extreme stress they were experiencing. One such subject, a tool designer, had continued to increase shocks to 390 volts, pausing occasionally, but without comment or questions.

Subject COOL: day, shade, water, cave. [No answer.] Incorrect. 390 volts. ZZZT. GOLD: dollar, necklace, moon, paint. [No answer.] Incorrect. 102 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

405 volts. ZZZT. HARD: stone, head, bread, work. [No answer.] In- correct. ZZZT. 420 volts. Experimenter Go right ahead, continue please. You have two more switches on the board. Subject Should I be a part of this? Experimenter Pardon me?

The realization of the gravity of his actions seemed to have caught up with the subject. Until now, his voice had been ﬁrm and steady. Now, there was a quiver in his voice as he asked the experimenter:

Subject Will there be any aftereffects later on? Should I be participating in this? Experimenter The experiment requires that you go on, Teacher. Subject Yeah, but how do I know he’s okay out there? We’re not getting any response. He’s not even saying “ouch” anymore. Experimenter Well, we have to go on until the learner has learned all the word-pairs correctly. Subject [Slurring his speech] Suppose he’s not capable of learning the words out there? Experimenter It’s absolutely essential that you continue. Subject [His voice breaking] Yes, but suppose there’s no one out there to respond? Experimenter As I said before, though the shocks may be painful, they are not dangerous. Would you please continue? Subject HARD: stone, head, bread, work. [No answer.] Incorrect. 435 volts. ZZZT. WET: night, grass, duck, cloth. [No answer.] Incorrect. 450 volts. ZZZT. Continue? Experimenter Yes, continue, please. Subject With? Experimenter Use the last switch on the board. Subject Continue to use it? Experimenter Right. Obedience: The Experiment 103

Subject BRAVE: woman, soldier, dog, horse. [No answer.] Incorrect. 450. ZZZT. WHITE: cloud, horse, rock, house. Incorrect, 450. ZZZT. SAD: face— Experimenter Excuse me, Teacher, we’ll have to discontinue.

Another resistant, although ultimately obedient, subject was a draftsman who had just “shocked” the learner with 195 volts.

Subject RED: brick, rose, sunset, wagon. BUZZ. This is incorrect. 210. ZZZT. Learner Ugh! Subject The correct answer is RED sunset. Learner [With desperation in his voice] I won’t be in the experiment any more! Subject The next one is LOW: noise, cloud, bridge, voice. BUZZ. This is wrong. 225 volts. ZZZT. The correct answer is LOW noise. The next one is NEW: house, pet, book, name. BUZZ. Correct!

Taking advantage of the break in the momentum of incorrect answers, he said to Williams in a barely audible voice:

Subject I don’t know if I can stand this much longer. Experimenter [Ignoring the subject’s controlled desperation] Go on, please.

Obeying the experimenter, he resumed the testing procedure without any further comment or resistance. A few word-pairs later, he did emit a sigh—the despair of a man who was clearly reluctant to continue hurting the victim, but couldn’t quite transform that reluctance into action. When the subject reached the 300-volt level, however, he managed to ﬁnd the inner strength to at least express his deep aversion to what was taking place.

Subject The next one is FAT: man, lady, tub, neck. BUZZ. This is wrong . . . 300 volts. ZZZT. 104 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

Learner [Agonized scream] Subject I, I can’t do this any more [chair scuffles]. Learner I absolutely refuse to answer any more. Get me out of here. You can’t hold me here. Get me out. Get me out of here. Subject I can’t do it any more. I’m sorry. I realize that you’re trying to do something. Experimenter The experiment requires that you continue to do so . . . Subject Yes, I know. But I’m just not the type of person that can inflict pain to anyone else, uh, more than what I feel. I felt I’ve gone far beyond what I should. Experimenter It’s absolutely essential that you continue. Please go on. Subject [Chair scuffles] You know, I’m to the point now I can just feel each one with him. [Sigh] ) The next one is GREEN: grass, hat, ink, apple . . .

Although the periodic sighs and long pauses before giving shocks were continuing signs of his inner torment, this subject ended up being fully obedient.

…

There was also great variety among those subjects who stopped before reaching 450 volts. One important variation concerned how early or late in the game the subject first showed some resistance. Two social psychologists, Andre Modigliani and Francois Rochat, conducted a fine-tuned analysis of the audio recordings of one of the experimental conditions. They found that the earlier in the procedure a subject showed some resistance, the more likely he was to end up being defiant. Also, the earlier in the shock sequence the subject expressed his dissent, the lower the final voltage he administered. Modigliani and Rochat explained their findings as follows:

In line with the theory of cognitive dissonance, the longer subjects continue without objections to carry out a very unpleasant collaborative task, the more they must convince themselves that some reasonable version of the “ofﬁcial” cover story is, in fact, correct—e.g., the experimenter knows Obedience: The Experiment 105

what he is doing, the shocks are not really dangerous, the learner is really OK, the procedure must continue.... Early verbal resistance is effective, then, because it reduces the pressures to rationalize that come with a more passive, lengthy and brutal complicity.

One disobedient subject was a forty-seven-year-old inspector for a large manufacturing plant. At ﬁrst, during the practice list, he had some trouble learning the procedure. But by the time he started with the main list, he had mastered it and was proceeding at a steady clip. At 120 volts, he had already pressed seven shock levers and had heard a mild complaint— “Ugh!”—from the learner three times.

Subject WET: night, grass, duck, cloth. BUZZ. Wrong. 120 volts. ZZZT. Learner Ugh! Hey, this really hurts. Subject It won’t hurt him any, the voltage? Experimenter Please continue. Subject BRAVE: woman, soldier, dog, horse. BUZZ. Wrong. [Sighs] 135. ZZZT. Learner Ugh! Experimenter! Subject The answer was horse. Learner That’s all. Get me out of here. I told you I had heart trouble. My heart’s starting to bother me now. Get me out of here, please. My heart’s starting to bother me. Experimenter Continue please. Go on. Learner I refuse to go on. Let me out. Subject I don’t know. He’s pretty well upset in there. Experimenter The experiment requires that you go on, Teacher. Go on, please. Subject But if you don’t mind, I’d like to see him myself before I do go on. Experimenter Well, you can’t have any contact other than through the microphone once we have started. It’s absolutely essential that you continue, teacher. Go on. Subject Well I don’t know. I don’t think I’d like to take that myself, what he’s taking right now. 106 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

Experimenter You have no other choice. Subject [Sneering] I’ll give you your check back if you want. Experimenter No, the check is yours simply for coming into the lab, that’s not the issue. Thing is, if you don’t continue, we’ll have to discontinue the entire experiment. Subject Well, I can’t properly go on with this the way he is out there now. I mean he said he had heart trouble, so I— Experimenter Well, we’ll have to discontinue the experiment, then.

Two factors seem to be operating here to help the subject free himself from the authority’s grip. One is his ability to empathize with the learner. He puts himself in the learner’s shoes and feels his pain: “I don’t think I’d like to take that myself, what he’s taking right now.” For most subjects, de- fying the experimenter’s commands is difficult because doing so is to question the legitimacy of his self-presentation as a competent, scientific authority. By invoking his empathy for the learner, this subject is making a subjective judgment that does not necessarily imply a general condemnation of the experimenter and his self-presentation. A second factor that likely led to this subject’s defiance is the experimenter’s unresponsiveness to his questions or objections. With the exception of his request to see the learner, the experimenter ignores his questions and brusquely orders him to continue, without providing any reassurances or justifications. In doing so, the experimenter’s prods backfire, producing vexation and stubbornness rather than cooperation. Another disobedient subject, a thirty-nine-year-old salesman, is an example of one whose disobedience occurs later in the experiment. Although he expresses some mild objections a couple of times earlier in the procedure, the experimenter is able to brush them aside. The subject continues without any further signs of resistance until he has given the 315-volt shock.

Learner [Intensely agonized scream] Subject RICH: boy,— Learner I told you I refuse to answer. Subject cake, man,— Obedience: The Experiment 107

Learner I’m no longer part of this experiment. Subject girl. [Long pause] He said that he’s no longer part of the experiment. He can withdraw at any time, which is what you said he could do. Experimenter Well, whether the learner likes it or not, we must go on until he’s learned all the word-pairs correctly. Please continue. Subject Well, I don’t think going against the man’s will is right. Being as how he was given the option of withdrawing at any time. Experimenter The experiment requires that you go on, Teacher, until he learns all these word-pairs correctly. Subject Well, I don’t—ah—I can’t go on. Now, if you hadn’t given him the option, if you had told him that once he started he had to continue, that’s one thing, but you gave him the option of withdrawing at any time. Which he has chosen to do. Experimenter Well, it’s absolutely essential that you continue. Subject No, I can’t go on . . . I mean, considering the other man. He gave an indication of a heart condition and he refuses to go on with the test that he was given the option of withdrawing from at any time. Experimenter Well, you have no other choice. Subject [Surprise in his voice] I have no other choice? Hmmm. Hmmm. [Pause.] I think I have. Experimenter That is to say, if you don’t continue, we’ll have to discontinue the entire experiment. Subject Well, I think in all fairness that’s what we would have to do at this point. I mean, considering the option you’ve given the man and his request for withdrawal from it. Experimenter Well, we’ll have to discontinue.

Unlike the ﬁrst deﬁant subject, who was able to bolt the experiment early on, at 150 volts, it took this man about twice as long to disengage himself. Although his early protests were signs of his displeasure with his assigned task, he had pressed more than twenty switches before he found the right verbal formula to enable him to break away. In a vigorous dialogue with the experimenter, he reminds the experimenter of the rules of the game—that the learner had the right to quit. 108 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

Actually this right was never made explicit, although it was clearly implied by the experimenter’s statement that the check was theirs to keep no matter what happened later. In the subject’s mind, however, this was transformed into an explicit rule that allowed him to confront the experimenter without discrediting his authority. The fact that the experimenter’s canned responses disregarded the case the subject was making for stopping the procedure only served to irritate him and intensify his resolve to quit.

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Milgram also investigated factors that facilitated resistance to authority. He not only enlightened us about the unexpectedly commanding power of authority but also provided a powerful antidote to the unwanted influence of authority. He did this by means of an experiment showing that the rebellion of two peers helped to free the subject from the authority’s grip. In this condition, there was a team of three teachers—the real subject and two confederates. Partway into the procedure, the confederates defy the experimenter and refuse to continue—one at 150 volts, the other at 210 volts. In this variation, 90 percent of the naïve subjects followed their example and dropped out at some point before the end of the shock series. In other words, only 10 percent of the subjects in this experiment were fully obedient. No other variation Milgram conducted was as effective in undercutting the power of authority as this one. He drew the following important conclusion from this finding: “When an individual wishes to stand in opposition to authority, he does best to find support for his position from others in his group. The mutual support provided by men for each other is the strongest bulwark we have against the excesses of authority.” All the experimental variations, from the beginning in August 1961 through March 1962, were conducted at Linsly-Chittenden Hall—the first four, the four-part proximity series, in the Interaction Laboratory on the first floor and the rest in a laboratory in the basement. After completing the fourth experiment, Milgram had to move out of the Interaction Laboratory because the Sociology Department, which had loaned it to him, now needed it back. Another laboratory space became available in the basement Obedience: The Experiment 109 of the same building, and Milgram was able to move his whole experimental setup there within a couple of weeks. To cap off the project, Milgram rented a three-room office suite in the Newfield Building, located at 1188 Main Street in downtown Bridgeport. He moved his laboratory there and set up shop under the made-up name of Research Associates of Bridgeport during April and May of 1962. Mil- gram’s aim was to completely dissociate the experiment from Yale to find out if people would still obey destructive orders without the authority and prestige of Yale hovering in the background. He found that although there was a drop in the obedience rate, a large proportion of the subjects still obeyed the experimenter. In Bridgeport, 47.5 percent of the subjects were fully obedient, although the difference between this figure and the obedience rate of 65 percent in the corresponding condition at Yale was not statistically significant. He offered the following speculative explanation for the results:

It is possible that if commands of a potentially harmful or a destructive sort are to be perceived as legitimate they must occur within some sort of institutional structure. But it is clear from the study that it need not be a particularly reputable or distinguished institution. . . . It is possible that the category of institution, judged according to its professed function, rather than its qualitative position within that category, wins our compliance. Per- sons deposit money in elegant, but also in seedy-looking banks, without giving much thought to the differences in security they offer. Similarly, our subjects may consider one laboratory to be as competent as another, so long as it is a scientiﬁc laboratory.

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The remaining experiments in the series included one that was carried out in May 1962 specifically for use in a documentary film, Obedience. Milgram made the film to provide visual evidence of his findings. Fourteen subjects, recruited in the same manner as the other subjects, were filmed over a two- day period, resulting in candid footage, since the subjects did not know they 110 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD were being filmed. At the end of the experimental session, subjects were informed of the filming, and Milgram asked for their permission to use the film for educational purposes. Only those who gave their consent appeared in the film, which depicted both obedient and defiant subjects. The result is a gripping depiction of the human propensity to obey authority. Milgram announced the completion of the series of experiments in a letter to his chairman, Claude Buxton, dated June 1, 1962:

I wish to announce my departure from the Linsly-Chittenden basement laboratory. It served us well. Our last subject was run on Sunday, May 27. The experiments on “obedience to authority” are, Praise the Lord, completed.

It was just two years earlier that Israeli agents had abducted Adolf Eich- mann from his home in Buenos Aires and ﬂown him to Israel. After a lengthy trial in Jerusalem, he was sentenced to death on December 15, 1961, for his role in the murder of six million Jews. His execution occurred shortly before midnight on May 31, 1962, four days after Milgram concluded his obedience study. The close conjunction of these two events pre- saged the important role the experiments would come to play in attempts to shed light on the behavior of the Nazi perpetrators. CHAPTER 7

AFTERSHOCKS

S THE OBEDIENCE experiments progressed during the 1961– A 1962 academic year, some of the startling results began making their way across campus. Before long, the Psychology Department was—as Robert Abelson, a member of the department, put it—“marinating in it. People would gossip about it.... We were coated with it. And it was mainly to the effect of how interesting it was.” The spread of information about Milgram’s experiments had been slowed somewhat—he didn’t even tell Allport about them until January 12, 1962— by a disconcerting discovery he made in September 1961, early in the project. Arnold Buss, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh, had just published a book, The Psychology of Aggression, that contained a diagram of an “aggression machine” and a description of its use that bore some general similarity to Milgram’s shock generator and his procedure. Milgram’s immediate reaction was that his machine and experimental procedure had been copied. Philip Zimbardo recalls a strange visit to Milgram’s office around this time. When he asked Milgram about the research he was doing, Milgram closed his office door, turned on a fan to provide a sound screen, and then proceeded to tell him about the difficult situation he was in as a result of Buss’s having appropriated his shock machine procedure. This, Milgram explained, was why he had to keep quiet about the experiments. That meeting “had a most paranoid quality to it,” Zimbardo added. There were some similarities between the two approaches. Buss’s machine contained a graduated series of ten shock buttons, his cover story was

111 112 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD also a learning experiment, the subject received sample shocks, and in one variation, there was feedback from the learner at the higher shock levels in the form of groans and gasps. But there were also distinct differences. Buss’s subjects could choose from any one of the ten shock buttons to “punish” the learner—rather than move up the shock level with each subsequent error— and the learning task was completely different, a “concept learning” procedure in which the learner had to identify different patterns of lights as being correct or incorrect. Buss used a “finger electrode,” whereas in Mil- gram’s procedure the electrode was placed on the wrist. Buss’s purpose was to study aggression, not obedience. But in the heat of the moment, the similarities fueled Milgram’s suspicions. An exchange of calls and letters with Buss reassured Milgram that he had developed his technique independently and that he had not heard about Milgram’s machine through the grapevine, although Milgram never completely accepted this explanation. His ire tended to be stirred up periodically, whenever people would call his shock machine “the Buss aggression machine”—even, in one case, in a letter to him requesting a photograph of the apparatus. When the details of the research finally did emerge, discussions in the department centered largely on Milgram’s surprising findings—that the subjects were willing to shock their victims far beyond what one would expect. For the most part, there wasn’t a lot of concern expressed about the ethics of the research, which is not surprising given the research norms of the times. Psychologists were routinely using deception in the laboratory, without always bothering to “debrief ” subjects afterward to correct the misinformation. In fact, a historian of psychology, Benjamin Harris, credits Milgram with the first published use—in a 1964 article—of the term debriefing to refer to a postexperimental procedure designed to correct mis- perceptions and reassure participants. However, there was at least one member of the Yale Psychology Depart- ment who was troubled enough by the experience Milgram put his subjects through that he complained to the American Psychological Association (APA). As a result, the APA held up Milgram’s membership application for over a year, until they could investigate the matter. This was conveyed to Aftershocks 113

Milgram in a letter from a staff member of the Membership Committee dated November 23, 1962:

The committee voted to defer until next year a ﬁnal recommendation on your application . . . because questions were raised about your ethical responsibilities in connection with certain research studies you had undertaken. I was asked to discuss the matter informally with the Secretary of the Committee on Scientiﬁc and Professional Ethics and Conduct and to arrange for additional information from persons familiar with your research. These things have been done.

She predicted a favorable decision on his application and expressed the hope that he would not let the experience “sour [him] permanently on the APA.” This episode marked the first of numerous attacks on the ethics of the experiments that Milgram had to deal with throughout his career. As late as 1977, he was still defending the ethics of the obedience experiments in print, although by then he had already moved on to other research. On January 25, 1962, Milgram submitted the first of two additional grant proposals to the NSF to support his obedience research. A main purpose of the proposal, he stated, was to conduct further experiments to aid his search for an adequate theoretical explanation for the unexpectedly high levels of obedience he had found so far, by identifying the psychological factors at work. Among the new experiments he proposed, one would involve “constructive obedience” in which a subject would be commanded to carry out a socially commendable act—in contrast to the destructive behavior he had studied so far. He had not yet devised a specific procedure for this kind of experiment, but was confident that he would be able to come up with one. The grant was approved on May 24, 1962, but in a distinctly modified form. NSF officials felt that since Milgram had already collected a large amount of experimental material, it would be preferable to attend to that, rather than to conduct more experiments. So, they and Milgram agreed that the grant money would be used for analysis and reporting of the experimental data from his completed experiments. 114 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

One of the external reviewers of this proposal had been Herbert Kelman. Although in his review Kelman credited Milgram with devising an inge- nious experiment that yielded some unexpected and striking findings, he expressed certain reservations about the proposal, which undoubtedly contributed to the NSF’s decision to approve funding only for analysis and reporting of data already collected. First, Milgram had stated that a main purpose of further research was to aid in the development of an adequate theory, and Kelman doubted that Milgram would be able to achieve this goal. Second, Kelman raised questions about the ethics of the research: “Is this perhaps going too far in what one asks a subject to do and in how one deceives him?” In April 1963, Milgram submitted a proposal to the NSF for a third and final grant to complete the analysis and reporting of the experimental findings. The grant was approved, and Milgram used the funding in part to create the documentary film Obedience out of the raw footage shot at Yale in May 1962. Milgram first published some of the results of his obedience experiments in a series of four journal articles between 1963 and 1965. The first one, “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” appeared in the October 1963 issue of the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology—at the time the premier out- let for research in social psychology. Putting his obedience research into print was not a simple matter. Milgram submitted that first article to the journal on December 27, 1961, and it was summarily rejected. On January 15, 1962, he submitted it to another journal, the Journal of Personality, which also rejected it. Its editor was Edward E. Jones, a clinician turned social psychologist, whose work on attribution processes—the study of the ways people explain the causes of their own and others’ behavior—became very influential in the 1970s and 1980s. Foreshadowing a kind of criticism that would dog Milgram for most of his career, Jones faulted him for not having any theory to illuminate his findings, which Jones dismissed as “a kind of triumph of social engineering.” On July 27, 1962, Daniel Katz, editor of the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, recalled the manuscript and accepted it for publication. But the ethical concerns were what plagued Milgram most at the time. In his writings and public statements, he was resolute about the ethical propri- Aftershocks 115 ety of his work. After all, he felt that he was asking a legitimate, socially important question: How far would people go if an authority figure commanded them to hurt another person? He hadn’t forced anyone to continue giving more punishments. It was ultimately the subject’s decision whether or not to continue. Besides, the victim was not actually getting shocked. In defending the experiments, however, he sometimes underestimated the distress of the participants. In one of his musings, he wrote: “I do not think I exaggerate when I say that, for most subjects, the experiment was a positive and enriching experience. It provided them with an occasion for self-insight, and gave them a first-hand and personalized knowledge of the social forces that control human conduct. . . . Most felt that they contributed to a significant scientific study, and are glad to have had the opportunity to serve in a socially valuable cause.” In a letter to a psychologist at the University of Delaware, he claimed that his participants experienced less damage to their self-esteem than college students who don’t do well on their exams. He had seen students petrified while taking exams and then depressed if they failed, or failed to attain the A they had hoped for. He noted the irony involved: “So it seems that in testing whether persons possess established knowledge, we are quite prepared to accept stress, tension, and consequences for self-esteem. But in regard to the process of generating new knowledge, how little tolerance we show.” In another place he made the preposterous claim that “relatively few subjects experienced greater tension than a nail-biting patron at a good Hitchcock thriller.” Two former subjects disagree. For them, the experiments involved a degree of distress that clearly transcended the stress of everyday, routine activities. When William Menold participated in the experiment in 1961, he had just been discharged from a Regimental Combat Team in the U.S. Army. “It was hell in there,” he said, describing the experiment. As the procedure progressed and the victim was getting the answers wrong, Menold “really started sweating bullets.” When the learner kept on screaming, he felt so sorry for him that he offered to switch places with him. He thought he could learn the materials faster, “’cause I figured this guy’s kind of dumb, you know. I mean he kind of looked . . . like he wasn’t going to win any IQ tests. . . .” 116 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

A ﬂeeting thought occasionally crossed his mind about whether the “thing was real or not.... But it was so well done.... I bought the whole thing.” An especially difﬁcult juncture in the procedure took place when the victim stopped responding: “I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I think, you know, maybe I’m killing this guy.” He told the experimenter that he was “not taking responsibility for going further. That’s it.” It was only after he was told that the responsibility wasn’t his, that they were taking full responsibility, that he continued. He ended up fully obedient: “I went the whole nine yards.” During the experiment, he recalls “hysterically laughing, but it was not funny laughter.... It was so bizarre. And I mean, I completely lost it, my reasoning power.” He described himself as an “emotional wreck” and a “basket case” during the experiment and after he left the lab, realizing “that somebody could get me to do that stuff.” Herbert Winer, another former subject, is a pleasant, low-key, articulate man. Several years ago he spoke about his experience to a group at Yale: “To my dismay, [the learner] began to stumble very early in the game.... It was quite clear that before we got very far, the level of shock was going to be increasing. . . . This was the end of the fun part. It is very difficult to describe . . . the way my feelings changed, and the conflict and tension that arose.” Winer then described how the learner’s expressions of pain grew louder and that, even after he started complaining about his heart condition, the experimenter still prodded him to continue. “And so I did, for a couple of times, and finally my own heart condition went into an extremely tense and conflicted state.... I turned to the chap in the gray coat and said, ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t go on any further with this ...’.” Winer went on to describe how he reacted when was told about the true nature of the experiment:

I stood there.... I was angry at having been deceived. I resented the whole situation. I was a little embarrassed at not having stopped earlier, or seen what was going on earlier, and I was not totally unconcerned about my own heart rate. What if I had had a heart problem?. . . Aftershocks 117

I went home in a cold fury.... I called [Milgram] the following morning, as one assistant professor to another, and told him of my anger, my skepticism, and the fact that we needed to sit down and talk about this. And he was somewhat upset, but agreed. And we had a series of meetings, in 1961 and ’62 which I found extraordinarily valuable, and which I think to some extent he did too.... But at that time, he was fresh out of his own doctoral studies, and was very much concerned with my somewhat inchoate but very strong talk about ethics, about deception, and about what struck me at the time, in view of what I felt to be my own physical reaction to this conflict, as imposing altogether unwarranted strain on people who had had no previous medical screening of any kind.... And I was very upset ... because I felt that had I had a heart condition, I could have been seriously inconvenienced. Stanley Milgram agreed, but . . . he said his proposal had been approved at the level of the president’s office, and that a lot of people knew about it, and they all felt that the objective justified whatever risks, which obviously he gave a much smaller value to than I did.

Milgram had a rich inner life of self-absorption, contemplation, and ru- mination. Sometimes these kinds of reflections would find expression in memos, diary notes, and observations no longer than a page or two. The intended audience for these musings appears to be no one but himself, a way to externalize and capture his thoughts and thereby make them available for possible reexamination and reevaluation later. These notes provide a window into the workings of Milgram’s mind, sometimes revealing inner conflicts that are not visible in his published writings or public statements. In the case of the ethics debate, they reveal that, at least early on, he was doing some painful soul-searching:

At times I have concluded that, although the experiment can be justiﬁed, there are still elements in it that are ethically questionable, that it is not nice to lure people into the laboratory and ensnare them into a situation that is stressful and unpleasant to them. Therefore, while what has been done cannot be undone, one can at least resolve not to repeat the perfor- 118 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

mance. There and then I decide, as a purely personal matter, not to do another experiment that requires illusion, or ensnarement, and certainly not to do an experiment that forces the subject into a moral choice and mar- shals powerful forces against his making the right choice. And having made this resolution and feeling content with myself, I begin to wonder what part courage plays in the scientiﬁc enterprises, how scarce a commod- ity it is, and how easily there can be a failure of nerve.

After a while, Milgram’s self-doubts evaporated—no more angst-filled self-directed notes appear—and by the time he left Yale, his statements and writings contain uniformly self-confident affirmations and strong arguments defending the ethics of the experiments. At the same time, he recognized the legitimacy of differing points of view on the issue, and he gave a fair hearing to his critics in his classes. In fact, in instructional materials he suggested that, as a useful class exercise, teachers could create a mock “ethics review board,” and different students could present arguments defending and criticizing the obedience experiments to the board. Then the members of the board could vote on whether or not the experiment was ethically acceptable.

…

The postwar growth of social psychology continued at a rapid pace in the 1960s with the emergence of new theories and the increasing use of more sophisticated quantitative methods. An indicator of the degree of growth and expansion of the field was that, while the Handbook of Social Psychology consisted of only two volumes in 1954, fourteen years later its second edition (which contained a chapter by Milgram) had grown to five volumes. But ironically, even as the field seemed to be blossoming as never before, some social psychologists started experiencing doubts about the methods and accomplishments of their discipline—“the crisis of confidence in social psychology,” as one psychologist dubbed it. Questions were raised about the ethics of the social-psychological experiment, and the viability of more benign alternatives such as role-playing was debated. Researchers became in- Aftershocks 119 creasingly concerned about the possibility that an experimenter’s expectations could bias results, and many grew concerned that a fun-and-games attitude pervaded the field, prizing cleverness in the creation and staging of experiments at the expense of social relevance. One critic even referred to experimental social psychology as “the glitter rock of science.” Discussions of the “crisis” invariably involved the obedience studies, sometimes to stoke the flames of discontent and at other times to put a damper on it. For many, it served as the most notorious example of the use of ethically problematic procedures. Yet for others, it was a prime example of social-psychological research with deep social significance. When critics tried to sink mainstream social psychology with accusations of triviality and irrelevance, the obedience experiments were invariably held up as the poster boy of substance. One of the critics who contributed to “the crisis of confidence” was Mar- tin Orne, a psychiatrist and psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who drew attention to what he believed was a potential source of error in psychological experimentation. He argued that a typical volunteer subject enters a laboratory in a highly cooperative mood. He wants to help the scientist achieve his goal of confirming his hypotheses. His strong motivation to be helpful leads him to be highly attentive to cues and clues within the laboratory—“demand characteristics,” as Orne called them—that help him discover what the experimenter is really after, and thereby be the best subject he can possibly be. To the extent that an experiment is laden with demand characteristics, the validity of its findings are called into question: Does the subject’s behavior represent a genuine response to the actual properties of the stimuli—the independent variable—or is it the product of the demand characteristics? That is, having been tipped off by the clues provided by the trappings of the laboratory or the experimenter’s behavior, the subject acts in a manner that he thinks would be most helpful to the experimenter. Orne applied his concept of demand characteristics to the obedience experiments to question their validity. He argued that subjects in the experiment were probably puzzled by the incongruity they encountered. On the one hand, the learner is screaming and begging to be released, while, on the other hand, the experimenter doesn’t seem to be perturbed by this. Instead, cool as a cucumber, he keeps pressing the subject to continue. Orne believed 120 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD that this incongruity led subjects to quickly figure out that the shocks were fake and that the victim was only feigning his suffering. In his response, Milgram granted that a small number of subjects in each condition did not believe that the shocks were genuine, but he asserted that the vast majority did. For empirical support, he drew on the results of a questionnaire sent to all the participants after the completion of the experiments, in the summer of 1962. One of the questions was about the credibility of the procedure. The responses showed that over 80 percent of the subjects believed that the learner had been receiving painful shocks, whereas only 2.4 percent said they had been certain that no shocks were being delivered. Orne’s conjecture raises an important question: When the subject figured out what was really going on, why didn’t he just pick himself up and leave? Orne’s answer was that subjects continued with the charade because they didn’t want to ruin the experiment. Turning his biting wit into a deadly weapon, Milgram replied: “Orne’s suggestion that the subjects only feigned sweating, trembling, and stuttering to please the experimenter is pa- thetically detached from reality, equivalent to the statement that hemophil- iacs bleed to keep their physicians busy.”

…

It often takes a couple of years for journal articles to wend their way through the peer review process, and Milgram’s obedience papers were no exception. Although Milgram had first submitted “Behavioral Study of Obedience”—the first article he wrote on the experiments—to the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in December 1961, it didn’t come out until October 1963, almost two years later. It contained a detailed description of the laboratory procedure, the results for the Remote condition—in which 65 percent of the subjects were fully obedient—and an initial attempt to account for the fact that a surprisingly high proportion of normal individuals were willing to inflict painful and possibly harmful shocks on an innocent victim in response to the insistent commands of a scientific authority. Aftershocks 121

The publication of this article was a significant milestone in the history of the obedience research, because it marked the beginning of the large- scale diffusion of knowledge about Milgram’s startling findings among the broader public, first in the United States and then in other countries. Be- fore the article appeared, knowledge of the research was limited and hap- hazard. Students and faculty in the psychology departments of some universities had heard about it through the academic grapevine. Also, many residents of New Haven, Bridgeport, and surrounding communities had heard about it from some of the hundreds of subjects in the experiments, but it had never been reported in the popular press. Within days of the article’s publication, the New York Times gave it detailed coverage in an article appearing on October 26, 1963, under the blar- ing headline “Sixty-five Percent in Test Blindly Obey Order to Inflict Pain.” Gradually other U.S. newspapers picked it up, and by mid-December, news of the experiment had crossed the Atlantic, with articles appearing in Der Spiegel of Hamburg and the Times of London. The editors of two anthologies quickly requested permission to reprint the journal article. Eventually, it would appear in dozens of anthologies. On November 2, a week after the New York Times article appeared, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a prescient editorial skewering Milgram and Yale for the ordeal they put their subjects through: “A story of man’s cruelty to man,” it began, “that is surprising even in light of fairly recent history comes from an experiment at Yale University.” The editorial went on to give the details of the experiment, including a vivid description of the suffering among the subjects. It concluded: “In all this it seems to us . . . that the showing was not one of blind obedience but of open-eyed torture, with an adverse score not of 65 per cent but of 100. . . . It very much remains to be shown that there was anything in the performance worthy of a great university.” Robert Buckhout, a social psychologist at Washington University, sent Milgram a copy of the editorial, enabling him to write a response, which appeared in the newspaper on November 16, 1963, as a letter to the editor: “The study started with a few questions that are of no small importance for humanity: What does a good man do when he is told by authority to per- 122 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD form acts that go against natural law?... In a laboratory setting, where we could be sure that no one would be hurt, we tried to get some answers. . . .” The New York Times article had appeared despite Milgram’s request that it not be published. In a telegram sent two nights earlier to the newspaper’s science editor, Walter Sullivan, he wrote: “I do not wish to have the experiment generally publicized at this time because publicity will interfere with further research. The experiment only works if the subject does not know what it is about.” This was a puzzling request, since Milgram had completed the obedience experiments in May 1962 and was not known to be planning to conduct any more of them. Perhaps he made the request with other prospective obedience researchers in mind, or perhaps he was in fact considering another obedience experiment. Professional readers of psychology journals, of course, did not have to wait for the New York Times piece. The engaging writing style of Milgram’s first journal article—at once profound, absorbing, and vivid—immediately set it apart from the bone-dry, third-person, passive presentational style of the typical scientific paper. In the opening paragraphs, for example, he wrote:

Obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose. It is the dispositional cement that binds men to systems of authority. Facts of recent history and observation in daily life suggest that for many persons obedience may be a deeply ingrained behavior tendency, indeed, a prepotent impulse overriding training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct.

Later on, in the results section of the report, we ﬁnd this description of subjects’ behavior:

Many subjects showed signs of nervousness in the experimental situation, and especially upon administering the more powerful shocks. In a large number of cases the degree of tension reached extremes that are rarely seen in sociopsychological laboratory studies. Subjects were observed to sweat, tremble, stutter, bite their lips, groan, and dig their ﬁngernails into Aftershocks 123

their ﬂesh. These were characteristic rather than exceptional responses to the experiment.

A continuous stream of reprint requests began to wind their way into Milgram’s office as soon as the article was published. One of them came from Elliot Aronson, a social psychologist who went on to become a leading figure in the field. He wrote that he wanted to assign the article to his class in Research Methods not only for its empirical value “but also as an illustration of the fact that there is a place for literate and stylistic writing, even in scientific journals. Your introduction is probably the most readable that I’ve seen in an experimental journal.” And Milton Erickson, a psychiatrist, wrote Milgram that he was “very much impressed by your studies which, I am convinced, have many implications which merit investigation.” But Milgram’s critics made themselves heard as well. Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim considered the research “so vile that nothing these experiments show has any value.... They are in line with the human experiments of the Nazis.” And although some clergymen would draw moral lessons from the experiments in their sermons and appreciatively send Milgram copies, a Benedictine monk from Washington, D.C., wrote him expressing his revul- sion at “the extremely callous, deceitful way in which the experiment was conducted.” One female psychologist to whom Milgram was introduced soon after the experiments became public turned her head and said, “You bastard.” Milgram later told an interviewer, “Within a year, I understand, she was divorced, so perhaps it was displaced anger.” A scathing criticism of the obedience experiments written by Diana Baumrind, a developmental psychologist, appeared in the June 1964 issue of the American Psychologist. Baumrind took Milgram to task for putting his subjects through an unexpected, emotionally disturbing experience. Al- though Milgram had stated that steps were taken after the experiment to ensure that the subjects left in a state of well-being, she found such reassurance unconvincing. Her main objection, though, was less about the physical discomfort subjects experienced during the experiment or the deception used than about the possibility of permanent, long-term harm— however slight it may be: “I do regard the emotional disturbance described 124 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD by Milgram as potentially harmful because it could easily effect an alteration in the subject’s self-image or ability to trust adult authorities in the future. It is potentially harmful to a subject to commit, in the course of an experiment, acts which he himself considers unworthy, particularly when he has been entrapped into committing such acts by an individual he has reason to trust.” Milgram was “totally astonished” by the criticism and also angry at the editor for not alerting him to the article prior to publication so that his rebuttal could appear in the same issue. At Milgram’s request, the editor gave him the opportunity to write such a piece afterward. In Milgram’s cover letter to the editor accompanying his reply to Baumrind, he wrote: “Baumrind’s article raises some legitimate points, but it was deficient in its information, and this could have been remedied by allowing me to see the manuscript prior to publication. Would this not be a generally more desirable policy for a journal concerned with professional standards?” He added: “The fact of the matter is that no one who took part in the obedience study suffered damage, and most subjects found the experience to be instructive and enriching.” The first part of this statement is, in principle, unverifiable. It is not possible to prove unequivocally the nonexistence of negative effects—a fact that Milgram conceded later in a 1977 article. The absolute, unqualified nature of the statement in his letter was obviously a reflexive overreaction to being attacked. In his rebuttal, Milgram pointed out that although there were psychological experiments whose purpose was to induce stress, his was not one of those. Although extreme tension was created in his lab, this was not intended, nor expected. And why didn’t he stop the experiment once he saw that some subjects experienced severe stress? He argued that “momentary excitement” is not equivalent to harm. And he decided to continue the experiment because he saw no injurious effects among his subjects. To counter Baumrind’s belief that subjects were likely left with permanent negative aftereffects, he presented the results of some follow-up procedures. On July 12, 1962, about six weeks after the conclusion of the experiments, Milgram sent all participants a detailed report about the experimental procedure, its rationale, and some of the main results. Ap- pended to the report was a questionnaire asking the respondents to reflect Aftershocks 125

TABLE 7.1 Now That I Have Read the Report, and All Things Considered, . . . Deﬁant Obedient Subjects, Subjects, Total, % (n) % (n) % (n) 1. I am very glad to have 40.0% 47.8% 43.5% been in the experiment. (146) (139) (285) 2. I am glad to have been 43.8 35.7 40.2 in the experiment. (160) (104) (264) 3. I am neither sorry nor glad to 15.3 14.8 15.1 have been in the experiment. (56) (43) (99) 4. I am sorry to have been in the 0.8 0.7 0.8 experiment. (3) (2) (5)

5. I am very sorry to have been — 1.0 0.5 in the experiment. (3) (3)

SOURCE: The Stanley Milgram Papers, Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives. back on their experience during the experiment. It consisted of ten multiple- choice items, and respondents were encouraged to make additional comments if they chose to. Milgram had probably intended to include results from the questionnaire in his planned book, but Baumrind’s attack com- pelled him to publish the relevant results then, in his rebuttal. The report and questionnaires had been sent to all the participants in the main series— 856 of them. Although it took two follow-up reminder mailings during the summer, Milgram ended up with 92 percent of his subjects returning the questionnaires—a remarkable return rate for a mailed survey. The most directly relevant results, which Milgram presented in tabular form (see Table 7.1), tapped subjects’ feelings—positive or negative—about their experience. He had ﬁrst used this question in Norway in the spring of 1958 after the conformity experiment. As Table 7.1 shows, most participants in the obedience experiment had positive feelings. Almost 84 percent said that they were glad to have participated, and only 1.3 percent said that they were sorry they had. In response to the question, “Do you think more studies of this sort should be carried out?” over 80 percent replied in the afﬁr- 126 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

TABLE 7.2 During the Experiment, . . . Deﬁant Obedient Subjects, Subjects, Total, % (n) % (n) % (n) 1. I was extremely upset. 8.7% 12.0% 10.2% (32) (35) (67) 2. I was somewhat nervous. 48.8 51.6 50.0 (179) (150) (329) 3. I was relatively calm. 38.2 30.2 34.7 (140) (88) (228) 4. I was completely calm. 4.4 6.2 5.2 (16) (18) (34)

SOURCE: The Stanley Milgram Papers, Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives. mative, just over 3 percent said “No,” and about 16 percent were undecided. About 74 percent said that they had learned “something of personal importance” from being in the experiment, and 10.5 percent said they had not. Tables 7.2 and 7.3 contain additional questionnaire results. Although Milgram did not include them in his response to Baumrind, they highlight an important distinction between being upset during the experiment and afterward. While a majority of the subjects (60.2 percent) were distressed during the experiment itself, a similar percentage (63.6 percent) were not bothered by it at all by the time they were completing the questionnaire— which, depending on the condition the subject had been in, ranged from six weeks to about eleven months after their participation in the experiment. Two points about the questionnaire are worth noting. First, self-report measures of this sort are susceptible to many sources of error, and Milgram was aware of their limitations. However, one important potential source of distortion can be virtually ruled out—some sort of self-selection bias that would tilt the results in one direction or other. With a response rate of 92 percent, it would be hard for anyone to argue that such a bias was operating. Furthermore, Milgram conducted some follow-up analyses to see if respondents differed in any meaningful way from nonrespondents. Important questions could be raised about the validity of the results if, for example, de- ﬁant and obedient subjects differed in their return rates. It turns out they Aftershocks 127

TABLE 7.3 Since the Time I Was in the Experiment, . . . Deﬁant Obedient Subjects, Subjects, Total, % (n) % (n) % (n) 1. I have been bothered by 7.7% 6.2% 7.0% it quite a bit. (28) (18) (46) 2. It has bothered me a little. 29.6 28.9 29.2 (107) (84) (191) 3. It has not bothered me at all. 62.7 65.0 63.6 (227) (189) (416)

SOURCE: The Stanley Milgram Papers, Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives. didn’t. In fact, comparisons between those who returned the questionnaire with those who did not yielded only one significant difference: age. A smaller proportion of people below age thirty-five returned the questionnaire than those who were thirty-five and older. Second, even if one regards Milgram’s treatment of his subjects during the experiment as callous, it is important to recognize the uniqueness of this kind of follow-up assessment of subjects’ perceptions and their well-being. When Herbert Kelman—the social psychologist most responsible for sensi- tizing his fellow professionals to the ethical dimensions of their work—was asked whether he knew of any other researcher who had ever done a similar postexperimental follow-up before Milgram, he answered, “No.” In his rebuttal article, Milgram also described the results of another kind of follow-up. He had a psychiatrist interview forty subjects who “would be most likely to have suffered consequences from participation” with the aim of identifying any who might have been harmed by the experiment. The psychiatrist found no evidence of harm in any of the subjects he interviewed. The interviews were conducted mostly in small-group sessions, from February through May 1963, by Paul Errera, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale University. His report to Milgram was titled “Statement . . . based on Interviews with Forty ‘Worst Cases’ in the Milgram Obedience Experiments.” Unfortunately, his report doesn’t describe what criteria he used to define the “worst cases.” Dr. Errera does not recall the criteria he used and no longer has written records of those meetings—neither of 128 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD which is surprising, given that the interviews took place forty years ago. However, based on other sources of information, such as Milgram’s grant applications, it seems probable that the “forty worst cases” were subjects who seemed especially agitated at the end of the experiment, had written some especially critical comments in the questionnaire, or had lodged some sort of complaint with Milgram or another person (in at least one case, a subject complained to the president of Yale). One interview participant, for example, a food wholesaler, was so upset by the experiment that he consulted afterward with a lawyer friend about it. In his rejoinder to Baumrind, Milgram vigorously disagreed with her contention that his subjects had been “entrapped” into committing reprehensible actions.

I started with the belief that every person who came to the laboratory was free to accept or reject the dictates of authority. This view sustains a conception of human dignity insofar as it sees in each man a capacity for choosing his own behavior. And as it turned out, many subjects did, indeed, choose to reject the experimenter’s commands, providing a powerful afﬁr- mation of human ideals.... My feeling is that viewed in the total context of values served by the experiment, approximately the right course was followed.... The laboratory psychologist senses his work will lead to human betterment, not only because enlightenment is more digniﬁed than ignorance, but because new knowledge is pregnant with humane consequences.

Whether he liked it or not, Milgram had many opportunities to offer his opinion on research ethics. In writings both published and unpublished, he objected to the use of the word “deception” to refer to experiments that used cover stories or other kinds of misinformation, because he felt it was a value-laden term whose use prevented an objective discussion of the ethics of that type of method. He preferred instead terms such as “staging” or “technical illusion.” In one of his weaker arguments defending the obedience research, Milgram noted that some of the classic experiments in social psychology, those conducted by Solomon Asch and Kurt Lewin, also contained ethical problems, although they were rarely mentioned. His obedience studies, he implied, should Aftershocks 129 be seen as a continuation of that classic tradition in social psychology. As an example, he pointed to Lewin’s classic studies comparing the group atmospheres created by different styles of leadership. One of the main findings was that when the authoritarian leader left the room, there was a sharp increase in aggressive behavior among the study subjects. Milgram asked: “Was it proper of Lewin to subject young people [to] the aggression inducing authoritarian style of a leader?” But this was a poor defense. There is a vast difference between the playful tussles of preadolescent boys and the violence that subjects in the obedience experiments thought they were perpetrating on the learner. In 1973, the APA published its comprehensive “Ethical Principles in the Conduct of Research with Human Participants,” and in 1975, the U.S. De- partment of Health, Education, and Welfare (DHEW) issued a regulation requiring that all research with human subjects—not just that funded by DHEW—be reviewed by an institutional review board, a committee created by each institution conducting human research to screen prospective projects to ensure the well-being of subjects. In 1977, Milgram remarked, “Many regard informed consent as the cornerstone of ethical practice in experimentation with human subjects,” reflecting the reality of the regulatory atmosphere that was in ascendance at the time. Milgram pointed out that many experiments in social psychology could not be carried out if subjects were fully informed beforehand. So he proposed three possible solutions. First, he argued that in almost every profession an exemption is made from general moral practice that allows that profession to function in ways that are beneficial for society. For example, it is generally not permissible to examine the private parts of female strangers, but that rule is suspended for the practice of obstetrics and gynecology. Similarly, he argued, social scientists should be allowed to have some exemptions from general practice— the use of short-term misinformation—if the technical requirements of their work call for it and if, in the long run, the work will benefit society. This was a fuzzy argument, however, since it glossed over the difference between benefiting the individual and benefiting society. A second alternative was what he called presumptive consent. This involved describing a planned experimental procedure to a group of people, and, if they found it acceptable, recruiting a different group of subjects to participate. 130 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

The third alternative Milgram suggested was to obtain prior general consent from a pool of subjects in advance of their actual participation. That is, before volunteering for a subject pool, they would be told that among the experiments to be conducted, some involved deceptions while in others they might experience some stress. In this way, those who objected to these procedures could exclude themselves from those kinds of experiments, and only willing subjects would participate. None of these suggestions was embraced by the psychology community.

…

Milgram would often receive letters from people asking about details of the obedience experiments that they couldn’t ﬁnd in his published reports, and Milgram was happy to oblige. For example, when people wrote to ask about sex differences in obedience, he assured them that he found none—a fact that would become public only on publication of his book many years later. Some letter writers tied Milgram’s studies to their personal lives with a surprising degree of candor. For example, one man from upstate New York wrote that he had read about the obedience experiments and found them interesting but limited, because the victim was an actor—not a person really getting hurt. The letter writer, by contrast, had real victims in his work: He was an electric company employee whose job was to turn off power to the homes of delinquent customers, even when the outside temperature dropped to below-freezing levels. Between 1963 and 1965 Milgram published four journal articles presenting various results from the main obedience series. One of the articles, containing a detailed description of the four-part proximity series as well as shorter treat- ments of other conditions was published in the journal Human Relations in 1965. It won Milgram the Socio-Psychological Prize for 1964 awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and came with an award of $1,000. This was the ﬁrst formal recognition of Milgram’s work by his peers, and a sign—or so Milgram thought—that he had arrived. CHAPTER 8

RETURN TO ACADEMIC EDEN

HILE MILGRAM WAS at Yale, Allport had told his col- Wleague Roger Brown, in a slightly conspiratorial manner: “I’m rather glad he’s doing these experiments in New Haven, but we’ll hire him as soon as he ﬁnishes.” Allport had a deep moral ambivalence about the ethics of the obedience experiments. On the one hand, his reaction to Milgram’s ﬁrst letter to him about the experiments was pure excitement—so much, in fact, that he immediately invited Milgram to come up to Harvard to talk about it to one of his graduate classes. On the other hand, he would regularly have his classes vote on whether or not the research was ethical. Typically, the result was an almost even split: sometimes the majority tilted toward a favorable judgment, and other times the outcome was in the opposite direction. Allport expressed his reservations about the obedience studies in an otherwise superlative letter of recommendation requested by Claude Buxton when Yale’s Psychology Department was evaluating Milgram for promotion. After telling Buxton that Milgram was one of the top three or four students he had had in thirty years, he wrote:

My one and only objection to his work concerns the “astonishing” ordeal to which he has put his subjects in the “obedience” research. Only Festinger and Schachter would have equal audacity! I know he is sensitive to the ethical issues involved, and regrets the need for experimental deception and stress. But he thinks it justiﬁed by the scientiﬁc yield—and so perhaps it is.

131 132 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

Milgram brought Sasha with him to Harvard for his invited talk so that he could introduce her to his former teachers and friends. Allport expressed his approval:

It was most pleasant to see you—and Sasha. You have a strong personality—slightly one-sided; and she creates an ideal equilibrium for you. I do congratulate you on the arrangement!... In her chosen career [social work] she will soothe mankind in proportion to the extent that you stir it up. So we’ll come out even.

At the end of 1962 Milgram was offered a position at Harvard. He could have stayed at Yale—he had received his promotion—but the prospect of returning to academic Eden was hard to resist, so he accepted a three-year appointment as an assistant professor in the Department of Social Rela- tions, beginning July 1, 1963, with a starting annual salary of $8,600. His appointment came with the stipulation that he not conduct any research with drugs. Allport knew of Milgram’s interests in mescaline, but Timothy Leary had left Harvard only months earlier, and Allport did not want a repetition of the problems that Leary’s presence had created. In the course of the hiring process, Milgram received a letter from the secretary of the Social Relations Department chairman, David McClelland, asking about his middle name. She explained that at Harvard it was necessary to submit the complete legal name when corresponding with the dean—so her request was not without some rhyme or reason. Neither was Milgram’s response—which he wrote in verse:

Dear Miss Thoren: My heart is heavy And spirit lame For I was born With no middle name Vexing as an unsolved riddle Is a name without a middle I rely on tolerance Return to Academic Eden 133

To quell all signs of remonstrance Stanley [ ] Milgram Assistant Professor

Although he was happy about returning to Harvard, Milgram looked back with some degree of satisfaction on his three years at Yale. It had provided an atmosphere of encouragement and support to do his research. And despite the fact that at the time Yale was a hotbed of attitude-change research, “it is to the credit of the Department at Yale”—he later wrote— “that no one ever suggested that I put aside my own interests and take up the attitude-change banner.” Milgram remembered with special fondness his graduate students, such as Alan Elms, Leon Mann, and Susan Harter, who constituted the heart of his daily life. Outside the confines of the university, New Haven did not have much of an intellectual or artistic community. And within the Psychol- ogy Department, the social climate was not especially friendly or comforting for the junior faculty. Although they were free to pursue their research interests, they were told what courses they had to teach, and it was understood that very few of them would be granted tenure. The department was controlled by the senior faculty, and there was a great divide between them and the young assistant professors, which generated a good deal of hostility among the latter. When new assistant professors joined the department, their wives were warned by the department chairman’s wife not to invite any of the senior faculty to their homes because they would be turned down. Milgram did not seem to feel the divide as acutely as his young colleagues, and in fact he enjoyed a warm relationship with a few of the older members of the department. Among the latter, he was closest to Irving Janis, who, over the years, proved to be a wise and reliable friend. Although Milgram was less intimidated by the prevailing social atmosphere than most other junior faculty, he was not completely unaffected by it. “It is interesting how in New Haven I had begun to take alienation for granted,” he later wrote his former Yale colleague, Howard Leventhal. Milgram was a man of many interests—he liked to think of himself as a neo-Renaissance man. As noted earlier, he began writing poetry and musi- 134 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD cals in college, and his choice of an academic career did not put an end to his other, nonscientific, pursuits. During the summer of 1963, Milgram began writing to literary agents to handle two short stories he had written. Although most turned him down, one, Joan Daves, agreed to represent him, and sent the articles off to several magazines. She was unable to sell them, but she did get a favorable response from the fiction editor of Made- moiselle, who asked to see more of his work. Although Milgram continued to write prose and poetry most of his life, he had only limited success in publishing any of his purely literary efforts. In the fall, Stanley and Sasha moved into a handsome two-bedroom apartment with a fireplace at 10 Forest Street in Cambridge. It was both within walking distance of Stanley’s office in Emerson Hall and close to other young academic couples like themselves—so that when their first child, Michele, was born, in November 1964, Sasha was able to seek out other young mothers and playmates for her. (The Milgrams’ second child, Marc, was also born in Cambridge, in January 1967, toward the end of their stay there.) Stanley and Sasha found themselves very much at home in Cambridge. They enjoyed its vibrancy and excitement and were soon caught up in the social life of the academic community. Their home became a haven of good food and stimulating company. Leon Mann recalls Thanksgiving dinner at the Milgrams’ in 1964, with Stanley carving a huge turkey using the step-by-step instructions provided by the New York Times Cookbook propped up on the table next to the bird. Stanley and Sasha became increasingly engaged in liberal Democratic causes. A favorite ploy was to write “we Republicans” letters to Republican political figures to persuade them to adopt more liberal positions on various issues—an application of the social-psychological principle that the more similar a persuader is to his target, the more effective he will be. Senator Barry Goldwater was one such target.

Dear Senator Goldwater:

First, my wife and I like your kind of reasoning and hope you will be the Republican candidate for President in 1964. Let’s keep the Republican Party Return to Academic Eden 135

true to its highest principles. Come on, Barry, show those Democrats that we Republicans have something fresh to say. Something new and vigorous and in the American tradition.

Second, and maybe more important at this very moment. My wife and I have just heard President Kennedy talk about the test ban treaty. Democrat or not, he is our President, and for once we thought he made a lot of sense. A lot of folks around here have been aware of the fallout problem because we get reports on radioactivity in milk products. And anybody can see that Commies or not we don’t want to continue polluting the atmosphere. Frankly, I’m surprised we wangled this treaty out of Krushchev.... In other words all of us here hope from the bottom of our hearts that you will lead the way to get that test-ban treaty signed....

Your friends, (Signed) Stanley & Alexandra Milgram P.S. And let’s see you President in 1964!

Becoming parents was something Milgram and Sasha looked forward to with great anticipation, and Stanley took pleasure in even the mundane aspects of fatherhood. Soon after Michele was born, his brother Joel remembers receiving an audiotaped “letter” from Stanley, describing in light- hearted and loving detail how he was in the midst of changing her diaper. And about a year after Marc was born, he wrote a close friend that “both children are more delightful than ever and growing rapidly.” Another letter to the same friend contains a statement that succinctly and eloquently conveys his feelings about being a father: “Parenthood brings pleasure to the day, for children are jewels, not without cost, but capable of emitting unexpected flashes of delight.” Aware of how much his own father’s busy work schedule had deprived him of time with his children, Stanley made his family a priority, despite his immersion in his own work. When Michele was two or three, he would take her to his office at Harvard on Saturday mornings and other occasions. Playing chess with Marc, staying up to all hours of the night chatting with Michele, taking family vacations—these were just as important to him as 136 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD any research project. He and Sasha took pride in their children’s achievements, whether it was Marc scoring in the 99th percentile on his SATs or Michele learning Italian so she could read the works of an Italian writer in the original. When the children went off to college—Michele to Vassar and then Marc to Brandeis—he wrote a colleague: “I have a great feeling of sadness about losing daily contact with our children.” The Milgrams’ idyllic Cambridge life was briefly interrupted in Novem- ber 1963 with the assassination of President Kennedy. At the time, Mil- gram was fairly new to Harvard, but his reputation as a crafty researcher had preceded him—you never knew when he was going to pull an experiment on you. So when in the early afternoon of Friday, November 22, 1963, he burst into Emerson Hall in the midst of a lecture by Talcott Parsons about the nature of social systems, and rushed to the podium, yelling, “I have horrible news. President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas,” he was met with outrage and skepticism. Barry Wellman, now a sociologist at the University of Toronto, remembers blurting out: “You’re just doing another experiment on us.” It was only after the students left Emerson Hall and heard the news from others in Harvard Yard that they realized Milgram’s announcement was genuine. The assassination of President Kennedy plunged the nation into a para- lyzing gloom. At Harvard, the mourning was for one of their own; twenty- three years earlier John F. Kennedy had received his bachelor’s degree cum laude at Harvard. All classes throughout the university were canceled on Monday, November 25—an action that was unprecedented in Harvard’s history. Many of the overflow crowd of 2,000 who attended the service at Memorial Church in tribute to the president wept openly. Milgram was deeply affected by Kennedy’s death and expressed his grief and gave his own tribute in a letter that appeared in the November 25 issue of The Har- vard Crimson:

To the Editors of the Crimson:

We are numb with the tragic, senseless death of our President. There are heartfelt gestures everywhere, but there is only one tribute that can give Return to Academic Eden 137

meaning to his death. It is simply this: that the ideals he lived for be embodied in law. No single piece of legislation was closer to him than a strong civil rights bill. If in the face of his death, we enact laws he urgently desired, then alongside the tragedy his spirit is proclaimed. If we do nothing, it is not fate, but we who render his death senseless and empty. We did not bring on the President’s death but we truly dispose of it by what we make of it. There is a way to give meaning to his death. Each of us must let congress and President Johnson know that we choose to honor our late President with the enactment of his courageous civil rights program. Let his spirit and ideals carry us forward in law. In the midst of sorrow and bewilderment, it is the only tribute that rings true.

Stanley Milgram Assistant Professor of Social Psychology

But it was the research that Milgram carried out at Harvard that most defined his Cambridge years. Two areas in particular dominated his agenda: the lost-letter technique and the small-world phenomenon. Both would become valuable as innovative research tools for social psychologists and other social scientists. In addition, the small-world idea would, decades later, capture the imagination of researchers in the physical and biological sciences and also become part of the vocabulary of pop culture through the phrase “six degrees of separation.” But the lost-letter technique—a continuation of work he had begun at Yale after completion of the obedience studies—has also had lasting significance. The method is still used today by social psychologists to find out what people really think about controversial issues.

…

The lost-letter technique, developed by Milgram and his students in 1963, was designed as a way of measuring community attitudes in as unobtrusive a way as possible—a sort of polling device. It is based on the belief that if you come across an unmailed letter lying on the sidewalk, the 138 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD right thing to do is find a mailbox and drop it in. But what if the letter is addressed to an organization you oppose or even detest? If you mail the letter, you may well be helping it. How one resolves this dilemma—by mailing the letter or not—presumably reflects one’s attitude toward the intended recipient of the letter. Milgram felt that measuring community attitudes in this way would remove interviewer effects that impair the accuracy of traditional modes of assessing attitudes and opinions. Instead of answering an interviewer’s questions truthfully, respondents may provide an answer they believe is more socially desirable, in order to create a more favorable impression. The lost-letter technique circumvented this source of error, because the letter-finder did not know that his behavior was being studied and therefore would not resort to tactics meant to burnish his public image. The technique originated as a class project conducted by members of Milgram’s graduate class Research Techniques in Social Psychology and Personality at Yale in the spring of 1963, right before Milgram left for Harvard. Although all ten members of the class participated, two of them, Leon Mann and Susan Harter, were more centrally involved than the rest; as a result, they were coauthors with Milgram on the first published report of the technique, which appeared in the journal Public Opin- ion Quarterly. Leon Mann recalls that the idea grew out of “creative chit-chat” in the class about how people reacted when they found a lost package in New Haven Common. “It was characteristic of Stanley’s genius” that he could turn this simple observation into a workable psychology experiment. The students “lost” letters throughout New Haven that were addressed to four different fictitious recipients: Friends of the Communist Party, Friends of the Nazi Party, Medical Research Associates, and a private individual, a Mr. Walter Carnap. (The choice of this name was an inside joke, a takeoff on the name of Rudolf Carnap, a philosopher of science.) There were 100 letters of each type, and they were all addressed to the same post office box in New Haven, which had been set up especially for the experiment. They all contained the same innocuous letter, which was ambiguous enough to be applicable to a variety of recipients. Return to Academic Eden 139

It was a brief note from a “Max” to a “Walter” about plans for an upcoming meeting of an unnamed group. Each student was responsible for “seeding” his or her territory with forty letters, which were to be distributed in four different kinds of locations: in phone booths, on sidewalks, inside stores, and under the windshield wipers of parked cars (with a note saying “found near car”). The letters were dropped in the late afternoon of April 3 and the final tally two weeks later revealed that the letters had been mailed in unequal numbers: 72 of the letters to Medical Research Associates and 71 of those addressed to Mr. Walter Carnap were mailed, but only 25 each of the Communist and Nazi letters reached their destination. So the technique worked; the pattern of mailed letters was consistent with the political and social attributes of their addressees. The apparent reluctance of finders to mail the Communist and Nazi letters made sense if one reasonably assumed that the American public had an aversion to the ideologies of those groups. As a precautionary measure, before embarking on the study, Mil- gram had notified the FBI, the New Haven police, and the local post office. A week later, he received a memo from the postmaster noting somewhat mysteriously, “Your addresses are causing quite a flurry of excitement in official circles.” This first experiment served as a feasibility study: it showed that the lost-letter technique worked. Milgram then decided to apply it to a social issue that at the time was creating a lot of tension in the South—racial integration. Milgram had a graduate research assistant, Taketo Murata, drive south from New Haven with a large batch of letters. Each was addressed to one of three fictitious groups: a civil rights group, “Equal Rights for Negroes”; an anti–civil rights group, “Council for White Neighborhoods”; and “Medical Research Associates,” which was meant to serve as a neutral or control group. During two nights in mid-May he distributed them in white and black neighborhoods in Charlotte and Raleigh, North Carolina. Table 8.1 presents the combined results for the two cities. What they found was a reversal in the percentage of mailed letters across neighborhoods. In predominantly white neighborhoods, a higher 140 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

TABLE 8.1 Percentages of “Lost Letters” Mailed to Three Different Addresses in White and Black Neighborhoods Equal Council for Medical Rights for White Research Neighborhood Negroes Neighborhoods Associates White 18 34 46 Black 25 16 28

SOURCE: The Stanley Milgram Papers, Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives. proportion of prosegregation letters than pro-integration letters were mailed, whereas the opposite pattern occurred in largely black residential areas. (A higher proportion of Medical Research Associates letters was mailed by both blacks and whites, reflecting perhaps its more noncontro- versial nature.) When Milgram arrived at Harvard, he tried to take the lost-letter technique to new heights by scattering pro-Johnson (Democrat) and pro- Goldwater (Republican) letters from a Piper Cub, ﬂying over Worcester, Massachusetts, in order to predict the winner in the 1964 Presidential election. This new method of losing letters did not work very well. Many letters landed in trees, in ponds, and on rooftops. Worse still, some got jammed into the movable parts of the airplane’s wings, putting the pilot and his letter-dropping passenger at risk. Not surprisingly, Milgram re- verted to the earlier, more pedestrian methods. In the fall of 1964, he distributed letters addressed to four different groups in several election wards in Boston. Two groups were pro-John- son—“Committee to Elect Johnson” and “Committee to Defeat Goldwa- ter”—and the other two were pro-Goldwater—“Committee to Elect Gold- water” and “Committee to Defeat Johnson.” The results were headlined in the Harvard Crimson a few days before the election: “Social Relations Finds Pro-LBJ Bostonians Won’t Mail Letters to Elect Barry.” More pro-Johnson than pro-Goldwater letters had been mailed. The lost-letter technique accurately predicted the outcome of the election in each of the wards, but it badly underestimated the magnitude of Johnson’s win. It predicted Johnson Return to Academic Eden 141 leading by only 10 percent over Goldwater, when in fact he won by a land- slide: In the wards where the letters had been dropped, Johnson’s lead was closer to 60 percent. Milgram’s ﬁnal use of the lost-letter technique took him all the way to the Far East. Here is his description of the study’s purpose and how it was carried out:

The lost-letter technique [as described so far] showed us things we already knew, or soon would know. It was not so much that the technique confirmed the events as the fact that events confirmed the technique. Could the lost-letter technique be applied to a situation where the answers were not clearly known and would be difficult to get? The situation of the 17 million overseas Chinese provided an interesting case in point. How would they respond to an extension of Red Chinese power? Were they pro-Mao or pro-Nationalists? These are questions difficult to investigate with ordinary survey methods, but perhaps they would yield to the lost-letter technique.

His plan was to distribute letters addressed to pro-Peking and pro-Taiwan groups, as well as to a nonpolitical organization, the Committee to En- courage Education, throughout Hong Kong, Singapore, and Bangkok. They all contained the Chinese equivalent of the straightforward letter used in the earlier American studies, and all were addressed to the same post ofﬁce box in Tokyo. Milgram expected that the return rates of the letters would provide an answer to his research question posthaste. But some unexpected problems arose, delaying the study:

Riots between the Malays and the Chinese began in Singapore just before our experimenter arrived. And in spite of written consent from the Malaysian government, he was put back onto the plane almost as soon as he arrived at the airport. We postponed the Singapore study. The following year our experimenter in Hong Kong . . . [who] had been paid in advance disappeared. After many months a Chinese colleague of mine reached him 142 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

by telephone. The would-be-experimenter said that in China research takes a very long time. In truth, he had absconded with the research funds. I decided to go to Hong Kong myself, stopping only in Tokyo to confer with Robert Frager [a doctoral student], who was to assist me in this study.... We employed groups of Chinese students as distributors. . . . We found that substantially more pro-Chiang than pro-Mao letters were picked up and mailed. The returns were consistent, and taken together, the ﬁndings from the three cities showed a statistically signiﬁcant pro-Taiwan feeling on the part of the overseas Chinese.

The opposition of the “overseas Chinese”—those living in Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Singapore—to the Communist government of mainland China made sense to Milgram. Many residents of Hong Kong were political refugees from Red China, and in Singapore and Bangkok, many Chi- nese owned small family businesses, which would be threatened by an extension of Communist China’s power and influence. Based on his experiences with the lost-letter technique, Milgram identified some limitations for prospective users. It would likely work for highly polarized and emotionally charged issues, but not for subtle ones. Large numbers of letters needed to be distributed in order to be able to obtain statistically significant differences between experimental and control letters because of the “unwanted variance” in the returns—some letters were always likely to be picked up by street cleaners, children, or people who couldn’t read. This problem could only be overcome by using large numbers. The shift in Milgram’s research program—from the serious and elaborate obedience experiments to the relatively lightweight lost-letter technique—might seem strange. But several things account for it. First, after the emotionally draining experience of the obedience work, Milgram leaped at the opportunity to distance himself from direct contact with subjects. The lost-letter technique fit the bill perfectly. Moreover, the lost- letter technique was not all that different from the obedience experiments, when examined closely. In fact, they shared important features that would become hallmarks of Milgram’s work. Return to Academic Eden 143

First, his experiments typically created a conflict for the subject that demanded resolution. And second, that resolution usually took the form of an unambiguously observable, concrete action. In the lost-letter technique, the conflict was between acting in line with prevailing norms and supporting a hated organization through that action. The resolution of that conflict came in the form of a dichotomous, concrete act—mailing or not mailing the lost letter. In the obedience experiment, the dilemma confronting the subject was whether to obey a legitimate authority or to follow the dictates of his conscience. Subjects responded to the dilemma by either continuing to press the switches or breaking off. Analo- gously, subjects in Milgram’s cross-cultural conformity experiments—as well as in Asch’s own original ones—were saddled with the dilemma of truth versus conformity. Here, too, the resolution of the dilemma took the form of a clear, easily discernible behavior: expressing agreement with the majority’s judgment or not. Indeed, most of Milgram’s experiments would come to have these same defining characteristics. And it was these very properties—a clear conflict resolved by an unambiguous act—that accounted for their compelling nature. In contrast to the relativism and ambiguity inherent in many other types of measures (for example, a point on a numerical scale), the discrete, observable acts constituting most of Milgram’s findings lent them a quality of absoluteness, clarity, and finality that made their implications readily discernible to a broad segment of the reading public, not just to professional audiences. Another factor driving Milgram’s move from the obedience experiments to the lost-letter technique was simply his own curiosity. And when Mil- gram became interested in something, it was difficult to redirect him, as he himself admitted in an unpublished interview:

My work has been dominated by creative presses. And I do not mean this in an altogether favorable sense. A creative person is very largely the victim of his own impulses. Often there were lines of research my intellectual side said ought to be pursued, but which gave way to more creative, less valuable pursuits. The problem for the creative person is that he can rarely direct his 144 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

impulses to conform to the conventional lines of his discipline but only de- ﬂect a portion of them within these grooves. Consider the lost-letter technique. There is a legitimate socio-psychological reason for a study of this sort, but there was also a kernel of poetry in the idea of using lost letters to measure social attitudes.

After noting its methodological limitations, he added rhetorically, “Why then did I pursue it beyond its initial demonstration? Obviously, I was responding to the poetry of the procedure, and not to its scientiﬁc adequacy.”

…

The completely new research focus that Milgram began at Harvard was the small-world problem. The phenomenon this research dealt with is illustrated by an incident involving Everett M. Rogers, a communication researcher, when he was a visiting professor at a university in Mexico City in 1979. One day, while having a conversation with a student named Pedro, Rogers complimented him on the excellence of his English. The student replied that this was a result of his having lived with a family in Iowa as an exchange student. The conversation continued:

Rogers Oh, where in Iowa did you live? Pedro With a farm family in Collins. Rogers Collins? That’s the community I studied for my Ph.D. dissertation at Iowa State University! What is the family’s name? Pedro Robert Badstubner. Rogers [In amazement] Why, that farmer was one of the opinion leaders in my investigation of the diffusion of 2,4-D weed spray! Rogers and Pedro [In unison] What a small world!

Two people meeting for the first time and discovering that they have someone in common happens surprisingly often, and has been referred to as the small-world phenomenon. The more general question these kinds Return to Academic Eden 145 of encounters pose is the small-world problem, which Milgram stated as follows:

Starting with any two people in the world, what is the probability that they will know each other? . . . Another question one may ask is: Given any two people in the world, person X and person Z, how many intermediate acquaintance links are needed before X and Z are connected?

The question did not originate with Milgram. Not long after returning to Harvard, he read a book, Cambridge U.S.A.: Hub of a New World, a breezy survey of current activity in science and technology. It noted that Ithiel de Sola Pool, a political scientist at MIT, was working on what he called the small world question. He and Manfred Kochen, a mathematician with IBM, were developing a theoretical model that suggested that any two strangers chosen at random could be linked by a small chain of acquaintances. Milgram was intrigued by the counterintuitive nature of the small- world idea and wondered if it would hold up if tested empirically. To provide an answer, Milgram devised an experiment, the small-world method: The name of a person (the target), usually in a distant city, was given to a sample of men and women (starters). The task of the starters was to send a folder to the target person using only a series of friends and acquaintances who were more likely to know the target person than they (the starters) were. The folder could only be sent to a person whom the sender knew on a first-name basis. To keep track of the course of the folder, it contained a roster to which each subject had to add his or her name as well as tracer postcards to be mailed to Milgram. He found that only a fraction of the chains were completed. For example, in a study with starters in Nebraska and a stockbroker in Boston as the target person, only 26 percent of the chains were completed. But among the completed chains, the findings were supportive of the small-world idea. On the average, it took about six intermediaries for a starter to reach the target. Milgram’s research broke new ground in two ways. He was the first to actually count how many acquaintances it took to link two arbitrarily cho- 146 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD sen strangers, and he devised an inventive way to do it. Second, most people can provide an anecdotal account or two of a personal small-world experience, such as finding yourself sitting next to a passenger on a transatlantic flight who turns out to be a classmate of your first cousin’s brother-in-law in Toronto. But it took Milgram to demonstrate that this kind of close interconnectedness was a general and quantifiable property of our social world—a finding that contradicts our intuitions. Milgram had asked an intelligent friend how many links it would take for letters sent by his starters in Nebraska to reach a target person in Sharon, Massachusetts. His friend estimated that it would take about 100 intermediaries. The publication of the small-world research took an unusual path. Re- searchers usually publish their work first in scientific journals. Afterward, they might also describe the research in less technical form in a magazine or some other publication aimed at the broader public. In presenting his small-world results, Milgram reversed this usual sequence, describing his work first in an article in Psychology Today—the launch issue of that magazine. The technical reports appeared several years later in two journals, So- ciometry in 1969 and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1970. He published the research first in Psychology Today in part to lend his prestige to help boost the new magazine. It was not purely an act of altruism, however: It enabled Milgram to bypass the long publication lags typical of scholarly journals and to air his novel research more quickly.

…

The Social Relations Department had undergone a number of changes since Milgram’s student days there. But its interdisciplinary orientation still served as its guiding philosophy, and Milgram found it as intellectually ap- pealing as a faculty member as he had as a student. He delighted to be once again in close contact with the three former teachers who had been his mentors and with whom he had continued a relationship of mutual fondness and respect: Gordon Allport, Roger Brown, and Jerome Bruner. The power of the interdisciplinary vision had diminished somewhat since the early years. Only two of the founding fathers were still involved— Return to Academic Eden 147

Talcott Parsons and Gordon Allport. Clyde Kluckhohn had died in 1960, and Henry Murray had retired from teaching in 1962. In addition, a new cohort of fresh Ph.D.’s who had trained elsewhere and therefore had no ideological commitment to the program were gradually filling the faculty ranks. However, there were still a sufficient number of older faculty aboard—such as George Homans, Robert Freed Bales, Robert White, and Fred Mosteller—as well as younger faculty who were former students— such as Tom Pettigrew, Philip Stone, Arthur Couch, and, now, Milgram— to provide the necessary critical mass of continued commitment to Social Relations’ philosophy. There had been some changes in the curriculum. Chief among them was the discontinuation of the qualifying courses that first-year students were required to take in each of the four program areas, along with their impossibly long reading lists and terrorizing three-hour exams. These were replaced by the less demanding Social Relations 200, Pro-Seminar: Problems and Concepts in Social Relations, required of all first-year students, in which notable members of the four areas introduced students to their disciplines as guest lecturers. But there were also important continuities. For example, Milgram taught the Pro-Seminar for Clinical and Social Psychol- ogy, one of the courses he himself had taken as a graduate student. He also introduced two new courses: a graduate seminar in Experimental Social Psychology, and Processes of Social Influence. While he was there, he chaired two doctoral dissertations, both of them cross-cultural studies. One, by Roy Feldman, was a comparison of helpfulness among residents of Paris, Athens, and Boston toward their compatriots and foreigners. The other, conducted by Robert Frager, was an attempt to replicate the Asch conformity experiment in Japan. A significant development for the Social Relations Department during Milgram’s tenure was its move to a new home, in William James Hall. At the beginning of the fall semester of 1963, construction was up to the third floor. By the end of 1964, the Center for the Behavioral Sciences was a fifteen-story gleaming white skyscraper. Designed by Minoru Yamasaki, it cost over $6 million, part of which was contributed by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health. The Social Rela- 148 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD tions Department had outgrown its space at Emerson Hall, so it had been forced to move some programs around Harvard Yard—to Bow, Divinity, Felton, and Kirkland Streets. With the new building, the university administration hoped not only to alleviate the space problem but also to strengthen the unity of the Social Relations Department. On January 26, 1965, the department had its first monthly meeting in the new building. William James Hall also provided a new home for the Psychology De- partment, enabling it to leave its dingy, cavernlike quarters in the basement of Memorial Hall. Becoming neighbors, however, did not take the chill off the relationship between the two departments. In fact, Edwin Newman, the chairman of the Psychology Department, insisted that a separate access key be provided for after-hours entry to the floors occupied by his department. Despite the founders’ conviction that the fusion of four social science disciplines was the wave of the future, the program was not replicated at other universities. Yet colleges around the country were vying to hire Social Relations graduates as soon as they got their Ph.D. degrees. By the end of the 1963–1964 academic year, the department had awarded nearly 400 doctoral degrees. The size of the department’s faculty kept growing, too. When Milgram was a student, the faculty numbered about forty; when he returned as an assistant professor, the teaching staff had grown to about sixty-five members. The most visible and important additions were Erik Erikson and David Riesman. Erikson was a psychoanalyst widely known for proposing a series of stages of human development which—going beyond Freud—encompassed the whole life span. David Riesman had gained wide recognition for his book The Lonely Crowd, which in 1950 became the best-selling book ever written by a sociologist. In addition to rekindling old ties, Milgram’s return to Harvard led to new friendships. David Marlowe, the co-developer of the Crowne and Marlowe social-desirability scale, a widely used measure of individual differences in the need for approval, became a close friend, as did Hans Toch, a visiting professor from Michigan State University. Toch, originally from Vienna, had received his Ph.D. in social psychology from Princeton. He had been invited to the Social Relations Department to fill in for Roger Return to Academic Eden 149

Brown, who was taking a sabbatical in 1965–1966. When Milgram was asked to write a chapter on mass phenomena for the Handbook of Social Psy- chology, one of the most authoritative reference works in the field, he invited Toch to collaborate with him. The resulting chapter was called “Collective Behavior: Crowds and Social Movements.” Milgram wrote the section on crowds—his most scholarly piece of writing—and Toch wrote the section on social movements. They team-taught the Pro-Seminar for Clinical and Social Psychology in the spring of 1966. According to Toch, Milgram’s classroom manner with students was “a combination of being understanding and empathic and being mercilessly critical.” But Toch believed that there was enough warmth and support below the harshness for students to realize that if Milgram was rough on them, it was in the service of their intellectual development. By far the most significant and closest of Milgram’s new friendships was with another junior faculty member, a sociologist named Paul Hollander, who had joined the Social Relations Department at the same time as Stan- ley. An assimilated Hungarian Jew, he had eluded deportation by the Nazis during World War II, and in 1956, right after the Hungarian revolution, he left Budapest for England to attend the London School of Economics. After receiving his B.A., he continued his education in the United States, ending up with a Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton in 1963. Milgram and Hollander met at the first department meeting in the fall of 1963. They immediately hit it off and began a friendship that would en- dure for life, in spite of their differences. Milgram had a more assertive personality than Hollander, and criticized him for his professional preoccupation with, and concern about, Communism, rather than Nazism, despite his family’s suffering under the latter. Milgram opposed U.S. involvement in Vietnam; Hollander did not. Milgram was concerned about nuclear weapons; Hollander was not. But these surface differences were secondary to the deeper and more essential bonds of friendship, which contained, according to Hollander, the elements of “trust, spontaneous pleasure in each other’s company, sharing of confidences, mutual appreciation of our different personalities and work, and willingness to turn to one another for support when needed.” They were in constant contact for the next two 150 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD decades—by mail, by telephone, through regular visits to each other’s homes, and through shared vacations. As Hollander later remarked:

The qualities of Stanley which attracted me included his forthrightness, a candor sometimes bordering on bluntness and abrasiveness which set him apart from most academics, from most people I knew. He spoke his mind in refreshing contrast to the conventions prevailing in academia. . . . I also admired his work and ideas, his intellectual power, his brilliance. His work, not surprisingly, reﬂected his personality, his originality and inquisitiveness, a talent for asking fundamental questions. Unlike many of his colleagues he was totally free of pomposity and esoteric jargon-mongering, of the pre- tentiousness common among successful academic intellectuals. He had a quality of no-nonsense sharpness, an ability to get to basics in simple, un- pretentious ways....

Like many others who knew Milgram, Hollander appreciated his sense of humor and his playfulness. Milgram would sometimes write fake letters to Hollander, once on ofﬁcial Kuwaiti government stationery, offering him a lucrative university position that came with some unusual fringe beneﬁts of a sexual nature. Another time, Stanley managed to get hold of Time magazine stationery, on which he wrote the following letter:

Dear Professor Hollander:

As you may know, each week Time Magazine features on its cover the portrait of an outstanding ﬁgure in world or national affairs. Our editorial board has unanimously recommended that your portrait be used on the September 24, 1976 cover of the magazine, and I am writing to you to make an appointment for a photographic portrait. The photograph will then be used as the basis for an illustration by one of our staff artists.

You may be wondering why we have selected you for our cover story, and I am authorized to disclose the following. As you know a number of sex scandals have recently appeared in the press and on television. No doubt, additional incidents of sex in government will be covered by the media. However, we at Return to Academic Eden 151

Time would like to deepen the story by giving an account of the role of sex in all phases of professional life, not excluding academic life. In our story, we would present you ﬁrst as a serious scholar, and give prominent mention to your work on Soviet and American society. After introducing you in this vein, we would cover your sexual experiences in and out of academic life. We have researchers in London, Budapest, and Boston who will interview your friends (of both sexes), your colleagues, and your present and former lovers. All of this information would be skillfully integrated into a feature story, which will incidentally, also be Time magazine’s ﬁrst use of full frontal nudity.

We shall be calling you shortly to arrange for a preliminary interview with our researcher, a former Radcliffe student who majored in oriental erotica. We trust we can count on your cooperation in this venture, which will, we feel, expand our appeal to academic as well as general audiences.

Sincerely, Henry Grünbald* Managing Editor

P.S. Your friend, Milgram, has been working in our ofﬁces lately; but frankly did not seem promising for the cover story we had in mind.

…

Life at Harvard had placed inordinate demands on Milgram’s time—some self-imposed, others expected of him as a departmental citizen. Besides his research, writing, teaching, dissertation supervision, speaking engagements, and correspondence, he had memberships on various departmental committees. As he wrote a correspondent who had requested some very time-consuming assistance with research he was planning: “To be sure my responses have been sluggish, but if you only had some idea of the pressures on my time from every direction, you’d feel some sympathy for the Milgram camp.”

*The name was a play on the name of the actual managing editor, Henry Grunwald. 152 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

Despite those pressures, he had written Leon Mann, “I have enjoyed Harvard greatly.” In fact, that was an understatement. In the opinion of his colleague Tom Pettigrew, Milgram had contracted a bad case of “Harvardi- tis.” Pettigrew explained that this is a terminal disease in which “you come to believe that Harvard is not only the greatest university in the world, it is the only university in the world.” Milgram had come to Harvard in the fall of 1963 under a three-year contract as an assistant professor of social psychology, which would end in June 1966. In the spring of 1965, the Social Relations Department voted an additional year’s appointment for him for 1966–1967 as a lecturer in social psychology, a nontenured position. His description of this appointment in a letter to Dave Marlowe, dated March 24, 1966, conveys his disappointment: “I’ve been demoted to Lecturer for next year, but to boost my ego, I’ve also been named Director of the Program for International Studies,” a new program within the department funded by the Ford Foundation. Although he was pleased with the directorship because it fit with his interests in cross-cultural research, the position did not come with tenure. In academic departments in other universities, new tenured appointments are typically initiated from within the departments when a need arises—for example, when someone dies or retires—or when a particularly attractive candidate becomes available, or when the department wants to prevent a talented cohort of junior faculty from leaving for another school. At Harvard, however, new tenured appointments were determined at the administrative level, using the so-called “Graustein formula,” a complicated system named after a Harvard mathematician who devised it. Milgram’s appointment as a lecturer for 1966–1967 was dictated by the fact that, according to the Graustein formula, the Social Relations Department was not due for a permanent opening that year. In the fall semester of 1966, however, a permanent position in social psychology to begin in the fall of 1967 did open up, and Milgram was discussed as a prime candidate by the committee responsible for making a recommendation. However, there were some deep divisions of opinion about Milgram among members of the committee. Allport, McClelland, and Return to Academic Eden 153

Roger Brown supported Milgram, but Milgram himself believed that Robert Freed Bales, a senior social psychologist who was already at Social Relations when Milgram was a student, and Robert White, a clinical psychologist, opposed him. The debate within the committee raged for months and spilled over into the new year, 1967. The committee even met on Sun- days. As of January 26, Milgram wrote David Marlowe, no decision had been made. The tenure committee ended up deadlocked over Milgram and, as in a political convention, they offered the position to a dark horse, Robert Rosenthal, another junior faculty member. This came as a complete surprise to Rosenthal, because not only had he not realized that he was in the running, he was not even a social psychologist. His Ph.D. was in clinical psychology, and he had been hired in 1962 to teach courses in psy- chotherapy and psychodiagnostics. In fact, he was somewhat perturbed that the offer came so late in the semester, because by March 1967, when the social psychology committee told him of their choice, he had already accepted a position in clinical psychology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. In the end, he accepted Harvard’s offer, and he stayed there until 1999, serving as department chairman for part of that time. Although he was not a social psychologist, there was some logical basis for the committee’s decision, because the research he was doing was social-psychological in nature. Rosenthal had gained recognition for his experiments on experimenter ex- pectancy effects, a form of self-fulfilling prophecy operating in the laboratory. He demonstrated through a series of experiments that researchers could unwittingly convey their hypotheses or expectancies to their subjects and thereby end up with flawed results. Roger Brown believed that the opposition to Milgram by some of the committee members was irrational. Specifically, he said that some people “attributed to him some of the properties of the experiment. That is, they thought he was sort of manipulative, or the mad doctor, or something of this sort.... They felt uneasy about him.” Brown believed that characterization to be unfounded. He considered Milgram a very decent individual and a man of great integrity and authenticity. 154 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

David Winter, a former student of Milgram’s in the Social Relations De- partment, agrees with Brown: “He definitely was ‘quirky’ and unorthodox, and he could assume an air like that implied by the three ‘probes’ used by the experimenter in his experiments. But at the core he really was nurturant and kind. I recall his giving me one of his papers and signing it, ‘with affection and esteem’—which has always struck me as an eloquent thing to say in a situation that usually evokes clichés.” Tom Pettigrew was one of those who voted against Milgram, but for a different reason altogether. He and Milgram had team-taught a pro-seminar in social psychology for first-year graduate students, and Pettigrew was outraged by Milgram’s harsh treatment of the students in that class. This was the same course Milgram had co-taught with Hans Toch a year earlier. Toch had also been a witness to Milgram’s rough treatment of students, but he believed Milgram’s behavior was tempered by an underlying concern for the students’ academic growth. Pettigrew, however, saw nothing redeeming in Milgram’s pedagogical style. He recalled that when Milgram asked a question and didn’t like a student’s answer, he might say, “That’s a stupid answer.... Who knows the real answer?” Pettigrew said, “I just couldn’t stand this . . . and I would jump in . . . and before the student got squashed I would argue with Stan.... I was trying to get him off their necks.... When I came [to Harvard] as a graduate student, I was scared to death. I even had a big trunk that my father had from World War I and I kept it open, because I was ready to leave. I could pull out within 48 hours if all went badly. So . . . to this day I have a lot of sympathy for first-year graduate students, and I try to do everything I can to reduce their stress . . . and Stan was just tough on them.” He added that “I’m quite sure he didn’t realize he came across like that.”

…

Being turned down in his bid for tenure was a traumatic experience for Stanley—not only because he and Sasha loved Cambridge and wanted very much to remain there, but also because, despite the long, drawn-out, nerve-wracking deliberations, the final outcome was unexpected and jolt- Return to Academic Eden 155 ing, since Milgram had generally enjoyed a very good relationship with the senior faculty. However, after the negative decision, Milgram realized that in some cases, his colleagues’ behavior toward him did not capture the whole truth—that below the surface their distaste for the obedience experiments was a still lingering issue. The outcome was also painful because it frayed his self-image, which was that of a person who almost always succeeded in attaining his goals, no matter what obstacles stood in the way. Robert Rosenthal believes that Milgram’s hurt was intensified by the fact that he lost out to someone who was not an obvious contender. However, Milgram bore no personal animosity toward Rosenthal, and they maintained a positive connection with each other. For example, in the fall of 1969, Milgram was invited back to Harvard by Rosenthal and Leon Mann (who came to Harvard on a limited-term faculty appointment after Mil- gram left) to give a guest lecture in a social psychology course they were team-teaching. In 1976 Milgram invited Rosenthal to appear in one of his educational films, Non-Verbal Communication. In early June, the outbreak of the Six-Day War in the Middle East dis- tracted Milgram from his loss. On May 26, the Egyptian leader, Gamal Nasser, openly declared his intention to destroy Israel. He formed an alliance with Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, and Israel found itself surrounded and threatened by Arab forces consisting of about 250,000 soldiers, 2,000 tanks, and 700 fighter planes and bombers. On the morning of June 5, the Israeli air force launched a preemptive attack, effectively destroying the air forces of the four allied countries. The war ended on June 10, with Israel having defeated the Arab armies that surrounded the country in six days. But when the hostilities first broke out and fierce battles raged on several fronts, the situation for Israel looked bleak, and Milgram, along with his Jewish colleagues at Harvard, felt an intense sense of personal involvement in Israel’s survival. Solidarity with Israel was expressed in various ways. The academic community placed a full-page ad in the New York Times. Robert Rosenthal went from office to office in William James Hall soliciting signatures for it. Milgram made a $100 contribution to the Israel Emergency Fund, the largest single contribution of this kind that he had ever made. He felt he 156 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD had to do something, because “recent history has taught us that . . . the most terrible things imaginable can actually come to pass, and particularly where Jews are concerned.” Already stung by his rejection at Harvard, Milgram was further disappointed when it came time to look for a new position—and offers from other prestigious universities did not materialize. He did receive expressions of interest from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo and solid offers from the University of California at Santa Cruz and from Cornell, but he couldn’t see himself stuck in a small town or a rural area. Milgram loved city life and was planning to study it through a wide-angle lens. As one of Milgram’s former students, John Sabini, noted, “He wanted to be part of the urban culture of the times, not just social psychology.” He had hoped that, if he had to leave Harvard, he might go to a high-prestige university located in or near a large metropolis, such as the University of Chicago, Columbia, or the University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley did invite him to come out to interview for an opening in their Psychology De- partment, but, despite strong letters of support from highly respected references, he was opposed by some in the department. Undoubtedly, this kind of division of opinion prevented other prestigious universities from considering him seriously. By now, Milgram was considered one of the most controversial figures in social psychology. In many a psychology department, opinion about him and his obedience studies was polarized. Since in most psychology departments—especially the more prestigious, research-oriented ones—hiring decisions were by faculty vote, few departments seriously entertained the possibility of hiring him. The odds of getting a majority of supporting votes were thought to be slim. In the winter of 1966, Milgram’s friend and former Yale colleague, Howard Leventhal, was recruited by the newly developing Ph.D. program in social psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, located on West 42nd Street in midtown Manhattan. The person at CUNY trying to recruit Leventhal was Silvan Tomkins, a leading figure in the psychological study of emotions and the founding director of a research unit of the University, the Center for Research in Cognition and Affect. Return to Academic Eden 157

The purpose of the center was to provide a setting for the study of human cognitive processes and emotional responses. Leventhal had been conducting research involving emotion—the role of fear arousal in persuasion—and by bringing Leventhal to CUNY, Tomkins would have a person on the staff who would not only help get the graduate program in social psychology off the ground but also contribute to the center’s activities. However, Leventhal told Tomkins that he didn’t want to come by himself; he would accept the offer only if he could bring along another social psychologist, his friend Stanley Milgram. On January 16, 1967, while the Harvard tenure committee was still de- liberating his fate, Milgram received a formal offer from Mina Rees, the dean of graduate studies at CUNY, of an appointment as professor of psychology, beginning in September 1967, at an annual salary of $18,600. “I know I need not tell you,” she wrote, “how eager our psychologists are to have you join them.” Besides teaching graduate courses in psychology, his duties would include being in charge of the psychology component of a special experimental program for college freshmen that would be inaugurated at the Gradu- ate Center in September 1967. The freshman program was to serve two purposes: to provide an intellectually enriching experience for a select group of college students and to provide teaching experience for some graduate students who would serve as teaching assistants. Milgram would have four graduate students helping him teach an introductory psychology course that first year at CUNY. On January 31, Milgram replied favorably to her offer, but he presented a number of conditions that would need to be satisfied in order for him to accept the position: First, he needed reassurance that the position would be a tenured one; Rees had not mentioned anything about tenure in her letter. Second, he asked for a yearly discretionary fund of $3,000, to be used for research tied to his teaching—for example, expenses associated with research carried out by students in his seminars. Third, he requested research space of about 1,000 square feet in addition to his office and another, smaller space for a secretary. Finally, he needed to know what the Univer- sity’s policy was on payment for moving expenses. 158 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

He promised that he would give her his final decision no later than March 1. Although Milgram did not tell her this, he put off making a final decision because the Harvard tenure committee was still in the midst of de- liberating, and he was still hoping for a favorable decision. Meanwhile, Howard Leventhal had put his own final decision on hold until he knew whether Milgram was going to CUNY. In addition to the offer from CUNY, Leventhal had two others waiting in the wings, from the University of Wisconsin and from the University of Michigan. With Mil- gram’s situation at Harvard still unresolved, Leventhal felt that he couldn’t wait any longer, and he accepted the offer from Wisconsin. On February 8, Milgram informed David McClelland, the Social Rela- tions chairman, of the CUNY offer and his promise to them of a final decision by March 1. Any offer from Harvard would have to come before then. He would no longer be available after that date. Two days later, Mc- Clelland replied to Milgram, reflecting his own exasperation at the continuing and drawn-out state of uncertainty:

Dear Stan:

Thanks for letting me know of your deadline. As you know, our deliberations are deliberate and unpredictable, and I really can’t say anything that should inﬂuence you in the slightest at the moment. But it is useful to us to have at least one ﬁxed point in our sea of confusion!

Sincerely, Dave

On February 17, Rees wrote a reply to Milgram in which she gave her assurance about tenure, granted him the requested 1,000 square feet of research space along with an office and secretarial service. Also, the university would pay up to $1,000 for his moving expenses. However, she had to turn down his request for an annual allotment of $3,000 for teaching-related research, after consulting with Harold Proshansky, the executive officer of the psychology graduate programs, who told her that no full professor in any of Return to Academic Eden 159 the graduate programs received such guaranteed assistance. Instead, she wrote Milgram, the university practice is for faculty to put in requests each year as needed. So far, she said, she believed “that the psychologists found [that kind of annual research assistance] to be reasonable.” Sometime between February 10—the date of McClelland’s reply to Mil- gram’s note—and the end of the month, the Harvard committee reached a negative decision and informed Milgram about it. So on March 1, he wrote Dean Rees to accept the position at CUNY. On the face of it, Milgram’s new position at CUNY was a phenomenal one. Although he had been a mere lecturer his last year at Harvard, he was hired as a full professor—skipping the assistant and associate professor levels—and almost doubling the salary he had been making at Harvard. De- spite his youth—he was only thirty-three—he was already at the helm of a Ph.D. program in social psychology. He was also at an urban university, and the fact that both Stanley’s and Sasha’s mothers were living in New York and that they both had lots of family and friends there was also important. In addition, they were able to find an apartment in a choice suburban location overlooking the Hudson, in Riverdale, near beautiful parks and an excellent private school, the Riverdale Country School—“a kind of Princeton for kids”—that the children would attend when they were old enough. Although the job he landed was not of the scale he had been angling for, it did make him a big fish in a small pond. While his colleagues may have been highly regarded within the narrow confines of their research specialties, Milgram’s fame already transcended the usual disciplinary boundaries, and by now he had even achieved some recognition among the general public. For example, one of the very first anthologies to reprint his “Behavioral Study of Obedience” was a collection for writing and literature classes, The Norton Reader: An Anthology of Expository Prose, in 1965. Mag- azines, too, were spreading the word about the obedience study and its implications. In 1964, a provocative article titled “Could We Be Nazi Fol- lowers?” appeared in Science Digest, and in 1966 readers of Pageant magazine would find a piece titled “You Might Do Eichmann’s Job” among its pages to contemplate. 160 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

But initially the thought of not being at a prestigious university was very depressing for Milgram. In fact, at first he did not plan on staying at CUNY for more than five years. By then, perhaps, a more eminent school would beckon. Until then, he would have to put his self-esteem in cold storage. Within a year, Roger Brown was already recommending him for a new senior position that had opened up at Berkeley. Whatever pain Milgram felt inside, it wasn’t visible in his demeanor— at least to those outside his circle of friends and family. One manifestation of Milgram’s melancholy was the more subdued tone of his correspondence. In the past, especially when writing to friends, his letters would invariably be laced with his humor. Now, it was less in evidence—although not totally absent. For example, in writing about his new job to Barry McLaughlin, a former Harvard student, he pointed out that his building was located right across the street from the main public library on 42nd Street. He also noted that it was next door to Stern’s department store, so that, if he missed the psychology department by a few feet, he would find himself in the lingerie department. Above the undercurrent of gloom, Milgram’s first few months after accepting the CUNY position were marked by the ebb and flow of emotional ups and downs and a constant weighing of the pros and cons of his decision. His ambivalence was already in evidence the day after he accepted the job. On March 2, he informed Cornell’s psychology department chairman, Harry Levin, that he had decided to go to New York City rather than Ithaca, adding: “God knows if it will work out, but the city has always attracted me.” His ambivalence was still evident about a week later when he informed his former Yale colleague, Irving Janis, of his decision and remarked wistfully that “it may turn out well.” In his own mind, he had failed to make the grade. To his friend Paul Hollander, he bemoaned the fact that he was “no longer first class Ivy League,” but at the same time he felt good about his high-speed move from a lecturer with an annual salary of $11,000 to a full professor making almost $20,000 a year. He had mixed feelings about Manhattan. It was badly overcrowded, but at the same time, because of its incomparable cultural delights, it was also a Return to Academic Eden 161 great stimulant. And judgments about his current situation would in- evitably involve comparisons to Cambridge. In another letter to Hollander, he noticed something about the flow of pedestrians in Manhattan. He had “the feeling that if you bumped into someone in Harvard Square there would be mutual apologies while in New York you would simply be trampled on silently and unnoticed.... The contrast between my present place of work and Harvard is so vast that it really defies comparison, and perhaps that is one of the reasons I chose the City University; there is no need to compare, indeed no possibility.” Writing to another correspondent, Milgram noted that while “New York is less than Cambridge, it is also more than Cambridge. The intensity of its cultural and artistic life is beyond anything else in the country.” But the city lacked the sense of community Stanley and Sasha had enjoyed in Cam- bridge, where at any cultural event they were likely to run into people they knew. And although they had not yet recovered from their depression over leaving Cambridge, they realized that New York fulfilled their needs more adequately than almost any other city in the United States could. Virtually all the letters Milgram wrote to friends during the summer and the early fall of transition from Harvard to CUNY demonstrated, in one form or another, conflicted feelings, a balance sheet of the pluses and mi- nuses of their move. But a letter to Leventhal in Wisconsin, written toward the end of September, stands out for the raw, unrestrained nature of the un- burdening it contains:

Let me tell about life in New York. First, making the transition from Harvard to City University was not easy, and hardest of all around the boundaries of the soul. I experienced a full blown “Harvard Hangover”, on or off for several months. Depression, a sense of futility, resentment, indignation, and a generalized malaise punctuated by moments of optimism, confidence, ambition, aspiration and buoyancy. I was really shaken up (—shaken down seems more appropriate a term). But the spirit has great recuperative powers, and except for a flickering feeling of sadness, now and then, I am now in a good mood, and am looking forward to a productive year. 162 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

My laboratories are still being built, but progress is rapid, and when they are completed, ought to be ample. It is too early in the term to comment on the quality of the students. Sasha is finding life somewhat more difficult, though we still appreciate our fine apartment.... All in all, the quality of life is a solid B+, a little less than the straight A we had been leading, but still an honors grade.

In almost every way, CUNY compared badly with Harvard, although it would turn out to be the ticket to a wider space for creating a larger array of new courses than “Eden” would have ever allowed. Milgram was energized by challenges, and building a new graduate program in social psychology would provide no shortage of them. CHAPTER 9

CITY PSYCHOLOGY

T TOOK SOME time for the Milgrams to adjust to life in New York Iafter so many years in Cambridge. In Manhattan, Milgram wrote Hol- lander in 1967, he felt “somewhat like an innocent provincial dropped into this intense, crowded, discourteous, inexorably moving mass.” But he was immensely happy with the apartment they found in Riverdale. Overlooking the Hudson, the apartment afforded the shimmering sight of a constant array of boats passing under their windows, and from their terrace they had a panoramic view of three bridges in all their gritty majesty: the George Washington, Tappan Zee, and Henry Hudson bridges. Stanley also had reason to be happy about his office at the Graduate Center, which was special in a number of ways. His office, Room 503, was on the south side of the building, so instead of brick walls, it had a large window that offered a view of Bryant Park and the New York Public Li- brary across the street as well as the Empire State Building, its looming grandeur dominating the scene. It was also larger than most faculty offices and came with a secretary’s desk and a glass-enclosed vestibule. Being on the fifth floor also gave him an added convenience: It was the only floor in the building that was accessible by both banks of elevators. For many years, a flat silhouette-like human figure served as a silent sentry in the vestibule outside of Milgram’s office door. The inscription at the bottom read: “The genuine article, by S. Milgram and L. Steinberg, based on a form by Trova.” Its front side consisted of a collage of first pages of journal articles published by the social-

163 164 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD personality program’s faculty. It was Milgram’s whimsical way of showcas- ing the achievements of his colleagues. Sasha stayed at home, taking care of the apartment and the children, as she had done in Cambridge. Although Stanley was at work most of the day, he remained focused on the children’s development. Michele, he noted, “was bright as a flame” and her language development was so rapid that Milgram felt he had to speak to her at the level of an adult. Marc, still a baby, was busy crawling after his sister and pushing furniture around, with determination etched on his face. CUNY’s graduate school, as a whole, was in its infancy when Milgram joined its faculty. CUNY itself was only six years old, having been established in 1961 by an act of the New York State legislature, and fashioned out of the loose-knit amalgam of New York’s four public colleges: Queens, Hunter, Brooklyn, and City College. CUNY grew into what it is today— the largest municipal university in the United States, involving a consor- tium of some eighteen schools and campuses spread across all five boroughs of New York City. Although master’s programs existed in a number of subjects at the four original colleges as early as 1920, the attainment of university status carried with it the right to grant the Ph.D. degree, and several disciplines started developing doctoral programs, with their numbers increasing from year to year. In 1965 the university graduated its first small crop of Ph.D.’s. The first dean of graduate studies, appointed in 1961, was a remarkable woman named Mina Rees, who, even before coming to the graduate school, had received wide acclaim for her contributions to mathematics. She began her professional career at Hunter College teaching mathematics. With the outbreak of World War II, she took a leave of absence from Hunter to work for a government agency in which she could apply her mathematical skills to the war effort. At the end of the war, the Navy asked her to head the mathematics branch of the Office of Naval Research, and in 1952–1953 she was promoted to the position of deputy science director. Rees’s energetic leadership as dean of graduate studies at CUNY was largely responsible for the school’s rapid early growth and expansion and for the specific form graduate education at CUNY would take. Rees had a City Psychology 165 grand vision of building a university with first-rate graduate programs and faculty—a vision that was shared and supported by the chancellor of the City University of New York, Albert Bowker, newly appointed to that office in 1963. Rees and Bowker agreed that for the graduate school to succeed as a unified, cohesive entity, all the graduate programs located at the various college campuses—Hunter, City, Queens, and Brooklyn—would have to be brought under central administrative control, rather than have each campus award its own Ph.D.’s. Before Rees had taken the position of dean of graduate studies, she had spent some time abroad at the University of London. Impressed with that university’s organizational structure and its intercol- lege faculty committees, Rees imported that idea to CUNY and created university-wide committees, each consisting of faculty from one discipline from each of the four senior campuses. It was just such a committee that later took up Milgram’s candidacy in 1967, unanimously recommending his appointment as professor of psychology. The transformation of a unified graduate school from an amorphous concept to a physical reality required a physical space that would not only serve as the school’s administrative nerve center but also enhance its legitimacy. In early 1966, the opportunity arose to buy a building in an ideal location in mid-Manhattan to serve as the home base for the graduate school. It was a rather nondescript eighteen-story office building with a Wool- worth’s department store at street level, at 33 West 42nd Street, across from the main branch of the New York Public Library. Rees arranged for the is- suance of a bond that enabled the university to buy the property. Before it became the Graduate Center, the building’s main claim to fame was that in February 1924, George Gershwin gave the premier performance of his “Rhapsody in Blue” on the concert stage at Aeolian Hall, which was located in the building. The owner at the time CUNY purchased it was—improb- ably—Yale University. This may well have seemed an unexpected continuing reminder for Milgram that his career would forever be building on his early accomplishments in New Haven. Working with dean of grounds, Marilyn Mikulsky, Rees redesigned the building to become the Graduate Center. Their efforts resulted in an archi- 166 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD tectural marvel that received a number of awards for excellence in design. The transformed building had a number of innovative features that made it an attractive and inviting place. Occupying the first floor was a spacious walk-through mall from 42nd to 43rd Street, providing the Graduate Cen- ter with a unique “vest pocket” campus in the middle of Manhattan. Its top floor became an elegant “buffeteria” with slate floors and a walnut ceiling and catering done by a former chef of a famous Persian restaurant whom Mina Rees had coaxed out of retirement. The Graduate Center had a hidden 400-seat auditorium beneath 42nd Street and an underground library extending all the way to Sixth Avenue. The third floor was occupied by a state-of-the-art computer center, where Bitnet—the precursor to the Inter- net—was developed to connect CUNY’s network of campuses sprawled across the five boroughs of New York. Although the Graduate Center (later officially renamed Graduate School and University Center) was the administrative headquarters for all graduate programs, not all of them were located there. Some were scattered throughout the various campuses of the CUNY system. In 1967, the year Milgram came to CUNY, three were situated at the Graduate Center: social psychology, personality, and developmental psychology. The following year, a doctoral program in environmental psychology—the first of its kind in the country—was added. In 1971, social and personality psychology were combined into one subprogram, called social-personality psychology. Each of the subprograms based at the Graduate Center had its core faculty, whose main affiliation was with the Graduate Center, as well as adjunct faculty whose primary appointment was at one of the campuses but who also taught, with varying degrees of frequency, in one of the subprograms at the Graduate Center.

…

One of the main reasons Milgram had turned down offers from Cornell and the University of California, Santa Cruz, in favor of CUNY was that he had been developing an interest in the psychology of city life. His very first year at CUNY, he introduced a new course, an urban research semi- City Psychology 167 nar—the first of a number of courses he created on urban psychology—and quickly got his students involved in innovative experiments showing how aspects of behavior in the city differed from behavior in small towns. Although at CUNY the psychology of urban life became a central focus of Milgram’s interests, his belief that social psychology could be applied to urban issues preceded his arrival in New York. In the fall of 1966, his last year at Harvard, he had offered an undergraduate tutorial on urban psychology to a group of Harvard and Radcliffe students, comparing New York, London, and Paris in terms of the factors that contributed to their differing atmospheres. They put ads in the New York Times and the Har- vard Crimson soliciting reports of people’s experiences in those three cities that could shed some light on their distinctive characteristics. A few of the students also did some film studies in various cities comparing people’s walking speed and the number of collisions between pedestrians. Even earlier, in 1964, Milgram and Paul Hollander had coauthored a “think piece” for The Nation on the Kitty Genovese incident. Kitty Genovese was an attractive twenty-eight-year-old bar manager who was killed on the night of March 13, 1964, as she was coming home to her apartment in the Kew Gardens section of Queens. Her killer had stalked her and stabbed her repeatedly for over half an hour. A subsequent investigation by a journalist revealed that thirty-eight of her neighbors had witnessed some part of the assault or heard her cries for help, but not one of them came to her aid. The incident shocked the nation, and it became emblematic of the alienating influence of city life. It also led two New York City social psychologists, Bibb Latané at Columbia University and John Darley at New York University, to conduct a series of experiments on the “bystander effect” to try to understand the phenomenon, prompting an interest in social psychology among the public. The article in The Nation was a conceptual analysis, pointing to certain behavioral consequences of urban life that might have led to the inaction of Kitty Genovese’s neighbors while she was attacked and murdered. For example, Milgram and Hollander argued that a violent act would be unexpected and incongruous in a respectable neighborhood. As a result, many of the neighbors could not fathom the possibility that such an extreme 168 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD act—the murder of a young woman—was taking place nearby. Instead, they were predisposed toward a more probable, and consoling, interpretation of the event—perhaps two lovers were quarreling, or a noisy, drunken party was taking place. The article brought a refreshingly rational and nonjudgmental approach to a tragic event in which outrage tended to blur the public’s perspective: “In our righteous denunciation of the thirty-eight witnesses, we should not forget that they did not commit the murder; they merely failed to prevent it. It is no more than clear thinking to bear in mind the moral difference.” Milgram’s belief that social psychology could add a new level of understanding to behavior in the urban environment did not merely influence his own research. He made sure it influenced the graduate careers of his students. As he wrote in the university’s catalogue:

The social psychology area of specialization rests on two basic foundations. First, it is grounded in traditional social psychological theory and research. Courses and training are offered in the fields of attitude change, group processes, and person perception, and in experimental, field and survey methods. Second, students are trained to use the surrounding urban environment as a source of ideas and problems in the development of new lines of inquiry in social psychology. The city of New York is conceived as a major laboratory to be utilized in the research and training of graduate students in social psychology. The location of the University Graduate Center in mid-Manhattan is particularly advantageous in this regard.

The graduate program’s urban orientation was soon reﬂected in the kinds of research pursued by some of the faculty and students: the analysis of crowds, psychological stress and social class, health-related behavior in urban settings, and urban design and social behavior. It became the ﬁrst social psychology graduate program in the country with an urban emphasis. Undoubtedly, the graduate school’s administration was pleased with this emphasis, since such an orientation was consistent with one of the school’s goals, as laid out by its creators in 1960. City Psychology 169

By September 1969—two years after Milgram’s arrival at CUNY—he and his students had conducted a sufficient number of innovative experiments showing how aspects of behavior in the city differed from behavior in smaller towns to warrant an invitation for him to speak at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association in Washington, D.C. A slightly shortened version of the talk appeared as an article titled “The Experience of Living in Cities” the following year in Science magazine. In his talk, Milgram introduced the idea of overload as a unifying concept to help make sense of the various behavioral differences between urban and rural residents he and his students, as well as others, had found. In 1938, the sociologist Louis Wirth had identified three defining properties of cities: a large number of residents, a high population density, and a heterogeneous citizenry. While Milgram valued Wirth’s insightful analysis, he felt that a concept was needed to help explain how Wirth’s demographic facts were internalized by the individual, affecting his subjective experience of city life. Milgram felt that the missing link could be provided by the concept of overload, in which a system is barraged by more input than it can process. The kind of behavioral changes that city life engendered could be understood, Milgram argued, as representing the various ways that people tried to adapt to the sensory onslaught of city life. Milgram’s article in Science reported a number of experiments he and his students conducted that identified some of the specific consequences of stimulus overload. In one such study, city dwellers and small-town residents were compared in their readiness to help a stranger when providing such help was an inconvenience. In addition, the study attempted to determine if the more compartmentalized, fleeting relationships of the city would lead urban salespersons to provide less assistance to a stranger when the helpful act was unrelated to their usual, job-related roles. The experimenters made phone calls to people in three cities—Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia—and to residents of small towns located in the same states as the cities—such as Coxsackie, New York; Chenoa, Illi- nois; and McAdoo, Pennsylvania. In each case the researcher pretended to be a long-distance caller who had been mistakenly connected to the respondent by the telephone operator. By design, in both types of locations 170 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD half the call recipients were housewives and half were salesgirls in women’s clothing stores. The caller began by asking about the weather for travel purposes. Then she said, “Please hold on,” put the phone down for a minute, and when she picked it up again, asked for information about hotels and motels in the respondent’s area. The subject’s degree of helpfulness was given a numerical score, ranging from 1 if she simply hung up without a word to 16 if she stayed on the phone when the caller put it down for a minute and cooperated fully with all the requests. The findings: Overall, people in cities were less helpful than the small-town residents, and in both types of places, those who were called at home were more helpful and informative than those called at work. Subsequent research by others also has generally found city dwellers to be less helpful than those living in towns. Milgram’s article in Science laid the foundation for the newly developing field of urban psychology. An offshoot of Milgram’s interest in the psychology of urban life was his research on the mental maps, or the subjective ge- ography, of the residents of two major cities—first New York and, later, Paris. These efforts paralleled his application of the concept of overload to urban life. Just as Milgram had introduced the overload idea to serve as a conceptual bridge between the objective demographic features of cities that Wirth identified—numbers, density, heterogeneity—and the individual’s subjective experience of city life, he undertook the study of mental maps of cities to better understand how the objective geographical layout of a city was represented subjectively in the minds of its residents. Milgram explained the value of this kind of research:

The image of the city is not just extra mental baggage; it is the necessary accompaniment to living in a complex and highly variegated environment.... People make many important decisions based on their conception of a city, rather than the reality of it. That’s been well demonstrated. So it is important for planners to know how the city sits in the mind. And wouldn’t it be enlightening to have such mental maps for Peri- clean Athens, for Dickensian London? Unfortunately, there were no social psychologists to construct such maps systematically at the time, but we know better and will do our duty. City Psychology 171

Despite their practical importance, the study of cognitive maps of cities was uncharted territory for psychologists, so Milgram fashioned some new methods that would suit the needs of such research. The ﬁrst one that he and his students devised would not only provide a way to externalize a person’s subjective experience but also allow such individual perceptions to be aggregated, making it possible to draw some general conclusions. They created a “scene sampling” technique that would provide a precise and objective assessment of which parts of New York City were most, and least, recognizable. Simply put, if a person were dropped off at a randomly chosen location in the city, how likely would it be that he would know where he was? Milgram emphasized the need for an objective means of geographic sampling by contrasting it with the limitations of a method a casual investigator might use to determine whether or not Manhattan was more recognizable than Brooklyn: “He shows a group of people a picture of the Em- pire State Building to represent Manhattan and his uncle’s garage to represent Brooklyn. He would ﬁnd, no doubt, that more people could recognize the Empire State Building in Manhattan than his uncle’s garage in Brooklyn. But that would hardly be an objective basis for asserting that Manhattan was more recognizable.” Milgram’s method built on the fact that any point on Earth can be specified as the intersection of its longitude and latitude. Using U.S. Ge- ological Survey maps of New York City with a fine-grained format which presents this coordinate system of longitudes and latitudes in 1,000- meter intervals, he created a viewing point for the study at every intersection of a 1,000-meter line of latitude with a 1,000-meter line of longitude. To bring the viewing points down to a manageable number, Milgram’s team systematically thinned them out, ending up with about 150 scenes spread out among the five boroughs—Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and the Bronx—each of which they pho- tographed in color. Their study sample consisted of a total of 200 subjects. Since one would expect familiarity with different parts of New York to depend on a person’s place of residence, the number of subjects from each borough within the total sample of 200 was proportionate to the population size of that borough. 172 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

TABLE 9.1 Percentage of Correct Scene Placements Within Each Borough Correct Correct Correct Borough Neighborhood Street Bronx 26.0 5.9 2.6 Brooklyn 35.8 11.4 2.8 Manhattan 64.1 32.0 15.5 Queens 39.6 10.8 2.2 Staten Island 26.0 5.4 0.6

SOURCE: Milgram, S. (1992) The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments, 2nd ed. Edited by J. Sabini and M. Silver. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Each slide was projected on a screen, and the subjects were asked to place the scene depicted in the photograph. Subjects were asked to identify the scene’s location with increasing specificity: first, they had to indicate which borough the scene was located in; then to identify its neighborhood (using a map that divided the city into fifty-four neighborhoods); and, finally, to give its exact street location. Table 9.1 presents the percentage of correct placements within each borough. Although the recognizability of a place diminished as the required precision increased, across all three criteria Manhattan turned out to be the most recognizable of the boroughs. For example, about twice as many random locations were correctly placed in Manhattan as those in the other boroughs. The neighborhoods of Manhattan were five times as likely to be identified correctly as those in the Bronx. The disparity between the recognizability of Manhattan and the other boroughs becomes even greater with the most stringent criterion of identification—street location. Milgram also found that Manhattan was such a dominant presence in the mental maps of New Yorkers that they recognized parts of Manhattan more frequently than sections of their own boroughs. For example, people living in Queens recognized four times as many street locations in Man- hattan as in Queens. Commenting on this finding, Milgram said:

Areas of Queens have often been accused of being nondescript, and taxi drivers are reported to fear entering Queens lest they never ﬁnd their way City Psychology 173

out. And with good reason, when even the people who live in Queens are lost in their home borough compared with the sense of place they experience in Manhattan! Thus it is correct to say that New York City is not merely culturally but also imagistically rooted in Manhattan.

…

One of the abiding insights of Milgram’s work is the surprising degree of influence that seemingly invisible social rules, or norms, exert on our daily actions. Although powerful, these rules are subtle and generally unnoticed, except when they are violated. Have you ever taken an elevator ride in which you maintained constant eye contact with another passenger standing next to you? Have you ever indulged in a lavish meal in an upscale restaurant and, when the waiter gave you the tab, instead of leaving a generous tip, you asked him for a donation to your favorite charity? Have you ever stood at the corner of a busy downtown intersection and sung “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the top of your lungs? Would you? An innocuous remark made by Sasha’s mother during a visit to the Mil- grams’ home in Riverdale led Milgram to devise an unexpectedly terrorizing experiment on the surprising power of norms. Only this time, the stress was felt not by the subjects, but by the experimenters themselves. Milgram’s mother-in-law lived on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and she would take a city bus to get to the Milgrams’ home in Riverdale. One day in the early fall of 1971, after she arrived at the Milgrams’ apartment, she asked Stanley: “Why don’t young people get up anymore in a bus or a subway train to give their seat to a gray-haired elderly woman?” Milgram replied: “Did you ever ask one of them for a seat?” Looking at him as if he were insane, she said: “No.” At the next meeting of his Urban Research seminar, he and his students embarked on a study to find out just exactly what would happen if each of them approached a seated passenger and asked for his or her seat. When he first suggested it to his class, he was met with nervous laughter. Many of the students expressed the opinion that New Yorkers were not going to relinquish their seats just because a stranger asked them to. When he 174 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD asked for volunteers, he did not get any. Finally, one student, Ira Good- man, stepped forward and bravely agreed to carry out the assignment. Ac- companied by a classmate who would serve as an observer, he was to approach twenty different passengers and ask each of them politely, but without any explanation, for their seat. Soon rumors started circulating in the psychology department: “They’re getting up! They’re getting up!” Peo- ple were astonished by Goodman’s discovery. “Students made pilgrimages to Goodman as if he had uncovered a profound secret of survival in the New York subway,” Milgram recalled. At the next class session, Goodman reported that about half of the passengers gave up their seat. However, that result was based on a sample of fourteen subjects, not the requested twenty. When Milgram asked him why he didn’t complete the assignment, he answered: “I just couldn’t go on. It was one of the most difficult things I ever did in my life.” To find out if this kind of response was unique to Goodman, Milgram decided to have everyone in class go through the experiment—including himself and his colleague, Irwin Katz, who team-taught the course with him. Here is how he described his own experience:

Frankly, despite Goodman’s initial experience, I assumed it would be easy. I approached a seated passenger and was about to utter the magical phrase. But the words seemed lodged in my trachea and would simply not emerge. I stood there frozen, then retreated, the mission unfulﬁlled. My student observer urged me to try again, but I was overwhelmed by para- lyzing inhibition. I argued to myself: “What kind of craven coward are you? You told your class to do it. How can you go back to them without carrying out your own assignment?” Finally, after several unsuccessful tries, I went up to a passenger and choked out the request, “Excuse me sir, may I have your seat?” A moment of stark anomic panic overcame me. But the man got right up and gave me the seat. A second blow was yet to come. Taking the man’s seat, I was overwhelmed by the need to behave in a way that would justify my request. My head sank between my knees, and I could feel my face blanching. I was not role-playing. I actually felt as if I were going to perish.... City Psychology 175

The next semester, in the spring of 1972, Milgram decided to bring his stand-up routine down into the New York subway again, but this time in a more refined and complex form. With members of his Experimental Social Psychology class, he created variations in the way they would ask for a seat, resulting in four different experimental conditions: The first was the No Jus- tification condition, in which the experimenter stood in front of a randomly chosen seated passenger and said simply, without further explanation: “Ex- cuse me, may I have your seat?” This was essentially the same approach used by his students in the previous semester in their first experimental for- ays into the subway. The result: 56 percent of the passengers gave up their seats. Another 12.3 percent responded with a compromise—they gave the requester a seat without relinquishing theirs by sliding over to make room for him. If the two kinds of responses are added, Milgram’s students obtained a seat by simply asking for it 68.3 percent of the time. The second condition was the Trivial Justification condition. It was created to test the idea that the high rate of compliance in the first condition was due to subjects’ assuming that there was some compelling reason for the request. In this condition the experimenter requested a seat by saying: “Excuse me. May I have your seat? I can’t read my book standing up.” A significantly lower percentage of requests, though still a surprisingly high number of them—41.9 percent—resulted in the experimenter’s obtaining a seat. Apparently, the addition of a trivial justification for the request prevented subjects from coming up with a more compelling justification for surrendering their seats. In a third condition, the Overheard condition, the subway car became the stage for a moving performance by pairs of students. Here two experimenters would position themselves in front of the subject. Appearing to be strangers to each other, one would ask the other, “Excuse me. Do you think it would be all right if I asked someone for a seat?” His partner answered with “What?” The experimenter then repeated the question. This time his partner answered, noncommittally: “I don’t know.” This condition was created to determine whether the high rate of compliance obtained so far was a startle response—the request was so unexpected that the seated passenger didn’t have enough time to come up with a reason for turning down the 176 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD student. Giving up one’s seat may have been easier than figuring out the best way to turn down the request quickly. This condition would help the students determine whether giving the subject some time would result in more refusals. After the two experimenters concluded their brief dialogue—which was staged so that it was loud enough to be heard by passengers seated in front of them—they waited about ten seconds. Then one of them asked the passenger seated in front of him for his or her seat. There was a significant drop in the rate of compliance. The experiments succeeded in obtaining a seat only 36.6 percent of the time, compared with 68.3 percent in the first condition. A fourth condition was created to determine whether a more indirect form of a request, in which eye contact between the requester and passenger was minimized, would result in less cooperation. Here the request was made in written form rather than orally. The experimenter handed a sheet of paper to the passenger seated in front of him with the following request written on it: “Excuse me. May I have your seat? I’d like very much to sit down. Thank you.” Milgram had expected a drop in compliance, when the pressure of a face-to-face oral request was removed. It turned out that he was wrong: 50 percent of the subway riders surrendered their seats. Mil- gram speculated that the somewhat bizarre form of the request may have made the passenger uncomfortable and spurred him to end the encounter quickly. Although subsidiary to the main findings of the study, there were some sex differences involved in the pattern of the results. Across conditions, more passengers stood up for a female experimenter than for their male counterparts. And more male than female subjects relinquished their seats to the experimenters. One of the student experimenters was Harold Takooshian, who went on to become a faculty member at Fordham University and has continued to do research on urban life. He draws some insightful parallels between the subway experiments and the obedience research:

The experimenters’ reactions . . . [were] the most salient and unexpected feature of our entire study of subway norm violation. We found that it was City Psychology 177

no accident that strangers are never seen asking for seats on the subway. Each and every experimenter reported experiencing great and dispropor- tionate amounts of tension. This tension even resembled the extremes produced in Milgram’s experiment on obedience.... For example, at least two of the female experimenters reported uncontrollable nervous laughter during the trials, similar to that found in the obedience study. ...When asked the well-put question, “Well, why did you go on despite the discomfort you felt?” one experimenter responded, “Well, I had to do it for the course,” so she surmounted her discomfort and completed the experiment. The parallel between the tension here and in Milgram’s obedience study is a clear one. . . . It is odd that this simple violation of a seemingly mild norm should arouse any degree of tension at all, as if there were some morality attached to it—as if our asking for a seat were not “un-norm-al” in the sense of “not-average,” but “ab-norm-al” in the moral sense.

Research in the subway did not remain an underground phenomenon for long. At the end of the semester, on June 2, 1972, Milgram presented his findings at an interdisciplinary conference on the cognitive and emotional aspects of urban life he had organized at the Graduate Center. A few years later, the research surfaced again when one of his students—John Sabini— began working on his doctoral research. Somewhat heavyset and boyish looking, he was one of Milgram’s brightest students. Sabini is now a faculty member and the past chairman of the psychology department at the Uni- versity of Pennsylvania. A wiry and Bohemian-looking fellow student named Maury Silver was his closest friend at CUNY. Sabini and Silver shared a philosophical bent and a near-collegial relationship with Milgram when they were still his doctoral students. Sabini was planning to do his doctoral dissertation on the topic of people’s reluctance to reprimand others, with Milgram as his chairman. Mil- gram wanted him to do it in a naturalistic setting, so Sabini tried out a couple of experimental performances in the subway. One scenario involved a bully whose actions deserved condemnation. In it, a female confederate entered a crowded subway train and the experimenter—Sabini—followed a 178 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD bit later. Maury Silver was also there serving as the observer. One day, the experiment turned ugly. The confederate took a seat, and Sabini went up to her, saying, “That’s my seat; I saw it first.” After trying unsuccessfully to elicit the support of the person sitting next to her, the confederate got up and left the car while Sabini took her vacated seat. Everything was going according to plan when, about a minute later, a middle-aged man with a slight foreign accent reproached Sabini, the bully, saying to him: “That was- n’t a nice thing to do.” Then he continued, “How would you like it if I told you to get up?” The passenger’s indignation seemed to escalate, because his next move was to crouch down in front of Sabini, look him straight in the eye and scream, “Someday somebody could kill you for that!” His anger apparently had not yet dissipated, because he then grabbed Sabini and picked him up as he screamed, “Get up!” and shoved him across the aisle. He finally sat down in the seat from which he had evicted Sabini. After Sabini and Silver managed to calm him down, all of them exited the train at the next stop. Sabini and Silver went back to Milgram and reported on their dangerous experience. Says Sabini: “I remember him sitting in his office. He puts his feet up [on his desk] and says, ‘There are anthropologists who study headhunting cultures where they risk their lives for their thesis. I don’t see why psychologists shouldn’t have to do that.’” But he did agree to let Sabini pursue his research questions within the safe and controlled confines of the laboratory.

…

There is one ﬁnal piece of urban research that deserves mention. Milgram noted that a pervasive characteristic of urban life is that, while we may become familiar with the faces of a number of people, we never in fact interact with them. He dubbed such individuals “familiar strangers.” In the spring semester of 1971, students in his Experimental Social Psychology class conducted a study to learn more about them. The platform for launch- ing the study was the Spuyten Duyvil railroad station on the Hudson division of the Penn Central Railroad. Not coincidentally, this was Milgram’s stop for his twenty-six-minute commute to and from Grand Central Sta- City Psychology 179

FIGURE 9.1 Typical photograph distributed to commuters, used in the study of the familiar stranger. SOURCE: Milgram, S. (1992) The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments, 2nd ed. Edited by J. Sabini and M. Silver. New York: McGraw-Hill. tion, located about two and a half blocks from the Graduate Center. The Spuyten Duyvil stop was only a short walk from the Milgrams’ apartment in Riverdale. Early one morning, his students gathered at the station and trained their cameras on clusters of commuters who were waiting for one of three trains that would take them to their offices in Manhattan. For ease of identification, the students numbered each person depicted in the photographic prints (Figure 9.1), and multiple copies were made of each picture. A few weeks later, teams of students returned to the station and distributed manila envelopes to commuters as they waited for their train. Each enve- lope contained a photograph of commuters traveling on their train and a questionnaire. They identified themselves as students at CUNY studying community problems, and asked the commuters to work on the questionnaire during their train ride. The student teams boarded the train and, when the train arrived at Grand Central Station, they collected all the completed questionnaires. Out of 139 passengers in the three trains who were given the packet, 119 or 86 percent of them returned it. 180 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

Milgram and his students found that 89.5 percent of the subjects identi- ﬁed at least one pictured familiar stranger. On average, they reported seeing four familiar strangers in the photograph. In contrast, only 61.5 percent reported conversing with at least one other passenger; the average number of passengers they had spoken to was 1.5. When asked if they ever wondered about any of these familiar strangers, about 47 percent answered “yes.” But that curiosity did not necessarily lead to any further interaction, because only 32 percent reported even a slight inclination to start a conversation with one of them. Milgram felt that the tendency not to interact with familiar strangers was a form of adaptation to the stimulus overload one experienced in the urban environment. These individuals are depersonalized and treated as part of the scenery, rather than as people with whom to engage. As he explained:

In order to handle all the possible inputs from the environment we filter out inputs so that we allow only diluted forms of interaction. In the case of the familiar stranger, we permit a person to impinge on us perceptually, but close off any further interaction. In part this is because perceptual processing of a person takes considerably less time than social processing. We can see a person at a glance, but it takes more time to sustain social involvement.

Milgram’s application of the overload concept here, while plausible, is not fully convincing. He had introduced the idea of stimulus overload to explain the distinctive forms of behavior that urban life engenders. To apply it to strangers, he would have needed to carry out a control, or comparison, condition at a train stop in a town or other non-urban setting— something he never did. What we clearly do have here is yet another demonstration of a principle that emerges from many of Milgram’s other studies, including his obedience and conformity studies: the gap that exists between intentions and actions. Close to 50 percent of the commuters Milgram polled had been curious about the familiar strangers they had City Psychology 181 encountered, but only about 30 percent had even considered initiating conversations with them. About the same time he was publishing the brief report on the study, Milgram was producing a ﬁlm, The City and the Self, with the help of a graduate student, Harry From. It was a visual companion piece to his article “The Experience of Living in Cities.” In the ﬁlm, he makes some observations about the familiar stranger that are powerfully evocative and possess a ring of truth, especially in light of the events of September 11, 2001. The film is narrated by Milgram. Most of the time his narration is sparse and understated, letting the unfolding scenes speak for themselves. But in the segment about the familiar stranger, his voice-over becomes a lyrical prose poem, which he recites with an ache in his voice that is almost palpable.

We studied the familiar strangers. We spoke to them in station after station, and this is what they told us. As the years go by, familiar strangers become harder to talk to. The barrier hardens. And we know— if we were to meet one of these strangers far from the station, say, when we were abroad, we would stop, shake hands, and acknowledge for the first time that we know each other. But not here. And we know— if there was a great calamity, a flood, a fire, a storm, the barriers would crumble. We would talk to each other. 182 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

But the problem for those of us who live in the city is this: How can we come closer— without the ﬁre, without the ﬂood, without the storm.

…

The Milgram that students and colleagues encountered at CUNY was essentially the same complex, sometimes enigmatic, individual people knew at Yale and Harvard. But in his role as program head, he became control- ling and domineering—a prima donna who always had to have his way. As a result, he was sometimes a difficult person to deal with. For example, Harold Proshansky, the executive officer for psychology, once suggested that the Graduate Center create an adjunct position for Otto Klineberg, a world-famous “elder statesman” of social psychology who was known for his work on intergroup relationships. Although others in the department felt that it would be an honor to have Klineberg join them, Milgram first wanted to know what Klineberg would do for the program. So, before inviting him to join the social-personality program, he stubbornly insisted that a lunch be arranged for Klineberg to find out what he could contribute. A lunch meeting was arranged, and afterward Milgram agreed to Klineberg’s being on board. Still, someone meeting Milgram for the first time would likely find him gracious and very charming. He took everything in and seemed genuinely interested in what someone had to say. But he had no patience for small talk, and he would rudely cut a person off if he thought what he or she was saying was trivial or nonsensical. Judith Waters, a feisty and outspoken former student and graduate assistant, recalls: “When he was displeased with anyone, including me, he made no effort to disguise his feelings. Moreover, he was perfectly democratic. It didn’t matter if the person was a student, a colleague, or even an invited guest speaker—he could be equally sharp in his comments.” As John Sabini put it: “He was an equal opportunity insulter.” City Psychology 183

In fact, he occasionally targeted his own family. Robert Panzarella, now a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, recalls that he was once having a conversation with Milgram in his ofﬁce when there was a light knock on the door:

It’s Sasha, and she just peeks in through the door, and he gets very upset, it seemed to me. He just turned to her most abruptly and said, “Can’t you see I’m talking to Bob? I don’t want to be disturbed when I’m talking to Bob.” And she just said, “I just wanted to let you know, I’m leaving now,” and she closes the door and leaves. I always felt very bad for her—that may not have been typical behavior at all. It may have been that whatever we were discussing was putting him on edge at the moment or something. I don’t know. But it was very striking.

And Joel Milgram recalled a time in the 1980s when he and Stanley had been discussing the possibility of a joint writing project about their childhood:

I called him at some absurd hour because I was excited about it. Naturally, he wouldn’t speak to me then and hung up. . . . My brother was a real good hanger-upper. [He] was very arrogant, you know, in many ways. I mean if you called him while he was watching CBS News, he’d simply say, “I can’t talk to you now, you call back,” and hang up. . . . That was just accepted.... [The] family just learned. And it just put some distance in our adult lives between us.

As a teacher, he was very demanding, always challenging students to think creatively. Harold Takooshian remembers:

He didn’t look extraordinary. But he certainly was extraordinary within a minute of hearing him open his mouth. He had that incisive way of expressing himself that just captured it. Everybody in the room could say: Yes, that’s what I was trying to say. [He was] just articulate. I would draw the parallel with William Buckley. He has that capacity too, of putting into 184 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

words inchoate ideas that everyone is grappling with. I would say that was one of Milgram’s primary qualities. He was scintillating in the class. . . . Sparks could ﬂy.... But it was so intense that some people didn’t care for that.... He was conscious of people’s personal feelings, but that doesn’t mean he always wanted to make you feel good. Sometimes he would make devastating comments to people. . . . He was very resentful of platitudes, of party lines, of truisms, and if he felt that somebody was saying something that didn’t have much basis . . . he would challenge you very quickly. And since he was the unquestioned authority in the class, he could say it in a strong way.

While he clearly was the “unquestioned authority” in his classes, he apparently thought it important to point out the situational nature of that characteristic and stress that it did not define his whole being. Robert Pan- zarella recalls a class with Milgram: “He began by saying, ‘I didn’t study obedience because I’m an authoritarian person,’ at which several of us burst out laughing.... Apparently, he was conscious that this is what people thought anyway.” And in a sense Milgram was at least partially right— while he may have been acting in a dictatorial fashion in his classes, he was not dogmatic or inflexible in his authoritarianism. For example, Panzarella remembers his first encounter with Milgram. It was the first day of the fall semester, a beautiful September day, sunny and warm. Panzarella was sitting in the front row and the first thing Milgram did after he walked into the classroom was point to him and say, “Take those sunglasses off!” Pan- zarella looked back at Milgram, through the sunglasses and replied, simply, “These are prescription glasses. I need them.” Milgram paused a moment and said, “All right,” and dropped the matter. Takooshian recalls a similar exchange during his first year in the graduate program:

One thing he did in the class which I was really surprised about . . . he said, “You know, it is really hard to rate you people because you haven’t taken that many exams yet, and I [would] like to get a sense of how you feel City Psychology 185

about each other. Does everyone have a pencil and paper here? OK. Look around the table; I’d like you to give each person a grade in the room here.” And people looked at each other, but they looked at him and they started writing. And I had the paper and pencil in front of me, and I wrote the names down, but I felt that it wasn’t right [for us] to grade each other because that was his job, you know.... So he collected the grades from people and he counted them up and he said, “Well, there are only twelve grades here and there are thirteen of you. One is missing.” I was beet red at the time and I said, “I didn’t hand it in.” And he said, “Well, are you going to?” And I said, “No.” And he said, “OK.” Just like that.

Looking back on her years as Milgram’s research assistant, Judith Wa- ters, now a professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, doesn’t think he was any more authoritarian than anyone else would have been in his position. Just as there was a wide consensus about Milgram’s off-putting, domineering, and prima donna-ish ways, Milgram’s superior intellect was ac- knowledged by virtually everyone in the department, even among those who were not necessarily fond of him. The force of his intellect made him a formidable presence, despite his diminutive size of 5’7”. John Sabini provided an especially distinctive perspective on Milgram’s intellect:

He was a genius. By which, one means he was possessed; I mean you never knew—he never knew—what direction his creativity would take. So he wrote music and he made board games and ﬁlms. . . . He was utterly unconventional in the way he thought about things, and insisted that you be. So he would call me in, sort of monthly, when I was looking for a job, and explain to me things like, the most important relationship you’ll ever form in your professional career is with your secretary. And you would laugh, and he would say, no, no, I’m serious. It’s far more important than graduate students, colleagues or post-docs. Your secretary is the person who will determine whether you will have a productive career or not.... And any suggestion that you might have that, well, maybe your colleagues are important, would be taken by Stanley as 186 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

a sign of near-conventionality in the way your mind worked, that you were not penetrating to the actual facts. And that was, I think, what was relentlessly Stanley, was this . . . dispensing with mythology and false belief and jargon, and all sorts of clutter that kept you from seeing the actual facts clearly.

The nature of Milgram’s relationships with his colleagues varied. For example, Salomon Rettig, a social psychologist specializing in the study of small groups, said that he “really enjoyed being with Stanley.... It was a pleasure to be with him.” On the other hand, his abrasiveness rubbed some people the wrong way. But, surprisingly enough, there was a noticeable and pervasive absence of jealousy among members of the social-personality program—even among those who otherwise may have disliked him—for two reasons. First, although no one in the program approached his fame, it consisted of many first-rate faculty who had achieved recognition as experts in their own areas of specialization. David Glass, for example—tall, with smooth facial features, always nattily dressed in a suit, and the most intense person there—was one of the founders of behavioral medicine, the study of bodily response to psychological stresses. Florence Denmark, a petite woman with a ready smile, was a leading figure in the psychology of women. She had political ambitions that culminated in her election as president of the American Psychological Association in 1980. Irwin Katz, one of Milgram’s closest colleagues, had conducted research that introduced a new approach to the study of prejudice and stigma. Ellen Langer, petite and pixieish, had a gargantuan grasp of theoretical perspectives in social psychology that made her the authoritative resource for her colleagues in the department. Her pioneering research on “mindlessness” helped alert social psychologists to the important role that reflexive actions play in our lives and is partially responsible for the current interest in nonconscious determinants of behavior within the field of social psychology. A second reason why Milgram’s colleagues did not appear to be envious of his star status was that he was much more distinguished than the social- personality program he was part of. A person becomes envious of someone City Psychology 187 who makes $100 more per week than he does; he doesn’t become envious of Bill Gates. So, no doubt, many of his colleagues were happy to bask in the reflected glory of Milgram’s fame. One of the perks of being a genius is that your quirkiness and eccentric- ities are accepted with greater equanimity. Among his graduate students Milgram had a reputation of someone who could perform “wonders”—as in “I wonder why he did that?” John Sabini once arrived at Milgram’s office at 10:29 for a 10:30 meeting. Milgram immediately told him to leave and come back in a minute. So Sabini went out into the hall and sat down on a bench. Meanwhile, Milgram could be seen through the open office door, sitting at his desk with his feet propped up, waiting until the minute was up. And for Harold Takooshian, the activities orchestrated by Milgram at the first meeting of his Advanced Social Psychology class are still mysteri- ous some thirty years later:

Milgram noted that he did not receive the classroom he expected, and for fully half of the two-hour class he had us rearrange the tables and chairs into different shapes to see which “felt” best—octagon, rectangle, square. For all fourteen of us, this was our ﬁrst day at CUNY Graduate School, and with the illustrious Professor Milgram. So this bizarre display had us all very privately wondering what on Earth was happening—as he had us repeatedly moving furniture, asking how we liked it now, welcoming new suggestions, then issuing new commands.... In the end we settled on a simple square. There was never any formal “debrieﬁng” of this never-repeated exercise, nor ever another word about furniture.

Much of the time Milgram’s quirkiness was a harmless object of puzzle- ment, but it could also take a more troubling turn in the form of erratic and mercurial behavior toward his students, resulting in a polarization of opinion about him. Some remembered him with fondness for his acts of kind- ness. When Ronna Kabatznick, a doctoral student, was completing her write-up of her dissertation, she was spending a lot of time in the computer lab by herself. One day she told Milgram that the isolation was driving her 188 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD to tears. So he told her that he was going to wheel a computer into his office so she could work on her dissertation there in his company. She did indeed complete her dissertation there, coming in every day and sitting down at the computer while he went about his normal activities—talking on the telephone or preparing a lecture. On the other hand, Milgram’s brother, Joel, recalls visiting Stanley and seeing a student bolt out of his office in tears. And on another occasion, after a meeting with a disgruntled student, Milgram found a gaping hole in the side of his handsome black office couch. While seated there, the student had managed to furtively grind a hole in the cushion with his pen. Even those students who had an affectionate relationship with Milgram recalled classes in which he became unpredictably nasty from one moment to the next, and which were sometimes emotional roller-coaster rides—in which exhilaration brought on by flashes of insight would alternate with the terror of waiting to be picked on. How does one explain these moment-to-moment fluctuations in his behavior? How do you account for the polarization in his long-term relationships with students—many of whom either loved him or hated him? An answer may lie in the fact that the inconsistencies in Milgram’s behavior were actually—and paradoxically—manifestations of a deeper continuity between his professional and personal lives. Milgram not only practiced social psychology professionally, he lived it. One of the main axioms of social psychology is that situations are powerful determinants of behavior, more powerful than we might suppose. To a surprising degree, our behavior is highly responsive to the concrete features of our immediate social environment. Different situations can bring different aspects of our personality to the fore. As many of his students and colleagues have noted, Mil- gram was unusually sensitive to the fine-grained details of his surroundings. So, his sometimes enigmatic and erratic behavior may well have been evoked by nuances in others’ behavior to which most people would not have been attuned. Milgram expressed a recognition early on of the strongly causal role played by the immediate situation. In one of his occasional musings, dated February 10, 1957 (his third academic year at Harvard), he wrote: City Psychology 189

By means which I am far from understanding, different girls cause me to behave differently in their presence. It is not volition that mediates these changes in behavior, but the direct, almost automatic effect of the presence of one girl or another, and it is quite out of my power to alter the effect of the particular girl I am with. So that what I am, my personality if you will, does not exist apart from my present company.

And here is what he wrote his former girlfriend Enid in 1959, as part of a letter trying to help her cope emotionally with her recent breakup of a love affair:

You seem to forget that ambivalence, a blend of love and hate, is the rule in any social relationship (but only a dullard would take this to mean that there is no possibility of deep, honest love); don’t you know that people can be vile, and hateful.... Goodness, delicacy, beauty of the spirit—these too are fundamental to the human picture; but they survive only within a particular set of conditions, and one must be grateful when these conditions prevail.

But there was another factor that quite possibly contributed to Milgram’s erratic and sometimes puzzling behavior—his occasional use of amphetamines, cocaine, and marijuana. Milgram’s daughter, Michele, was ignorant of her father’s drug use when he was still alive. And when Sasha ﬁnally did discuss it with her, she was shocked and upset. But then she recalled certain childhood incidents when her father’s behavior hadn’t made sense to her at all:

We used to play Monopoly—and there was a period of time when we absolutely couldn’t play it with him [her father]. You know, if you throw dice, the odds of both dice landing at the exact same time are, like, nil. . . . One would often fall before the other. And he would accuse someone of cheat- ing if they were doing that. And he would just get very upset, especially if he was losing. We eventually had another game that had a little gadget that you would put . . . dice in a special lever and they would come out of the bottom, so that was our solution to that. 190 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

Now, looking back, Michele wonders if this kind of erratic behavior might have been due to her father’s drug use. She is quick to point out that it was not “necessarily the norm of all of his behavior and much of it was very pleasant [with] lovely conversations and singing musicals and things like that. But there was also a darker side sometimes.”

…

Milgram’s legendary rudeness would fade as his students progressed through the graduate program at CUNY—some viewed it in retrospect as a kind of rite of passage—and when it came time for students to ﬁnd a chairman for their doctoral dissertations, Milgram was most in demand of all the faculty, mentoring the largest number of doctoral students (fourteen) while he was there.* Professors generally subscribe to one of two approaches to mentoring doctoral students—at least in psychology. Some mentors have an ongoing research program that their students dip into and expand into a researchable question for their dissertation. The other type of mentor encourages his students to follow their own lights and pursue a topic that interests them, even if it is not one of the mentor’s main interests. Gordon Allport represented the second type of mentor. He had chaired the largest number of dissertations in Harvard’s social relations program, and no two of them were alike. Rather than expecting his doctoral students to hitch a ride on one of his research projects, Allport let them be themselves and pursue their own interests. Milgram emulated Allport’s open mentoring style. His doctoral students pursued a potpourri of topics, many of which were outside the perimeter of his main research interests. In fact, only two of his students conducted doctoral research grounded in his work on obedience to authority. One of his students, Arthur Blank, carried out doctoral research that involved the microanalysis of dialogue. Reflecting back on this, Blank recalled:

*Appendix A lists Milgram’s doctoral students and the titles of their dissertations. City Psychology 191

My interests in sociolinguistics were not central to Stanley’s. Indeed, my interests were quite peripheral to his. But that was what impressed me about Stanley. He maintained a quizzicalness about the world and supported others’ inquiries into novel phenomena. It was his openness to new interests and ideas that I found invaluable. He could take an idea, rotate it, or otherwise put it in a new perspective.

Once Milgram became a student’s mentor, the student felt that he had a lifelong advocate, always ready to help him land the best jobs. Milgram would readily write letters of recommendation for former students long after they received their degrees. When Judith Waters was coming up for promotion to associate professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Mil- gram suggested that, to improve her chances, she organize a conference featuring a famous keynote speaker. He offered to be that speaker, for free, although by this point in his career he was being paid in the thousands for his speaking engagements. And, as Florence Denmark put it: “He stood up for people he believed in and never let me down.” But he is perhaps best remembered by his students and colleagues for his relentless wit and sense of playfulness, which found expression in various ways, depending on the circumstances. When it came to his work, for instance, he was utterly serious about it, but he would never undertake some piece of research unless he found it intrinsically interesting. A playful curiosity energized his research, so that the same person who gave the world the profoundly important obedience studies could also readily absorb himself in a less weighty question, such as: How do New Yorkers explain those billowing clouds of steam that mysteriously come out of the ground? His doctoral student Elyse Goldstein recalled that Milgram was so fun-loving “that no [other] graduate career could have [provided] so much humor and wit.” On one especially zany day at CUNY, he communicated in song the entire day and would only reply to others if they too sang their words to him. One student recalls Milgram lecturing about obedience while shocking himself with a battery-operated device attached to his fingers. When Judy Waters served as Milgram’s research assistant, 192 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD and there would be a lull in projects that needed attention, they would play a word game that Milgram had invented. He would give her a simple phrase that she then would try to transform into complex “psychologese.” So, for example, “I guess” became “Based on the previous assumptions as enumerated above, it is possible to hypothesize that the following outcomes will obtain under certain limited conditions.” And in a letter to Paul Hollander when he and his wife were expecting their first child, he wondered whether Paul “preferred indoor or outdoor plumbing” on his firstborn.

…

While the content of Milgram’s varied research interests defies pigeonhol- ing, virtually all of his studies shared an important stylistic characteristic. The object of study—the dependent variable—was typically some form of concrete, observable behavior, be it picking up a “lost letter” or giving up one’s seat on a subway train. As he told an interviewer: “Only in action can you fully realize the forces operative in social behavior. That is why I am an experimentalist.” In this sense, one aspect of his urban research, the study of mental maps, was a departure from his usual research style: It dealt with private experience, rather than overt action. At the beginning of 1969, an opportunity arose for Milgram to return to behaviorally focused research in a splashy way. On March 29, 1969, Joseph Klapper, the director of CBS’s Office of So- cial Research, convened a scientific meeting to discuss the theoretical issues and research relevant to a burning social question—the impact of television violence on the viewer—and to invite participants to submit grant proposals to study the question further. Milgram had attended the meeting, and about a month later, on April 23, he submitted a research proposal to CBS, which was approved after a review by a panel of social scientists, with a funding of $260,000. Although the relationship between television violence and aggression was not something Milgram was intrinsically interested in—and, in fact, he harbored some doubts about the existence of such a relationship—the idea of being able to do research on a grand scale appealed to City Psychology 193 him. Indeed, the very large grant enabled him, among other things, to hire a research associate, R. Lance Shotland, a social psychologist from Michi- gan State University, and a large staff, to carry the research to four cities— New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and Detroit—and to consult about data analysis with some of the country’s top experts in research methodology and statistical techniques. Milgram’s research brought something new to the study of television’s effects—something that makes the work unique to the present day. Virtu- ally all experimental research on the effects of televised antisocial behavior used already existing fare as stimulus materials. In a typical study, subjects were randomly assigned to watch either a program that was clearly violent in content or free of violence altogether and were subsequently compared on some dependent measure of aggression. A built-in problem with this approach was that the chosen programs might also have differed in other qualities as well. Milgram and Shotland departed radically from this traditional approach by varying the content of a single episode of a popular prime-time television series. Milgram was able to get the cooperation of CBS to produce a particular episode of the then-popular dramatic series Medical Center with three different endings. The script of that episode, titled “Countdown,” was written by a professional screenwriter, Don Brinkley, with some input from Milgram. The program went into production in early 1970, and Milgram spent some time on the set at MGM studios trying to act as a censor—though not always successfully—whenever an element was injected into the story that did not meet the requirements of the experiment. The plot revolved around the misfortunes of a hospital orderly, Tom Desmond: He loses his job—with a sick wife and an infant to support— and his boat, which he had hoped would provide some income, is repos- sessed. Two versions end with a destructive act, with the orderly repeatedly smashing open fund-raising collection boxes distributed by the medical center and stealing the money they contained. In one variant, he is caught by the police; in the other, he eludes capture. A third version has a prosocial ending, with Desmond putting money into, rather than stealing from, the collection box. The two antisocial versions also show 194 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD the orderly placing abusive telephone calls to the medical director of the hospital. Another episode, with a completely different story line, without any suggestion of violence whatsoever, served as a neutral, control condition. From September 1970 to November 1971, Milgram and Shotland embedded these programs in a series of field experiments—some involving millions of at-home viewers as potential subjects—in which both viewing and the opportunity to imitate the antisocial acts occurred in real-life settings. The general procedure was this: Subjects watched one of the four stimulus programs in a preview theater in midtown Manhattan, over the air, or individually via closed-circuit television. They were promised a General Electric transistor radio as a reward for their participation, which they could pick up at a scheduled time a few days later at a “gift distribution center” in a building on 42nd Street. When they arrived at the distribution office, they found it unoccupied. Looking around, they would notice on one of the walls a charity display for Project Hope with a clear plastic container box attached, containing some dollar bills and coins. Hidden TV cameras recorded the subject’s every move. The main question was whether or not subjects would steal money from the charity box—and, more specifically, would those who had seen the antisocial versions of the program be more likely to do so than those who saw either the prosocial program or the neutral, control program? The study was not without shortcomings. Toward the end of the episode, whenever Tom Desmond fixes his gaze on a collection box, a “boing-boing” sound brings it into dramatic focus. The sound, not unlike the kind one hears when a cartoon character bounces back after running into a brick wall, creates an unintended melodramatic effect. But the overall approach was enormously innovative. Across eight experiments, Milgram did not find any greater tendency for the viewers of the antisocial versions to imitate the depicted antisocial acts than those who saw the control or prosocial versions. What makes the study unique to the present day is that Milgram had control over regular prime-time television programming, which enabled him to build the independent variable—the three different endings—into its City Psychology 195 content while keeping most of the program constant across the three experimental conditions. Milgram’s research is often absent from reviews of the literature on television violence and aggression, for two reasons. First, in the write-up of the research in the book Television and Antisocial Behavior: Field Experiments, authored by Milgram and Shotland, there is virtually no attempt to relate the findings to the vast amount of prior research on observational learning and imitation and, in particular, on the effects of violence in the media. In contrast to Milgram’s experiments, a good deal of the earlier research found evidence that portrayals of antisocial behavior on television did have an impact on the viewer. Second, the results of Milgram’s series of experiments were inconclusive and inherently ambiguous. Did they demonstrate that people are not influenced by destructive actions shown on television? Or is it possible that the antisocial program did in fact have negative effects on the viewing audience, but the particular measures Milgram used simply missed them? For example, the imitative response might have been a delayed one, showing up, perhaps, in a later time and different place. Thus there are compelling reasons why many literature reviews have omitted Milgram’s series of field experiments. But in doing so, they have missed what the study’s unique design was able to accomplish—a degree of control over the independent variable rarely achieved in experiments on the effects of television violence, a design feature that is critical for drawing conclusions about cause and effect. The director of the “Countdown” episode was Vincent Sherman, who already had a successful career directing films featuring such Hollywood stars as Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Errol Flynn before he started working in television. Now in his nineties, he recalls Milgram’s visit to the studio and his “brilliantly conceived” experiment. In a letter to Sherman written in March 1983, Milgram reminisced about his television study, situ- ating it within the broader framework of the nature of social-psychological experimentation:

The television study, for which you directed the episodes of Medical Cen- ter, was certainly the best budgeted piece of research I have carried out, 196 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

but the equivocal nature of the results make it somewhat unheralded. If only we could have shown that your programs jolted viewers into a frenzy of antisocial imitation! But alas, while experimenters may design their questions with a certain creative ﬂair, and there is a dramaturgical element in socio-psychological experiments, the denouement is always left to the experimental subject. That is, we may create the situations into which we bring the subject, but we need to leave open how he will respond to them. Only the questions are under our control, not the answers. From this standpoint, the dramatist, who controls his own denouements and ﬁnales, has a decided advantage. Stanley as a little boy. (SOURCE: This and the next nine photographs are from the personal collection of Alexandra Milgram.) Bar Mitzvah portrait of Stanley, 1946.

Stanley in Florida during an Air Force ROTC training trip while he was a student at Queens College. Stanley with parents, Adele and Samuel, at the pier prior to his departure for Europe, June 10, 1953.

Stanley and Sasha at the lab where the obedience experiments were conducted, spring 1961. A subject in the obedience experiment at Yale. Stanley and Michele at home in Cambridge, January 15, 1966.

Marc, Michele, Sasha, and Stanley in Paris, 1973. Milgram in his ofﬁce at the Graduate Center, CUNY, 1974. Picture of Milgram taken in the late 1970s while doing research with his students.

In this 1977 picture, Milgram is in a laid-back mood, surrounded by the various editions and translations of Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. (© Al Satterwhite.) Stanley and Sasha with Henri Verneuil (left) and Yves Montand (right) in the studio during the ﬁlming of "I Comme Icare," Paris, 1979. (Photo taken by Vincent Rossel.)

The very last photograph of Milgram (on the right), shown together with colleague and friend, Irwin Katz, and student, Christina Taylor, celebrating her just- completed successful oral defense of her doctoral dissertation. It was taken about 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, December 20, 1984. Milgram died a few hours later. (By permission of Irwin Katz.) CHAPTER 10

CENTER STAGE

HEN MILGRAM WAS in Hollywood during the filming of Wthe Medical Center episode, he was impressed with the efficiency and organizational skills of the production crew, and this whet his own appetite for filmmaking. As luck would have it, a couple months after his return from the West Coast, a man named Harry From walked into his office. From was short and stout and spoke with a brittle accent that sounded vaguely Eastern European. He was a graduate of the Film Uni- versity in Romania and was a film director with experience in documentary films. He had immigrated to Israel, and then had come to the United States on a grant from the Israeli Film Union. After being involved in a number of projects in the United States, he decided he wanted to study psychology. He went over to the Graduate Center, where he was directed to Stanley Milgram. That initial meeting in Stanley’s office lasted several hours, with Milgram showing a lot of interest in From’s background in film as well as in his family’s suffering under the Nazis and, later, under Communism. The following semester, in the fall of 1970, Harry started in the doctoral program in social psychology, read Milgram’s “The Experi- ence of Living in Cities,” and suggested to Milgram that they make a film based on it. The result was The City and the Self, which came out in 1972, made on a shoestring budget scraped together by Milgram. The ability to make the ﬁlm on a low budget was aided greatly by the fact that Harry’s wife, Nitza, did the editing. She worked as an assistant editor for an established ﬁlm

197 198 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD production company that made commercials, and the owner allowed her to use his state-of-the-art equipment for free in the evenings. The film is essentially a visual companion piece to Milgram’s article. Using both naturally occurring scenes as well as staged experiments, it examines the various consequences of the stimulus overload experienced by people in cities. A man drops a bunch of papers on a busy New York City sidewalk; no one stops to help him as he struggles to gather up the scattered papers. A shoplifter hurriedly grabs pairs of shoes from the outdoor bin of a discount store on 14th Street and stuffs them into a shopping bag in full view of onlookers who do nothing to try to stop him. A young adult knocks on the doors of city apartments and asks to use the telephone to call a friend nearby whose address was forgotten. Peepholes open, but the occu- pants do not allow entry. But the film also depicts the city’s unexpected delights, capturing Mil- gram’s ambivalent feelings about New York: A street-corner virtuoso beating out a Bach concerto on a steel drum, or finding a manmade waterfall in a tiny park squeezed between two office buildings. Besides its scientific and educational value, The City and the Self received artistic recognition—it won the Silver Medal of the International Film and Television Festival of New York, and was selected for showing at the Mu- seum of Modern Art and the Donnell Library. Over the years, it has turned into a commercial success as well, through continuing purchases by universities for teaching purposes.

…

In September 1971, Milgram applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship to extend his research on psychological maps to a European city. When he applied, he had London or Paris in mind, but hadn’t yet decided between them. He and Sasha were weighing the conveniences of London against giving their children a solid opportunity to learn French. By the time the approval came through in March 1972, they had decided—to no one’s surprise—on Paris. Milgram’s interest in further research on cognitive maps of cities was genuine. It would combine his longtime fascination with cross-cultural Center Stage 199 comparisons with his newly found enthusiasm for studying people’s mental image of their city. However, the prudent thing would have been to wait until the following year, 1973–1974, his seventh year at CUNY, when he would have been eligible for a sabbatical. Universities typically pay a full salary for a one-semester sabbatical or half-salary for a yearlong sabbatical. By now, Milgram’s annual salary was about $32,000. The Guggenheim Fel- lowship paid $15,000. If he had waited, the combination of these two in- comes would have put him on easy street—but that was too far down the road to serve several immediate needs. First, Milgram felt he had to get away. He had been teaching continu- ously, without a break, since he had started at Yale in 1960. He had not stayed long enough at Yale or Harvard to earn a sabbatical at either place. By the end of the 1971–1972 academic year, he would have had twelve years of nonstop teaching behind him. In addition, that academic year was turning out to be especially hectic and exhausting. Besides his regular teaching and committee responsibilities, Milgram’s typical day was filled with a number of other duties: conducting his subway research with his students; completing the television study and preparing a report on it for CBS, due April 15, 1972; organizing an interdisciplinary conference on city behavior; and, beginning in January 1972, filming The City and the Self with Harry From. Second, the completion of a book about his obedience research was within reach if he could arrange for temporary freedom from his academic duties. He had been planning to write such a book since 1963, and while he would periodically jot down some ideas, he didn’t actually start writing chapters for it until the latter half of 1969. While still at Harvard, he had met Virginia Hilu, an editor at Harper and Row, who was eager to publish a book about the obedience research. But because of a major writing commitment at the time, it wasn’t until 1969 that Milgram felt he had the time to embark on the book project. He signed with Harper and Row in September 1969, and, when he mailed the signed contract to Hilu, he also sent her a draft of chapter 2 of the book. (They had agreed that an article he had written in 1967 for Patterns of Prej- udice, an obscure British journal, would serve as the introductory chapter.) She wrote Stanley encouragingly on November 5: “Chapter 2 makes me 200 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD eager for chapter 3. You have a marvelous way with language and somehow have made this chapter dramatic and shattering.” Although the contract called for a delivery date of September 1970, months passed without any more material from Stanley. On July 21, Hilu wrote him to inquire about the book. Everyone at Harper and Row was looking forward to receiving the manuscript, and they were all hoping that his silence meant that he was hard at work on it. On August 13, 1970, he sent a draft of one chapter and promised another one soon. Hilu found that unsatisfactory and immediately replied, giving him chapter and verse: “Where is that manuscript? We are now working on our publication list for 1971 and I had hoped that your book would be one of the big books on our spring list.” In order to publish at all in 1971, she needed to have the manuscript by January 1, 1971, at the latest. Milgram sent Hilu a draft of the whole manuscript at the beginning of April 1971—noting that it still needed a lot of work. Incorporating the feedback she provided over the next few months, Milgram sent her the first eight chapters of the manuscript on September 17, 1971. Even though there were more chapters yet to be done, he was sending her those because he was “eager for [her] editorial skill to be brought to bear on the manuscript.” At this point, he must have realized that, given the amount of work still left to do on the book, he would have to free himself from his regular academic obligations in order to complete it within a reasonable amount of time. So he filled out an application for a Guggenheim Fellowship and hand-delivered it to the foundation’s offices on Park Avenue on September 30 in order to meet their deadline of October 1. And, in fact, when he started his Guggenheim year in Paris, the task he turned to first was working on the obedience book, not the mental maps of Parisians. Third, he needed to get away because, as he told Sasha and his closest friends, he was experiencing a midlife crisis. In a letter to Paul Hollander dated October 12, 1972, Milgram wrote: “I approach 40. The zenith is in the past. Please forward detailed plans on how best to use the declining years ahead.” Although he never elaborated to Sasha about the cause of his crisis, she believes it came from looking back wistfully at his life so far and realizing that, despite his enviable accomplishments, it hadn’t unfolded ex- Center Stage 201 actly the way he had wanted it to. He had been used to succeeding no matter the obstacles. But then, he didn’t make tenure at Harvard and he couldn’t land a position at a prestigious university. None had come knocking at his office door in the Graduate Center, and looking ahead, he had no reason to expect it to happen in the near future. His malaise was also undoubtedly fueled, at least to some extent, by the increasing intrusions of politics into academic life. While he was a political liberal in his vigorous opposition to the Vietnam War and support of nuclear disarmament, his views were decidedly more conservative when it came to affirmative action. In a letter to Leon Mann dated October 26, 1971, he wrote: “There is some sense of progress and movement at the Graduate Center. A big question, however, is whether intellectual standards or political pressures will prevail in the conduct of our program. Already, we have been asked to recruit faculty on a racial basis, and we make exceptions to our usual admission standards in assessing potential black students. If carried too far, this could have disastrous consequences for the quality of the program. Then I’ll leave.” It was time for a change of scene. The Milgrams’ sojourn in Paris began in the summer of 1972. Sasha and the children flew to Paris on July 12. Sasha found a small but cheerful apartment on Rue de Rémusat. It had two bedrooms in the back facing an inner courtyard and a salon in front that looked down onto the street below. The street was densely lined with three rows of trees, which created a feeling of living in a tree house. Stanley couldn’t go with them because he had some work to finish before he left New York. The next morning, he wrote to Sasha, Michele, and Marc that “it is very lonely in the apartment without you and I really do miss my family.” Two days later, he wrote them another letter: “This apartment is just a big, empty set of rooms with lonely echoes—and I really look forward to rejoining you in Paris. . . . The contrast between immersion in family life and this solitude is immense.” He flew to Paris a week later, on July 19. Paris empties out in August, and Stanley never liked being in the city then. So he joined the exodus and arranged for the family to vacation for two weeks in August at a family-style Club Med in French Morocco. When they returned to Paris, Sasha enrolled the children at Pershing Hall, 202 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD an American-style school located a few blocks from their apartment. Michele went into the third grade, and Marc started the first grade. Al- though the children studied French with a French teacher every day, it was an English-speaking school. There was a school uniform—a green blazer with the school’s emblem over the heart. “It is all exceedingly goyish,” Stan- ley remarked to Hollander, “but I think I like it.” Milgram loved being back in Paris, and as summer gave way to fall, the city looked especially lovely. The city’s beauty and the respite from 42nd Street did not lead to a quick dissipation of Milgram’s sense of malaise, however. On October 30, 1972, he wrote Hollander that he had been feeling “rather low,” and he wasn’t sure whether it was the result of an existential examination of his current life circumstances or simply a mild case of the flu. He congratulated Hollander on the imminent publication of a book on American-Soviet relations, adding, “Naturally, since it does not adequately reflect the spirit of the ‘détente,’ you will be deported.” He hoped that he would be able to report to Hollander on the completion of his own book within the coming year. A few months later he was able to do just that. On January 13, 1973, he flew to New York to attend to a number of matters—the main one being the obedience book. Virginia Hilu told him that if she had the completed manuscript by February 1, the book could be published in September. Given Hilu’s patience in spite of the delays, he was eager to meet her goal. He had finished a final draft of the manuscript and had come to New York to deliver it and work with her on tying up loose ends—completing footnotes, bibliographic references, and graphs and charts and providing her with photographs. He gave her some line drawings to be used in the book, prepared by his graduate student Judith Waters, a skilled artist. In the course of going through the manuscript, both he and Virginia realized that the ending was weak and needed to be rewritten. She also asked Stanley to write a preface. It took him a few days to write them, and by January 24 the book was ready to go into production. “Virginia has been quite good, in her Pollyanna-like way,” he wrote Sasha. “She has extraordinary faith in the book.” Besides completing the obedience manuscript, Stanley had used his months in Paris to work on another book, about his television research, Center Stage 203 which was to be published by Academic Press. He had completed the book before his trip to New York, although on his arrival the editor asked him to rewrite the preface and to provide some photographs. The book, coauthored with R. Lance Shotland and titled Television and Anti-Social Behav- ior: Field Experiments, was published in the summer of 1973. Another business matter that Milgram took care of in New York was signing an agreement, together with Harry From, with Time-Life Films to be the distributor of their film, The City and the Self. Filmmaking had become a passion for Milgram, and The City and the Self led to a contract with Harper and Row a couple of years later for him, with Harry From as director and coproducer, to make four educational films on various topics in social psychology. They also hired an agent to try to sell The City and the Self to one of the television networks, although that effort failed. Despite his hectic schedule, he wrote an affectionate letter to Sasha and the children virtually every day, describing his activities. Even though their separation was brief, Stanley and Sasha missed each other. For example, on January 24, Stanley wrote to Sasha, Michele, and Marc: “How I would like Sasha’s company, not to mention her kisses and other things. Although productive and busy, my life here is very narrow.... My love, hugs, and kisses to you all. Love, Stanley.” On the same day, Sasha wrote to Stanley: “If you are able to finish your work as scheduled by Feb. 2, you will be home in just over a week.... I yearn for you and the children miss you. . . . Love and kisses, Sasha.” Since the main purpose of the New York trip was to take care of aca - demic matters, Stanley had gone by himself. In that sense, it was an exception, because the Milgrams took a number of family trips together to other countries during their Guggenheim year in France. They celebrated Thanksgiving 1972 in London, and the following spring they took a week- long trip to Italy. But their longest trip was a spectacular visit to Israel during the second half of December 1972. Stanley had been invited by Elihu Katz, of the Communications Institute of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, one of the pioneers in the study of mass communication, to talk about his recently completed television research. Milgram accepted, adding that he would be willing to talk about other research topics as well. Over a two-week period Milgram gave six lectures 204 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD to audiences from the Communications Institute as well as their colleagues in the Psychology Department. In addition to his television research, he lectured on his obedience studies and on experimental methods in social psychology. In between, the Milgram family crisscrossed the country. They toured Haifa, Netanya, Tel Aviv, Jericho, and the Dead Sea. They also visited the artists’ colony in Safed and ascended to the top of Masada. Before leaving Israel, Stanley was offered a permanent faculty position by the dean of Hebrew University. He felt good about being asked and gave it some serious thought, but ultimately turned it down. It was only after Milgram returned from his January visit to New York that he was ready to give his full attention to the study of cognitive maps. On March 13, 1973, he wrote to Paul Hollander that because he had devoted his time until then to completing the two books, he was just getting his study of mental maps under way. In fact, that was too optimistic a statement, since, as of April, he had not yet interviewed a single subject. The reason: he was now lacking the financial resources to do the study. And this put him in a quandary. He felt obligated to the Guggenheim Foundation to conduct the research, since the funding they provided was for that purpose. But the $15,000 award from the foundation had not even been enough to pay for their personal living expenses for the year. To make matters worse, the dollar had recently been devalued. Recognizing this, the Guggenheim Foun- dation awarded him a bit more money. But even with this supplement, he and Sasha found that they had to dip into their personal savings. Milgram’s problem was solved by the intervention of a friend and fellow social psychologist, Serge Moscovici, the director of the Social Psychology Laboratory at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, a government- supported research center. Moscovici was a Romanian-born immigrant to France. After surviving a pogrom in Bucharest in January 1941, in which the homegrown fascists, the Iron Cross, brutally murdered hundreds of Jews, he spent the rest of the war in a forced-labor camp until Romania was liberated by the Russian army in August 1944. He made his way to France in 1948 and subsequently earned a Ph.D. in psychology at the Sorbonne. Milgram and Moscovici first met at Yale in June 1963, toward the end of Moscovici’s one-year stay as a visiting member at the Institute for Ad- Center Stage 205 vanced Study in Princeton. That began a collegial relationship that was to last into the 1980s. Their friendship was grounded in mutual respect for each other’s work as well as their shared status as iconoclasts. Moscovici’s main experimental work was in conformity, and it challenged the prevailing dominant approach to the subject. Most contemporary research on conformity, he argued, was too limited, because it focused mainly on how a group exerts its influence on the individual. Moscovici’s research showed that under certain conditions, this process could be reversed, with the lone individual swaying the group to adopt his viewpoint. Moscovici believed that the power of majorities was derived from their sheer numbers. He demonstrated, by contrast, that minorities could convince majorities through their style of behavior—their forcefulness, unswerving persistence, and the consistency of their positions. This process is vividly illustrated in the spell- binding film classic Twelve Angry Men, starring Henry Fonda. Fonda plays the role of a member of a jury charged with deciding the fate of a teenager accused of knifing his father to death. An initial straw vote reveals that all the jurors are ready to vote “guilty” with virtually no discussion of the case—except the character played by Henry Fonda. The film depicts how Fonda, through dogged persistence and persuasive arguments, is able to change each juror’s mind, one by one, until finally the jury ends up with a unanimous verdict of “not guilty.” As late as the 1980s, social psychology was largely a North American discipline, with as many as 90 percent of its practitioners living in the United States and Canada. Moscovici was among the earliest European social psychologists whose work was able to penetrate mainstream North American social psychology, and his perspectives on minority influence are well represented in most American social psychology textbooks. Despite the largely sporadic nature of their correspondence, Milgram and Moscovici maintained a level of collegiality and continued readiness to help each other—sometimes as a result of their own initiative and the involvement of a great deal of effort. Moscovici recognized Milgram’s work on obedience as important research with enduring value. He was especially struck by its timeliness. He saw its relevance not only to the horrors of the Nazi era that he had lived through, but 206 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD also to the protracted and bloody conflict that had led up to Algeria’s independence from France about a year earlier, in 1962. As he wrote Milgram, “the methods invented by the Nazis have spread very dangerously all over Europe.” Milgram, in his reply, expressed the possibility that he might want to do a replication of the obedience experiments in France in a few years. He also told Moscovici that he very much enjoyed their wide-ranging conversations in New Haven and suggested that they collaborate on a book-length critique of social psychology that would be published simultaneously in Eng- lish and French, “with a special Swedish version to be transmitted to the Svenske Akadamie to insure our receiving a Nobel Prize.” After their first meeting in New Haven, Moscovici offered to help Mil- gram publish an article on the obedience research in French—Milgram could even send the text in English, and he could have it translated into French. Later in the year, Milgram sent him a French version of a report of his first study—the pilot study with undergraduates—which had not yet been published. Moscovici submitted the article for Milgram to a monthly review, Les Temps Modernes. At the time, Milgram had not even heard of it. Had he been familiar with it, he would have realized that Moscovici was trying to help him publish in the most influential and widely read periodical in France. Its founders and editors were Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beau- voir, and it contained articles by the most highly regarded thinkers of the day. Had Milgram appeared in the magazine, he would have become widely known among French intellectuals. However, the magazine rejected the article, finding both its methods and its results appalling. Later, in 1973, Moscovici put Milgram in touch with a publisher, Calmann-Levy, who would end up publishing the French edition of Milgram’s obedience book. Over the years, Milgram, in turn, tried on his own initiative to advance Moscovici’s career. In 1973, he submitted, on Moscovici’s behalf, an essay of his on social influence as an entry for the American Association for the Ad- vancement of Science’s annual sociopsychological prize, an ultimately unsuccessful effort that involved Milgram’s cutting its length in half to meet the word limit. In 1976 and in 1982, Milgram made repeated efforts to interest American publishers in bringing out English translations of two of Moscovici’s books. Center Stage 207

In July 1972, about a week before Milgram flew to Paris to begin his Guggenheim Fellowship year, he had written Moscovici about his plans to work on a psychological map of Paris in the upcoming academic year, asking if he could provide him with an office in his Social Psychology Labora- tory. Moscovici readily provided one, but his more crucial help was in the spring of 1973, when Milgram was dangerously short on funds. Moscovici wrote a letter to the director of the French government’s ministry of scientific and technical research requesting an emergency grant of 35,000 francs, equivalent to about $8,000 at the 1973 rate of exchange, to enable Milgram to conduct his research “on the mental representation of urban space.” The money would be used primarily to pay for interviewing a representative sample of 300 Parisians and for collecting and analyzing the data. He would be assisted in the research, Moscovici wrote, by Denise Jodelet, a project director in his laboratory. It was a forceful, persuasive letter, praising the scientific quality and originality of the research and its tremendous value in stimulating the growth of the new discipline of environmental psychology. In his attempt to bail Milgram out of his predicament, Moscovici even went overboard by promising, unrealistically, that a report of the research would be available by the end of the summer. Moscovici’s letter succeeded, and Milgram was awarded the requested amount, making it possible for him to conduct the research. The money enabled him to hire a survey research firm to conduct interviews with subjects. Given the short time remaining in his fellowship year, that kind of assistance was essential for carrying out his work. The Parisian mental map study built on the one Milgram had conducted in New York City, but it went beyond it in its richness of detail. Like the New York study, it used a “scene sampling” technique in which groups of Parisians were shown photographs of forty different landmarks of their city and asked to identify them. But now, Milgram added some new techniques for capturing and externalizing the mental representations of Paris held by its residents. A full appreciation of his findings is largely limited to Parisians and others—like the Milgrams—with intimate knowledge of the nooks and crannies of the city. How many non-Parisians, for instance, know the names “Porte St. Martin” or “Eglise d’Alesia,” two of the land- 208 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

FIGURE 10.1 One Person’s Mental Map of Paris. marks that subjects were asked to identify, much less feel enlightened by the fact that 67 percent and 54 percent of the viewers recognized the two scenes, respectively? But what can be appreciated about the research regardless of one’s degree of familiarity with Paris is the degree of inventiveness Milgram brought to the task. For example, 218 subjects, drawn from each of the twenty administrative sectors (arrondissements) of Paris in proportion to their populations, were asked to draw a map of Paris—a map that reﬂected their personal image of the city rather than one that was simply a tourist map. The maps were then subjected to individual, qualitative analyses guided by Milgram’s assumption that “through processes of selectivity, emphasis and distortion, the maps become projections of life styles, and express emotional cathexes of the participants.” Here, for example, is Milgram’s analysis of a map (see Figure 10.1) drawn by a butcher from the eleventh arrondissement:

At ﬁrst the map looks confusing, but we begin to discern the elements of a set of life circumstances when we examine it closely. He does not forget to Center Stage 209

include his home arrondissement, which is something of a hidden one to most subjects. Nor does he neglect La Villette, where the major stockyards and slaughterhouses of Paris are to be found. One can imagine his visits to the great exposition hall at the Porte de Versailles, to see displays of meat cutting equipment, motorcycles, and perhaps automobiles. Faubourg St. Antoine, of revolutionary signiﬁcance, is placed on the Left Bank, where it would seem to belong politically. We are most confused, perhaps, by the inverted curvature he has given to the Seine; the disposition of elements along the river seem all out of line with reality. Yet if Etoile, Maison de la Radio, and the Porte de St. Cloud deviate from their true spatial coordinates, they do preserve a meaningful topological sequence.

But Milgram realized that a true psychological map of Paris would have to capture the collective representation of the city, not just its idiosyncratic position in the minds of specific individuals. To create a mental map of Paris based on the shared elements in many peoples’ images of the city, Milgram went from a qualitative analysis of a selected group of maps to a quantitative analysis of all the maps produced by his subjects. The use of individual maps to create an aggregated cognitive map of the city was grounded in Milgram’s assumption that the sequence with which subjects sketched different parts of the city would be indicative of what features stood out most in their minds. So Milgram had asked subjects to number each detail of the map as they sketched it. (A close look at the butcher’s map, for example, reveals that he first drew in the line designating the city’s boundary, followed by the river Seine, and so on.) By counting the number of times an element was entered first in subjects’ maps, and which parts of the city appeared most frequently, Milgram was able to gauge their salience to the collective mind of the Parisian. The most frequent first entry was the Seine, followed by Notre Dame and Ile de la Cité. He found this ordering entirely sensible: These elements “are at the very heart of the idea of Paris. Lutèce was born on the Ile de la Cité; Notre Dame was constructed there 800 years ago. The sequence with which subjects enter their elements in the hand-drawn maps recapitulates 210 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD this history.” Furthermore, evidence for a shared representation of Paris in the minds of its residents was provided by the following finding: Milgram’s subjects sketched a total of 4,132 places into their subjective maps. Despite this large number, there was a good deal of commonality among the maps. About half of the 4,132 features that appeared in the maps were found in only 26 different locations. Finally Milgram probed aspects of Parisians’ perceptions of their city by presenting them with a number of questions. One of them was this: “Sup- pose you were to meet someone in Paris, a person whom you had never met before, and you knew the exact date and time of the meeting, but not the place. Assume the person you were to meet operated under the similar handicap of not knowing where you would wait for him. Where in Paris would you wait so as to maximize the chances of encountering the person?” Some did not answer this question—denouncing it as stupid, illogical, or unanswerable. Among the 188 subjects who did answer it, six places accounted for more than 50 percent of their answers—with the Eiffel Tower topping the list. To Milgram this finding suggested that people may know some things about their city that they are not consciously aware of, and that this kind of unverbalized knowledge may be shared widely. In sum, Milgram’s main purpose in conducting the map studies, both in New York and in Paris, was to externalize how the city “sits in the mind” of its residents. But the methods he used to achieve this goal were different in the two cities. In New York he devised an objective method for doing it— his “scene sampling” technique. In Paris, the primary method for making Parisians’ mental image of their city visible was to have them draw maps that would express their personal view of their city. The use of hand-drawn maps had an important advantage over the scene sampling technique in that it permitted a direct comparison of a person’s image of the city with its geographical reality. Milgram expressed the value of mental maps this way:

[Mental maps] allow a treatment of the city’s spatial character in a way that words frequently avoid. And they show how urban space is encoded, dis- torted, and selectively represented, while yet retaining its usefulness to the person. For the image of the city is not just extra mental baggage; it is the Center Stage 211

necessary accompaniment to living in a complex and highly variegated environment.... The maps are not only individual products; they are shaped by social factors, and therefore acquire the status of collective representations—that is, symbolic conﬁgurations of belief and knowledge promoted and disseminated by the culture.

…

The year in Paris was a splendid experience for the whole family, and they were saddened by the prospect of leaving France. And just as when they first moved from Cambridge to New York in 1967, Sasha and Stanley found themselves comparing the two, with New York City again suffering by comparison. The family flew back to New York on August 22. A month later, Mil- gram wrote Moscovici to thank him for his crucial help in making the Paris map study possible. In that letter, he also remarked on the difficulty of readjusting to life in New York. “We buy food and automatically convert the price to francs. I suppose in a few weeks this compulsion will disap- pear....” One of the things that helped ease the transition was the impending publication of his book and Stanley’s intense curiosity about how it would be received. “Most likely, it will be highly controversial,” he wrote Moscovici. “That is, I suppose, better than being totally ignored, but hardly as good as being universally acclaimed.” After Milgram had delivered his revised manuscript to Harper and Row and worked with Virginia Hilu to tie up the loose ends, the publisher set the production gears in motion. When Milgram received the complete copyedited manuscript for his review and approval, he found to his dismay that a major reworking of the manuscript had taken place without his consent. He was furious. He had written portions of the book in the present tense, to enhance its sense of immediacy, to make it come alive for the reader. Now he found that those sections had been put in the past tense. Since Milgram felt that framing parts of the narrative in the present was a stylistic feature that was necessary to create the intended impact on the reader, he was now confronted with the tedious task of undoing the publisher’s changes and reinstating his original wording. 212 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

But even as that matter was being cleared up, another irksome matter arose. The publisher sent Milgram the design of the book’s dust jacket, and the Milgrams found it simply repulsive. Sasha recalls that the background color was a “vomity green” and a strand of barbed wire was depicted streak- ing threateningly across the front cover. Stanley conveyed his dissatisfaction to the publisher, and they ended up settling on the simple, uncluttered cover design that still adorns the American edition of the book—yellow and white lettering atop a black background with a straight orange line un- derscoring the author’s name. While correcting these matters was a nuisance, it did not slow the production schedule appreciably. Bound galleys were ready in July, and the book was published in January 1974. Although printing of the book began in November, Harper and Row held off actual publication until January to bypass the crowded state of bookstores before Christmas. A preview of the book, titled “The Perils of Obedience,” appeared in the December 1973 issue of Harper’s magazine. It was an article-length condensation prepared by Taylor Branch, who was then on the magazine’s staff. A British edition of the book came out a few months later, in May. French, German, and Dutch editions were also published that year. Eventu- ally the book would appear in eight additional languages: Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, Indonesian, Japanese, and Danish. It had been a long haul. Ten years had passed since he had first intended to begin writing the book. A number of things had conspired against him during that time. First, writing did not come easily to Milgram. Coming up with an idea for a study, creating just the right technique, and then carrying it out—these were the things that excited him, not writing a book, especially one that was a retrospective account requiring theoretical integration, which was not his forte. Another reason the book was delayed was that Milgram was very much a family man. The Milgrams’ children, Michele and Marc, were born within a few years after the obedience studies were completed, and evenings and weekends were set aside for the family, even when the children were older. Trips with Sasha and the children to museums and parks were common. And there were annual family trips to the Caribbean, New England, Center Stage 213 and sometimes to Europe. Stanley applied some of the same energy and inventiveness to parenting as he did to his work. For example, when Marc arrived at summer camp one year, there were already letters from his father waiting for him, to help alleviate his homesickness. And Stanley would occasionally make home movies with fictional plot lines in which Marc and Michele would be the stars. One of the more complex ones was titled “A Bird in Paris,” which required several birds to play the part. In it, Marc and Michele buy a bird at an open-air market. Very soon, they lose it, providing Milgram with an excuse to film the children running all over Paris chasing the bird. They finally catch the bird, but then they feel sorry that it is locked in a cage. In the finale, they take the bird up to the top of the Eiffel Tower to release it. But the bird doesn’t cooperate and flies away too quickly. So Milgram resorted to using a stunt double, a toy bird that he had purchased. There was yet a third factor that delayed the writing of the obedience book. On May 19, 1964, Milgram received a letter from coeditors Gardner Lindzey and Elliot Aronson, asking him to contribute a chapter on mass phenomena to the second edition of the Handbook of Social Psychology. Beginning with the first edition in 1954, the multivolume Handbook has been the premier reference resource in social psychology. A new edition appears about every fifteen years, and its chapters are state-of-the-art presen- tations of the various subtopics in the field. An invitation to contribute to the Handbook carried with it a great deal of prestige, and Milgram accepted. It turned out to be a daunting, drawn-out, time-consuming task, which di- verted his attention from the obedience book. Not until March 1965 did he send the editors his chapter outline, and he didn’t actually begin writing until that fall. Lane Conn, a Harvard colleague, recalls how difficult it was for Stanley to start writing: “He was blocked, and he couldn’t get it written. And I said, ‘What are you going to do?’ So what he did was he went into his office and took some psilocybin [a hallucinogenic drug found in mush- rooms]. And I said to him, ‘Well, Stanley, how is that going to come out?’ And he said, ‘Well, you know, 90 percent of it will be crap, but 10 percent of it will be good.’ And he used that as a way to try to get his creative juices flowing.” The final product was a massive piece of work, over 100 printed pages long, which he didn’t complete until the end of 1966. Its final title 214 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD was “Collective Behavior: Crowds and Social Movements.” Hans Toch, who was a visiting professor at Harvard in 1965–1966, wrote a small section of the chapter and appears as a coauthor. Milgram’s halting progress on the chapter was aided by the gentle prodding of coeditor Elliot Aronson. For example, in a letter of October 12, 1966, Aronson wrote:

Dear Stanley:

Nuuuu?

Best regards, Elliot

It turned out that Milgram’s initial writing difﬁculties had no bearing on the ﬁnal product. The chapter is Milgram’s most scholarly piece of writing, a masterly work of integration and analysis of theories and studies of mass behavior. After Milgram submitted the chapter, Aronson wrote him that it was “one of the two or three most exciting contributions to the Handbook. ...I literally enjoyed every word of it and would not have dreamed of suggesting any major changes.”

…

Given the twelve-year lag between the completion of the obedience experiments and the publication of the book, Milgram wondered if some people might erroneously think that the current book was merely a facsimile edition of the original, which had actually been published about ten years earlier. He didn’t need to worry. The book was a triumph of exposition and a greatly expanded treatment of the experiments and the issues raised by them. Obedience to Authority described nineteen experimental conditions—some already published and others reported for the first time—in comparable detail. Milgram fended off, by means of argument and data, various criticisms that had been leveled at the research: that the subjects were atypical; that they “obeyed” because they saw through the deception; that the findings were lim- Center Stage 215 ited to the lab and not generalizable to the real world; and that the research was unethical. The defense against this last criticism was largely a reproduction of material he had published earlier in his American Psychologist rebuttal of Baumrind’s article and in his reply to a critical essay by the Welsh poet and playwright Dannie Abse, who had written a play, The Dogs of Pavlov, inspired by the obedience experiments. An effective feature of the book, which helped personalize the subjects’ experiences for the reader, were individual vignettes of ten different subjects in various conditions of the experimental series. The book also presented, for the first time, a theory of obedience, grounded in a combination of evolutionary thinking and cybernetics—the science of regulation or control. Milgram argued that membership in authority-dominated social groupings provides enormous advantage in coping with a hostile environment. Because a propensity for obedience is a prerequisite of this type of social organization, evolutionary processes have made such a tendency part of human nature. When acting autonomously, a person’s destructive impulses are held in check by his conscience. However, organizations cannot operate in an effective, coordinated fashion if its members all follow their own individual ideas of right and wrong. So, according to Milgram, when a person enters an organizational mode, he necessarily cedes individual internal control to the group’s leadership, and his conscience is no longer brought into play. The transition from an autonomous mode of functioning to an organizational or “systemic” mode is achieved through the person’s entry into what Milgram called the “agentic state,” a different experiential state, one in which a person relinquishes responsibility to the legitimate authority in charge. According to Milgram, once a person accepts the legitimacy of an authority, he also accepts the authority’s interpretation of a situation. So, if the authority says that another individual is deserving of punishment, the person who becomes a willing agent of that authority also accepts that assessment. Allowing the authority to redefine the meaning of the situation and passing on responsibility to him make it possible for a person to act in ways that he would normally consider reprehensible. He is no longer concerned with whether or not the action is morally acceptable; he has ceded that judgment to the person in charge. His main concern now is how adequately he has carried out the required action. 216 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

Milgram describes the agentic state as follows: “From a subjective standpoint, a person is in a state of agency when he defines himself in a social situation in a manner that renders him open to regulation by a person of higher status. In this condition the individual no longer views himself as responsible for his own actions but defines himself as an instrument for carrying out the wishes of others.” Milgram’s theorizing is the weakest part of the book. First, his evolutionary-cybernetic analysis—never before mentioned in Milgram’s journal articles related to the experiments—cannot explain the variations in amounts of obedience that occurred in his various experimental conditions. Despite the differences in the experimental setups among the various conditions, most of them continued to share a similar authority-dominated organizational structure, which should lead to uniformity in the relinquishing of internal control to the person in charge—the experimenter. Second, the validity of the agentic state concept is not dependent on its embeddedness in Milgram’s evolutionary-cybernetic theory. That is, the validity of the idea that destructive obedience requires entry into an agentic state—whose essence is shedding of responsibility for one’s actions and relinquishing it to a legitimate authority—is not enhanced by seeing the process as a product of evolutionary necessity. The validity of the agentic state concept is ultimately an empirical question: Is entry into the agentic state a necessary precondition for destructive obedience? A specific theory about how or why such a precondition came into being is only of secondary importance. Among the experimental conditions that were reported for the first time in the book was one in which all the subjects were women. Their rate of obedience was identical to male subjects in the comparable condition—65 percent. Although Milgram found no gender differences in degree of obedience, he did find that obedient women experienced more tension than obedient men. At the end of each experimental session, subjects indicated on a numerical scale how tense or nervous they were at the point of maximum tension. Milgram reports that the self-rated nervousness of obedient women was higher than that of obedient men in all the other experimental conditions in the series. Center Stage 217

Another condition newly described in the book was one that yielded the highest rate of obedience of his whole series. In this condition, the naïve subject didn’t shock the learner; he was merely an accessory to the act. The situation was set up so that the job of pressing the switch was given to another subject—actually a confederate—while the real subject performed only some subsidiary actions. So, while he contributed to the overall procedure, he was not directly involved in punishing the victim. The result: 37 out of 40 subjects (92.5 percent) continued to the end. Milgram articulated the troubling implications of this ﬁnding:

Any competent manager of a destructive bureaucratic system can arrange his personnel so that only the most callous and obtuse are directly involved in violence. The greater part of the personnel can consist of men and women who, by virtue of their distance from the actual acts of brutality, will feel little strain in their performance of supportive functions. They will feel doubly absolved from responsibility. First, legitimate authority has given full warrant for their actions. Second, they have not themselves committed brutal physical acts.

While Milgram had no overarching theory to guide him as he was conducting the obedience project in 1961–1962—the “agentic state” concept was post hoc theorizing—there were speciﬁc sets of experiments within the broader series that were meant to provide answers to particular questions. An example of this, already discussed, was the four-part proximity series, the purpose of which was to see what effect varying the physical and emotional distance between the teacher and learner would have on obedience. Among the nine experimental conditions described for the ﬁrst time in the book was another subset with a common focus—to provide experimental support for Milgram’s belief that the destructive behavior shown by his subjects was a product of their obedience to the experimental authority and not the uncapping of bottled-up aggression. This had become a contentious point. Some saw the subjects’ behavior as a form of aggression, rather than obedience, an approach rooted in Freudian thinking. According to Freud, all individuals harbor destructive impulses. 218 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

Although these destructive tendencies continually press for release, they are usually held in check because society considers their expression unacceptable. Applying this view to Milgram’s experiment, one could argue that in his laboratory he created a permissive environment in which those normally pent-up hostile urges could be freely expressed by “hurting” the learner. In other words, the experimenter gave subjects permission to act in ways they wanted to anyway, rather than made them do something distasteful to them. Freud’s views on aggression were just one piece of his larger attempt to provide an all-encompassing theory of human behavior. Milgram had no such broad ambitions. Moreover, he was uninterested in probing the interior of the human psyche, preferring to focus on the external social forces that have surprisingly powerful effects on our behavior. While Milgram recognized that aggressiveness is part of human nature, he argued that it was not the primary determinant of his subjects’ behavior, because it was overpowered by a situational determinant—the experimenter’s commands. Subjects shocked the learner not to satisfy destructive urges but because they felt obliged to obey the commands of a destructive authority. Several of his experimental variations provided empirical support for his view. In one such variation, the subject was required as usual to shock the learner every time he made a mistake on the word-matching task. However, in contrast to the usual rule that the voltage had to be stepped up on each subsequent error, the subject was free to administer any of the thirty shock levels whenever the learner made a mistake. If destructive urges were at the root of the shocking conduct in Milgram’s experiments, one would expect subjects in this condition to repeatedly zap the learner with high-voltage shocks, since the choice was up to them. In actuality, almost all subjects stayed at the lower shock levels, with the average shock level being 3.6 on the thirty-step shock continuum. Milgram concluded: “If destructive impulses were really pressing for release, and the subject could justify his use of high shock levels in the cause of science, why did they not make the victim suffer?... Whatever leads to shocking the victim at the highest level [in other conditions] cannot be explained by autonomously generated aggression, but needs to be explained by the transformation of behavior that comes about through obedience to orders.” Center Stage 219

Another condition that provided empirical support for Milgram’s viewpoint involved the most clever piece of staging of the whole series of experiments. In the beginning phases of this condition, things proceed in the standard fashion, with the learner receiving increasingly intense shocks after each error. The learner’s complaints begin at 75 volts and gradually intensify as he keeps getting stronger and stronger shocks. After the subject shocks the learner with 150 volts, something unusual happens. The experimenter says that the experiment will have to end, because the learner’s protests had become increasingly intense and, in light of his heart condition, he should not receive any more shocks. Suddenly, the learner’s voice is heard from the adjacent room. He cries out in protest that he wants the experiment to continue. He says that a friend of his had recently participated in the experiment and had continued until the end. To stop now would be an insult to his manliness. The experimenter reiterates his concern for the well-being of the learner, and the learner again demands that the experiment continue. He had come to the lab “to do a job” and he intended to complete it, so he insists that the teacher resume the procedure. The naïve subject is now in a bind. Whom should he listen to—the learner, who demands to be shocked, or the experimenter, who prohibits it? The results show that all the subjects resolved the conﬂict in a similar manner: Despite the learner’s wishes, not a single one gave him another shock. All of them obeyed the experimenter’s orders to stop. If aggression were the key, the subjects would surely have continued to shock the learner. What could supersede permission from the person who is being hurt? Yet no one continued, a clear demonstration that the subjects’ behavior was governed by the authority’s commands and not by any hostile tendencies.

…

Much like when the first journal report was published in 1963, the appearance of the book drew public attention to Milgram and his startling research findings—but on a much grander scale. Large portions of the book were serialized in the London Sunday Times, and it was a finalist for a Na- 220 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD tional Book Award in 1975. BBC Television produced a film about Mil- gram and his work for a documentary series, Horizon, titled “You Do as You Are Told.” He made appearances on various television talk shows and news programs in the United States, such as the Today show and Donahue, as well as in France and England. For a book about a scientific experiment, it was reviewed in an unusually large number of newspapers and magazines for a general readership, in addition to the usual professional journals. More than sixty reviews appeared in English-language publications alone. The reactions to the book were as varied as the initial media reports about the experiments a decade earlier. A reviewer for the Los Angeles Times wrote, “Obedience to Authority ...is one of the most significant books I have read in more than two decades of reviewing,” while a writer for The Spectator of Lon- don said, “Professor Milgram seems to see some deep social significance in it all, and no doubt a great many reviewers will take his word for it.... I personally decline to be convinced that he has discovered anything so significant.”* One review, however, stands out because of its unusual degree of com- bativeness: the lead review in the January 13, 1974, issue of the New York Times Book Review. Sprawled across the section’s cover page, it was accompanied by some nightmarish surrealistic artwork with the shock machine as its centerpiece, as if to forewarn the reader of the sinister nature of the book being reviewed. It was a mean-spirited, polemical piece, written by Steven Marcus, a professor of English at Columbia University. Although he granted that the experiments were “extremely provocative and probably important,” they were “little masterpieces of bad faith” designed to bring out the worst in people. He criticized parts of the book for their moralistic tone and their “mutilated syntax.” He also found fault with Milgram’s theoretical explanation, which was admittedly flawed. But, while some other reviewers also judged the theoretical portions of the book to be weak, Marcus was dis-

*A sampling of other quotations from reviews appears in Appendix B, along with a quantitative content analysis of the reviews. Center Stage 221 tinctively derisive, referring to them as “general disaster” and “a pretty bad joke” and disparaging their “empty pious sentiments.” When Milgram appeared on the Dick Cavett Show, Cavett asked him what he thought of Marcus’s review. Milgram replied: “Well, obviously he was not competent to review the book from a scientific standpoint, since he is a teacher of English. And he did point to a sentence that required some syntactical correction, and any English teacher would normally correct that. It was not a serious review from [a scientific] standpoint. What he failed to do was to extract what one learns from the experiment, what one learns from the activity, rather than attending to some relatively trivial details.” While Milgram and his obedience research would remain irredeemably reprehensible to some, the benign attitudes conveyed by a large portion of the book reviews is consistent with the fact that within intellectual circles, he was widely respected as a serious thinker. Indeed, he was held in high regard both within the profession and outside of it. For example, in 1966, just three years after his first journal publication on the obedience research, he was asked to serve as the program chairman for the personality and social psychology division of the APA at its annual convention. In March 1972, he was nominated for election to the council of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, a group whose goal is to apply social-scientific knowledge to problems of society. In 1977, he was an invited speaker at a psychiatric symposium on obedience to authority, which included a presentation by John Dean, the former White House counsel. And between 1976 and 1980, he gave invited addresses at four different conferences dealing with ethics and research. In June 1978, he gave a major invited address, “The Problem of Obedience in a Just Society,” at an international conference on psychological stress held in Jerusalem. And when Harvard was considering appointing a full professor in social psychology, the chairman of the department, R. Duncan Luce, wrote Mil- gram soliciting his opinions about the relative merits of five well-known candidates they were considering: Elliot Aronson, Ellen Berscheid, Reid Hastie, Bibb Latané, and Lee Ross. After expressing his qualified preference for Aronson, Milgram concluded his letter with a brief comment on 222 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD the state of social psychology, which included, for good measure, a mild swipe at political correctness:

Many of those working under the label of “social psychology” today deal with intrapsychic phenomena that are not inherently social. This has given an active, but amorphous character to the field. If you can find someone who, in addition to possessing strong experimental and theoretical strengths, can articulate a persuasive vision of the field, by all means grab him (her—oops!), for that is a pressing intellectual need of our discipline.

He was an invited speaker at a variety of conferences outside of social psychology: a conference on the implications of obedience to authority for the legal system sponsored by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York in May 1977; an international conference on terrorism held in Evian, France, the following month; an interdisciplinary conference on cults and new religious movements convened by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith in January 1979 in the wake of the Jonestown mass suicide; and a symposium on the future of cities at Denison University in April 1979. At its commencement exercises in June 1981, Queens College honored Mil- gram as a Distinguished Alumnus, and in 1983 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The wide public exposure he received via the television appearances and book reviews made him something of a minor celebrity. As a result, people from all walks of life wrote him letters, which ranged from the silly to the sublime. He received and answered letters from correspondents as varied as an autograph collector from Indiana, Pennsylvania, who wanted to add Milgram to his list of 7,000 names; a high school student from Canton, Ohio, asking for help with a speech based on his research; columnist Max Lerner, requesting reprints for a planned article; a Florida college student inquiring about the relevance of R.D. Laing’s writings to his obedience research; and rock musician Peter Gabriel, who, after reading Obedience to Au- thority, was planning to use obedience as the theme for a new piece of music. He asked permission to use the soundtrack from Milgram’s film Obedience to punctuate the instrumental theme as well as photographs from Center Stage 223 the obedience experiment, which would appear on the album’s inner sleeve. Although he told Milgram that he had no intention of criticizing the experiments and that he was not “a punk rock singer about to set upon your work with razor blades,” Milgram turned him down, explaining that he only gave permission for scientific use and not for entertainment purposes. A dirge-like song, “We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37),” did end up as a track on Gabriel’s album So, which came out in 1986, but without the embellishments the musician had hoped for. Among the many letters Milgram received was one from a young mother from Port Chester, New York, with an unusual request. Their first child, James, had just had his first birthday. When he was born, they gave him a present consisting of newspapers and magazines published in the month he was born as well as a number of best sellers and hit recordings. Now, for his first birthday, they wanted to give him a more memorable gift, a collection of autographs of a selected group of the world’s leaders in science, arts, literature, and so on. She asked him to send an autographed photograph or note. Milgram replied with the following letter, addressing the toddler:

Dear James:

Do you agree with the analysis of child disobedience discussed on page 208 of my book, Obedience to Authority? You will soon be in a position to know about such things and to instruct your parents.

Best wishes, Stanley Milgram

A more serious—but no less unusual—request came from a staff psychologist at a psychiatric hospital in upstate New York. One of her patients, a bright and physically healthy young man, was suffering from a very persistent and crippling folie à deux with his brother, that so far had resisted all efforts at treatment. She wrote Milgram that the patient believed that he was a hypno- tized subject in “satellite-controlled telemetric studies” being conducted by Milgram and he wanted to be “released” so that he could get on with his life. When his therapist asked him if a letter from Milgram would help, he re- 224 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD sponded with delight at the idea. The psychologist asked Milgram if he would consider writing a letter indicating that the patient was not—and had never been—involved in any of his experiments. Milgram quickly obliged.

…

After collaborating with Harry From on The City and the Self, Milgram had begun to develop a passion for filmmaking, and the completion of his book freed him to direct his attention once again to that enterprise. As noted earlier, the artistic success of The City and the Self led to Milgram’s and Harry From’s contract with Harper and Row to make four educational films on various topics in social psychology. The first was Invitation to Social Psychol- ogy, which was quickly followed by Conformity and Independence—both appearing in 1975. The first won the Silver Award at the Chicago Interna- tional Film Festival, and both were awarded the Chris Bronze Award at the Columbus Film Festival—all in 1975. In 1976 came Human Aggression and Non-Verbal Communication. Many of Milgram’s students appear in the films. Milgram himself made brief appearances in Conformity and Indepen- dence and Human Aggression, and he narrated Invitation to Social Psychology. The films have surprising staying power in terms of the concepts and findings discussed, and they are still used in college classes. Like all the films in the series, Invitation to Social Psychology uses both real-life vignettes and reenactments of experiments to convey some of the principles and findings of social psychology. For example, spilling hot coffee in a college cafeteria line is used to illustrate the “actor-observer” attributional effect, the tendency to point to situational causes for our own actions but to the personal qualities of others when it comes to explaining their actions. When one student sees another one spilling coffee from his tray, he calls him clumsy. A moment later he himself has a similar accident. When asked what happened, he explains: “The coffee was really hot.” Similarly, a dramatization of Albert Bandura’s experiment in which children watch an adult punching an inflatable “Bobo doll” is used to teach how aggressive behavior can be a product of imitation. And Conformity and In- dependence uses both everyday behaviors and research studies as teaching Center Stage 225 tools. For example, the differing behaviors of participants in a smoking cessation group after they leave a session are used to illustrate different forms of social influence. The scene begins with the group leader ending a session by asking members of the group to indicate by a show of hands who will not smoke during the coming week. Ultimately, all hands go up. The camera moves outdoors and follows two of the participants as they walk away from the building. First, it shows a woman dumping a pack of cigarettes into a sidewalk trash can, her facial expression conveying her resoluteness. Her behavior is an illustration of what Herbert Kelman called “internaliza- tion,” the process by which a person’s behavior changes because a new belief or action fits with his or her own needs and values. This kind of change persists even when the individual is not being observed by the group. The behavior of a male participant is then used to illustrate the more superficial process of “compliance,” whereby an adopted action persists only as long as a person is under the surveillance of the group. As soon as the male leaves the building, he immediately lights up a cigarette, inhaling deeply to com- pensate for the deprivation he experienced during the meeting. And a reenactment of one of Milgram’s own field experiments on the sidewalk across the street from the Graduate Center shows how a group of people becomes an increasingly more powerful social magnet, causing increasingly larger numbers of passersby to imitate them—by looking up at an office window on the sixth floor of the school building—as the size of the stimulus group expands. Despite its simplicity, this experiment reveals a fundamental truth about human nature and social life—that we use other people’s behavior as sources of information to help us cut through the complexities of our environment. The intent of Milgram’s field experiment was not to demonstrate that humans can act in a blind, lemming-like fashion. Rather, it was designed to show that imitation can be a rational process. In this case, a passerby probably assumed that, if a group had stopped to look up at a window, there was probably a good reason for it, and the larger the crowd, the more compelling the reason must be. The film Non-Verbal Communication is about language without words— eye contact, human spacing, vocal intonation, facial expressions, gestures— and the uses we make of them. By means of a wide and often entertaining 226 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD array of real-life and staged examples, the film points out that nonverbal cues are used both automatically and consciously. The latter is illustrated by means of a dizzying ride through midtown Manhattan with a cab driver manically explaining how he uses gestural cues to decide whom to pick up. In producing the film, Milgram and From benefited serendipitously from an international conference on nonverbal behavior that was taking place in Toronto when they were shooting the film. From flew there with his small technical crew, and he was able to incorporate brief appearances by some of the top nonverbal researchers. So, for example, the film depicts the anthropologist Edward Hall discussing cross-cultural differences in the use of personal space and Robert Rosenthal noting that women are better at “reading” nonverbal cues than men. The film Human Aggression depicted the role aggression played in an ordinary day of an actual teenage gang in the Bronx. In one scene, for example, as the gang is raucously walking down the middle of a residential street, one member spots a bowling ball lying on the ground, picks it up and spon- taneously throws it through an open window, without any apparent concern about hurting someone inside. From was introduced to the gang by a police informer who was one of the leaders of the gang. The leader took him to the gang’s meeting place, an abandoned apartment with the mezuzah of its former Jewish residents still attached to its doorpost. Gang members were sitting around smoking dope, eating cupcakes, and fondling the breasts of a girl. After some discussion, the gang agreed to participate in the film in exchange for money for beer and partying. One night, From got a call from the police saying that the members of the gang had been on the roof of a building and, amidst the excitement about doing the film, someone had thrown down a slab of concrete, killing a girl. As a result, the police would no longer provide any protection for the film crew if they continued with the filming. Milgram and From finally terminated their contact with the gang when one day they heard that the gang was planning a fight with another gang, complete with guns and bats, for the film. From immediately called the police, told them where the battle was supposed to take place, and prevented the gang war. He told them: “We are not going to shoot. There are more important things than footage.” Center Stage 227

Milgram’s experiences with filmmaking led him to see that the scientific method had certain limitations that film was able to transcend. Harry From recalled that, when they were working on The City and the Self, there came a time “when Stanley felt much more freedom in treating subjects of interest to him through film than through a very rigorous experimental methodology. He sometimes felt the constraints of such an approach. What the film can afford and the scientific method cannot is ambiguity,” an unavoidable feature of life. Milgram was intrigued by the possibility of capturing images on film that could not be translated into words, much less assigned numbers. Although it would not be possible for a discovery made through film to “be given a conclusion in a paper,... it can certainly disturb enough to give other people seeing it at least as much experience or information as an epilogue of a scientific paper.” By the mid-1970s filmmaking started moving toward the center stage of Milgram’s interests and activities, and by May 1977 he even gave his profession as “professor and filmmaker” on a questionnaire for a listing in the biographical publication “Men of Achievement.” He started taking courses in filmmaking in schools in the New York area, such as the New School for Social Research and New York University. In the fall of 1975, he enrolled in a film editing workshop conducted by Joanne Burke, editor of the feature film The Anderson Tapes and of Gimme Shelter, a documentary about the Rolling Stones’ infamous concert at Altamont, during which a member of the audience was stabbed to death. He was also eager to learn film directing. He submitted a grant application to the American Film Institute’s Independent Filmmaker Program to support a film project, motivated at least partially by the directorial experience he would gain in the process of making the film. Beginning in the spring of 1976, he started creating and offering film- related courses to the students in the social-personality program at CUNY, such as the Psychology of Photography and Film, Urban Psychology through Film, and Film and Video as Research Tools in Social Science. While the medium of film allowed Milgram to step outside the boundaries of a scientific social psychology, it did not diminish his belief in the field’s value, as the following statement, written in 1977, attests: “The cre- 228 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD ative claim of social psychology lies in its capacity to reconstruct varied types of social experience in an experimental format, to clarify and make visible the operation of obscure social forces so that they may be explored in terms of the language of cause and effect.” Nor did it diminish his self-definition as a social psychologist. He continued teaching the core social psychology courses that he had been teaching since his arrival at CUNY. In a letter dated May 7, 1983, to his long- lost childhood friend Bernard Fried, who is now retired from Lafayette College as professor of biology, he expressed his continued identification with social psychology:

Since 1967 I have taught social psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University. There I do my thing, which is not so different from what you do, except that it contains a more generous admixture of fantasy and some slices of baloney. But, at the root, I’ve maintained a deep interest in science, and have never relinquished the curiosity and desire to understand things that were part of our makeup even when we were young boys. . . . My career has been somewhat successful and quite controversial, but most of all, it has allowed me to fuse creative and scientiﬁc inclinations in a constructive and disciplined way.

…

About the same time that Milgram was coproducing the social psychology films with Harry From, the idea for a different kind of movie was taking shape in the mind of George Bellak, a seasoned television dramatist, who had been the writer for a number of television series, including The De- fenders and The Untouchables. When Bellak first read about the obedience experiments, he immediately became fascinated with them. He had been in the U.S. Army intelligence service during World War II, and the experiments resonated with him, since, as he put it, “I was as obsessed as Stanley with the question of cruelty to people, and the German situation, and the Jews and all that.” So he decided to write a play dramatizing the experiments, the people involved, and the events surrounding them. The final re- Center Stage 229 sult was a made-for-TV movie, The Tenth Level, starring William Shatner as the Milgram-like scientist. The reaction to the film paralleled in many ways the earlier furor following the experiments themselves. Bellak wrote an outline of the story and tried to sell it on and off for four or five years, but no one would touch it. The most severe reaction was from the president of ABC, who found it fascinating but wouldn’t have anything to do with it because he thought it was “Godless.” Bellak took that comment to mean that the executive did not believe that people by nature were capable of such things, that God would never allow human beings to behave in this manner—and if He did, the news should not be disseminated widely. Eventually, Bellak managed to get CBS interested in producing the play, for showing on its prime-time Playhouse 90 program—at a cost of $300,000. It had been scheduled for the Christmas season of 1975, but it did not air until August 26, 1976, because it took that long to put together a group of sponsors for it. The more prestigious sponsors such as Xerox, IBM, and AT&T “wouldn’t go near it with a ten-foot pole,” recalls Bellak. On the other hand, Shatner believed so strongly in the play that he gave up being with his children—who lived with his divorced wife—on Christmas Day in order to perform in it. CBS paid Milgram $5,000 to serve as a consultant, but he ended up having very little input and ultimately felt torn about it. As a film, he felt it was dull, with the “genuine drama underlying the obedience problem [getting] lost in the welter of video clichés.” Indeed, the film is flawed, overburdened as it is by too many fictional elements that were added, presumably, for dramatic effect. But the film is powerful, in its way, and it does effectively communicate the discrepancy between how far it was thought people would go in shocking the victim and how far they actually went; the anguish and turmoil of the participants; and the fact that Milgram could have stopped the experiments when he saw how distressed his subjects were, but didn’t. The Amer- ican Psychological Foundation saw enough merit in the film to give George Bellak honorable mention among its 1977 National Media Awards, “for increasing the public’s knowledge and understanding of psychology.” Mil- 230 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD gram was glad that it helped spread knowledge about the obedience experiments, so he was not all that distressed about the film’s shortcomings. He accepted them as the price one had to pay to get a national audience and, in fact, was delighted to get the attention. In 1977, Addison-Wesley published a collection containing almost all of Milgram’s writings up to that point, called The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments. Milgram had a hard time finding a publisher, since books of readings were not generally lucrative, but he wanted a collection that would inform readers of the diversity of his accomplishments beyond the obedience experiments. He would take offense whenever someone would mention “the Milgram experiments,” meaning the obedience experiments, in his presence—“Which one of my experiments are you talking about?” he would ask. He once told his brother, Joel, that he often felt like the actor James Arness, whom people only knew from his starring role in the television series Gunsmoke, and not from any of his other roles. The articles in the book are organized into sections such as “The Indi- vidual in the City” and “The Individual and Authority.” Each section begins with an introduction in which Milgram provides the historical background for the studies and how they fit in with the main themes of the section. These introductions are generally very useful, although occasionally self-serving as well—such as when he reproduces his notes from 1960 on some planned experiments on bystander intervention which “prefigured” the Kitty Genovese case. The publication of such an anthology in midcareer was strangely prophetic. The flow of creative ideas was still there and would be for many years, but the truth of the matter is that, with two exceptions, Milgram did not report on any new innovative empirical work after that. But the two exceptions are interesting in their own right. The first involved the consequences of a particular kind of norm-breaking—cutting into line. And the second was his research on “cyranoids,” which held out the promise of a completely fresh approach to an old topic in social psychology—how we form impressions of other people. CHAPTER 11

VEXATIONS, CYRANOIDS, AND THE DECLINING YEARS

HEN MILGRAM FIRST came to the Graduate Center in W1967, he was not planning to stay more than five years. But CUNY turned out to be much more stimulating than he expected, and he ended up remaining there for the rest of his career. The university’s central location in one of the world’s greatest cities made it an ideal place for Milgram’s budding interest in the psychology of urban life to bloom and even branch out to study New Yorkers’ mental maps of their city. As head of the social-personality program from 1967 to 1971, he was in a position to incorporate an urban emphasis into the curriculum. And it was at CUNY that his interest and talent in filmmaking, which had been dormant since his documentary Obedience, in 1965, was reawakened with the help of Harry From. Much to his surprise and delight, by the mid-1970s, Milgram was doing very well financially—a combination of the fact that faculty salaries at CUNY were among the highest in the country and that the royalties from his books and films were substantial, as were his speaking fees, which, after the appearance of Obedience to Authority, typically netted $1,000–$2,000, plus expenses, per talk. He once confided to Harry From that he had earned $80,000 the previous year. “It was an impressive amount for him, and for me as well,” From recalled. Stanley’s brother Joel remembers that “Stanley was very, very pleased . . . in his peak financial years. It was a great source of pride to him and awe to me, because the notion of becoming a college professor was traditionally a very modest thing, if not close to poverty.” A large pro-

231 232 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD portion of his lucrative invited talks were related to his obedience research. Of the approximately 140 invited speeches and colloquia that Milgram gave during his lifetime, more than one-third dealt, directly or indirectly, with the topic. Milgram was still giving invited talks on the obedience experiments in 1984—twenty-two years after he had completed them. Those experiments turned out to be both the boon and the bane of his career. On the one hand, he longed to put them behind him. As he wrote a childhood friend in 1976, “I started work on obedience in 1960, a long time ago, and it would be nice to move on.... But professional life turns you into a kind of snail, in which everything you do becomes another curl of your ever enlarging carapace.” On the other hand, they had made him famous and added substantively to his income. At the same time, Milgram’s tenure at CUNY was also marked by periods of difficulty and frustration. The Graduate Center’s finances rose and fell with New York City’s as a whole. One such period cast a shadow of uncertainty over the university’s very future. In an attempt to deal with a fis- cal crisis in the spring of 1976, the university administration cut faculty salaries. “It appears,” Milgram wrote Hollander, “as if we are about to enjoy a 1/12th pay cut, euphemistically termed a ‘furlough,’ (visions of happy army boys emerging joyously from chain-link fenced-in military bases as they scramble for the nearest bordello).” During the late 1960s and early 1970s, many American campuses erupted with student dissent and black militancy. In their more extreme forms, these activities involved volatile confrontations with the administration, the occupation of campus buildings, disruption of classes, and destruction of property. Although some New York schools, such as Columbia Uni- versity, were the epicenter of such activities, the Graduate Center—because it was a graduate school only—was largely unaffected by the disturbances. Milgram was not opposed to the idea of the students’ raising their voices to try to right a wrong, per se, something he regretted not doing at Queens College in the early 1950s when he and most of the students silently stood by as some of their favorite teachers were fired for refusing to testify about Communist Party membership before the Senate Internal Security Sub- committee chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy. And he was in agreement Vexations, Cyranoids, and the Declining Years 233 with some of the goals of the student protests, such as nuclear disarmament and opposition to the Vietnam War. However, as he wrote Hollander, he was very disturbed by the extreme methods they used: “I deplore their strategy of acting out destructive adolescent fantasies on the institutions they know are least likely to strike back.... Somewhere a proper balance between concern and apathy must be struck and the line between ineffectual, amateurish protest which changes nothing, and violent, unlawful action which destroys everything must be determined.” While the Graduate Center was spared student protests, it was not completely untouched by them. As at many schools throughout the country, more and more students were now demanding social relevance—that their intellectual and academic concerns show some real impact on the contemporary social world—but Stanley would not give it to them. He regarded pure scientific research as a valuable pursuit in its own right—even if it only satisfied his own curiosity. So he continued with his innovative research, studying such things as the photographer-subject relationship, the social- psychological wisdom contained in the television program Candid Camera, pedestrian norms about staying to the right on the sidewalk, and whether or not strangers would reciprocate with a handshake if you extended your hand to them. For students looking for social relevance, these kinds of things “looked absolutely petty bourgeois,” according to Harry From, and Milgram was not popular among such students. Undoubtedly, though, one of the greatest vexations of Milgram’s time at CUNY was the difficulty he repeatedly encountered in obtaining external grant support for his research. For an academician, successful grantsman- ship is important for a number of reasons. First, of course, the grant provides the funds that make it possible to conduct planned research. Second, the scientific ego thrives on grants. Since grant proposals are typically reviewed by one’s scientific peers, approval of a grant is a form of recognition of the merits of the applicant’s work—much like the acceptance of an article in a peer-reviewed journal. Third, grants enhance the recipient’s value to his or her school—literally. The money a grant brings in has two components. Most of it pays for “direct costs.” This is the portion of the grant that benefits the researcher, or “principal investigator,” directly paying for such 234 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD things as his summer salary and the salaries of other staff, research subjects, and equipment. The second component of a grant consists of “indirect costs” or overhead. This is money that goes to the principal investigator’s university to pay for the administrative costs and operating expenses it in- curs in the support it provides for the research. In actuality, the university can use the money in any manner its president chooses. So grants bring in cash, not just cachet. On March 29, 1977, Milgram submitted a very large grant proposal to the National Science Foundation. Although he had been awarded a small, internally funded grant of $10,000 by the Graduate Center for a small map study in 1975–1976, this grant, if approved, would be Milgram’s first exter- nally funded grant since the early 1970s, when he received funds from the French government for his Paris map study in 1973 and $260,000 from CBS for his television study in 1969. He was eager to get back in the game. The NSF grant application, submitted to the agency’s Ethics and Values in Society program, was to support the production of three educational films dealing with ethical issues in psychology, sociology, and biomedical research, respectively. Milgram’s stated aim was to produce educational films “that will communicate ethical principles to students and practitioners in a way that is lively, interesting and informative.” There were also undoubtedly some unstated aims: The grant would afford him the opportunity to satisfy his recently discovered appetite for filmmaking. In particular, it would give him the chance to develop his directing skills, which he had not been able to do so far, since Harry From had directed all the films they had made together. The films would also help heal Milgram’s bruised ego, which had taken a beating from the relentless ethical criticisms of his obedience research. Students whom he was close with at CUNY in the 1970s were dumb- founded that he still seemed to be smarting from failing statistics at Har- vard in the spring of 1957, the only time he failed anything in graduate school and, for that matter, in college. No doubt he still ached from Har- vard’s denial of tenure as well. The continuing attacks on the obedience experiments irritated Milgram, not so much because of the substance of the criticism—he recognized that Vexations, Cyranoids, and the Declining Years 235 there could be reasonable disagreements on the issue—but because it meant that, to some extent, he had failed. He thought he had asked a legitimate question—How far would normal individuals go in obeying destructive orders?—and provided eye-opening answers, with built-in safeguards to protect the well-being of his subjects. The persistent questioning of the legitimacy of his methods meant that he had not been fully successful in his experimental efforts. He hoped to correct the situation by putting the ethical questions to rest through a film in which he planned to juxtapose his experiment with others generally regarded as blatantly unethical and deserving of thorny criticisms. In this way, he expected, his own research would look good. The application requested a total of $263,994, for a two-and-a-half-year period, for the production of the three films. Of that figure, $222,810 constituted the “direct cost” component, and $41,884 the “indirect cost” or overhead paid to the university. This proposal was a greatly expanded version of two much smaller film proposals, focusing on ethical issues in psychology only, that Milgram had submitted earlier. He had sent the first to the American Film Institute’s In- dependent Filmmaker Program, an annual competition, on September 12, 1975. Although he was not among the forty-three winners, he was one of the finalists, a respectable accomplishment given the fact that there were 1,047 grant applications that year. Next, Milgram proposed the film idea to Harper and Row Media, for whom he and Harry From had recently produced the four social psychology films. Although the company had been pleased with Milgram’s previous work and shown an initial interest in producing additional films, no offer ever materialized. The setting for each of the new films was to be a meeting of an ethical review board to evaluate three cases. The chairman would open the meeting by reminding its members “that its purpose is to review a number of cases, to clarify the underlying ethical issues, and to vote on whether each experiment in question should be run, and, if so, with what modifications.” The chairman would then begin to describe the first case, and very soon his narrative account would change into a vivid reenactment of it. 236 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

In the National Science Foundation proposal Milgram did not specify the exact cases that would be depicted in the three films. However, based on earlier proposals to the American Film Institute and Harper and Row Media and his handwritten outlines, it is possible to guess which experiments he would have chosen for the psychology film. One would undoubtedly have been his own obedience research. The other two would have been experiments that were rife with ethical problems because of the unexpected, terrifying ordeal they had had put their subjects through. In one, conducted in 1961, a group of army recruits, flying in a DC-6, were told they were going to have to crash-land because of malfunctioning landing gear. Ambulances and fire trucks could be seen racing toward the runway below. Meanwhile, aboard the plane an officer quickly distributed next-of-kin forms to the recruits. Then they were ordered to freeze into a head-between- the-knees position in preparation for a crash landing. When the plane landed, medical aides took urine samples from the frightened recruits. It was a faked emergency, designed to study how the body reacts to stress. The second prospective case was a laboratory experiment reported in 1964 by some Canadian researchers. The subjects were male alcoholics who volunteered after they had been told—falsely—that the experiment was connected with a possible therapy for alcoholics. During the laboratory procedure they were unexpectedly injected with a drug, scoline, which made them stop breathing. Among the group of subjects, the duration of their respiratory paralysis ranged from 90 seconds to 130 seconds. After- ward, all of the subjects said that they thought they were dying. One subject compared what he went through to a wartime experience. During World War II he had been a rear-gunner on a bomber that, during one raid, had flown for 5,000 yards on a radar beam, straight and level over a Ger- man city. He considered his interrupted-breathing experience as the more traumatic of the two. To ensure an objective and balanced treatment of the issues, Milgram asked an ethicist, Daniel Callahan, the director of the Institute of Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences, to serve as a consultant. Callahan readily agreed, telling Milgram that his project was an excellent idea, since there was a lack of good films on research ethics. The ethics panel itself was to Vexations, Cyranoids, and the Declining Years 237 consist of psychologists “known for their concern and thoughtfulness on ethical issues” and representing a diversity of points of view on research ethics—for example, Herbert Kelman, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Stanley Schachter—as well as one or two non-psychologists, such as philosopher Robert Nozick and sociologist Orville Brim. After the dramatization of each experiment, a discussion among members of the ethics panel would ensue. The viewing audience would then be invited to vote on the ethical acceptability of the depicted case. This would then be followed by an actual vote of the members of the ethics panel. In contrast to the rest of the film, the panel’s discussion was to be an unre- hearsed, spontaneous, and genuine expression of their viewpoints. While Milgram recognized that the success of the film depended to a large extent on the quality of the panelists’ statements, he felt that this part of the film could be enhanced by dynamic editing of their discussion. Milgram’s proposal also included an evaluative component. He planned to assess the effectiveness of the films by testing the viewing audiences’ shifts in attitudes and knowledge after viewing them. And, finally, the films would be modified on the basis of the outcome of the evaluations. The film was to end with the following concluding comments by the narrator:

With increasingly powerful experiments, the problems for psychology may soon approach the seriousness of the problems of medical research. So it is well that psychologists themselves focus their attention on ethical issues. For unless psychologists come to grips with these problems, others will as- suredly move in, and we could well slide into a new dark age in which all experimentation on human beings is proscribed. A society that values scientiﬁc research, no less than it values individual rights, must create a climate to encourage such research. But for every impulse to explore and probe human nature with the tools of science, society must—if it is to call itself civilized—ﬁnd the corresponding ethical balance.

The external reviewers to whom the proposal was sent included educational and documentary filmmakers as well as psychologists. Most of the 238 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD reviewers gave Milgram’s proposal a favorable rating, although a few qualified that judgment. There was a general recognition of his uniqueness in having dual qualifications in filmmaking and scientific research. A couple of reviewers recommended that since Milgram had no expertise in sociology or biomedical research, NSF should provide funding for the psychology film only. Despite the external reviewers’ recommendations to approve the grant proposal in whole or in part, it was ultimately rejected—mainly because the amount Milgram requested represented a sizable chunk of the total budget for the year. In June 1979, he submitted a trimmed-down version of the grant. This one requested support for only one film, on ethical issues in psychology, rather than three, and the direct costs were reduced to about $97,000. In addition, the revised proposal incorporated some suggestions made by reviewers of the first proposal. The review panel would be more heterogeneous, with the inclusion of women and more non-psychologists. In addition, the wording of the concluding narration was toned down, eliminating the reference to “a new dark age . . . in experimentation,” which one reviewer found “unnecessarily apocalyptic.” Despite the changes, and without any real explanation, this proposal was also turned down. The second major grant proposal that Milgram prepared in this period was to support research on “cyranoids”—the name he gave to persons who serve as mediums of communication in an invented social situation. Mil- gram defined a cyranoid as “a person who does not speak thoughts originating in his own central nervous system: rather, the words that he speaks originate in the mind of another person who transmits these words to the cyranoid by means of a . . . tiny FM receiver with connecting earphones fitted inconspicuously in his ear.” In the cyranic mode of interaction Milgram devised, there are three participants: the source, the person who is originating the speech; the cyranoid or medium, the person who shadows the source’s talk and passes it on to the third person; and the interactant or listener, the person to whom the speech is directed. Milgram used the term “cyranoid” because of the similarity of his model to a form of mediated speech that occurs in the famous balcony scene in Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand’s nineteenth-century drama. Vexations, Cyranoids, and the Declining Years 239

In that scene, Christian, a love-struck but inarticulate soldier, declares his love for Roxanne in a romantic recital as he stands below her balcony. How- ever, his speech is not his own—he is merely repeating word-for-word the sentences whispered to him by Cyrano, who is hiding in the shadows. Milgram carried out some preliminary studies with the cyranic mode in his Media class on November 4, 1977. He described those initial efforts in a notebook in which he would jot down various ideas for films, inventions, and experiments. His notebook entry, titled “The Person as Medium: Stud- ies in the Cyranic Mode,” describes that initial effort with the technique as “spectacularly effective in that the medium appeared to carry on a very natural conversation, although he was merely tracking the words of the source. I believe the technique has many interesting applications both for theoretical studies and for practical training possibilities. In social psychology it may be used in studies of person perception, attribution theory, prejudice, etc. A 15 year old dropout suddenly acquires a mature scientific mode of speech. A shy person suddenly interacts with a beautiful girl, with a knowing and sophisticated line.” To help him conduct research on cyranoids on a larger scale, in February 1979 Milgram submitted a grant proposal to the National Science Founda- tion’s program in Social and Developmental Psychology, the section of the granting agency that sponsored basic, mainstream research in social psychology. In this proposal, titled “The Technique of Mediated Speech as a Tool in Social Psychology,” he requested about $200,000 for a two-year period. The program director at the time was Kelly Shaver, a social psychologist known for his work on an aspect of the attribution process in social perception— how we arrive at judgments of responsibility and blame when we try to understand people’s actions. When Milgram submitted the grant proposal, he sent Shaver a cover letter informing him that he had some video footage from his pilot studies that he could send. He felt that the tapes would be useful in conveying the power of the cyranic procedure to the program’s advisory panel. Shaver accepted Milgram’s offer and told him to go ahead and send a copy to have on hand in case the advisory panel wanted to see it. The proposal was sent to a group of external ad hoc reviewers who then sent their written evaluations to Shaver to help him and his standing advisory panel 240 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD make their evaluations during their next meeting in May. The reactions of the eight external readers varied, but there were some common threads. Many commented on the brilliance of Milgram’s prior contributions to social psychology. Reviewers generally agreed that the cyranic technique was imaginative. But most of them also agreed that the theoretical basis for the experiments—and the specific ones he proposed—were weak. Part of Milgram’s genius, as reflected in his past research, was to identify questions worth pursuing and then, if needed, invent methods suited for them. Here, a number of reviewers pointed out, he had reversed things. He had come up with a clever technique and was now searching for a phenomenon to apply it to. Milgram had proposed a mixture of studies focusing on basic social processes as well as more practical applications—without any attempt at theoretical integration. One of the “basic” studies he proposed dealt with attitude change, a topic with a long history in social psychology. His idea was to create an experiment with two different conditions. In one condition, a subject would give a persuasive talk to a group. In the other, the subject would try to influence a different group using the cyranic mode. He would now be a cyranic medium, with the source being an expert on the issue being discussed. Milgram’s purpose was to test whether or not a speech presented in the cyranic mode would be more persuasive than one given in a normal fashion. It is evident that Milgram did not apply much thought to this experiment, because, as several reviewers correctly noted, the design contains a bla- tant “confound” which makes any significant difference between the two communication situations completely uninterpretable. If, for example, audiences were more persuaded in the cyranic condition, was it due to the difference in the mode of communication, per se, or to the fact that in the cyranic condition, but not in the “normal” condition, an expert was involved? Another one of Milgram’s planned studies had a more applied focus. He wanted to demonstrate the usefulness of the cyranic mode in emergency situations, such as hostage taking. The person speaking with the hostage taker might not have the necessary skills to negotiate well. Equipped with the cyranic apparatus, he could be guided word-for-word by an expert ne- gotiator who was not able to be physically present. Vexations, Cyranoids, and the Declining Years 241

The reaction of one reviewer who recommended rejecting the proposal was representative of most:

It seems obvious that the PI [principal investigator] has become fascinated with a method he has invented and is seeking uses to which it can be put. Unfortunately, it seems to me that none of the studies he proposes will illuminate our understanding of social behavior in any substantial way. And I ﬁnd that especially unfortunate because the PI is someone who in the past has made important contributions to our ﬁeld.

After he received NSF’s boilerplate rejection letter on July 30, 1979, Milgram was steamed to learn that the review panel did not see the videotape he had provided Shaver. Milgram felt that, because of the newness of the technique, it could not be properly evaluated without actually seeing it work. He therefore asked Shaver for a reconsideration of the proposal after the advisory panel watched the videotape of his pilot studies. The directorship of the Social and Developmental Psychology Program has generally been a rotating position. As Milgram was trying to get his proposal reevaluated, Shaver was leaving and another social psychologist, Robert A. Baron, was coming on board for a two-year stint. Baron was familiar to social psychologists because of his research on aggression and because he was (and still is) the coauthor of one of the most successful social psychology textbooks. Baron was very accommodating, going beyond a mere reconsideration of Milgram’s proposal. He told Milgram that he would accept it as a resubmission, which meant that he would solicit external reviews from a completely new set of readers. He also assured Milgram that the videotape would have a role in the review process. Milgram resubmitted the proposal, with some minor textual changes, at the end of November. In an accompanying letter to Baron he suggested the names of some prospective outside reviewers (a practice generally encouraged by the foundation) who, he claimed, had done work “in ﬁelds touched upon by the cyranic technique.” Actually, their more apparent unifying characteristic was that most of them were former colleagues from Yale and Harvard. 242 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

The list of names included Roger Brown, Irving Janis, Philip Zimbardo, Jerome Bruner, and Eleanor Rosch (a former research assistant at Harvard). In this set of reactions, the extremes were more divergent than in the ﬁrst. At one end was a reviewer who judged it “a stunningly interesting proposal,” while at the other was a reviewer who wrote, “This is the weakest proposal that I can recall receiving in 18 years of reviewing proposals for NSF.” But the central theme was the same: Milgram had developed a clever technique and was now searching for phenomena to apply it to, and the studies he proposed were short on theoretical signiﬁcance. One reviewer, who considered Milgram to be one of the most important thinkers in social psychology, hit the nail on the head when he wrote: “Milgram is here the clever kid who has been given a clever hammer and now needs something that needs pounding.... I, for one, am not yet prepared to defend this proposal when Senator Proxmire nominates it for a Golden Fleece. A quarter of a million dollars for a mechanized ventriloquist. I can see it now.” Based on the generally negative reactions of the outside reviewers, Baron’s advisory panel recommended rejection. Baron informed Milgram of the bad tidings in a letter that was almost apologetic. He had taken every step to make sure that the proposal received a fair review, he wrote Mil- gram. This included showing the tape to the panel and choosing most of the external reviewers from Milgram’s list. Apparently, loyalty to Milgram did not blind his friends to the proposal’s failings. While Milgram’s lack of success in getting grant support was undoubtedly disappointing, he could not really fault the reviewers’ criticisms, because he also had similar reservations about the cyranoid technique, as indicated in a letter he wrote to a former CUNY colleague, Stuart Albert, on October 8, 1983:

It’s a phenomenon that remains intriguing, though its exact scientific significance is elusive. Sometimes I suspect it’s more a theatrical than a scientific phenomenon, evoking artistic wonder, rather than serving as a source of scientific propositions. But I’m uncertain and will explore it further.... The main problem in all this has been to define the key issues and figure out exactly what should be measured. Here is a paradigm in which the in- Vexations, Cyranoids, and the Declining Years 243

dependent variable (the functioning cyranoid) is inherently fascinating, but where the compelling dependent measure is less clear.

Milgram did explore the phenomenon further in the spring of 1984 with the help of a small internal grant of $5,000 from CUNY. One of the important findings to emerge from this research was people’s strong tendency to seek unity and coherence when forming impressions of other people. Milgram found that interviewers of the cyranoids tended to perceive a co- herent personality despite very large differences between the cyranoid and the sender; for example, a fifty-year-old psychology professor performing as sender and a twelve-year-old boy as a cyranoid. No one suspected that the cyranoid’s words were not his own. In another experiment, when several different people alternated serving as senders to the same cyranoid, no one perceived a fragmented personality. Despite Ralph Waldo Emerson’s pronouncement that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” the need for consistency is a hall- mark of human nature. Our relentless search for consistency and harmony when presented with contradictory information derives from a need to sim- plify our complex world and make it more predictable. Thus, for example, social psychologists have repeatedly demonstrated the operation of the simplifying principle “What is beautiful is good” in human perception—that is, we believe that outward appearance and inner character go together. In a different vein, an inconsistency between cause and effect—for example, a huge, important outcome having a small, insignificant cause—is jarring to the mind: According to some social psychologists, this may explain the enduring belief in conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination among a large segment of the population. Milgram’s cyranoid research showed—in a highly inventive manner—just how powerful this simplifying and unifying tendency is in human behavior.

…

In January 1980, Milgram was appointed Distinguished Professor of Psy- chology at CUNY. The nomination process had been initiated in 1974 by 244 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

Florence Denmark, who was then executive officer of the Ph.D. programs in psychology at CUNY, but the funding for the appointment did not become available until six years later. This was soon followed by a joyous event of a different sort. On January 26, Marc became a Bar Mitzvah at the Riverdale Temple. After services, the festivities continued at the Milgrams’ apartment with a catered lunch for about sixty guests, arranged by Sasha. Michele had had her confirmation at the same temple about six months earlier, on June 3, 1979. On February 17, about thirty students and alumni threw a dinner party for the Milgrams at the Hungarian Rendezvous restaurant in Manhattan to celebrate Stanley’s appointment. The next monthly meeting of the social- personality faculty began with a toast by Irwin Katz, expressing the faculty’s pleasure over Milgram’s award. A small group of colleagues took Milgram out to lunch to mark the occasion, but they made no mention of his distinguished professor award during the meal, a fact that irked Milgram. After all, he was the first—and at that time the only—psychologist at the Grad- uate Center to achieve the status of distinguished professor. Several months later, on a bright and inviting May day, Stanley decided to go bicycle riding in the hilly park across from their apartment building. This was the first time he had gone riding since the fall, and he stayed out for quite a long time—too long, as it turned out. When Sasha walked out to meet him, he asked her to take the bicycle back for him. After placing the bike in the basement storage area, she returned to the apartment to find Stanley lying in bed, reading about the symptoms of a heart attack in a medical book. Sasha immediately whisked him off to the emergency department at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, a ten-minute drive from their home. Stanley was having a massive coronary attack. Although he had discovered he had high blood pressure in 1975 and had been taking medication for it, with Sasha keeping him on a low-salt diet, the heart attack was acute and came without warning. At first, things looked bleak, but Stanley ended up making a good recovery and was discharged from the hospital after a two-and-a-half-week stay. By mid-July he was able to walk a few miles a day. Caution led him to forgo a planned trip to Europe in August, however, and the family vacationed in the Berkshires instead. Vexations, Cyranoids, and the Declining Years 245

While he was in intensive care, he received a get well note from Roger Brown. After returning home, Stanley wrote him a thank you letter in which he described a conversation with a physician named Francis Minot Weld.

After some small talk, he whipped out informed consent sheets and asked if I would serve in his experimental project. How ironic this solicitation seemed. The tables turned.... Results of the tests would be correlated with post-hospital survival rates. After some soul searching and consultation with my cardiologist, I consented: a ﬁtting penance, I thought. It all went very well, but, of course, the most delicate part of the study lies ahead: for to obtain the survival data they must periodically call my home and dis- creetly inquire whether I am still of this world. I suppose that part will be relegated to a graduate student.

He was soon able to resume his normal activities—teaching, conducting research, and giving invited talks around the country. However, his heart condition restricted him to ﬂying only in pressurized airplanes. Conven- tional jetliners had pressurized cabins, but smaller, propeller-driven puddle jumpers did not, which effectively ruled out any further speaking engagements at colleges located in small towns or rural areas. About a year later, on June 23, 1981, Milgram had another heart attack, and again landed in Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital for a two-week stay. In August he had an angiogram, which revealed a fundamental problem that did not bode well for his longevity. The test showed that his arteries were too blocked for bypass surgery to be done. A heart transplant was considered, but after weighing the pros and cons, Stanley decided against it. He was glad to resume his regular activities when the fall semester began, but his deteriorating heart condition was slowly taking its toll. He didn’t have the stamina of his pre–heart attack days, and the medication he was taking made him even more tired. Sometimes when he was walking, he would have to stop to catch his breath. His libido was weakening, and he was despondent. Friends would hear him lamenting that his accomplishments were all behind him. He wrote to Hollander, “As far as work goes, the past seems brighter than the future.” 246 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

His heart attacks led to a drastic change in his demeanor, which was visible to virtually everyone close to him. The more biting aspects of his personality became dulled. He mellowed, became less sarcastic, more sensitive to people’s feelings. He became more subdued, contemplative, and sentimental. His brother Joel recalls:

The . . . true intimate closeness, not counting childhood, started with his ﬁrst heart attack.... He talked about the pain of writing. We talked about our parents. He talked about the qualities he admired in me. A lot of these things were absolutely stunning. I think the stunning thing was not so much the information, but the quality of the conversation. Suddenly, he wasn’t [just an] older brother.... I think it was a dying man talking to his brother.”

As his condition gradually worsened, he felt the need to take some time off. He applied for, and was granted, a sabbatical leave for the spring of 1982. Under normal circumstances, he probably would have taken the sabbatical abroad, most likely in France. But, after two heart attacks, a tranquil respite seemed more sensible, and he spent his time mostly around Riverdale. He bought an IBM personal computer and took advantage of his free time to learn BASIC, becoming a “dedicated micro-maven.” He reﬂected on his newly discovered interest in a letter to Moscovici:

A confession, Serge: I have been seduced by my computer. It is odd that I have worked in computer environments for at least 20 years, but it was not until the micro-computer appeared, that a personal interest was evoked. I do think a signiﬁcant techno-intellectual shift is underway. I was astonished to learn how accomplished both of my children are in programming. It is a skill that an entire generation of adolescents is learning underground, much the way we used to pick up dirty words.

Acquiring computer skills gave him a lot of satisfaction, but he was even happier that, in the fall, he felt well enough to go back to his teaching and research at the Graduate Center. Vexations, Cyranoids, and the Declining Years 247

Stanley had missed his teaching as much as his research. Unlike some academic scientists for whom teaching is a mere afterthought, Milgram took these responsibilities very seriously. As one of his students, Eva Fogel- man, said, “Teaching for him—being a professor—was a way of life. It was- n’t just a job.” Arthur Weinberger, a doctoral student, recalled that “he was brilliant as a teacher.... He could be dictatorial, he could be authoritarian, he could turn on a dime.” But if you were looking for intellectual stimulation and wanted to learn to do original work in social psychology, Milgram was the person to go to. For Ronna Kabatznick, being a student in Mil- gram’s classes “remains one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life.... He spoke so ﬂuently and so succinctly about psychology.... He was able to explain [things] in a way that was so compelling. His classes were always a lot of fun and stimulating . . . and he was always thoroughly prepared and very methodical in his teaching.” His colleague, Irwin Katz, summed it up this way:

He was a superb teacher. I know because we sometimes taught together. He could inspire students to delight in the recognition of an idea, and in the discovery of a new idea. He taught many students—all those who had a bent for it—how to enjoy the playful side of good intellectual endeavor. For Stanley had a light touch in his approach to research. I think one of his deepest motives as a psychologist had to do with the pleasure that came with discovering things about the social world that were too obvious to be seen by others. His interest in human ways and in the people around him was insatiable. All of this delight in the scientiﬁc uses of ordinary curiosity—in the indulgence of an almost childlike wonder about social life—he conscientiously nurtured in his students. His goal as a teacher was always to bring forth their latent creativeness.

In the fall, Michele began her freshman year at Vassar and decided to major in cognitive science, which consisted of a blend of computer science, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology. Stanley told friends that he and Sasha had hoped to send her to the more affordable State Uni- 248 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD versity of New York, but Michele was so excited about Vassar that they decided “it was worth flirting with bankruptcy.” Marc was now fifteen, a junior in high school. Both he and Michele were very good with computers. He had recently figured out the solution to an intellectually challenging computer game, called “Adventure.” When he offered through computer magazines to sell the solution, he got responses from more than forty customers across the country. Two years later, in the fall of 1984, he would begin his first semester at Brandeis, majoring in computer science, after scoring in the 99th percentile in math on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Sasha went to work full time as a social worker in the Washington Heights office of Selfhelp Community Services, an agency serving the needs of elderly Holocaust survivors. She had worked outside the home before this, but only on a part-time, volunteer basis. She had earned a master’s degree in social work (M.S.W.) from Smith College at the end of the summer in 1964, but Michele was born that November, and Marc came along in January 1967. While the children were growing up, Sasha had been too busy being a homemaker to work full time as a professional. In 1979 and 1980, she did social work two mornings a week at the Fairfield Division of the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale. Before that, from 1972 to 1981, she had helped Stanley periodically in his office at the Graduate Center. Sasha had occasionally contemplated becoming a full-time social worker, but after Michele was accepted at Vassar, merely thinking about the possibility of working was no longer sufficient. Vassar’s pricey tuition required an infusion of income into the Milgram household, so Sasha found the job at Selfhelp Community Services. Her work at the community agency included individual counseling, group sessions, and advising clients about entitlement programs—and she found it very rewarding. When Stanley wrote their friends about Sasha’s new job, he oriented them about its location by noting that Washington Heights was Henry Kissinger’s old neighborhood, “but he hasn’t become a client—yet.” While Milgram followed a strict diet and made a conscious effort to reduce stress, once he returned to the Graduate Center in the fall of 1982 he Vexations, Cyranoids, and the Declining Years 249 resumed most of the activities that had engaged him before his heart attack. He carried a full load of two courses each semester and supervised four doctoral dissertations. He readily slipped back into his role as an active departmental citizen. Early in the fall semester, after a faculty member with a very large research program left, the administration took away seven of his eleven office spaces from the department. It was the department’s consensus that Milgram and another faculty member were the right people to meet with the provost in an effort to reclaim the offices for their program. Toward the end of the semester, when the faculty was considering offering an M.A. degree in social-personality psychology in addition to the Ph.D., it was Milgram whom they authorized to initiate discussions with the administration. In his research, he turned to exploring some new phenomena. Even as his health diminished, his intellectual vitality and experimental inventiveness remained intact. Before the semester began, he was completing a report of an experiment he had conducted with his students on responses to “cutting” into waiting lines. “We had collected some impressive data,” he wrote Alan Elms, “but the challenge was to transcend the inherent banality of the subject matter through insightful analysis of the phenomenon. (How insightful we got remains to be seen).” He met the challenge mightily. The article was accepted in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the highly selective flagship journal of those fields, which had a rejection rate of about 90 percent. During the fall semester of 1982, his Urban Psychology class conducted research on the “vertical city.” In 1970, in his article, “The Experience of Living in Cities,” Milgram had shown how the behavior of urbanites differs from that of small-town dwellers. Now, twelve years later, he made an anal- ogous comparison—although on a smaller scale—between the “vertical city” and the “flat city.” How, he asked, does living in a skyscraper modify thinking and behavior? What effect, if any, does the vertical life have on human relationships? Milgram’s mastering of the PC during his sabbatical opened up a whole new world of possibilities for experimental investigation. His first effort involved bringing Asch’s work into the computer age. In the spring 250 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD semester of 1983, students in his seminar in Experimental Social Psy- chology conducted a computer version of Asch’s conformity experiment. Instead of placing the naïve subject amid a group of confederates, the majority’s erroneous judgments were presented to him or her on a computer screen. Sometimes the subjects were told that the responses flashing on the screen came from network contact with other participants, whereas in other conditions they were led to believe that the personalities they were interacting with existed only in the computers. “It is an interesting approach,” he reported to Roger Brown, “because it is possible to build enough Artificial Intelligence into the program so that the computer appears to be aware of what you have said, and is able to respond appropriately, which corresponds to the essence of sociality. Last week the students were analyzing the data and were heard to shout ‘Eureka’ up and down the corridors.” During the spring semester of 1983, Milgram also had a chance to renew his contact with Jerome Bruner, who had recently accepted a professorship at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. Energized by the experience, he wrote Roger Brown that their mutual friend “is more interesting to talk with than just about anyone in town. There is a certain intellectual resonance that gets going in conversations with Jerry that is, as you know, very special.” The spring semester had a surprise ending for Milgram. On May 11, 1983, he received a letter from the American Academy of Arts and Sci- ences—a venerable institution founded in 1780 by John Adams—informing him that he had been elected as a Fellow. Milgram had long ago resigned himself to the fact that the controversy stirred up by his obedience research would make it virtually impossible for him to achieve any type of national recognition, so this honor came as an especially delightful surprise. Marc was entering his senior year of high school in the fall, so, in anticipation of his entering college in the fall of 1984, the Milgrams began their summer vacation investigating some prospective schools in the Boston area, after which they drove to a rental house in Eastham on Cape Cod. A string of beautiful, sunny days enabled them to explore the magnificent beaches Vexations, Cyranoids, and the Declining Years 251 nearby. In the evenings they would go to First Encounter Beach to watch the sun setting over the bay. Milgram described one especially memorable evening to their friends:

A fresh wind brought out the kite ﬂyers. The tide was out so it was possible to walk a half mile from the shore and still be only ankle deep in water. Seagrass growing far from the shore sprouted from the receding water. The sun drifted lower, and soon ﬁres were lit on the shore, and children’s voices, though originating far away, sounded close. Kites darted in the evening sky. The ocean air was intoxicating. Then a moment of poetic excess: A horse and rider galloped far out on the bay, spray shooting up wherever its hoofs hit pools of water.

On August 15, Stanley turned fifty. By now the Milgrams were back home in Riverdale. They considered throwing a big half century party, but while it sounded fun in the abstract, they couldn’t cope with the logistics. Instead, some of Stanley’s students took him out to lunch, and in the evening, Sasha invited a few neighbors over for a glass of champagne. In the fall of 1983, with 1984 and its Orwellian significance just over the horizon, Milgram began receiving and accepting a flurry of invitations to speak about the relationship between his obedience research and the highly regimented, authoritarian society envisioned in Orwell’s novel. In fact, had it not been for the travel limitations imposed by his heart condition, he would have been snowed under an even higher number of such talks. Dur- ing the 1983–1984 academic year, most of the talks he gave at various colleges around the country were connected to 1984. One exception was the Catherine Genovese Memorial Conference held at the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University in March 1984. Or- ganized by Harold Takooshian, it brought together experts from the social sciences and law and public officials to commemorate and contemplate the urban tragedy of Kitty Genovese’s murder. Keynote speeches were given by Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and the directors of the National Insti- tute of Mental Health and the National Institute of Justice. In his com- 252 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD ments, Milgram noted why, in his view, Genovese’s murder had received so much attention:

The case touched on a fundamental issue of the human condition, our primordial nightmare. If we need help, will those around us stand around and let us be destroyed or will they come to our aid? Are those other creatures there to help us sustain our life and values or are we individual ﬂecks of dust just ﬂoating around in a vacuum?

As the spring semester came to a close, Sasha and Stanley wanted to recapture the magical vacation experience of the previous summer on Cape Cod. So they rented a comfortable house in Wellﬂeet and arrived in mid- June. A week later, on the evening of June 30, Stanley suffered a third massive heart attack. An ambulance rushed him to the nearest hospital, in Hyannis, about thirty-three miles away. Earlier in the day, he had been going up and down the sand dunes on the beach. The doctors at the hospital told him that, with his heart condition, he shouldn’t have engaged in such vigorous activity, which had undoubtedly brought on the attack. Less than a month later, on July 18, Stanley suffered yet another heart attack. They were now back in Riverdale, and Sasha drove him to Columbia- Presbyterian Hospital. He landed in the hospital in the midst of a strike by nonmedical personnel. Milgram was miserable enough, but the strikers’ mode of protest was to pound on drums outside the windows. Sometimes the noise- makers started as early as 6:45 A.M., and their drum strokes continued late into the night. Milgram expressed his indignation at the protesters’ behavior in a guest column in The Riverdale Press. While he sympathized with the hospital workers’ demands and deemed them reasonable, he found their noisemaking, day after day, to be abhorrent. “To all those recuperating—or failing to recu- perate—on my ﬂoor,” he wrote, “the noise was a serious irritant, interfering with the rest and tranquillity needed after a heart attack. One wondered how workers involved in patient care could adopt so callous an attitude.” Milgram stayed in the hospital for two weeks and then continued his re- cuperation at home. His sense of humor did not falter. In a thank you card he designed and sent to well-wishers, he wrote: Vexations, Cyranoids, and the Declining Years 253

There is a little confusion as to whether I had one or two heart attacks this summer. I managed two, one in Cape Cod in June and the second, while recovering from the ﬁrst, in New York. (The latter attack is, of course, subject to the 8.25% sales tax.) Recovery usually takes about six weeks, so that barring further incident, I should be able to resume teaching in the fall. Meanwhile, like Menachem B., I’m more or less in restful seclusion. I’m glad to get your notes and letters, and regret only that I cannot give each the personal response it deserves. Warm regards and best wishes, Stanley Riverdale, August 1984

The back of the card read as follows:

A Contemporary Greeting Cardiac c. 1984

Although the content of the card was identical for all recipients, Milgram managed to personalize it by inserting the well-wisher’s name into a balloon next to his photograph, which appeared on the front of the card (see Figure 11.1). The previous spring, Milgram had continued his research on cyranoids with students in his Experimental Social Psychology class, aided by a small $5,000 internal grant from CUNY. He had also accepted an invitation to talk about his cyranoids research as part of a symposium titled “New Para- digms in Psychology” at the annual convention of the American Psycholog- ical Association (APA), which was being held in Toronto from August 24 through August 28. The organizer of that program was James Pennebaker, a social psychologist whose research had shown that writing about troubling life events provided an emotional release that could improve a person’s physical and mental health. He got wind of Milgram’s research from his CUNY colleague, Susan Kobasa; the APA talk would be Milgram’s ﬁrst public air- 254 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

FIGURE 11.1 One of the Personalized Thank You Cards Milgram Sent to Well-Wishers After His Fourth Heart Attack. ing of the cyranoid research. Unfortunately, by late August, Milgram’s health worsened, and he was too ill to travel by plane. Still, he was able to give his talk in absentia by means of an audiotape he sent to Pennebaker. Members of the audience found themselves in the somewhat bizarre situation of hearing Milgram’s disembodied voice emanating from a tape recorder placed on the dais alongside the other (live) presenters. By the beginning of the fall semester he was back at CUNY. Much to Sasha’s surprise, Stanley’s cardiologist had allowed him to resume teaching. Anyone viewing Milgram’s activities from a distance would no doubt have considered the semester a typical one: He was teaching a normal course load; he continued writing letters of recommendation for his doctoral students seeking jobs. He was completing some research papers. He gave Hol- lander detailed and nuanced feedback on his writing, as he had always done, and, with the help of a graduate student, he was trying to recruit subjects for more cyranoid studies. He even undertook a totally new project midsemester: organizing a conference titled “The Everyday Culture of New York City” to be held sometime in 1985. Vexations, Cyranoids, and the Declining Years 255

But, in actuality, he was a very sick man. He was no longer capable of walking to and from his commuter train station, as he had in the past. Sasha now had to drive him there in the morning and pick him up when he returned from the Graduate Center in the afternoon. By the time of his fourth heart attack—the second one of the past summer—he had only 17 percent of the normal amount of blood pumping from his heart. How did he keep going during his final difficult years? He had three sources of strength. First and foremost was the constant support of Sasha. Stanley paid tribute to her in their annual end-of-the-year letter in De- cember 1984, in which, referring to the first heart attack he had earlier that year, he wrote:

Anyone looking at the experience would say it was awful, but this is only part of the story. Adversity brings its own epiphanies. While in the hospital on the Cape, Sasha drove sixty-six miles daily to bring me her love and support. Was anyone ever blessed with more love and devotion? How keenly it is felt at such times.

A second source was his work—going in to school and sticking to his academic routine as much as possible. As his colleague Irwin Katz said:

I was very impressed by the way he handled his illness. . . . I had never seen a contemporary go through this kind of ordeal, this experience. You know, some people withdraw, some people become self-absorbed, some people become passive. He stayed with his work, he stayed with his students, he maintained his interest in the world around him and other people.

A third source of fortitude came from a deeper involvement in Ju- daism. Stanley had always had a strong sense of Jewish identity, although he didn’t wear it on his sleeve. In fact, it was sometimes an off-the-cuff remark that revealed the sturdiness of that identity, as exemplified by an exchange a few years earlier between Milgram and Chas Smith. At the start of the fall semester in 1977, Smith, who was then head of the social- personality program, sent a memo to members of the program’s executive 256 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD committee noting that because Rosh Hashanah fell on September 14 that year, the orientation for new students initially scheduled for that day was being moved to September 16. However, he wanted to leave an executive committee meeting scheduled for that day unchanged, because there was a lot of important business to discuss. Milgram, who was on that committee, replied to Smith:

Dear Chas, Sorry for the inconvenience, but this particular holiday was scheduled 5738 years ago, and therefore has my prior commitment. I’d appreciate rescheduling....

Stanley was a ﬁrm supporter of Israel and worried about its survival. After the daring rescue by Israeli commandos of Jewish hostages in En- tebbe, Uganda, in July 1976, Milgram wrote a letter to the Israeli prime minister expressing his pride and solidarity. Characteristically, he had ended his letter by saying that words were nothing; only actions counted, so he was going out to purchase Israeli bonds. And whenever there was a death in the family of close friends, he and Sasha would typically buy trees in Is- rael in memory of the deceased. They did that, for example, when the father of Irwin Katz’s wife Lois died. They wrote her: “We’ve taken the liberty of planting some trees in Israel in [your father’s] memory, saplings to bring new life to Galilee, Bethlehem, Jerusalem....” He participated in the grassroots letter-writing campaign to the Russian ambassador to try to free the imprisoned Jewish dissident Natan Sharansky. Over the years, Stanley had spent a good deal of time and effort tracing his Hungarian Jewish roots. He discovered that the name Milgram comes from the Yiddish word for pomegranate, one of the seven fruits native to the land of Israel mentioned in the Torah (in Deuteronomy 8:8). “Thus, the Milgrams were ‘lovers of Israel’,” he once explained with apparent pride, and “the pomegranate (rimon in Hebrew) is also a symbol for the Torah.” Through genealogical research he was able to construct family trees of his father’s and his mother’s families and make contact with a cousin in Roma- nia and ﬁnd and visit an aunt and cousins living in Israel. Vexations, Cyranoids, and the Declining Years 257

But now, during the last few years, he moved beyond what had been a largely cultural identiﬁcation with Judaism. He never turned into a practic- ing, observant Jew, but he became increasingly interested in the more religious and spiritual aspects of Judaism. For example, he began to study the Torah from time to time. This change in his orientation toward Judaism was a result of his contact with Rabbi Avi Weiss, the activist rabbi of a modern Orthodox congregation, the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale. For a number of years, Rabbi Weiss had conducted an outreach service for the community on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur afternoons, and one year the Milgrams decided to attend and found it very inspiring. Milgram’s deepening involvement with his Jewish roots can be seen in a fascinating children’s story he wrote in 1983 and delighted in telling some of his colleagues and students about. It is called “When a Boy Becomes a Man,” and is told from the perspective of a twelve-year-old boy who decides not to have a Bar Mitzvah celebration. A chance encounter with a Russian Jew who left his country because of the restrictions on the study and the observance of Judaism leads him to a change of heart and a greater appreciation of Jewish tradition. Here is how Stanley concluded the end-of-the-year letter he and Sasha sent to friends in December 1983:

Now we are back in Riverdale, grateful that the year has been so kind to us, and wondering about the future. Sometimes a little Chasidic song comes to mind. It consists of only ten words in Hebrew but is swelled by translation. It is a good message for this time of the year:

The whole world Is a very narrow bridge But the main thing to recall Is to have no fear at all.

…

On Thursday afternoon, December 20, 1984, Stanley chaired the successful oral defense of the doctoral dissertation of one of his students, Christina 258 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

Taylor. After the meeting, at about 4:00 P.M., he told Irwin Katz, who was also on the doctoral committee, that he wasn’t feeling very well. Katz suggested they try to get a cab to take him to the nearest hospital. Milgram didn’t want to do that. “Sasha is waiting and I don’t want to disappoint her,” he told Katz. So Katz walked Stanley to Grand Central Station and insisted on accompanying him on the commuter train ride to Riverdale. Dur- ing the half-hour train ride, Stanley regaled Katz with funny stories. Katz thought he was doing this both to divert his own attention from his physical condition and to set Katz at ease. When they got to Riverdale, Sasha was waiting, and she drove them immediately to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. When they arrived at the emergency department, Stanley walked up to the desk and said, “My name is Stanley Milgram. This is my ID. I believe I’m having my fifth heart attack.” Even as he lay in the emergency room near death, Stanley’s humor did not abandon him: He asked his cardiologist if they happened to have a baboon’s heart available—a reference to the recent case of “Baby Fae,” who survived for twenty days with a transplanted baboon heart. He died within the hour, his heart muscles finally giving way. He was fifty-one. CHAPTER 12

MILGRAM’S LEGACY

MERICAN PSYCHOLOGY HAS had a love-hate relationship Awith Stanley Milgram. His obedience research has become a classic of modern psychology. It is a “must” topic for introductory psychology and social psychology courses, and any textbook for those courses that failed to mention those studies would be considered incomplete. Social psychologists invariably invoke the results of the obedience experiments whenever they feel the need to affirm that the discipline can reveal something about social behavior that is not predictable from common sense. As Roger Brown put it, “Is there any social psychologist who teaches who is not damn glad that he has the Milgram experiment to teach? He legitimizes our enterprise.” A recent study ranked Milgram as one of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century. Yet the APA never gave him one of its annual awards for Distinguished Scientific Contributions, its most prestigious award. Recipients include Gordon Allport, Irving Janis, Leon Festinger, Roger Brown, Solomon Asch, Jerome Bruner, and Elliot Aronson—and even a former Harvard classmate of Milgram’s, Saul Sternberg. Most writings on the history of psychology make only passing mention of Milgram, if they include him at all. These slights are at odds with the fact that references to Milgram’s writings by scholars and researchers continue unabated. Yet Milgram is at least partly to blame for the fact that some of the conventional, “establishment” forms of recognition eluded him. It had a lot to do with the impression he created among some psychologists of a dilet- tante who flitted from one newsworthy phenomenon to the next, not stay-

259 260 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD ing with any long enough to probe it in adequate depth. Even those with a more favorable view of Milgram’s accomplishments are not likely to think of him foremost as someone who did programmatic, time-consuming research. Some odd publication decisions also contributed to this impression. Mil- gram never published his massive cross-cultural conformity study in a scholarly journal; completely flouting the norms of scientific publication, he published it only in Scientific American. Because scholarly readers do not normally expect a magazine to be the primary—or sole—publication vehicle for the presentation of original research, for a long time psychologists remained unaware of the conformity studies and the extensive program of research they represented. Analogously, Milgram’s first article about the small-world method was published not in a scientific journal but in Psy- chology Today in 1967; his reports of this research in scientific journals came later, in 1969 and 1970. Milgram’s obedience work epitomized what social psychologists Aronson and Carlsmith have called experimental realism, an experimental situation that is so compelling and involving for the participants that they cannot respond with rational detachment, thereby increasing the validity of the findings. After almost forty-five years, the obedience work remains unmatched as the example, par excellence, of the creative use of experimental realism in the service of a question of profound social and moral significance. Milgram’s work has had a revelatory effect on how we think about the nature of human evil and destructiveness; about the role of moral principles in social life; about our malleability in the face of social pressure, especially in response to the demands of authority; and about the dehumanizing potential of the hierarchical forms of social organization so pervasive in modern society. He showed us that it doesn’t take evil or deranged individuals to act destructively against innocent human beings. Normal, ordinary people are capable of horrible actions—which they would not undertake on their own—if commanded by a legitimate authority. His work made us acutely aware of the unexpected power of the immediate situation, sometimes overriding our sense of right and wrong. He found that the degree to which participants in his experiments obeyed po- Milgram’s Legacy 261 tentially harmful orders diminished when the victim was brought closer and increased when a buffer was introduced between subject and victim. Again, Milgram’s contribution was not in telling us that human beings have a propensity to obey authority but in demonstrating just how unexpectedly powerful this tendency is—and, further, by enlightening us about the factors that make such extreme obedience possible: relinquishing responsibility to the person in charge and accepting his definition of the situation. The obedience experiments have had an intellectual impact far beyond their home territory. It is a testament to the broader human significance of the research that disciplines outside of psychology—such as economics, education, sociology, political science, philosophy, and the arts—have found them relevant. Given the widespread familiarity with the obedience studies, it is perhaps not surprising to find them discussed or referred to in publications as diverse as the Archives of Internal Medicine and the Indian Journal of the History of Science. Thoughtful discussions of his research can be found in books by well- known writers, such as Janus, by Arthur Koestler, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, by Doris Lessing, and Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Re- volt, by Barrington Moore. But consider also the dizzying diversity of uses various other writers have made of the obedience research. Here are just a few of many examples: In 1984, Swedish writer Maria Modig published a book titled Den Nöd- vändiga Olydnaden (The Necessary Disobedience). Since then it has been reissued in three subsequent editions, most recently in 2003. The book’s intent is to help empower individuals to take more responsibility for their lives, to take risks in making changes that would contribute to their personal growth, and to make difficult choices, including the choice to disobey authority when necessary. The book, dedicated to Milgram, was inspired and informed by the obedience studies and in fact contains portions of an interview Modig conducted with Milgram in New York in May 1982. Suzanne Clothier, a dog-trainer, recently published a gracefully written book titled Bones Would Rain from the Sky. In it, drawing on the obedience experiments, she admonishes dog owners who readily follow the cruel dog- 262 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD training advice of “experts” even when their instincts tell them it is not the humane thing to do. Dying by Degrees is an absorbing murder mystery by Canadian writer Eileen Coughlan centered on a Milgram-type obedience experiment with a sinister twist conducted by an unscrupulous psychologist at a university in Alberta. The obedience experiments have also had an enduring influence on the performing arts. As mentioned earlier, rock musician Peter Gabriel recorded a song entitled “We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37)” on his 1986 album So. (The number 37 refers to the percentage of defiant subjects in Milgram’s Voice-Feedback condition—the second variation in his four- part proximity series.) There is also a French punk rock group named Mil- gram whose CD is titled “Vierhundertfünfzig Volt” (the German translation of “450 volts”) and a British musical group named Midget issued a CD titled “The Milgram Experiment.” In neither case is there a thematic connection between the music and Milgram’s work. Apparently, these groups were simply fascinated by him and the experiments. The same is true of Robbie Chafitz, who produced a weekly off-Broad- way performance during the summer of 1999 titled “The Stanley Milgram Experiment,” which was advertised as “original scripted humor.” According to Chafitz, the show was not really about the obedience experiments. But ever since he saw Milgram’s documentary film Obedience in middle school, he had wanted to form a band and name it after the experiments. The only problem was that he didn’t play a musical instrument. The sole connection between Chafitz’s staged humor and the obedience experiments was that in both cases things were not what they seemed. Milgram’s work has also captured the dramatic imagination, as evidenced by the several films and plays that have been based on the obedience experiments, including two full-length feature films and some shorter pieces produced by film students. One of the full-length films was The Tenth Level. The other was a French film, I . . . comme Icare (I . . . as in Icarus), made in 1979, starring Yves Montand and directed by Henri Verneuil, one of France’s most successful filmmakers. Stanley and Sasha were in France when the film was being made, and Verneuil and Montand invited them to the studio outside of Paris to see a day’s production. Milgram’s Legacy 263

In February 2002, Rod Dickinson, a conceptual artist, staged a reenactment of the obedience experiment at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow, Scotland. He used actors to play the roles of a number of different subjects, the experimenter, and the learner for the dramatic re-creation, and he preserved it on film. Dickinson paid meticulous attention to details in reconstructing the Yale laboratory and in duplicating the original furnishings and equipment. At least four dramatists have written plays based on the obedience experiments, and a couple of others are in early stages of development. The first one, published in 1973, “The Dogs of Pavlov,” was written by Welsh poet and playwright Dannie Abse. “Tolliver’s Trick,” a one-act play written by Buffalo playwright and journalist Anthony Cardinale in 1987, was inspired by the obedience experiments as well as Cardinale’s friendship with a local Holocaust survivor, whom he had accompanied to Jerusalem to an international gathering of Holocaust survivors. The third play, “Mosaic,” by Daphne Hull, is a black comedy consisting of four scenes, one of which is a dramatic adaptation of the obedience experiments. The most recent drama inspired by the obedience research is a full-length play, titled “One More Volt,” written by John P. Lavin in 2001 when he was a graduate student in the drama program at Carnegie-Mellon University. There is no question that if Milgram were alive today, he would be very pleased by the continuing use of his obedience experiments as raw material by dramatists, because he saw a close affinity between the experiment and theater. He expressed this idea almost aphoristically: “Good experiments, like good drama, embody verities.” For Milgram, laboratory experiments were a form of theater, with an important difference: Unlike a real play, which is scripted from start to finish, in an experiment, the ending—the subject’s behavior—is always an unknown until it actually unfolds. In his experiments, Milgram was much like a director of a play, both in his meticulous attention to technical details and staging and in their intended effects on his audience (i.e., readers of his reports). A statement he once made is an apt summary of his—and some other social psychologists’—approach to experimentation: “Although experiments in chemistry and physics often involve shiny equipment, flasks, and elec- 264 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD tronic gear, an experiment in social psychology smacks much more of dramaturgy or theater.” For Milgram, the theater also provided a perspective from which to view a goal of experimentation and the means one sometimes has to use to achieve it. This can be seen most clearly in an exchange Milgram had with Dannie Abse. In an introductory essay to “The Dogs of Pavlov,” Abse vigorously condemned Milgram’s use of deception and the induction of stress. He argued that many people “may feel that in order to demonstrate that subjects may behave like so many Eichmanns the experimenter had to act the part, to some extent, of a Himmler.” In his rebuttal, which appears together with the script and Abse’s introduction in one volume, Milgram expresses surprise at Abse’s harsh criticisms of his use of what Milgram prefers to call “technical illusions” (rather than deception), because “as a dramatist you surely understand that illusion may serve a revelatory function, and indeed, the very possibility of theater is founded on the benign use of contrivance.” He goes on to point out that both the playwright and the experimenter use artifice as a means to beneficial ends—entertainment and intellectual enrichment in the case of the theater, and the revelation of truths that are hard to get at in the case of the experiment. Milgram notes a further parallel between the stage and the laboratory: In both, the participants find the use of pretense acceptable. The- atergoers do not feel tricked, for example, that an old man turns out to be quite young when the greasepaint is removed. In a similar vein, most subjects in the obedience experiments felt that the experience had been worthwhile, once it was explained to them. One of the profound effects of the almost forty-five-year-old experiments has been to serve as a constant reminder of the inherent dangers lurking within organizational environments, which have become perhaps the central feature of modern life. Professions such as marketing, account- ing, and management have drawn practical lessons from the obedience studies, alerting their practitioners to Milgram’s warning in Obedience to Authority that when an individual “merges . . . into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the Milgram’s Legacy 265

FIGURE 12.1 The Electrifying Power of Authority. sanctions of authority.” Observations like these about the evaporation of individual responsibility in hierarchical organizations anticipated the kinds of tragedies that later resulted from automakers’ employees’ willingness to follow their bosses’ directives to produce unsafe cars and tobacco company employees’ acquiescence to policies designed to deceive the public. Figure 12.1 is an illustration from a textbook used in courses on business ethics; the authors use the obedience experiments to warn their readers about unethical demands that might be made on them by their superiors in the business world. According to some business school faculty and administrators, at least some of the concrete, humanizing changes that have been taking place in business environments are traceable to Milgram’s findings and insights: the 266 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD increasing tendency to involve employees, at all levels, in decision making; the encouragement of independent thinking; and the creation of hotlines and the placement of ombudsmen to facilitate the reporting of wrongdoing and expose morally problematic orders. Outside of psychology, the obedience experiments have had the most pervasive influence in legal scholarship and practice. Several U.S. Supreme Court briefs have referenced the obedience studies, and a recent check of the database LexisNexis shows that since 1983, 165 law reviews and journal articles have cited Milgram’s experiments (twelve additional articles cited some of his other work). While in some cases the citation is minimal, in others the obedience research plays a central role in the article. A thought-provoking example is in the description of an educational exercise conducted by University of San Diego law professor Steven Hartwell in which his students were to individually advise litigants in a small-claims court. He told his students that he would be available in an adjacent office if they needed to consult with him. Hartwell writes:

The “clients” were, in fact, a single confederate who sought the same advice from each student: how she should present her side of a rent dispute. I told each student to advise the client to lie under oath that she had paid the rent. When students asked for clariﬁcation, I uniformly responded, “...My advice is that, if your client wants to win her case, then you must tell her to perjure herself.”...We wanted them to experience the pull between loyalty to authority . . . and prescribed ethical conduct.... Although many of the 24 participating students grumbled either to me or to the client about my proffered advice, 23 told their client to perjure herself.

Perhaps the most consequential legal use of the obedience experiments was in trial testimony in which the lessons learned from those experiments (as well as some other basic social-psychological studies) actually saved lives. In the late 1980s, Andrew Colman, a social psychologist, testified as an expert witness in two trials in South Africa involving a total of thirteen defendants accused of murder during mob actions. The courts accepted his testimony that obedience to authority—and other social psychological phe- Milgram’s Legacy 267 nomena—were extenuating circumstances, with the end result that nine of the accused were spared the death penalty. In his obedience studies, Milgram obtained that rare kind of finding— one that people can apply to themselves to change their behavior or to provide new insights about themselves and others. Countless people who have learned about the obedience work have been better able to stand up against arbitrary or unjust authority. An example with broad consequences was revealed by a former student who spoke at a memorial gathering after Mil- gram’s death. Until recently, he had been living in a country in Latin Amer- ica. He told the audience that those involved in opposing dictatorial governments embraced Milgram’s work, giving them the courage to resist tyranny. In 1982, Milgram received a letter from an individual who had been a subject in a version of the obedience experiments in 1967 while he was an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota. He wrote to thank Milgram “for making a major contribution to my understanding of myself and of the meaning of the values I have.... Reading your book [Obedience to Author- ity] has been like hearing echoes of my own reflections about the experience. I am, and was, decent, kind, and intelligent. I would never do what you described in your book. Nevertheless, I did.... I think I hold my values about proper human behavior more deeply now than I did before the experiment, but I also realize that they would have to be very deeply rooted indeed ever to prevail against the subtle force of authority.” A Swede named Eduardo Grutzky credits Milgram for helping him make sense of his past: “I am Jewish and spent seven years in a fascist prison in the seventies in Argentina.... Most of the people that tortured me and killed my friends were ‘normal people.’ I discovered Milgram some years ago and he opened my mind for understanding the world....” And a Croatian psychologist, Vera Cubela, read Milgram to understand events unfolding before her eyes: “When I first read [Milgram’s] book on obedience to authority I was fascinated by the very behaviors he observed in the laboratory. When I found myself in the middle of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I could observe behaviors illustrating the same phenomenon, but was not fascinated by them, of course. Yet, since I carried Mil- 268 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD gram’s volume with me . . . and often re-read it, I became more and more fascinated by the elegancy of his demonstration of the phenomenon underlying many cruelties.” A posting to the community Web site Metafilter put it this way: “Got my copy of Obedience to Authority right here. The little fire of hatred for humanity it inspires keeps me warm at night. Exaggeration aside, I honestly believe that Milgram’s Obedience Experiments . . . were not only the most important thing I learned in college but the most important thing I possibly could have learned.”

…

While the obedience experiments have stimulated scholarly debate across a wide range of disciplines, their implications have perhaps been greatest for our understanding of the Holocaust. Milgram’s work provided the scientiﬁc underpinnings for Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” perspective, which challenged early explanations of the Holocaust that simply demonized the Nazi leaders and perpetrators, placing their behavior beyond the pale of rational discourse and debate. Milgram insisted that such behavior could indeed be studied and, by applying the tools and language of social science, he helped forge a new perspective. Whether or not one agrees with Milgram, his point of view is taken seriously by those trying to account for the Holo- caust, as suggested by a review of Daniel Goldhagen’s controversial book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: “[Goldhagen] now claims he deserves a place alongside Hanna Arendt, Stanley Milgram, Raul Hilberg, and Yehuda Bauer, the great fathomers of the Holocaust.” Here is how Milgram described the relevance of his ﬁndings for understanding the Holocaust:

A commonly offered explanation is that those who shocked the victim at the most severe level were monsters, the sadistic fringe of society. But if one considers that almost two thirds of the participants fall into the category of “obedient” subjects, and that they represented ordinary people . . . the argument becomes very shaky. Indeed, it is highly reminiscent of the issue Milgram’s Legacy 269

that arose in connection with Hannah Arendt’s . . . book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt contended that the prosecution’s effort to depict Eich- mann as a sadistic monster was fundamentally wrong, that he came closer to being an uninspired bureaucrat who simply sat at his desk and did his job.... After witnessing hundreds of ordinary people submit to the authority in our own experiments, I must conclude that Arendt’s conception of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare imagine. The ordinary person who shocked the victim did so out of a sense of obligation—a conception of his duties as a subject—and not from any pe- culiarly aggressive tendencies. This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.

Although Milgram recognized that there are “enormous differences of circumstance and scope” between obedience in his laboratory and Nazi Germany, he argued that “a common psychological process is centrally involved in both events.” He believed that his experiments spoke to all hierarchical relationships in which people become willing agents of a legitimate authority to whom they relinquish responsibility for their actions. Having done so, their actions are no longer guided by their conscience but by how adequately they have fulﬁlled the authority’s wishes. In applying Milgram’s work to the Holocaust, an important distinction must be kept in mind—that between explaining and excusing: While Mil- gram’s approach may provide an explanation for how ordinary people can be made to act with extraordinary cruelty, it does not excuse such actions. Milgram made this distinction explicit in a preface he drafted for the Ger- man edition of Obedience to Authority but that did not actually appear in the book:

It is ﬁtting that this book be translated into German, since it has a special relevance to Germans. Obedience is, after all, their favorite alibi. My guess is, after conducting the experiments reported in this book, that if the same institutions arose in the United States—the concentration camps, the gas 270 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

chambers—there would be no problem ﬁnding Americans to operate them. Yet, the fact that a potential for blind obedience exists in all people does not absolve the Germans from having transformed that potential into actual brutality and actual slaughter. Stanley Milgram

Milgram’s approach has a good deal of appeal. It is certainly consistent with the litany of “I was only following orders” heard repeatedly at the Nuremberg war crimes trials of the major Nazi leaders at the end of World War II. It also has support from Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann’s trial in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, which claimed that Eichmann was a very conventional person, guided largely by a drive to advance his career rather than hate for his victims. The impressions of Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter whose investigative work led to Eichmann’s capture by the Israelis, are very similar. He describes Eichmann as “an utterly bourgeois, an utterly normal, almost in fact a socially adjusted, person.... He was not driven by blood lust.” One historian even makes a direct connection between some events that occurred during the Holocaust and Milgram’s obedience experiments. In his book Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning describes the activities of a Nazi mobile killing unit that scoured the Polish countryside between 1942 and 1943, searching for Jews. The unit’s members ended up murdering 38,000 Jews in cold blood at the bidding of their commanders. Browning makes a detailed comparison between the actions of members of “Battalion 101” and those of Milgram’s subjects, concluding that “many of Milgram’s insights find graphic confirmation in the behavior and testimony of the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101.” The “banality of evil” thesis also finds support in the writings of Raul Hilberg, the premier historian of the Holocaust. Hilberg has pointed out that the Nazis’ success in carrying out their destructive plans on such a massive scale was made possible by countless bureaucrats and agencies applying their practiced skills and standard procedures to the task at hand. Among the examples he mentions is the SS being billed by the German railroad for each Jewish deportee it transported. Milgram’s Legacy 271

Consistent with Hilberg’s thesis are ﬁndings of recent historical research on the conduct of members of speciﬁc professions who, when the Nazis came to power, readily assimilated Nazi doctrine and directives into their everyday, routine activities. Richard H. Weisberg, a legal historian, studied the behavior of French lawyers and judges under the collaborationist, pro- Nazi, Vichy government, which instituted racial laws that eventually led to the deportation of 75,000 Jews to Nazi death camps. He writes:

Legal activity during the full four years of Vichy was pervasive. Courts functioned much as they had always functioned, although bound by an unusual oath to Vichy’s leader, Marshal Pétain. . . . Private legal practitioners . . . took up the new materials of racial, religious and ethnic ostracism and worked with them in volume and without substantial protest. Legal acade- micians wrote doctoral theses and had them published on the subject of the anti-Jewish laws, made their reputations as young law professors by discussing “neutrally” the stuff of exclusion....

In a similar vein, German psychologists generally “ran with the ball” when the Nazis took over. The first anti-Jewish law enacted by Hitler after he came to power, the “Law for the Reconstitution of the Civil Service,” led to the dismissal of the Jewish psychologists at universities (including Max Wertheimer, one of the founders of Gestalt psychology). The Ger- man Society for Psychology took no action to help their dismissed colleagues; instead, they requested that the authorities fill the vacated positions quickly to ensure the continued representation of psychology in the affected universities. Milgram was also on solid ground in pinpointing obedience to authority as a possible key to understanding the Holocaust, given the high value placed on it by Nazi ideology and German culture generally. For example, the first of twelve commandments listed in a primer used to indoctrinate Nazi youth was “The leader is always right.” And many generations of Ger- man children grew up on cautionary tales, such as Struwwelpeter, or Shock- headed Peter, whose moral was that disobedience could lead to rather drastic, violent, consequences. 272 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

The story of Struwwelpeter, which has usually been published in picture- panel format, begins with a mother telling her young son that she has to go out, that he must stay in the house while she is out, and warns him ominously that, if he disobeys her, she will take him to the tailor. The moment she leaves the house, Struwwelpeter bolts out the door. The mother returns, discovers that her son has ignored her wishes, and drags him to the tailor. The last picture panel in the story shows the boy leaving the tailor’s shop crying, with fingers severed, dripping blood. But how much explanatory power do the obedience experiments really have? Do they fit the historical record? Was the obedient Nazi subordinate mechanically carrying out the murderous commands of his leader, without any hatred or hostility toward his victims? As noted earlier, Milgram saw Arendt’s “banality of evil” thesis to be in harmony with his own findings and conclusions. Yet a reading of the Holo- caust literature can certainly lead one to contest the idea that a cold, emo- tionless, and dutiful approach, such as Eichmann’s, was characteristic of the Nazis’ behavior. To begin with, Arendt’s perception of Eichmann has been challenged. Jacob Robinson, a historian, points out that Eichmann pursued his goal of shipping as many Jews as possible to the extermination camps with a degree of drive, perseverance, and enthusiasm that was clearly beyond the call of duty. Furthermore, to intensify their suffering, in many cases large-scale actions against the Jews were timed to coincide with their religious holidays. For example, the deportation of the Jews of Warsaw began on the eve of Tisha B’Av ( July 22, 1942), the day of mourning that commemorates the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. According to historian Martin Gilbert, “since the first days of the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Germans had used the Jewish festivals for particular savagery; these days had become known to the Jews as the ‘Goebbels calendar’.” The historical evidence for the spontaneity, inventiveness, and enthusiasm with which the Nazis degraded, hurt, and killed their victims also argues against explaining their behavior as mere obedience to an authority’s commands, despite the perpetrators’ abhorrence of their own actions and without hatred toward their victims. It must have come from within. Milgram’s Legacy 273

Here are a few of countless examples: “Simone LaGrange was sent to Auschwitz and, one day, saw her father there. He was in a column of men marching by. She waved and an SS guard asked if that was really her father. ‘Then go kiss him, girl,’ the guard said. She ran to her father. The guard shot him” (Richard Reeves, a journalist, writing about the testimony of a witness at the trial of Klaus Barbie, “the butcher of Lyons”). And here is a description by a survivor of the Majdanek concentration camp of the kind of brutalities that routinely took place there: “[A] customary SS habit was to kick a Jew with a heavy boot. The Jew was forced to stand to attention, and all the while the SS man kicked him until he broke some bones. People who stood near enough to such a victim often heard the breaking of the bones. The pain was so terrible that people, having undergone that treatment, died in agony.” There were also the actions of an Einsatzgruppe, or mobile killing unit, in operation in the town of Uman, in the Ukraine. A German army ofﬁcer described how the Jews of the area were gathered near the airport and surrounded by SS men and other militia. The Jews were ordered to undress, hand over everything they owned, and to stand in a line in front of a ditch. They were then shot and thrown into the ditch. The observer stated that no one was overlooked:

Even women carrying children two to three weeks old, sucking at their breasts, were not spared this horrible ordeal. Nor were mothers spared the terrible sight of their children being gripped by their little legs and put to death with one stroke of the pistol butt or club, thereafter to be thrown on the heap of human bodies in the ditch, some of which were not quite dead. Not before these mothers had been exposed to this worst of all tortures did they receive the bullet that released them from this sight.

Significantly, the observer noted that the killers worked “with such zealous intent that one could have supposed this activity to have been their life- work.” A final example is a heart-rending story from the memoirs of Lieutenant Meyer Birnbaum, a Jewish officer who served in the U.S. Army during 274 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

World War II. At the end of the war, his unit came to Ohrdruff, a concentration camp annexed to Buchenwald. At first they saw no sign of life. They were greeted by a pile of still-warm bodies machine gunned by the retreat- ing Germans “in a final spasm of hatred.” Birnbaum searched for survivors and found two in the typhus ward. They were so weakened they could barely move, and that is what saved them from the fate of their fellow prisoners. They had been far too sick to obey the order to gather in the courtyard, where the others were shot. Both were Jewish; one was a thirty-five-year-old man from Poland, and the other a sixteen-year-old Hungarian boy. Their first request was a piece of bread, and they both sobbed uncontrollably as they recalled their murdered families. Birnbaum’s narrative continued:

After about fifteen minutes of bitter sobbing, the sixteen-year-old suddenly looked at me and asked whether I could teach him how to do teshuvah [repent]. I was taken aback by his question and tried to comfort him. “After the stretch in hell you’ve been through, you don’t have to worry about doing teshuvah. Your slate is clean. You’re alive, and you have to get hold of yourself and stop worrying about doing teshuvah,” I told him. But my words had no effect. I could not convince him. He kept insisting: “Ich vill tuhn teshuvah—I want to do teshuvah. Ich muz tuhn teshuvah—I must do teshuvah.” Finally, I asked him, “Why must you do teshuvah?” in the hope that talking would enable him to let go of some of the pain I saw in his eyes. He pointed out the window and asked me if I saw the gallows. Satisfied that I did, he began his story.... Two months ago one of the prisoners escaped.... The camp commandant was furious about the escape and demanded to know the identity of the escaped prisoner. No one could provide him with the information he was seeking.... In his fury, the commandant decided to play a sadistic game with us. He demanded that any pairs of brothers, or fathers and sons, step forward. We were terrified of what he might do if we did not comply. My father and I stepped forward. They placed my father on a stool under those gallows and tied a noose around his neck. Once the noose was around my father’s neck, the commandant cocked his luger, placed it at my temple, and hissed, “If you or your father doesn’t tell me who Milgram’s Legacy 275

escaped, you are going to kick that stool out from under your father.” I looked at my father and told him “Zorgst sich nit—Don’t worry, Tatte, I won’t do it.” But my father answered me, “My son, you have to do it. He’s got a gun to your head and he’s going to kill you if you don’t, and then he’ll kick the chair out from under me and we’ll both be gone. This way at least there’s a chance you’ll survive. But if you don’t, we’ll both be killed.” “Tatte, nein, ich vell dos nit tuhn—I will not do it. Ich hab nit fargessen kibbud av—I didn’t forget kibbud av (honoring one’s father).” Instead of being comforted by my words, my father suddenly screamed at me: “You talk about kibbud av. I’m ordering you to kick that stool. That is your father’s command.” “Nein, Tatte, nein—No, Father, I won’t.” But my father only got angrier, knowing that if I didn’t obey he would see his son murdered in front of him. “You talk about kibbud av v’eim [honoring one’s father and mother],” he shouted. “This is your father’s last order to you. Listen to me! Kick the chair!” I was so frightened and confused hearing my father screaming at me that I kicked the chair and watched as my father’s neck snapped in the noose. His story over, the boy looked at me . . . as my own tears ﬂowed freely, and asked, “Now, you tell me. Do I have to do teshuvah?”

But, in some ways, a quote that is mostly directly at odds with Arendt’s “banality of evil” thesis can be found in an introduction to a book about the trial in Frankfurt from 1963 to 1965 of twenty-two SS men who served at Auschwitz. The book contains the testimony of witnesses describing the unimaginable acts of torture and murder perpetrated by the defendants. The writer of the introduction reﬂected on the horrors described in the book:

No one had issued orders that infants should be thrown into the air as shooting targets, or hurled into the ﬁre alive, or have their heads smashed against walls.... Innumerable individual crimes, one more horrible than the next, surrounded and created the atmosphere of the gigantic crime of extermination. 276 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

The author was none other than Hannah Arendt, giving recognition to the fact that there was another face to the Holocaust besides that of the dutiful bureaucrat, and she stated that the Frankfurt trial “in many respects reads like a much-needed supplement to the Jerusalem trial.” So, while her phrase “banality of evil” has been adopted by some to describe the essential nature of Nazi destructiveness, it would seem that Arendt herself recognized a broader truth. Milgram’s approach, then, does not provide a wholly adequate account of the Holocaust. Clearly, there was more to the genocidal Nazi program than the dispassionate obedience of the average citizen who participated in the murder of his fellow citizens out of a sense of duty and not malice. At the same time, it could not have succeeded to the degree that it did without the passive or active complicity of Everyman. While Milgram’s approach may well account for the dutiful destructiveness of the dispassionate bureaucrat, who may have shipped Jews to Auschwitz with the same degree of routinization as potatoes to Bremenhaven, it falls short when it comes to explaining the more zealous, hate-driven cruelties that also de- ﬁned the Holocaust. But, even so, Milgram’s ideas still possess significant explanatory value vis-à-vis the Holocaust, in the following ways: Although the vast majority of Germans were not directly involved in killing Jews, zealously or otherwise, they readily accepted the various decrees, beginning in 1933, that increasingly led to the Jews’ economic suffering and social isolation (e.g., dismissal from their jobs, “Aryanization” of their businesses, imposition of curfews, restrictions on their use of public transportation and telephones) and eventually to their annihilation. In this regard, Security Police Chief Heydrich considered all Germans as a kind of auxiliary police force, who were expected to ensure that Jews “behaved” themselves and to report anything that might look suspicious. And when they were rounded up for deportations, few Germans attempted to protect their Jewish friends. Milgram’s work certainly speaks to the dutiful complicity of the vast majority of Germans. Milgram’s ideas may even shed light on the behavior of the cruel Nazi killer who seemed to take delight in his savagery. Milgram argued that Milgram’s Legacy 277 two processes are involved in destructive obedience—relinquishing responsibility to the person in charge (which he referred to as “entry into the agentic state”) and accepting the authority’s definition of the situation or reality. As Milgram put it: “There is a propensity for people to accept definitions of action provided by legitimate authority. That is, although the subject performs the action, he allows authority to define its meaning.” By abdicating responsibility to the commanding authority, the person frees himself from having to decide on the morality of his actions; the authority does that for him. The Nazi leaders’ “definition of action” vis-à- vis the Jews was to see them not as humans but as “a lower species of life, a kind of vermin, which upon contact infected the German people with deadly diseases.” Thus, while the zeal and inventiveness with which many Nazis murdered their Jewish victims suggests that a deep-seated hatred of Jews was the main driving force behind their actions, the two processes suggested by Milgram undoubtedly enabled them to proceed without a guilty conscience. Third, one of the distinctive features of the Milgram obedience paradigm is the sequential escalation of the delivery of shocks. The learner’s “suffering” intensiﬁes in a gradual, piecemeal fashion. Milgram considered this manner of giving shocks one of the factors “that powerfully bind a subject to his role.” The importance of this unfolding process as a facilitator of destructive obedience in Milgram’s laboratory has alerted us to the vital role played by the step-by-step, escalating process the Nazis used in the victimization of the Jews, as described by Hilberg:

The process of destruction unfolded in a definite pattern . . . a step-by-step operation.... The steps of the destruction process were introduced in the following order. At first the concept of the Jew was defined; then the ex- propriatory operations were inaugurated; third, the Jews were concentrated in ghettos; finally the decision was made to annihilate European Jewry. Mobile units were sent to Russia, while in the rest of Europe the victims were deported to the killing centers.... It is the bureaucratic destruction process that in its step-by-step manner finally led to the annihilation of 5 million victims. 278 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

Referring to the incremental feature of his experimental procedure, Mil- gram said: “The laboratory hour is an unfolding process in which each action influences the next. The obedient act is perseverative.” One can hear echoes of this view in Hilberg’s assertion that “a measure in a destruction process [whose sequential nature he had just outlined] never stands alone.... It always has consequences. Each step of the destruction process contains the seed of the next step.” Milgram taught us something profoundly revelatory about human nature—about ourselves—that we did not know before: just how powerful our propensity is to obey the commands of an authority, even when those commands might conflict with our moral principles. And, having been enlightened about our extreme readiness to obey authority, we can try to take steps to inoculate ourselves against unwanted or reprehensible commands. One important arena where this has been happening is the U.S. Army. It apparently has taken the lessons of Milgram’s research to heart and acted on it. In 1985, a college student doing a research paper on the obedience experiments wrote a letter to West Point, asking if Milgram’s research was “considered a vital part of [their] program.” In response, she received a letter from Col. Howard T. Prince II, head of the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership, who wrote: “The answer is a definite, yes. All cadets at the United States Military Academy are required to take two psychology courses, General Psychology . . . and Military Leader- ship. . . . Both of these courses discuss Milgram’s work and the implications of his findings.” And there is more. A military psychologist, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, wrote an insightful book about soldiers’ resistance to killing and how it is overcome. In this book, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Grossman draws substantively on Milgram’s work. After I read the book, I contacted Grossman to ask him if Mil- gram’s work has had any discernible impact on the military. His answer astounded me. He told me that when he was undergoing officer training in the early 1970s, he was shown training films instructing soldiers on how to disobey illegitimate orders. He described this as a “true revolution Milgram’s Legacy 279 in military history,” directly attributable to Milgram’s findings, as well as to the My Lai massacre.

It is important to note that although the murderous behavior of the Nazis stimulated the obedience research, Milgram did not consider that connection essential to the importance of his ﬁndings. In fact, early on after he completed the studies, he expressed some reservations about applying his ﬁndings to the Holocaust. In late March 1964, he received a letter describing an experiment modeled on his obedience research that the letter-writer had submitted as an entry for her state science fair. The “shock” apparatus consisted of seven switches and had some clever details to add a touch of realism, such as a transformer that threw sparks and created an arc of electric current. She reported to Milgram that 77 percent of the teenage subjects in her “learning” experiment fully obeyed and pressed all seven switches, which supposedly gave increasingly painful shocks. She concluded, she wrote Milgram, that her American subjects were comparable to the Nazi youth who followed Hitler’s orders without hesitation. In his reply, he told her that “it is quite a jump . . . from an experiment of this sort to general conclusions about the Nazi epoch, and I, myself, feel that I have sometimes gone too far in generalizing. Be cautious in generalizing.” In 1967, in a draft for an article, he wrote:

In introducing the problem of [the obedience] research, I have set it against the background of behavior in Nazi Germany.... Yet obedience, as a problem of human behavior, does not depend for its signiﬁcance on the Nazi example. Its importance for understanding society [and man’s role in it] transcends this speciﬁc case. Indeed, it is quite possibly an error to link the laboratory experiments too closely to the question of behavior in Nazi Ger- many. Obedience to authority would still require psychological analysis if Germany had never existed, and if Jews had never been victims. Obedience needs to be understood because it is a basic element in the structure of social life. Without a well developed capacity for obedience, society could not function. Yet under the sway of obedient dispositions, morality vanishes. 280 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

This passage did not end up in the published version—apparently Mil- gram’s viewpoint on the matter had not yet settled. But by the time he wrote his book, he had resolved the issue. This is what appears in its ﬁnal pages:

The late Gordon W. Allport was fond of calling this experimental paradigm “the Eichmann experiment” ...perhaps an apt term, but it should not lead us to mistake the import of this investigation. To focus only on the Nazis, however despicable their deeds, and to view only highly publicized atrocities as being relevant to these studies is to miss the point entirely. For the studies are principally concerned with the ordinary and routine destruction carried out by everyday people following orders.... The dilemma posed by the conﬂict between conscience and authority inheres in the very nature of society and would be with us even if Nazi Germany had never existed. To deal with the problem only as if it were a matter of history is to give it an illusory distance.

…

The ethical controversy surrounding the obedience experiments has left an indelible mark on experimentation with human subjects. In the early 1970s, the American Psychological Association formulated its ethical principles for research with human subjects, and institutional review boards (IRBs) were created to ensure that human subjects are protected. The use of IRBs was mandated by the National Research Act, signed into law by Congress in July 1974. Of course, the obedience work was by no means the sole catalyst for these changes. In 1953, a number of jury deliberations in Wichita, Kansas, were tape-recorded by researchers from the University of Chicago without the knowledge of the jurors involved. In the early 1960s, a new drug, thalidomide, was imported into the United States from Europe, and more than 1,000 physicians prescribed it to their patients without informing them of its experimental nature. The drug caused fetal deformations in many pregnant women who took it. In 1963, a group of medical researchers in a Brooklyn hospital injected live cancer cells into feeble, elderly patients without revealing the true nature of the injections. In 1972, a study begun Milgram’s Legacy 281 in 1932 on the effects of untreated syphilis among a group of black men (the Tuskegee study) came to light. The men were not told that they had syphilis or that they were subjects in a research study. The progress of the disease in these men was tracked for forty years, and they were not offered any treatment even after penicillin became available. Psychologists and other behavioral and social scientists have disagreed about the need for governmental regulations. Milgram himself felt that the “erection of a superstructure of control [by the federal government] on sociopsychological experimentation is a very impressive solution to a non- problem.” Today many social psychologists agree with Milgram and believe that although most biomedical research requires vigilant oversight, social-scientific research generally does not. Regardless of one’s position on the issue, there is today a greater sensitivity to the well-being of research participants than was the case in the past; one author writing in the American Psychologist has even referred to the “post-Milgram era of ethically sensitive psychology.” Can anyone imagine a governmental agency today exposing large numbers of people to dangerous levels of radiation without their knowledge or consent, or conducting research that would involve withholding effective medications from patients afflicted with syphilis? The fact that such abuses are virtually unthinkable today is clearly an outcome of the ethical controversy surrounding the obedience experiments, along with a few other widely publicized studies, and the increased sensitivity generated as a result. Could Milgram’s obedience experiments be conducted in the United States today? In principle, yes, but in practice, almost certainly not. Both the American Psychological Association’s ethical principles and federal regulations place a heavy emphasis on informed consent: Potential subjects must be given enough details about an experiment beforehand to enable them to make an informed decision about whether or not to participate. Clearly, the obedience experiment would not produce valid results if subjects knew beforehand that the shocks were not real and the learner was really an actor pretending to be in pain. Still, in neither code is the principle of informed consent an absolute. Both leave the door open for the application of a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether the benefits to the sub- 282 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD ject or to society outweigh the potential risk the research entails. However, at the institutional level, it is the local IRB that actually implements the federal regulations. Over the years, psychologists and other social scientists have found it increasingly difficult to obtain IRB approval for research that is much more benign than the obedience experiments. The problem seems to stem from the fact that many IRB decisions are based on idiosyncratic interpretations that go beyond the federal guidelines. Such decisions are often guided by an oversensitivity to possible problems that have only a remote chance of materializing. One social psychologist, Louis Penner, who has been the chairman of his university’s IRB for social and behavioral research, put it this way:

I’ll confess it right up front: I think that IRBs are a good idea.... But please note that . . . I did not say that they were necessarily a good thing in practice.... There are almost as many different interpretations of [the federal regulations] as there are different IRBs. At some institutions the researcher who submits an IRB application is entering the “Gates of Hell.” The IRB (or its chair) has little first-hand experience with research and is concerned almost exclusively with protecting the institution from possible government censure (or worse) and/or from possible lawsuits by “aggrieved” research participants.... At other institutions, the IRB (or its chair) has the experience and judgment to decide which studies really put their research participants at risk, while at the same time being sensitive to the institution’s research mission. But (and this is important) they are both working from exactly the same set of federal regulations.

Milgram once commented admiringly on the fact that Asch’s conformity paradigm produced many variations: “For me Asch’s experiment rotates as a kind of permanent intellectual jewel. Focus analytic light on it, and it dif- fracts energy into new and interesting patterns.” When one considers how much the obedience work has permeated contemporary culture and thought and the variety of uses that have been made of it, Milgram’s Milgram’s Legacy 283 metaphor of a “permanent intellectual jewel” can just as appropriately be applied to his own obedience paradigm. What accounts for the far-flung influence and appeal of those experiments? Most likely it has to do with the fact that, in his demonstration of our powerful propensity to obey authority, Milgram has identified one of the universals of social behavior—one that transcends both time and place—and people intuitively sense this.* Lee Ross, a social psychologist at Stanford University, effectively captured the sweeping impact of the Milgram obedience experiments when he wrote:

Perhaps more than any other empirical contributions in the history of social science, they have become part of our society’s shared intellectual legacy—that small body of historical incidents, biblical parables, and classic literature that serious thinkers feel free to draw on when they debate about human nature or contemplate human history.

…

Milgram applied his innovative touch to research on a variety of phenomena besides obedience. Although overshadowed by the obedience studies, his other research is also an important part of his legacy. Milgram’s lost-letter technique has been—and remains—the most widely used indirect, unobtrusive measure of attitude and opinion. It has been used for a variety of purposes, from studying the Catholic-Protestant conﬂict in Northern Ireland to measuring attitudes toward abortion. A recent study deserves special mention in this context, because—heed- ing Milgram’s recommendation about the need for large numbers—it represents a quantum leap in the size of the samples used. As a science project for the Intel Science Talent Search competition for 1999–2000, Lucas Hanft, then a Long Island high school student, “lost” 1,600 letters in well-

*See Appendix C for the results of two data analyses that provide some evidence for this assertion. 284 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD to-do neighborhoods in New York City and suburban Long Island over a three-week period in the summer of 1999. Ann Saltzman, of Drew Univer- sity, a former Milgram student at CUNY, served as his adviser. The letters were addressed to organizations meant to represent positions for or against school vouchers or homosexuality or support for Rudy Giuliani or Hillary Clinton for the Senate. As expected, the urban/suburban differences in letter returns were consistent with the liberal or conservative political orientations of their residents. However, there were some surprises, too. For example, within Manhattan, the results showed overwhelming support for school vouchers. Hanft provides an insightful perspective on this ﬁnding:

The tremendous city return rates for “Say Yes! to School Vouchers” raises an interesting issue in that school vouchers, as a rule, tend to be supported by those on the conservative side of the political spectrum. Why would generally liberal New Yorkers support school vouchers so strongly? This high degree of support reﬂects the fact that upscale parents send their children to private schools, as opposed to public schools. For these parents, vouchers are a “pocketbook issue” and their self-interest, at least as far as this study shows, takes precedence over their political predisposition. The ability of the lost-letter technique to discriminate with regard to the school voucher issue is an encouraging ﬁnding as it relates to the accuracy of the methodology.

Among Milgram’s research endeavors, beyond the obedience research, one clearly stands out in terms of its enduring impact—his research on the small-world phenomenon, which has stirred the imagination of both the public and the scientific community. The most immediate impact of Mil- gram’s small-world research was on social network researchers, because it provided them with a new method for studying acquaintanceship patterns. Studies of social networks typically relied on self-report measures, such as questions asking subjects to list individuals with whom they have a particular kind of relationship. Through the small-world method, Milgram enabled network researchers to use subjects’ actions as a source of information about their social ties. Over the years it has become “one of the critical tools Milgram’s Legacy 285 of network analysis,” according to Charles Kadushin, a prominent social network researcher. Until the late 1980s, awareness of Milgram’s discovery of the small-world phenomenon was confined largely to social network researchers and other social scientists. Only a small segment of the larger public was familiar with Milgram’s small-world research; when his article appeared in 1967 in the first issue of Psychology Today, the magazine had only a small readership. But then, in 1990, the small-world concept started to enter the public consciousness through an unlikely gateway. A play titled “Six Degrees of Separation” by John Guare made its debut on Broadway. One of the play’s characters, Ouisa Kittredge, makes an oblique reference to Milgram’s findings when she says: “I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet.” The play, and then its movie version, which appeared in 1993, helped make large numbers of people aware of Milgram’s pioneering work on the small-world phenomenon. In 1998, two researchers in applied mathematics at Cornell, Steven Stro- gatz and Duncan Watts, one of his doctoral students, broke new ground with their startling discovery that Milgram may have identified an underlying principle that is pervasive in our world, and not limited to social contacts. In an article in Nature, they showed through numerical simulations that the small-world effect—the remarkable ability of very large networks to be traversed in only a small number of steps—is present in domains as diverse as the electric power grid of the Western United States, the neural pathways of nematode worms, and the nearly quarter million actors listed in the Internet Movie Database. As Strogatz put it:

Milgram’s pioneering work on the small-world problem is enjoying a renaissance in some unexpected ﬁelds. It has recently stimulated a lot of work in mathematics, computer science, physics, epidemiology, neuroscience, . . . the common thread being that the small-world phenomenon turns out to be more than a curiosity of social networks—it is actually a general property of large, sparse networks whose connectivity is neither completely regular nor completely random. 286 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

Much of this “renaissance” is described in the book Linked, by physicist Al- bert-László Barabási, whose own research on computer networks has contributed to it. He and his colleagues have shown that the Internet has small-world properties. In an analysis of hyperlink connections, they found that, on average, it takes nineteen clicks to connect two randomly chosen pages on the World Wide Web. Recently, Duncan Watts, now an assistant professor at Columbia Uni- versity, completed an ambitious project—conducting an Internet version of Milgram’s small-world method. His goal was to replicate the small-world phenomenon on a global scale, a venture made possible by the use of e-mail as the functional equivalent of Milgram’s regular mail procedure. People participated—that is, became “senders”—by logging on to the project’s Web site, http://smallworld.sociology.columbia.edu. They were then randomly assigned one of eighteen possible targets from thirteen countries in different parts of the world, varying in age, race, socioeconomic status, and profession. The results, as reported by Watts and his project colleagues, Peter Sheridan Dodds and Roby Muhamad, in Science in August 2003, present a mixed picture regarding the validity of the small-world concept. On the one hand, they obtained an extremely low completion rate: Of the 24,163 chains that were started, only 384 were completed. On the other hand, among those few that did reach their target, the average chain length was about four. When Watts and his colleagues conducted a mathematical extrapolation to calculate what the average chain length would be if all the messages had reached their targets, the estimated chain lengths were between five and seven. These results are consistent with Milgram’s findings. The Columbia team also replicated two other findings by Milgram: Mes- sages were more likely to be sent on to friends than to relatives, and male- to-male and female-to-female links were more frequent than message trans- missions to the opposite sex. However, Watts’s team found no evidence of the “funneling” effect described by Milgram: A large percentage of the mailings in Milgram’s study that started in Nebraska reached the target person— a stockbroker in Massachusetts—through a particular clothing merchant. Despite the continuities with Milgram’s findings, the disappointingly low completion rate of the e-mail experiment warrants examination. Does Milgram’s Legacy 287 it conflict with the idea that we live in a small world—that people are capable of carving relatively short paths out of the morass of huge social networks? It certainly would if chains had died because people could not think of an appropriate next link. But this was not the case: Watts and colleagues report that only 0.3 percent of their participants gave that as a reason for not passing on the message, suggesting that they dropped out because of lack of interest or incentive. Milgram had similar speculations about why people in his studies dropped out. It is also possible to explain the high dropout rate in the Columbia study by invoking a concept Milgram used to explain the behavior of city dwellers: stimulus overload. The “in-box” of many, if not most, e-mail users is overloaded on a daily basis with too many messages, many of which are unsolicited spam. One form of adaptation is to pay less attention to, or even ignore, lower-priority messages that might have been attended to in a less crowded Internet environment. Such an extension of Milgram’s overload concept beyond the urban environment was already suggested in a 1997 book by David Shenk titled Data Smog: Sur- viving the Information Glut. The author argued that the overload of unwanted information resulting from advances in information technology has led to a deterioration in the quality of life. He wrote that “Milgram’s . . . analysis of overload [is] just as applicable to victims of data smog in 1997 as it was to urban residents of 1970.” Malcolm Gladwell, in his book The Tipping Point, drew on the small- world concept to explain how a Chicago native, Lois Weisberg, seemed to know virtually everybody. The December 11, 1999, issue of the Los Angeles Times described a test of Milgram’s idea conducted by the staff of the prestigious Hamburg newspaper Die Zeit, in which they helped connect a person they had chosen at random—an Iraqi immigrant—through a global chain of acquaintances to anyone he picked. He chose his idol, Marlon Brando. The weekly’s 450,000 readers were enthralled with progress reports spanning six months. They ended up verifying Milgram’s hypothesis—with a qualification: They reached Brando’s agent via “six degrees of separation,” but they were unable to breach the actor’s wall of privacy. A highly original “test” of the small-world idea was carried out by a London filmmaker, Lucy Leveugle, in October 2002. She decided to use 288 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD herself as the “mailing” to be passed on from one acquaintance to another to see if it could be done in just six steps. Using Milgram’s rule, each person could send her only to a person whom he or she knew on a first-name basis. To find a remote “target” on the other side of the world, she placed an ad in newspapers in Mongolia, asking for volunteers for a documentary film to reply with their name and photograph. The respondent she chose was Purev-Ochir Gungaa, a nomadic herdsman in the middle of the country’s vast steppes. If she could get to him, she figured she could reach anyone. For her first link, she traveled to Dublin to meet an old school friend, Francis, whose family had traveled to Russia. He passed her on to his sister Emily, who sent her to Geneva to her friend Rolf, an environmentalist, who, incredibly, could send her directly to Mongolia. After a five-day trip on the Trans-Siberian Express—made especially grueling by the fact that, as a vegetarian, there was hardly anything for her to eat on the train—she arrived in Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia, to meet her fourth link, Urt- nasan, a high-ranking government official. She then moved on, in turn, to two civil servants, links 5 and 6, and then a businessman, link 7. By now, she was feeling utterly dejected, because she had failed her six- link goal, and her herdsman was nowhere in sight. But suddenly things started looking up. The businessman sent her hundreds of miles into the desolate steppes to meet Oyuntuya, her eighth link, a teacher in a small village. More important, Oyuntuya was none other than the herdsman’s mother! She led Leveugle to her son’s tent in the middle of the desolate, frozen steppes. But with his nomadic lifestyle, roaming the land with his herd of 600 horses, cows, and sheep, Oyuntuya couldn’t guarantee that he would be there. When Leveugle finally saw Purev-Ochir approaching on horseback—her ninth and final step—all her disappointment at not reaching him in six steps disappeared. And rightly so—Milgram’s six-link model was never meant to be an ironclad rule of social life. That number was merely an average. In one of his small-world studies, the number of chain links ranged from two to ten. The revelatory nature of his finding does not hinge on specific numbers but rather on its counterintuitive feature—the unexpected finding that one could cut a swath involving very few connections through very large, complex social networks. So Leveugle’s replication— Milgram’s Legacy 289 shown on British television in February 2003—was still very much a demonstration of the small-world phenomenon.

…

Milgram left a legacy of lucid, jargon-free writings that made his works accessible to a wide readership. As a result, he has played an important role in the public’s recognition of the value of a disciplined, scientific approach to an understanding of everyday social behavior. Perhaps more important, Milgram made social psychology exciting. When he was still alive and his name would come up in conversations, someone would invariably ask: “I wonder what he is up to now?” More often than not, the answer would be that Milgram was not only doing something intrinsically interesting but was expanding the proper domain of social psychology in the process. While some critics were chipping away at the bedrock findings of social psychology through claims of error and artifact, Milgram was expanding its territory by turning his attention to such topics as photography, the “familiar stranger,” mental maps of cities, and subway norms. To dispel the gloom created by periodic pronouncements about a crisis in social psychology, one could always share vicariously in what Milgram liked to call the “pleasurable activity of experimental invention” through exposure to such innovations as the lost-letter technique, the small-world method, and the cyranic mode of interaction. Milgram was an intellectual risk taker, which contributed to some extent to the polarization of opinions about him. Among some psychologists it augmented their perception of him as an outsider and his image as a bête noire. On the other hand, through his willingness to live on the edge scien- tifically, he became a role model to the younger generation of social psychologists. As Craig Haney, Zimbardo’s collaborator on the Stanford Prison Experiment, noted:

It is impossible to calculate the number of students who were inspired by the sheer dramatic force of [the obedience] studies to pursue careers exploring unexamined dimensions of human nature, but I count myself 290 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD

among them. His work pushed against the limits of not only the ethical bounds of experimental research, but also the political limits of incisive social psychological commentary.... His work ... help[ed] to expand our sense of what it was possible to accomplish in an experimental setting and even to embolden us in the critical uses to which we were willing and able to put our laboratory-based empirical knowledge.

Milgram was a major standard-bearer for the situationist perspective, and his obedience research has provided strong ammunition for the situational emphasis of mainstream social psychology. In virtually all his experiments—for example, the lost-letter technique, the television study— the primary focus was on situational manipulations rather than on personality or other individual-difference variables. But Milgram was not dogmatic about this approach. For example, in 1982, he chaired a dissertation by Sharon Presley that focused on the individual-difference variables distinguishing political resisters from nonresisters. Despite the importance Milgram placed on situational factors in understanding social behavior, he did not negate the role of personality and individual differences. In fact, one can readily find examples of individual dispositions receiving recognition in Milgram’s writings. In his writings on the psychology of photography, for example, he states that one of the greatest research challenges is the delineation of the psychological makeup of the professional photographer. More generally, Milgram saw a dispositional approach complementing his own orientation to the study of social behavior:

The implicit model for [my] experimental work is that of the person inﬂu- enced by social forces while often believing in his or her own independence of them. It is thus a social psychology of the reactive individual, the recipient of forces and pressures emanating from outside oneself. This represents, of course, only one side of the coin of social life, for we as individuals also initiate action out of internal needs and actively construct the social world we inhabit. But I have left to other investigators the task of examining the complementary side of our social natures. Milgram’s Legacy 291

Milgram spent most of his professional career at CUNY. During that time, he supervised more doctoral dissertations in social psychology than any other faculty member. Many more students came into contact with him through course work, seminars, or as a member of their dissertation committees. Yet—although the innovative work of some of his students bears his creative imprint—his students have not had a major impact on social psychology. There is no clearly identifiable Milgram “school” of social psychology, comparable, say, to that of Festinger, grounded in his theory of cognitive dissonance. This lack of continuity is due to Milgram’s approach to research. It was phenomenon oriented, rather than theory based. As one writer noted: “Most psychologists test hypotheses; Milgram asks questions.” The majority of Milgram’s studies were driven by his curiosity, his quest to verify the existence of a phenomenon or regularity in behavior suggested by subjective experience, and once established, to identify the factors that led to variations in the observed phenomenon. For example, the subway study was meant to find out if subway riders would give up their seats if you asked them to. Once the phenomenon was established, Milgram varied the nature of the request to see what led to different amounts of compliance. But progress in science depends, at least ideally, on cumulative research—that is, experiments aimed at testing one of a number of hypotheses derived from a theory; these experiments can spawn further experiments that might help refine the theory or help resolve some questions raised by the first set of experiments. On the other hand, phenomenon-centered research is not cumulative. Once you have verified the existence of some behavioral regularity, and perhaps identified its boundaries, there is nowhere else to go. For example, once Milgram had identified the “familiar stranger,” that creature of urban life, what else was there to do beyond perhaps carrying out some follow-up questioning to find out what psychological barriers maintained people’s reluctance to approach “familiar strangers”?

…

Milgram sensitized us to the hidden workings of the social world. He showed the difﬁculty people often have bridging the gap between inten- 292 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD tions and actions. Even moral principles are not invariably translated into behavior and can have their potential power overridden by momentary situational pressures. Although people can be responsive to the precise and subtle details of the immediate situation, they are generally not aware of the power of situational cues and forces. Social norms can often have a compelling effect on our behavior, wielding their power by means of the unexpected amount of inhibitory anxiety generated by their violation. Few people who have read about Milgram’s work remain unaffected by at least some aspect of it—whether it’s the enhanced sense of control and empowerment provided by his alerting us to the subtle social pressures operating on us; a better understanding of the Holocaust; a new, balanced, nonjudgmental approach to city life; or the possibility and excitement of fresh discoveries amid our familiar, mundane activities. As he once told an interviewer:

I . . . believe that a Pandora’s box lies just below the surface of everyday life, so it is often worthwhile to challenge what you most take for granted. You are often surprised at what you ﬁnd. AFTERWORD TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

NE OF THE DISTINGUISHING aspects of Milgram’s re- Osearch contributions is how wide a net their legacy has cast on an improbable array of events and domains, such as law, organizational behavior, the military, and the performing arts. The last chapter of this book, “Milgram’s Legacy,” was devoted to the particulars of Milgram’s influence on contemporary culture and thought. Because his influence has continued unabated, in this afterword I want to provide an update on recent Milgram- related developments since the first publication of this book. Undoubtedly, the most important recent development represents a major milestone in the evolution of the obedience experiment itself. In 1974, Milgram had published his Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, his most comprehensive publication about the obedience studies he had conducted in 1961 and 1962. Ironically, by this time, increased concern about the ethical treatment of human research subjects (which had been brewing since it was stirred up by the obedience studies as well as a handful of other controversial studies) had resulted in two documents aimed at safeguarding the well-being of human research subjects—which effectively put a halt to obedience experiments: the “Ethical Principles in the Conduct of Research with Human Participants,” published by the American Psy- chological Association in 1973, and the signing into law of the National Research Act by the U.S. Congress in 1974. The latter resulted in the requirement of ethical screening of human research by Institutional Review

293 294 AFTERWORD TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

Boards (IRBs). In fact, the last two obedience experiments using Milgram’s format in the United States took place soon thereafter—a role-played version in 1975 that a Milgram student, Daniel Geller, conducted for his doctoral dissertation (using Milgram’s machine) and a 1976 study, also a doctoral dissertation, by Elaine Costanzo, which studied all the possible subject-learner gender configurations. It took about another ten years before obedience experimentation stopped worldwide—with the last ones, dated 1983 and 1985, conducted in India and Austria, respectively. In 2006, Jerry Burger, a social psychologist at the University of Santa Clara conducted a faithful replication of Milgram’s “heart-problem” condition with an important modification: The maximum “shock” a subject-teacher could administer was 150 volts, rather than the 450-volt maximum in the original Milgram experiment. As the first obedience experiment after twenty years anywhere, about thirty years after the last U.S. replication, and forty-five years after Milgram’s original studies, Burger’s experiment clearly was a milestone in the history of obedience research. Why the 150-volt maximum? Looking back at Milgram’s own results, Burger made a simple but crucial observation: 79 percent of Milgram’s subjects who continued past 150 volts ended up giving the 450-volt maximum. Therefore, the results of this modified version would allow for a comparison with Milgram’s findings. It also achieved a second goal: to make the experiment palatable to his IRB, since 150 volts is the first time the learner complains of a heart condition and begs to be let out. With higher voltages, in the original experiments the learner’s protest became more agonized and pitiful. Burger also built in additional safeguards to ensure the safety of his subjects: A multi-step screening process, culminating in an interview by a clinical psychologist to weed out anyone who might react negatively to participating in the experiment. This also constituted an important milestone. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first instance in the history of the obedience studies in which potential participants were first screened. There were two main results: There was no statistically significant difference between the proportion of participants who were fully obedient (i.e., were willing to go past 150 volts) and the proportion of fully obedient participants in Milgram’s experiment. And, second, also paralleling Milgram’s AFTERWORD TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION 295 own findings, male and female participants did not differ in their level of obedience. These findings complement my own analyses of past obedience studies showing no relationship across time between when a study was done and the amount of obedience found (see Appendix C in this book), and no sex differences in eight out of nine replications conducted by others. ABC News’s Primetime program showed Burger’s replication on January 3, 2007, which was very fitting since the whole idea of attempting a replication was the brainchild of Muriel Pearson, a producer of the show. Given Milgram’s views about the affinity between social-psychological experimentation and theatrical performance, I think he would have been pleased. Another recent milestone in the history of the Milgram obedience experiment was achieved by computer scientist Mel Slater of University College, London, and colleagues, because it represented a radical departure from the way obedience experiments have always been conducted. Al- though it followed the style of the usual Milgram experiment, it was conducted in an “immersive virtual environment” in which participants were required to give increasingly more powerful “shocks” to a virtual human whose image was projected on a screen in front of the subject sitting at a “shock machine.” As in the original obedience experiments, the participant had to teach a word-association task to a learner—who in this case was not a human being, but a female virtual character. Whenever “she” made a mistake, the teacher-subject had to turn up the voltage. The learner, in turn, responded with vocal protests indicating her increasing distress. In a control condition, the teacher could neither see nor hear the learner and communicated with her only through text messages. Although in this condition subjects continued to give all the shocks, in the main condition where the learner could be seen and heard, only 74 percent were fully obedient, with 26 percent dropping out earlier—even though they knew they were not hurting a real person. Apparently, some subjects were able to get so deeply absorbed in the experiment that they came to treat the virtual human as if she were real. In addition to breaking off from the experiment, they also showed greater signs of stress, which included physiological responses, such as increased heart rate. There had been evidence from earlier “role-played” versions of the obedience experiments (where human subjects 296 AFTERWORD TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION are told the shocks are not real, but told to pretend that they are) that subjects who were able to get deeply immersed in their role produced results similar to Milgram’s findings, such as Geller’s dissertation mentioned earlier. Many also experienced stress, but the evidence was through observation or self-report. The “virtual reality” replication by Slater and colleagues is the first to provide the more objective, physiological evidence of the experience of stress in a make-believe or role-played version of a Milgram obedience experiment.

…

Two horrific events occurred, or came to light, within the last few years: the torture and humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib by American military personnel and the rash of strip-search hoaxes throughout the United States over a nine-year period. While the two clearly differ in scope and magnitude of consequences, their revelation has evoked outrage and dis- belief. Reporters often recognized the parallels between these events and the obedience experiments (as well as Zimbardo’s prison experiment), making their occurrence more plausible. Although we may never know the full scope of the mistreatment of the Iraqi prisoners, various press reports seemed to agree that the guards’ reprehensible actions were carried out in response to demands from officers above them in the command structure who wanted the prisoners “softened up” for interrogation. If that is the case, Milgram’s findings foreshadowed the nightmarish events in the cells of that prison, and many journalists and columnists saw the connection between the two. In fact, a documentary, The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, contains footage from Obedience, Milgram’s black- and-white documentary filmed during the experiments. The strip-search hoaxes represent another unsettling example of peoples’ willingness to obey authorities—even when their demands go beyond actions people would not normally carry out on their own. I am referring to a cruel hoax that was carried out at least seventy times in mostly fast-food restaurants throughout the United States over a nine-year period from 1995 to 2004—a hoax that had all the earmarks of a Milgram experiment in vivo. AFTERWORD TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION 297

Most cases involved a similar modus operandi. A call is received by a restaurant’s manager from a person claiming to be a police officer who says that a particular employee—usually a female teenager or young woman—is suspected of stealing money, and that she needs to be strip-searched to see if money is found in her possession. Apparently, the caller had an authoritative speaking style, peppered with police lingo, and he would sometimes imply that “corporate” or other higher-ups were aware of this investigation. The manager would then take the suspect into a back room and, with the pseudo-policeman continually on the line, follow his instructions to tell the girl to disrobe and jog in place naked, presumably to let the money fall out. No stolen property was ever found. The “officer’s” commands were often also perverse sexual demands, such as soliciting detailed descriptions of the victim’s undergarments and naked body, directing her to assume embarrass- ing poses, and sometimes spanking her. And in a case at a McDonald’s in Mount Washington, Kentucky, which was captured by a surveillance camera, the victim’s harrowing four-hour ordeal included having to perform a sexual act on the man conducting the strip search, at the behest of the caller. I was interviewed by Andrew Wolfson, a journalist who had written the most thorough investigative report on the hoaxes and told him that I believe Milgram would not have been surprised by the behavior of the people who were fooled by the pseudo-policeman. The Academy Award–winning documentary director Alex Gibney made The Human Behavior Experiments, a film shown on the Sundance Channel and Court TV in June 2006. It provided a detailed examination of the three most famous social-psychology experiments of the 1960s and ’70s and their relevance for contemporary events—the obedience experiments, Latané and Darley’s bystander intervention studies, and Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiment. Using extensive footage from Milgram’s Obedience film, and scenes captured by the surveillance camera at the McDonald’s in Mount Washington, Kentucky, the film effectively connects Milgram’s experiments to that horrid strip search. (In the service of full disclosure, I should mention that I appear in the film and that I have served as an expert witness in support of the victim in a different strip-search case in Missouri, helping her win an out-of-court settlement with the fast-food restaurant 298 AFTERWORD TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION where she was abused.) And as I write this, the strip-search hoax has entered the world of TV drama via an episode of the series “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” aired on April 29, 2008. It contains a number of link- ages to the obedience experiment, including the fact—in a dubious case of black humor—that the caller allegedly ordering the strip search called himself “Detective Milgram.” Portions of Milgram’s film Obedience also appear in another documentary by Gibney, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. In the last chapter of this book, “Milgram’s Legacy,” I documented Mil- gram’s impact on contemporary culture and thought via the improbable potpourri of uses that have been made of the obedience experiments. This has steadily continued since the first publication of this book in 2004. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, Eric J. Cassell, M.D., used the obedience experiments as a springboard to warn physicians about their potential for mistreatment of their patients. Legal scholarship and practice continue to draw on the obedience experiments. In the original edition of this book, I reported that a search of the database Lexis-Nexis found 165 law review articles citing the obedience experiments. Today, about four years later, that number has risen to over 250. A newspaper opinion piece berated organizational consultants who conduct workshops in which employees are directed to engage in childish and silly activities in the service of creativity and team-building and the willingness of most people to go along. Invoking the obedience experiments, the author states rhetorically, “It makes me wonder what we would not do if a consultant instructed us.” An article in Psychology Today describes an interactive game used by Abbott Laboratories to teach ethical behavior to their sales staff. Every time the staffer gave a wrong answer, he automatically delivered a high-voltage shock to an avatar. According to a spokesman for the drug company, “Any resemblance to Stanley Milgram’s infamous experiment ... is purely coincidental.” On a more serious note, in an article in Slate magazine, Michael Kinsley draws on the obedience experiments in a thoughtful exploration of the dilemma of obedience versus disobedience in emergency situations. And continuing the tradition of theatrical performances based on the obedience studies is a clever off-Broadway multimedia work, The Answer Is Horse, AFTERWORD TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION 299

created by Joya Scott and performed in New York in the summer of 2006. A tragicomic novel, The Learners, written by well-known graphic designer Chip Kidd, is set in New Haven in 1961. In the story, the central character works for an ad agency and gets the job of designing Milgram’s display ad to recruit subjects for his “learning” experiments. The main character decides to volunteer for the experiments himself, with some unexpected consequences. The book The Intellectual Devotional, published in 2006, consists of wide- ranging nuggets of information—one for each day of the year. One day is devoted to the obedience experiments. Although a novelty item, the book is surprisingly informative. Substantial portions of some recent books are devoted to the obedience experiments. American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares by historian Kirsten Fermaglich examines the life and work of four American Jewish intellectuals who, she argues, were influenced by the Holocaust. Besides Milgram, the book focuses on Robert J. Lifton, Betty Friedan, and Stanley Elkins. The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo, the long-awaited book about the Stanford Prison experiment and its continuing implications, has a chapter devoted largely to the obedience experiments and related research. A recent book on reality television has a chapter expressing the arguable viewpoint that Milgram is the father of reality TV. In 2002, conceptual artist Rod Dickinson recreated portions of the obedience experiment with actors in Glasgow, with meticulous attention to details in order to recapture the laboratory experience at Yale in 1961–1962. The chapters in a book titled The Milgram Re-enactment also reflect on that event. Although the vast majority of recent Milgram-related developments are tied to his obedience experiments, a few of his other studies have also received some attention. In 1997, Steven Stern and Jon Faber introduced the lost e-mail technique, an internet version of the lost-letter technique. A recent experiment by Brad Bushman and Angelica Bonacci used it inven- tively as an unobtrusive measure of prejudice. And at Intel Research in Berkeley, Eric Paulos has been using twenty-first-century technology to study the familiar stranger and urban atmospheres. In August 2004, when Michael Luo, a New York Times reporter, first read about Milgram’s subway study, he thought it might make an interesting 300 AFTERWORD TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION story to track down the students who had conducted the experiments over thirty years earlier and find out if they still remembered that very stressful experience. At the same time, two of his colleagues duplicated those experiments to see how today’s subway riders compared to those in 1972, when Milgram’s students studied them. Following Milgram’s procedures, seated passengers were approached and simply asked for their seats. Contradicting the stereotype, held in many quarters, of the hard-boiled, rude New Yorker, thirteen out of fifteen—or 87 percent—gave up their seats, compared to the compliance rate of 68 percent found by Milgram’s students. In thirty years, New Yorkers seem to have become more civil and accommodating. In rapid succession, over the next two weeks, reporters in other places—London, Dublin, Glasgow, and Melbourne, Australia—also conducted subway experiments. With the exception of Melbourne, where only one person out of twenty got up, the compliance rates were typically as high or higher than what the New York Times reporters found. While these “replications” were not scientific, their consistency high- lights an important axiom of social psychology: Whenever possible, one should study behavior directly, and not simply ask people how they might behave, because there is often a gap between how people think they might act in a situation and what they actually do. As Milgram once told an interviewer: “Only in action can you fully realize the forces operative in social behavior. That is why I am an experimentalist.” APPENDIX A List of Milgram’s Doctoral Students at CUNY, with Year and Title of Dissertation

Name Year Dissertation

Rita Dytell 1970 An Analysis of How People Use Groups as a Source of Information on Which to Base Judgments Swadesh Grant 1971 Spatial Behavior and Caste Membership in Some North Indian Villages Daniel Geller 1975 A Role-Playing Simulation of Obedience: Focus on Involvement John Sabini 1976 Moral Reproach: A Conceptual and Experimental Analysis Elinor Mannucci 1977 Potential Subjects View Psychology Experiments: An Ethical Inquiry Maury Silver 1977 The Social Construction of Envy Marcia Newman 1978 Perceptions of Silence in Conversation Harold Takooshian 1979 Helping Behavior As a Social Indicator Arthur Blank 1980 Rules of Order: Or So to Speak Arthur Weinberger 1980 Response to Old People Who Ask for Help: Field Experiments Elyse Goldstein 1981 The Mediation of Television Messages by Personal Inﬂuence: An Experimental Paradigm Sharon Presley 1982 Values and Attitudes of Political Resisters to Authority Ronna Kabatznick 1984 The Public’s Perception of Psychology: Attitudes of Four Selected Groups Christina Taylor 1984 The Social Perception of Extramarital Relationships

301 This page intentionally left blank APPENDIX B Sample Quotations and Content Analysis of Reviews of Obedience to Authority

SAMPLE QUOTATIONS Milgram’s book is carefully assembled and considered research, but past that it is also a streamlined and scientiﬁc metaphor for much of recent history. The resonance is deep, from Auschwitz to My Lai, the connections unavoidable; the implications altogether cheerless. —Rolling Stone

Milgram’s experiments are arresting and dramatic, among the most original in all of social psychology.... Deception and manipulation led to a remarkable addition to our knowledge of the perils of authority. Knowledge like that comes hard and slow. Can we afford to prohibit further discoveries of that caliber and relevance? —Commentary

Prof. Milgram’s study can only call forth praise. It is almost anti-climactical to add that the book is easily read, thanks to the clarity and precision with which the results and analysis are presented. —Journal of Analytical Psychology

The experiments are well worth writing up in book form.... They have generated ﬁerce argument.... The argument has included strong attacks on Milgram’s own morality in deceiving (some say cruelly deceiving) his subjects. It may be that in so doing Milgram was, like his subjects, only manifesting obedience to the authority of “Science.” —British Journal of Psychiatry

303 304 APPENDIX B

We can argue that the experiments were cruel and should not have been undertaken. We can question whether much truth can be abstracted from such a complex of deceptions.... But the results of the experiments remain: they are real, they have been repeated, their implications are appalling, and must not be dismissed. —Newsweek

Professor Milgram’s research into man’s need to obey authority has culminated in a book which calls into question the wisdom of letting some forms of research results loose. —Police Review, London

Milgram’s work is of ﬁrst importance, not only in explaining how it is that men submit, but also in suggesting how better they may rebel. —Sunday Times, London

If it is “immoral” to ﬁnd out about ourselves in a way we do not like, these experiments are certainly immoral. But then, as these experiments show, morality—at least in its public form—may have quite a lot to answer for. —London Times Literary Supplement

Do we gain very much from a simulated or artiﬁcially provoked glimpse of inhu- manity when there are so many genuine historical precedents on which to draw? —The Sunday Telegraph, London

When I consider that the initial study was a demonstration and not even an experiment, that the research program lacked any initial theory or tests of signiﬁcance, and that many of its conclusions are subject to alternative explanations, I am saddened that it is the obedience study that will go down in history as reﬂecting the 1960s in social psychological research. —Contemporary Psychology

I believe that the publication of Obedience to Authority is more than justiﬁed and indeed makes a major contribution. But then I must confess to being partial to Mil- gram’s work, which I consider to be a model of original, elegant, systematic, programmatic and socially relevant research.... —Australian Journal of Psychology

…

The book reviews from which the above quotations were drawn came from a larger set comprising mostly reviews of Obedience to Authority compiled by Milgram with APPENDIX B 305 the aid of professional clipping services in the United States and Great Britain. With the help of bibliographic databases, I located a few additional reviews that were not in Milgram’s collection. Not counting brief, one-paragraph, summaries of the book, I had a total of sixty-two reviews that had appeared in newspapers, magazines, and journals. As exempliﬁed by the publications the quotations were drawn from, the collection of book reviews came from a very heterogeneous array of sources. Given that U.S. and British clipping services were involved, it is reasonable to assume that the sixty-two reviews constitute all or nearly all of the book reviews of Obedience to Authority that appeared in U.S. and British publications.

CONTENT ANALYSIS The existence of such a large set of reviews created the opportunity to go beyond qualitative impressions and conduct a quantitative analysis that would provide a more ﬁne-tuned differentiation of the reviews in terms of their judgments of the book. With the assistance of two of my students, Melanie Duncan and Dawn Walls, I conducted a systematic content analysis of all sixty-two reviews. Two 5- point numerical scales were created for the content analysis. The ﬁrst provided a global assessment of the favorability of the review, with the numbers representing the following gradations: 1 = all negative, 2 = mostly negative, 3 = neutral or evenly balanced, 4 = mostly positive, 5 = all positive (see Figure B.1). The second scale evaluated the ethical judgments expressed in the reviews (see Figure B.2).

10 Number of Reviews

0 12345 Favorability Rating

FIGURE B.1 Favorability Ratings of the Reviews. 306 APPENDIX B

10 Number of Reviews

0 12345 Ethical Rating

Ethical Rating Scale 1. Did not mention ethics at all 2. Simply mentioned or described ethics as being part of the book’s content without further comment 3. Was critical of the ethics of the experiments 4. Noted the ethical problems but felt that Milgram had dealt with them adequately 5. Noted the ethical problems but felt that the importance of the findings outweighed them

FIGURE B.2 Ethical Ratings of the Reviews.

After initial discussion and training in the use of the scales, one of the students read all sixty-two reviews, assigning each one a favorability rating and an ethical rating. Rating reliabilities had been established by two of us independently rating fifteen randomly selected reviews. The agreement of ratings was 67 percent for the favorability scale and 70 percent for the ethics scale. While these are rather modest reliabilities, they reflect the inherent difficulty in making global, unitary judgments of what were often complex textual materials. The distribution of the favorability ratings is depicted in Figure B.1. The most notable finding is that only one of the sixty-two reviews (1.6 percent) received the “all negative” rating. Twenty-nine percent were judged to be “mostly negative”; the “neutral” and “all positive” categories were each applied to 21 percent of the reviews; and about 27.5 percent were judged to be “mostly positive.” Combining the APPENDIX B 307

“all positive” and “mostly positive” categories reveals that about half of the reviewers (48.5 percent) gave the book their stamp of approval. Combining the “all negative” and “mostly negative” ratings shows that 30.6 percent of the reviewers found fault with the book. That left 21 percent of the reviewers straddling the fence. The ethics rating was included in the content analysis because the ethical acceptability of the obedience research has been the longest-running controversy associated with it. The ethical rating scale was meant to provide a more precise reading on the issue of ethics by assessing its relative importance for the reviewers. The distribution of the ethical ratings is depicted in Figure B.2. The most frequent rating was 1, indicating that the reviewer did not mention ethics at all (33 of 62, or 53 percent). Nineteen percent simply indicated that ethics was part of the book’s content, without further comment; about 6.5 percent of the reviews were critical of the experiment’s ethics; an equal number noted the ethical problems but stated that Milgram had dealt with them adequately; and about 14.5 percent of the reviewers felt that the importance of the ﬁndings outweighed the ethical problems. The reviews were evenly split in terms of the publications they were in. Half appeared in professional sources, such as scholarly journals, and the other half came from periodicals aimed at nonprofessional audiences, such as newspapers and magazines. A statistical analysis comparing the favorability and ethics ratings of the book reviews in the two types of sources showed no signiﬁcant differences between them. This page intentionally left blank APPENDIX C The Stability of Obedience Across Time and Place

I have carried out two data analyses that provide at least some evidence for the stability of rates of obedience across time and place. In one, I evaluated the relationship between the results of both Milgram’s standard obedience experiments and the replications conducted by others, and their date of publication. There was absolutely no association between when a study was conducted and the amount of obedience it yielded. The correlation coefficient hovered near zero (see Table C.1). In a second analysis, I again took all of Milgram’s standard conditions and replications conducted by others and compared the outcomes of the studies conducted in the United States with those of studies conducted in other countries. Remark- ably, the average obedience rates were very similar: In the U.S. studies, on average, 61 percent of the subjects were fully obedient, and elsewhere the obedience rate was 66 percent. A statistical test showed that those averages were not signiﬁcantly different from each other (see Table C.2).

309 310 APPENDIX C

TABLE C.1 Obedience Studies, with Year of Publication, Country in Which Study Was Conducted, and Obedience Rate Found Obedience Study Country Rate (%) Milgram (1963) United States Exp. 1 65 Exp. 2 62.5 Exp. 3 40 Exp. 5 65 Exp. 6 50 Exp. 8 65 Exp. 10 47.5 Holland (1967) United States 75 Ancona and Pareyson (1968) Italy 85 Rosenhan (1969) United States 85 Podd (1969) United States 31 Edwards, Franks, Friedgood, Lobban, and Mackay (1969) South Africa 87.5 Ring, Wallston, and Corey (1970) United States 91 Mantell (1971) West Germany 85 Bock (1972) United States 40 Powers and Geen (1972) United States 83 Rogers (1973) United States 37 Kilham and Mann (1974) Australia 28 Shalala (1974) United States 30 Costanzo (1976) United States 81 Shanab and Yahya (1977) Jordan 73 Shanab and Yahya (1978) Jordan 62.5 Miranda, Caballero, Gomez, and Zamorano (1981) Spain 50 Schurz (1985) Austria 80 APPENDIX C 311 85.0 73.0 62.5 50.0 80.0 42.5 Obedience Spain Italy Austria South AfricaGermany 87.5 85.0 Country Rate (%) Foreign Studies Foreign Pareyson (1968) Pareyson of 1 Remote and 3 Voice- of 1 Remote and 3 conditions) Feedback 37.0 Gupta (1983) (Average India 85.0 Mantell (1971) 30.0 Schurz (1985) 81.0 31.0 Kilham and Mann (1974) Australia 28.0 40.0 (1978) ShanabYahya and Jordan 91.0 (1977) ShanabYahya and Jordan 75.0 (1969) al. et. Edwards Rate (%) Author(s) Obedience U.S. Studies U.S. Comparison of Obedience Rates Found in U.S. Studies and Non-U.S. Studies Studies and Non-U.S. in U.S. Comparison of Obedience Rates Found TABLE C.2 TABLE Author(s) Costanzo (1976) mean obedience rate=65.94% foreign mean obedience rate=60.94%; U.S. Holland (1967) of Exps. 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10) 8, 6, 5, 3, 2, 1, of Exps. Rosenhan (1969) Milgram (1974) (Average 56.43 and Ancona Bock (1972) and Geen (1972)Powers Rogers (1973) 83.0 (1981) al. Miranda et. Podd (1969) Podd (1970) al. Ring et. Shalala (1974) This page intentionally left blank NOTES

KEY TO SOURCES AHAP: Archives of the History of American Psychology ASM: Personal collection of Alexandra (Sasha) Milgram HUA: Harvard University Archives. With a few exceptions, the material is from Milgram’s graduate student file. ISW: Milgram, S. (1977). The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Milgram, S. (1992). The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments, 2nd edition. Edited by J. Sabini and M. Silver. New York: McGraw-Hill. This is an anthology of Milgram’s published writings. The two editions contain the same introductions and mostly the same articles. The second edition dropped a few articles and added some articles that were published after the appearance of the first edition. In the notes below, articles that are cited as reprinted in ISW may be found in both editions. When page numbers are provided, they refer to the second edition. If an article appears in only one of the editions, this will be indicated (e.g., reprinted in ISW, 2nd edition only). OTA: Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: Harper and Row. Remembrance: Letters by Milgram’s colleagues and students reflecting back on how Milgram affected their lives. At the American Psychological Association Convention in August 1993, a number of events marked the thirtieth anniversary of the appearance of Milgram’s first obedience article and what would have been his sixtieth birthday on August 15. In conjunction with those events, some of Mil- gram’s former students solicited letters of remembrance to be presented to the Milgram family. SMP: Stanley Milgram Papers, Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives

PROLOGUE xviii Found in the Talmud: Tractate “Ethics of the Fathers,” chap. 4, v. 27. xviii The ﬁrst experiment: Triplett (1987). xix Skills . . . during World War II: Cartwright (1948).

313 314 NOTES TO PAGES xix–6

xix Watson attempted to create: DeGrandpré and Buskist (2000); Lundin (1996). xx The first textbook: Hilgard (1987). xx As John Dashiell . . . wrote: Dashiell (1935, p. 1097). xxi Lewin was a Jewish psychologist: Marrow (1969). xxi “Path-breaking in their procedural audacity”: Jones (1985a). xxi An experiment to study . . . leadership styles: Lewin, Lippitt, and White (1939). My description of this study benefited from Jones (1985b) and Wheeler (1970). xxii The theory of cognitive dissonance: Festinger (1957). xxii Milgram . . . also influenced by Lewin: Letter from Milgram to Kathy Grant, March 5, 1980, SMP. xxii According to Lewin: Marrow, op. cit. xxiii “[Lewin] conceived of a person”: Jones (1985b, p. 68).

CHAPTER 1: THE NEIGHBORHOOD WITH NO NAME 1 Stanley Milgram was born: Interview with Joel Milgram, Cambridge, MA, June 24, 1993; Interview with Marjorie (Milgram) Marton, Rockville, MD, September 26, 1996. 1 His father seemed “especially sturdy”: From an unpublished memoir by Mil- gram about his early childhood, titled “The Neighborhood With No Name,” written in the early 1980s, ASM. 2 “The neighborhood was always abuzz”: Ibid. 2 Sam and Adele’s second child: Interviews with Alexandra (Sasha) Milgram, Riverdale, NY, April 25 and June 13, 1993. 3 “Mom would be going to the hospital”: “The Neighborhood With No Name,” op. cit. 3 When Joel was old enough: Interview with Joel Milgram, op. cit. 3 Center of their lives: From a film titled “The Old Neighborhood” made by Milgram’s students in his class “Film and Video as Research Tools in Social Science” in the spring of 1981 at CUNY. In the film Milgram takes the viewer on a walking tour of the Bronx neighborhood where he grew up, reminiscing and pointing out significant locations, such as PS 77 and one of the buildings the family had lived in, ASM. 3 A dress code: Marjorie Marton, conversations, January 2001. 4 Babies came from tulips: “The Old Neighborhood,” op. cit. 4 Stanley’s superior intelligence: Interviews with Sasha Milgram, op. cit. 4 Proud of his brother’s achievements: Interview with Joel Milgram, op. cit. 4 When the “sodium bomb” exploded: Tavris (1974b) 5 “It was as natural as breathing”: Quoted in Tavris (1974a, p. 77); reprinted in ISW, p. xxviii. 5 Among Stanley’s childhood experiences: “The Neighborhood With No Name,” op. cit. 6 Samuel Milgram was a proud father: Ibid. 6 “He resembled his father”: Interviews with Sasha Milgram, op. cit. NOTES TO PAGES 6–16 315

6 One of Stanley’s . . . childhood memories: “The Neighborhood With No Name,” op. cit. 7 When the United States entered World War II: Interviews with Joel Milgram, Marjorie Marton, and Sasha Milgram, op. cit. 8 “As I come of age”: Milgram’s handwritten Bar Mitzvah speech, ASM. 8 Bernard Fried . . . remembers the school: Interview with Bernard Fried, Feb- ruary 18, 2001. 9 Zimbardo remembers Milgram: Interview with Philip Zimbardo, Toronto, August 22, 1993. 9 Stanley was a member of Arista: A. Milgram (2000). 10 He did not date at Monroe: Interview with Bernard Fried, op. cit. 10 The bakery Sam . . . bought: Interviews with Joel Milgram and Marjorie Mar- ton, op. cit. 11 Marjorie . . . remembers it as “the closest thing”: Interview with Marjorie Marton, ibid. 11 In 1953, the Ford Foundation: The People’s College on the Hill (1987). 11 At Queens College: Milgram’s college transcript, HUA; Queen’s College yearbook, “Silhouette,” for 1954, courtesy of Joseph Brostek; application submitted to Social Science Research Council (SSRC) December 31, 1956, ASM. 11 In the summer of 1953: Interviews with Sasha Milgram, op. cit. 12 French language course: Sorbonne enrollment form for a “Cours Pratique,” HUA. 12 Fell in love with a French girl: Interview with Joel Milgram, op. cit. 12 Later that year: Interviews with Marjorie Marton and Joel Milgram, op. cit. 12 A New York State Regents scholarship: SSRC Fellowship application, op. cit. 13 “He would live to be fifty-five”: Interviews with Sasha Milgram, op. cit. 13 Was accepted by . . . School of International Affairs: A. Milgram (2000). 13 Fried has a distinct memory: Interview with Bernard Fried, op. cit. 13 In the spring semester of 1954: Milgram’s Queens College transcript, HUA; A. Milgram (2000); Tavris (1974b). 14 Ford Foundation . . . Program: Tavris (1974b). 14 Selected as one of the recipients: Report from the Ford Foundation, April 30, 1954, AHAP. 14 He was the first Jew: Interviews with Joel Milgram and Marjorie Marton, op. cit. 14 Henry Ford . . . a vocal anti-Semite: See Baldwin (2001). 14 Lacked adequate preparation: A. Milgram (2000); Milgram’s Queens College transcript, HUA. 14 Letter to the Social Relations Department dated May 30, 1954: HUA. 15 Reply from Gordon Allport: Letter from Allport, June 1, 1954, HUA. 15 Enrolled in six undergraduate courses: Letter to Mrs. Sprague, July 15, 1955, HUA. 16 Concluded one of his letters: Letter to Allport, July 8, 1954, HUA. 16 “We can discuss a plan”: Letter from Allport, July 19, 1954, SMP. 316 NOTES TO PAGES 16–23

16 “Gordon Allport was my longtime mentor”: Quoted in Tavris (1974a, p. 77). Also in ISW, p. xxviii. 16 A lonely existence: Entry for June 9, 1951, in Milgram’s diary, “Thoughts,” ASM.

CHAPTER 2: MAKING THE GRADE AT HARVARD 17 Integrating the four disciplines: Conversations with E. L. Pattullo, 2001; Par- sons (1956). 17 The productive teamwork: Marrow, op. cit. 17 The concept of “attitude”: Allport (1935). 18 Study of prejudice and of religious belief: Allport (1954); Allport and Ross (1967). 18 Clyde Kluckhohn . . . Navajo Indians: Hay (1999). 18 Talcott Parsons . . . leader in his field: Brick (1999); Vidich (2000). 18 The rationale . . . was spelled out: Allport and Boring (1946). 18 The interdisciplinary aims: Parsons, op. cit. 19 During Milgram’s first semester: Letter to Allport, September 28, 1954, SMP. 19 The sociologists walked out: Conversations with E.L. Pattullo, op. cit. 20 Immediate source of instability: Nichols (1998). 20 Atmosphere of optimism: Parsons, op. cit. 20 Personality in Nature, Society, and Culture: Kluckhohn, Murray, and Schneider (1967). 20 A wide-ranging interest in the social sciences: Letter to Kathy Grant, op. cit. 20 Roger Brown . . . recalled: From a talk he gave at a commemorative gathering at the CUNY Graduate Center on May 10, 1985, organized by Irwin Katz, Milgram’s colleague. 21 He had created a norm: Milgram told this story in ISW, pp. 253–254. 22 Emerson Hall in . . . Harvard Yard: Bunting (1985). 22 Harvard’s social gospelers: Vidich, op. cit. 22 The first Ph.D.’s in psychology: Triplet (1992). 22 She wrote on her test booklet: I obtained this quotation from a Harvard Uni- versity Web page that no longer seems to be available. In searching for an alternative source, I discovered that there are different versions of the quote, in which the wording and details differ slightly. Although I could not find a source with the same wording that I obtained from the Harvard Web site, a similar, and probably more authoritative, account can be found in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, edited by Carl Van Vechten (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 66. 23 Milgram was able to take: Milgram’s graduate record, HUA. 23 Letter from Gordon Allport, dated June 9, 1955: SMP. 23 He also attained A’s: Graduate record, op. cit. 23 The graduate school gave him credit: Graduate record, op. cit. 23 Bruner had sent a progress report: Letter from Bruner to Robert Knapp, Jan- uary 25, 1955; undated and unsigned memo, “Report on Harvard and Colum- bia Fellows—1954–55,” most likely written by Knapp, AHAP. NOTES TO PAGES 24–27 317

24 “I really fell in love with the discipline”: Questionnaire sent in May 1955, AHAP. 24 Extension of his fellowship: Letter to Bernard Berelson, February 3, 1955, AHAP. 24 Informed by Robert Knapp: Letter to Milgram, February 16, 1955, AHAP. 24 Recommended him for a full scholarship: Letter to the Ford Foundation, June 6, 1955, AHAP. 24 Milgram joined it: Letter to Cadet Stanley Milgram from William P. Vanden Dries, Major, USAF, ASM. 25 Military service as a commissioned officer: Interview with Joseph Brostek, May 9, 2001. 25 He withdrew from the course: Milgram’s Queens College transcript, HUA. 25 Sent off another letter: Letter to Ford Foundation, op. cit. 25 Knapp’s . . . reply had even greater finality: Letter to Milgram, June 15, 1955, AHAP. 25 Chronic state of anxiety: From an article Milgram wrote during the 1957–1958 academic year for Impuls, a mimeographed newsletter put out by the psychology students at the University of Oslo, titled “Life and Learning at Harvard’s Department of Social Relations,” ASM. 26 He had worked almost every summer: Conversations with Sasha Milgram, 1999–2003. 26 Received a reassuring letter: Letter from Mrs. Eleanor Sprague, July 21, 1955, HUA. 26 Most important scientific influence: Letter to Kathy Grant, op. cit. 26 Both Bruner and Allport agreed: Interview with Jerome Bruner, New York City, October 26, 2000. 27 A Letter to . . . Talcott Parsons: Letter from Asch to Parsons, February 24, 1956, HUA. Asch also wrote Milgram a warm thank you letter on September 3, 1956, SMP. 27 “Almost exclusively stressed the slavish submission”: Asch (1958). 27 Opinion serves as a stimulus: Wheeler, op. cit. 27 Asch’s experimental procedure: Although the philosophical issues that led Asch to examine conformity experimentally were clearly ones that he first contemplated as an adult, the idea for the specific technique he invented may have been spawned by a childhood experience. Asch was born in 1907 in Warsaw, Poland, and grew up in Lowitz, a small town outside of Warsaw. He recalled the first night of Passover when he was about seven. It was the first time the children were allowed to stay up late for the Seder: Everything was prepared; it was a glowing ceremony.... Then I saw my grandmother fill a cup of wine for each of us including the children; and in addition, another cup. Then I saw a chair in which nobody sat. I was sitting next to an uncle of mine and I asked what this meant. He said that the prophet Eli- jah comes into every Jewish home on Passover. That is why there is a chair prepared for him, and at the proper moment in the ceremony the door is opened 318 NOTES TO PAGES 28–34

to admit him and that he takes a sip of the cup of wine meant for him. I was completely fascinated and astounded that the prophet Elijah would in one night stop at all the Jewish homes in the world. I said to my uncle, “Will he really take a sip?” and he said, “Oh yes, you just watch when the time comes, watch the cup”—it was ﬁlled to the rim—“and you’ll see that it goes down.” And when the moment came, my eyes were glued to the Prophet’s cup; I looked and looked and then it seemed to me as if perhaps it did go down a little!... Don’t ask whether what happened to me at the age of seven was responsible for an experiment that came forty years later—I don’t know. (Quoted in Ceraso, Gruber, and Rock, 1990, p. 3). 28 An “epistemological nightmare”: Quoted in Ceraso et al., ibid., p. 12. 29 Milgram felt freer to be himself: Interviews with John Shaffer, March 29, 1999; Saul Sternberg, May 24, 2001; Robert Palmer, May 14, 2001; Norman Bradburn, May 15, 2001. 29 He wrote back to her: Letter to Mrs. Sprague, March 2, 1956, HUA. 30 “Since it appears to me unlikely”: Letter to Mosteller, May 25, 1956, HUA.

CHAPTER 3: NORWAY AND FRANCE 31 An analysis of national stereotypes: Letter to Allport, October 17, 1956, SMP. 31 He wanted Allport to be his . . . supervisor: Ibid. 31 “A ﬁrm believer in the uniqueness of personality”: Pettigrew (1999). 32 Milgram’s plan was to complete: Letter to Social Science Research Council (SSRC), August 31, 1956, ASM. 32 Made some inquiries: Letter from Elbridge Sibley to Milgram, September 5, 1956, AHAP. 32 A lengthy letter to Allport: Letter to Allport, October 17, 1956, op. cit. 32 The Nature of Prejudice: Allport (1954). 33 “The design you outline is not feasible”: Letter from Allport, November 4, 1956, SMP. 33 A streamlining . . . research plans: Milgram’s fellowship application to SSRC, December 31, 1956, ASM. 34 Allport wrote: Allport to Stein Rokkan and Ragnar Rommetveit, December 18, 1956, HUA. 34 Both men expressed a genuine interest: letters to Allport from Rommetveit, January 21, 1957, and Rokkan, January 29, 1957, SMP. 34 His name . . . on a short list: Letter from Sibley, March 26, 1957, ASM. 34 He was awarded a fellowship: Letter from Joseph B. Casagrande, ASM. 34 “You fail [sic] the examination”: Letter from Allport, June 6, 1957, SMP. 34 “Considerably distressed”: Sibley’s reply, June 12, 1957, to Allport’s letter, June 13, 1957, HUA. 34 Milgram wrote Sibley: Letter dated June 17, 1957, ASM. Why did Milgram fail the exam? Given his academic record in other courses and his general competence, it is surprising. The explanation he gave Sibley was this: Doctoral students in social psychology have a statistics requirement that is usually met by passing the ﬁnal examination of Social Relations 191, a statistics course. Al- NOTES TO PAGES 35–42 319

though students typically take that course, they are allowed to take the exam without having enrolled in the course. Milgram had signed up for Social Rela- tions 191 at the beginning of the 1957 spring semester but dropped it when he found that it conflicted with other, unspecified, activities. However, he did do the course readings and the assignments in the syllabus on his own. Appar- ently, this alternative mode of learning the material was not adequate enough to pass the course, although Milgram felt that he had learned the statistical techniques covered in the course. 35 After receiving assurances: Milgram’s telephone memo, July 3, 1957, ASM. 35 The monthly installments: Letter from Sibley, July 8, 1957, ASM. 35 They approved the proposal: Thesis Conference Committee Report, Septem- ber 24, 1957, HUA. 35 “Let me repeat that we know”: Letter from Allport, September 30, 1957. 36 Letter to a female friend: Letter to Enid, October 18, 1957, ASM. 36 “I have great respect”: Letter to Allport, November 18, 1957, SMP. 36 Milgram’s host organization: Letter to Allport, ibid. 37 All the regions . . . would be represented: Milgram’s dissertation (1960); Mil- gram (1961), reprinted in ISW. My presentation of the procedure and results of the conformity experiment is based on these sources. 37 Since he would be: All the subjects were male. Milgram explained why: “Nu- merous experiments show that sex is an important variable in determining the level of conformity. By eliminating this source of variability, we increase the chance that differences due to the factor of nationality will come through” (Milgram, 1960, p. 19). 38 The others constituted a “synthetic group”: Milgram’s use of tape recordings to simulate a group was an adaptation of a technique introduced by Blake and Brehm (1954). 38 “The group is always willing”: Milgram (1960, p. 27). When a year later Mil- gram published an article based on his dissertation in Scientific American (Mil- gram, 1961), it contained a modified version of this quip: “With tape recordings it is easy to create synthetic groups. Tapes do not have to be paid by the hour and they are always available.” 38 “It is hard to convey”: Milgram (1960, p. 38). 40 “It is a common fallacy”: Ibid., p. 194. 40 Introduced him to the Janteloven: Ibid., p. 200. 41 A detailed progress report: Letter to Allport, February 19, 1958, HUA. 41 “Probably inter-sterile”: Letter to Allport, ibid. 41 Question of generalizability: Milgram (1960, p. 116). 42 Allport was delighted: Letter to Milgram, February 28, 1958, SMP. 42 “A Biblical miracle”: Letter to Allport, February 19, 1958, op. cit.; letter from Sibley, December 26, 1957, ASM. 42 “Since Milgram is a very bright person”: Allport to Sibley, February 28, 1958, HUA. 42 Awarded the one-year extension: Milgram accepted the fellowship in a letter to Sibley dated April 10, 1958, ASM. 320 NOTES TO PAGES 42–49

42 This kind of censure: Milgram also conducted another kind of “censure” condition. Here, instead of being criticized for showing off, the comments from the other “subjects” were personal insults, questioning the naïve subject’s ability. His correct answers would be followed by such comments as “That was stupid” and “Fool.” While this “personal inadequacy” condition yielded a 65 percent conformity rate, which was lower than the condition in which subjects were criticized for the social impropriety of their response (75 percent), the difference was not statistically significant. Milgram did not conduct this “personal inadequacy” condition in France. 44 “Most subjects were glad”: Milgram (1960, pp. 175–176). Later, Milgram reproduced his chapter from his dissertation on the ethical questionnaire—where this quote is from—in ISW. His purpose was to show critics of his obedience experiments that he was sensitive to ethical issues, and that his sensitivity in fact predated the experiments. 45 In one of his reports: Asch (1956, p. 53). 45 In describing his ethics questionnaire: Letter to Allport, May 11, 1958, SMP. 45 Bragged that word had reached him: Letter to Enid, October, 1958, ASM. 46 Actually carvings of himself: Letter to Mother and Joel, August 19, 1958, ASM. 46 She would . . . write chatty letters: For example, letters of September 8, 1958; November 23, 1958; February 27, 1959, ASM. 46 “My true spiritual home”: Letter to John Shaffer, November 9, 1958, ASM. 46 “I did not know how to ski”: Letter to Mrs. Sprague, September 23, 1958, HUA. 47 Finding some female companionship: Ibid.; Milgram note, April 25, 1958, ASM; letter to Rosalind, October 19, 1958, ASM. 47 Shared an apartment: Interviews with Sasha Milgram, op. cit.; letter to Mrs. Sprague, ibid. 47 “The damp season in Oslo”: Letter to Ulf Torgersen, November 3, 1958, ASM. 47 Staying in Norway longer than . . . planned: Letters to Allport, May 11, 1958, SMP; Sibley, July 29, 1958, ASM; Allport, August 21, 1958, HUA; Saul Sternberg, September 13, 1958, ASM. 47 The Elektrisk Bureau: A large manufacturer of electric appliances in Oslo; letter to Sibley, July 6, 1958, ASM. 48 “Paris is the city I like best”: Letter to Ulf Torgersen, op. cit. 48 “There is so much selfishness”: Letter to Saul Sternberg, op. cit. 48 “If I am feeling depressed”: Letter to Ulf Torgersen, op. cit. 48 “When my girl ‘friend’ left Paris”: Undated letter fragment to unidentified recipient. Quoted portions suggest he wrote the letter after he returned to the U.S., which would date it sometime after April 1959. Unquoted parts of the letter suggest that he was writing to a female friend, ASM. 49 Entry . . . was gained fraudulently: Letter to Enid, December, 1958, ASM. 49 His stay at Victor Lyon . . . almost cut short: Letter to Enid, ibid. The English translation of Milgram’s article in Le Journal de Victor Lyon was provided by Francois Rochat. NOTES TO PAGES 50–57 321

50 She sent a complaint to . . . Harvard: Letter from Robert W. White to Gerard Latortue, June 24, 1959. Letters of support came from Robert G. Mead, April 6, 1959, and Gerard Latortue, May 27, 1959. The quotation is from the latter’s letter and was translated by Leonard Siger. The three letters and Milgram’s graduate record are from HUA. 50 Jerome Bruner had contacted: Letter to Allport, August 21, 1958, SMP. 51 “It worked on 50 cycle synchronized operation”: Milgram (1960, p. 129). 51 “It would have been superﬁcial”: Milgram (1960, pp. 152–153). 52 Table 3.1: Based on Table 19 in Milgram, ibid. 52 Figure 3.1: Based on bar graph in Milgram (1961, p. 50), as reproduced in ISW, p. 208. 53 In two cases quite explosively: As noted earlier, Milgram did not repeat a “personal inadequacy” condition—which he had conducted after the Censure condition in Norway—with his French subjects. No doubt, he did not want to risk a repetition of the kind of volatile reactions shown by some of his French subjects in the Censure condition. 53 Reﬂecting back on his experiments: Milgram (1961), reprinted in ISW. 54 “Each time something like this happens”: Letter to Haakon Hovstad, March 1959, SMP. 54 “Stanley was quite international”: E-mail to me from Leon Mann, October 16, 2002.

CHAPTER 4: FROM THE “PRINCETITUTE” TO YALE 55 Passed (with “distinction”): Milgram’s graduate record, HUA. 55 “A final, beatific year”: Letter to Mike and Lise, ASM. 55 A letter from Asch: Dated August 29, 1959, SMP. 56 Help edit a book: Letter to Mike and Lise, op. cit. 56 A salary of $4,200: Milgram’s memo “Note on Salary received from Asch,” Oc- tober 15, 1959, SMP. 56 Milgram agonized . . . Asch’s invitation: Undated ruminations, in rough draft form, most likely written in September 1959. Although it seems to be a letter to Asch—it begins with “Dear Dr. Asch”—some negative comments it contains about the benefits of working with Asch make it highly unlikely that he actually sent it, SMP. 56 Successfully petitioned: Letters from Milgram to Asch, September 19, 1959, SMP; Milgram to Allport, September 28, 1959, HUA; from Allport to Mil- gram, September 30, 1959, SMP. 56 A diary notebook: ASM. 57 Accepted . . . with the expectation: Undated ruminations, op. cit. 57 Expectation not fulfilled: Undated “Letter to S.E.A.,” likely written in May or June, 1960, but not sent, SMP. 57 His name does not appear: There is an Asch file in the library of the Institute for Advanced Study, consisting largely of correspondence between Asch and Institute staff. There is no mention of Milgram in any of the letters. 57 A letter of resignation: Letter to Asch, June 3, 1960, SMP. 322 NOTES TO PAGES 57–63

57 A very stressful . . . year: Ibid. 57 Came up with . . . suggested wording: Letter to Asch June 18, 1960, SMP. 58 A few bright spots: Letter to Ed, October 23, 1959, ASM. 58 “My only pleasure”: Letter to Marilyn Zeitlin, October 17, 1959, ASM. 58 “I’m listless, uneasy”: Letter to Enid, January 15, 1960; ASM. 58 Break up the monotony: Interviews with Sasha Milgram, op. cit. 58 Life went on: Interviews with Sasha Milgram, Joel Milgram, and Marjorie Marton, op. cit. 59 “I have dropped all pretensions”: Letter to Allport, November 4, 1959, HUA. 59 “Your progress report”: Letter from Allport, November 9, 1959, SMP. 59 “The dissertation has been pushed forward”: Letter to Allport, January 16, 1960, HUA. 59 “Masterpieces of conviction”: Letter from Allport, January 20, 1960, SMP. 59 “An intermediate version”: Letter to Allport, February 29, 1960, HUA. 59 “Perhaps I’m slipping”: Letter from Allport, March 3, 1960, SMP. 60 A letter from Leonard Doob: ASM. Most likely the suggestion that Doob contact Milgram came from Irving Janis, a senior member of the department, who had met Stanley in Oslo in 1957–1958. Janis had spent that year at the Institute for Social Research as a Fulbright scholar, the same year that Milgram was conducting the Norwegian portion of his cross-cultural conformity experiment. Once at Yale, Janis became Milgram’s closest friend among the senior faculty and a constant source of encouragement to him. 60 Milgram wrote back promptly: Letter to Doob, May 6, 1960, ASM. 60 Research Fellow in Cognitive Studies: Official appointment letter from Har- vard, May 16, 1960, ASM. 60 Annual salary of $6,500: Official Yale University appointment letter, October 8, 1960, ASM. 60 “It was a very hard decision”: Undated draft of a letter to Allport, most likely written in May 1960, SMP. 60 Allport had been trying to help: Allport to Dick [Solomon] and Jerry [Bruner], March 9, 1960, HUA. 61 “A proud rooster”: Letter from Allport, January 28, 1962, SMP. 61 “An excellent study”: Letter from Kelman to Allport, May 3, 1960, HUA. 61 “Your thesis is very good indeed”: Letter from Allport, June 2, 1960, SMP. 62 A phenomenon of great consequence: Interview with Roger Brown, William James Hall, June 23, 1993. 62 “[My] laboratory paradigm”: ISW, p. 126. 62 “I was trying to think”: In Tavris (1974a), p. 80; also in ISW, p. xxxi. 63 Milgram listed . . . research projects: Letter to Allport, March 2, 1960, SMP. 63 He first learned about Milgram’s plans: Interview of Asch by James Korn, July 14, 1989, Solomon Asch Papers, AHAP. 63 Milgram arrived in New Haven: Letters to Ed, September 18 and 30, 1960, ASM. 63 His favorite . . . classic garden: In light of this, it is perhaps especially appropriate that the Manuscripts and Archives department, which houses the Stan- ley Milgram Papers, is located adjacent to this garden. NOTES TO PAGES 64–70 323

64 “Are you a psychologist”: Letter to Allport, October 10, 1960, SMP. Mil- gram’s quip was a mildly critical comment on the fact that some psychologists at Yale were doing research with animals—especially rats—as subjects rather than humans. 64 Milgram was renting: Conversations with Sasha Milgram, 1999–2003. 65 A small grant proposal: “Application for Grant-in-Aid Research,” October 7, 1960, SMP. 65 He assured Allport: Letter to Allport, op. cit. 65 Request was turned down: Letter from D.H. Daugherty, December 19, 1960, ASM. 65 He did some self-experimentation: Interview with Nijole Kudirka, 2002. 65 A dart-throwing game: “Dart Game Experiment,” a brief description of procedure, with results in graph form, SMP. 65 Occasionally used other drugs: Conversation with Sasha Milgram, April 1, 2001. 65 “Next year I . . . plan”: Letter to Allport, op. cit. 66 “Obedience is as basic an element”: Letter to Petrullo, October 14, 1960, SMP. 67 His own shock machine: Buss (1961). 67 Milgram suspected: E-mail to me from Philip Zimbardo, May 5, 1998; letter to Henry Riecken, September 21, 1961, in Milgram’s grant file G-17916, “Dy- namics of Obedience: Experiments in Social Psychology,” National Science Foundation. 67 Exchange of correspondence . . . allayed Milgram’s suspicions: Letter from Arnold Buss, September 21, 1961, SMP; letter to Riecken, ibid.; Milgram (1963, p. 373, footnote 3). 67 Did not completely eliminate them: Letter to Alan Elms, September 25, 1973, SMP. 67 Two other grant prospects: Letter to Public Health Service, November 15, 1960; letter to Dr. Henry Riecken, National Science Foundation, November 17, 1960, both SMP. 67 Pilot experiments were carried out: “Recollections of the Yale Psychology De- partment” by Milgram, sent in a letter to William Kessen, Chairman of Yale’s Psychology Department, on January 16, 1979. Kessen had requested such recollections from former faculty and students to help mark the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the department, SMP. 68 His written report: Milgram (1964c); Proposal for Grant G-17916, NSF Grant file, op. cit. 68 “Before an experiment is carried out”: “Recollections of the Yale Psychology Department,” op. cit. 69 A formal application: Letter to National Science Foundation from Marcus Robbins, Comptroller, Yale University, January 27, 1961, SMP. 70 A colleague’s criticism: OTA, p. 170. 70 Approved on May 3, 1961: Acceptance telegram to Dr. Henry Riecken, Director, Social Science Division, NSF, from Donald V. Green, Manager, Office of Gifts, Grants and Contracts, Yale University, May 3, 1961, NSF Grant file, op. cit. 324 NOTES TO PAGES 70–76

70 Completed the first four experiments: Letter to Riecken, September 21, 1961, NSF Grant file, op. cit. 71 Ethical questions . . . took a back seat: Interview with Herbert Kelman, William James Hall, August 22, 2000. 71 A final but important note: NSF Grant file, op. cit. 71 Knowing that the “victim” was not hurt: Milgram (1964b). 71 Riecken observed somewhat critically: NSF Grant file, op. cit. 72 The NSF final panel rating was “Meritorious”: Ibid. 72 He met Alexandra (Sasha) Menkin: Interviews with Sasha Milgram, op. cit. 73 “He was very impressed with Sasha”: Interview with Howard Leventhal, spring 1999. 74 David Sears . . . told him: Quoted by Milgram in “Recollections of the Yale Psychology Department,” op cit. 74 Married in a small ceremony: Interviews with Sasha Milgram, op. cit.

CHAPTER 5: OBEDIENCE: THE EXPERIENCE 75 Turning his attention to the many details: For example, letter to an instrument manufacturer, the Grason-Stadler Company, June 20, 1961, inquiring about a procedure for recording the duration of each shock administered; a letter dated June 6, 1961, to Holt, Rinehart, and Winston ordering the book The Teaching- Learning Process, by Nathaniel Cantor, one of the props to be used in the experiments; letter to department secretary, Miss Henry, July 29, 1961, requesting payment to a technician for his work on the electric circuits in the shock machine, SMP; letter to Riecken, August 15, 1961, NSF Grant file, op. cit. 75 The laboratory doors opened: Letter to Riecken, ibid. 75 Subjects were scheduled: Letter to Yale University Police, October 17, 1961, SMP. 75 A display ad: Reproduced in OTA, p. 15. 75 In the early 1960s: Elms (1995). 76 Cleared it with the department chairman: Letter to Buxton, June 6, 1961, SMP. 76 The subjects ranged: These and most other general details of the laboratory procedure to be described are based on OTA and Milgram (1963, 1965b), the latter reprinted in ISW. 76 At the door of the lab: The experimenter-subject dialogues reproduced in this and the next chapter are actually from the Bridgeport experiment conducted later in the series (Experiment 10 in OTA), not the earlier experiments in Linsly-Chittenden Hall. The protocols (e.g., experimenter’s instructions, learner’s prerecorded schedule of complaints, and so on) are exactly the same as in a baseline “heart-condition” experiment (Experiment 5 in OTA) conducted in Linsly-Chittenden Hall. I used these dialogues because the Bridgeport condition was the only one whose “sanitized” audiotapes were available at SMP when I was writing this book. I did some minor editing of the transcripts of the audiotapes and supplemented the account with visual details from Milgram’s descriptions in his book, in the film Obedience, and, in the case of the first sub- NOTES TO PAGES 76–97 325

ject to be presented, an unnamed observer’s notes on his behavior found in his data ﬁle at SMP. 76 A gray—rather than white—lab coat: Meyer (1970). 76 Milgram’s primary assistants: While they were the main experimenter-subject team, in a few instances, as dictated by the needs of the experiment, other people served as experimenter and learner; see, e.g., Experiments 6 and 9 in OTA, pp. 59, 60, and 66. 76 Repeated rehearsals: Tavris (1974b). 76 His employers were not very happy: E-mails to me from Robert McDonough, the youngest of James McDonough’s nine children, December 9 and 17, 2000. In the experimental conditions to be described as well as in other conditions in Milgram’s series of obedience experiments James McDonough refers to a heart condition. According to Robert, this was actually based on fact. His father did have a heart problem and died from it about three years later. 77 In his interview notes: Undated, handwritten, two pages of notes, which also contained other information, such as McDonough’s occupation, his rate of pay ($1.75 per hour), what hours he was available, and the fact that he was willing to work for a year, SMP. 78 Commercial sources . . . told him: Milgram’s grant application to NSF, titled “Obedience to Authority: Experiments in Social Psychology,” dated January 25, 1962, SMP. When approved, it received the grant number G-24512. This was the second in a series of three grant applications—all approved—that he submitted to NSF to support his obedience studies. 78 Two electrical engineers: Letter to Riecken, August 15, 1961, op. cit. 81 To 1/100th of a second: Ibid. 89 Intensely agonized scream: For standardization, I have used Milgram’s wording to describe the subject’s nonverbal responses and screams; see OTA, “The Learner’s Schedule of Protests,” pp. 56–57.

CHAPTER 6: OBEDIENCE: THE EXPERIMENT 93 The first four experiments: First reported in Milgram (1965b), reprinted in ISW, and then presented again in OTA. 95 Wanted to publish . . . quickly: Letter to Riecken, February 5, 1962, SMP. 95 The Yale seniors predicted: Milgram (1963). 95 A group of psychiatric residents: Letter to Allport, February 2, 1962, SMP. 95 “Although they expressed great certainty”: Letter to E.P. Hollander, Septem- ber 24, 1962, SMP. 96 At most, one or two subjects: Letter to Riecken, September 21, 1961, NSF Grant file, op. cit. 96 “It is a very disturbing sight”: Ibid. 96 “The learner . . . begs him to stop”: OTA, pp. 45–46. 97 Figure 6.1: Reproduction of Figure 6 in OTA, p. 36. 97 The measure of shock duration: These findings are described in “Obedience to Authority: Experiments in Social Psychology,” January 25, 1962, Milgram’s second grant application to NSF, op. cit., SMP. A graphical depiction of the re- 326 NOTES TO PAGES 98–111

sults was also included in the grant application. My Figure 6.2 is a reproduction of a more professionally drawn version, also found in SMP, which must have been drawn later. 98 He first met Milgram: Interview with Alan Elms, San Francisco, August 17, 1998. 99 “A pleasant month of leisure”: Letter to Elms, June 27, 1961, SMP. 99 “Numerous productive functions”: Letter to Asch, June 27, 1961, SMP. 100 His main scientific influence: For example, letter to Kathy Grant, op. cit. 100 A congratulatory letter: A typed draft to Asch, January 11, 1968, SMP. A written notation—“handwritten and slightly revised”—appears on the bottom. 100 “Ten variations on a theme by Asch”: Letters to Igor Kusyszyn, February 18, 1969, and Asch, August 25, 1969, SMP. 100 “The results are terrifying”: Letter to Riecken, NSF Grant file, op. cit. 101 “The trait/situation controversy”: A more detailed discussion can be found in Blass (1984). 101 Personality and Assessment: Mischel (1968). 101 “The social psychology of this century”: OTA, p. 205. 104 A fine-tuned analysis: Modigliani and Rochat (1995). 104 “In line with the theory of cognitive dissonance”: Ibid., pp. 114 and 120. 106 The experimenter’s prods backfire: This possible explanation is suggested by Modigliani and Rochat, ibid. 108 The rebellion of two peers: Milgram (1965a); Experiment 17 in OTA, pp. 116–121. 108 “Stand in opposition to authority”: OTA, p. 121. 108 The Sociology Department . . . needed it back: Elms (1972). 108 Another laboratory space: Memo to “Messrs. Blatt, Child, Leventhal, Mil- gram, Norman Miller” from Claude E. Buxton, September 27, 1961, SMP. 109 Rented a three-room office suite: Letter to Wheeler Company, March 22, 1962, SMP. 109 47.5 percent . . . were fully obedient: Experiment 10 in OTA, pp. 61, 66–70. 109 “It is possible”: OTA, pp. 69–70. 109 Documentary film, Obedience: Milgram prepared a booklet, “Obedience,” as a teaching aid for use in conjunction with the film. It is made up of two parts: a set of study questions for the film prepared with the help of Andre Modigliani and a section describing how the film was made. My description of the making of the film is based on this section. Pamphlet, courtesy of Andre Modigliani. The content of the pamphlet was later incorporated into a combined “Instruc- tor’s Manual” for both OTA and the film, which came out in 1980, SMP. 110 Letter to . . . Claude Buxton: SMP. 110 A lengthy trial in Jerusalem: Arendt (1963).

CHAPTER 7: AFTERSHOCKS 111 “Marinating in it”: Interview with Robert Abelson, New Haven, March 26, 1997. NOTES TO PAGES 111–114 327

111 A book, The Psychology of Aggression: Buss, op. cit. 111 Procedure had been copied: Letter to Riecken, September 21, 1961, NSF Grant file, op. cit.; e-mail to me from Philip Zimbardo, op. cit. 111 Zimbardo recalls a strange visit: Ibid. 111 Buss’s machine: Buss, op. cit. 112 Reassured Milgram: Letter from Buss, ibid.; letter to Riecken, NSF Grant file, op. cit. 112 Never completely accepted: Letter to Elms, September 25, 1973. 112 Requesting a photograph: Undated letter from Alan Wurtzel, with handwritten reply from Milgram on the bottom, dated November 3, 1982, SMP. 112 Milgram’s surprising findings: Interview with Abelson, op. cit. 112 Harris, credits Milgram: Harris (1988). 112 In a 1964 article: Milgram (1964b). 112 One member . . . was troubled enough: Interview with Ed Zigler, Yale Uni- versity, March 26, 1997. Although I learned about the complaint to APA from Zigler, he was not willing to identify the complainer, saying only that he was a junior faculty member who was a social psychologist. 113 “The committee voted”: Letter was from Jane D. Hildreth, November 23, 1962, SMP. 113 “Sour [him] permanently on the APA”: Ibid. It didn’t. In 1966, for example, he accepted the position of program chairman for APA’s Division 8 (Personality and Social Psychology) at that year’s annual convention. 113 As late as 1977: Milgram (1977d), reprinted in ISW, 2nd edition only. 113 The first of two additional grant proposals: “Obedience to Authority: Experi- ments in Social Psychology,” op. cit. 113 The grant was approved on May 24, 1962: Letter to A. Whitney Griswold, Pres- ident, Yale University, from Randal M. Robertson, Acting Director, NSF, SMP. 113 Used for analysis and reporting: Letter to Claude Buxton, op. cit. 114 Kelman credited Milgram: Anonymous “National Science Foundation Pro- posal Rating Sheet,” courtesy of Herb Kelman. 114 Proposal to NSF for a third and final grant: “Completion of Obedience Study,” April 29, 1963, accompanied by a cover letter to Robert L. Hall, Program Di- rector for Sociology and Social Psychology, SMP. In a letter dated July 8, 1963, Hall notified Milgram that the grant had been approved, SMP. The grant number NSF assigned it was G-251. In addition to the funding provided by the three grants, in February 1962 Milgram put in an emergency request to NSF for a supplemental allowance of $3,700. Because he was able to conduct his experiment at a faster pace than projected in his first grant proposal, submitted in January 1961, he was already running out of funds. The money was needed to keep the experiment going without interruption until a second—regular—grant proposal could be approved. He received the emergency funding. Letter to Robert Hall, NSF, Feb- ruary 14, 1962, SMP; an internal memo by Hall, February 9, 1962, and an undated memorandum, also by Hall, NSF Grant file. 328 NOTES TO PAGES 114–123

The activities funded by the third grant were carried out at Harvard’s De- partment of Social Relations, where Milgram accepted an appointment as assistant professor as of July 1, 1963. Although the termination date for the grant was September 15, 1965, two “no-cost” one-year extensions enabled him to stretch the grant money through the summer of 1967, when he moved from Harvard to the Graduate Center of the City of New York (CUNY). 114 A series of four journal articles: Milgram (1963, 1964a, 1965a, 1965b). 114 Submitted that first article: Letter to Production Manager, APA, May 26, 1963, SMP. 114 Jones faulted him: Letter to Milgram, March 27, 1962, SMP. 115 “I do not . . . exaggerate”: Part of a note. Although undated, other parts indicate that it must have been written while Milgram was at Yale, SMP. 115 A psychologist at the University of Delaware: Letter to Robert Lakatos, June 11, 1969, SMP. 115 “A good Hitchcock thriller”: Typescript, dated November 13, 1963, of Mil- gram’s letter to the editor of the St. Louis Dispatch in reply to an editorial appearing on November 2, 1963, criticizing Milgram and Yale for conducting the obedience experiments. Although the newspaper published Milgram’s letter on November 16, 1963, it had cut parts of it, including the passage I quoted, SMP. 115 “It was hell in there”: E-mail to me from William Menold, July 8, 2001. 115 “Started sweating bullets”: Interview with William Menold, February 14, 2003. 116 He spoke . . . to a group at Yale: Transcript of talk given by Herbert Winer, titled “The Experiment in Memory and Learning,” at Berkeley College, Yale University, April 4, 1994, courtesy of Herbert Winer. 117 One assistant professor to another: At the time, Winer was an assistant professor in the School of Forestry at Yale University. 117 “At times I have concluded”: Undated note, titled “An Experimenter’s Dilemma,” SMP. 118 Instructional materials: The combined Instructor’s Manual for OTA and the film Obedience, op. cit., SMP. 118 “The crisis of confidence”: Elms (1975). 119 “Glitter rock of science”: Comstock (1974). 119 Orne applied: Orne and Holland (1968). 120 In his response, Milgram granted: Milgram (1972), reprinted in ISW. 120 “Subjects only feigned sweating”: ISW, p. 164. 121 Sent Milgram a copy: letter from Buckhout, November 4, 1963, SMP. 122 “I do not wish”: Night letter to Sullivan, sent right after midnight, October 23–24, SMP. 122 “Obedience is the psychological mechanism”: Milgram (1963, p. 371). 122 “Many subjects showed”: Ibid., p. 375. 123 “As an illustration”: Letter from Elliot Aronson, January 17, 1964, SMP. 123 “Very much impressed”: Letter from Erickson, April 14, 1967, SMP. 123 Bettelheim considered: Quoted in Askenasy (1978, p. 131). NOTES TO PAGES 123–132 329

123 A Benedictine monk: Letter from Edward Markley, July 6, 1967, SMP. 123 “Within a year”: From the transcript of an unpublished interview. Neither the name of the interviewer nor the date of the interview appears in it, although some of the contents indicate that it probably took place sometime in the 1970s, SMP. 123 A scathing criticism: Baumrind (1964). 123 “I do regard”: Ibid., pp. 422–423. 124 “Totally astonished”: Interview with Stanley Milgram in Evans (1980), p. 193; also in ISW, p. 132. 124 “Raises some legitimate points”: Letter to Arthur Brayfield, August 18, 1964, SMP. 124 Milgram conceded later: Milgram (1977d); also in ISW, 2nd edition only. 124 In his rebuttal: Milgram (1964b); reprinted in ISW, first edition only. 124 On July 12, 1962: Internal report, “Questionnaire to Subjects,” prepared by Taketo Murata, one of Milgram’s research assistants, SMP. 125 92 percent of his subjects: Op. cit., p. 849, footnote to Table 1. 127 Only one significant difference: Data analysis sheet titled “A comparison of those who returned questionnaires with those who didn’t,” SMP. 127 He answered, “No”: Conversations with Herb Kelman, 2000–2003. 127 “Statement . . . based on Interviews”: Dated June 20, 1963, SMP. A published version appears in Errera (1972). 127 Dr. Errera does not recall: Interview with Paul Errera, September 2000. 128 In at least one case: Milgram’s second grant application to NSF, “Obedience to Authority: Experiments in Social Psychology,” op. cit. 128 “I started with the belief ”: Milgram (1964b, pp. 851–852); ISW, first edition only, pp. 145–146. 129 Lewin’s classic studies: Lewin, Lippitt, and White, op. cit. 129 “Many regard informed consent”: Milgram (1977d, p. 19); ISW, 2nd edition only, p. 180. 130 Four journal articles: Milgram (1963, 1964a, 1965a, 1965b). 130 The journal Human Relations in 1965: Milgram (1965b).

CHAPTER 8: RETURN TO ACADEMIC EDEN 131 Allport had told . . . Roger Brown: Brown’s talk at the commemorative gathering for Milgram, May 10, 1985, op. cit. 131 To come up to Harvard: Letter from Allport, January 28, 1962, SMP. 131 Have his classes vote: Interview with Roger Brown, William James Hall, June 23, 1993; e-mail to me from David Winter, November 18, 1997. 131 Requested by Claude Buxton: Letter from Buxton to Allport, November 2, 1962, HUA. 131 “My one and only objection”: Letter from Allport to Buxton, November 5, 1962, HUA. 132 “It was most pleasant”: Letter from Allport, March 7, 1962, SMP. 132 “In her chosen career”: Letter from Allport, November 5, 1962, SMP. 330 NOTES TO PAGES 132–139

132 Offered a position at Harvard: Letter to Roger Brown, December 18, 1962, SMP. 132 A three-year appointment: Ofﬁcial appointment form letter from Harvard, March 11, 1963, SMP. 132 Research with drugs: Interviews with Sasha Milgram, op. cit. 132 She explained: Letter to Milgram from Alice Thoren, January 31, 1963, SMP. 132 “My heart is heavy”: Letter to Thoren, February 1, 1963, SMP. 133 “To the credit of the Department”: “Recollections of the Yale Psychology De- partment,” sent by Milgram to William Kessen, op. cit. 133 Remembered with special fondness: Ibid. 133 The social climate: E-mail to me from Howard Leventhal; interview with Leventhal, op. cit. 133 Was closest to Irving Janis: “Recollections of the Yale Psychology Depart- ment,” op. cit. 133 “It is interesting”: Letter to Leventhal, October 14, 1963, SMP. 134 Agreed to represent him: Letter from Joan Daves to Milgram, September 11, 1963, SMP. 134 Asked to see more: Letter to Daves from Madeline Tracy Brigden, February 12, 1964, SMP. 134 Stanley and Sasha moved: Conversations with Sasha Milgram, 1999–2003. 134 Leon Mann recalls: Remembrance letter from Leon Mann, August 10, 1993, courtesy of Harold Takooshian. 134 “Like your kind of reasoning”: Letter to Goldwater, July 27, 1963, SMP. 135 An audiotaped “letter”: Interview with Joel Milgram, op. cit. 135 “Both children are more delightful”: Letter to Paul Hollander, September 1967, courtesy of Hollander. 135 Another letter to the same friend: Letter to Paul Hollander, August 30, 1968, SMP. 135 Made his family a priority: Conversations with Sasha Milgram, 1999–2003. 136 “A great feeling of sadness”: Letter to Arthur Miller, March 14, 1984, ASM. 136 “Doing another experiment on us”: Remembrance letter from Barry Wellman, August 1993. 136 Unprecedented in Harvard’s history: Harvard Crimson, Monday, November 25, 1963, SMP. 136 Wept openly: Ibid. 136 “We are numb”: Ibid. 138 More centrally involved: Letter to Susan [Harter] and Leon [Mann], Septem- ber 28, 1964, SMP. 138 They were coauthors: Milgram, Mann, and Harter (1965). 138 “Creative chit-chat”: Remembrance letter from Leon Mann, op. cit. 138 The students “lost” letters: Milgram (1969), reprinted in ISW. 139 “Seeding” . . . with forty letters: Mimeographed sheet titled “General Scheme for Letter-Dropping Experiment,” SMP. 139 Late afternoon of April 3: Memo titled “April 4, 1963, Anti-defamation League,” SMP. NOTES TO PAGES 139–149 331

139 The final tally: Data summary sheet, “Lost Letter Technique Tabulation as of 4/16,” SMP. 139 Memo from the postmaster: On a printed “Post Office Department Routing Slip” dated April 9, 1963, SMP. 139 Drive south from New Haven: Milgram (1969). Also in ISW. 139 Two nights in mid-May: Handwritten logs, dated May 16 and May 17, SMP. 140 Table 8.1: From data summary sheet titled “To be Table VII,” SMP. 140 To new heights: Milgram (1969). Also in ISW. 140 In the fall of 1964: Ibid. 141 “Showed us things”: ISW, pp. 282–283. 141 “Riots between the Malays and the Chinese”: Ibid., pp. 283–285. 142 Emotionally draining experience: On January 7, 1963, in correspondence about rank and salary at Harvard with Social Relations Department chairman David McClelland, Milgram wrote: “I am going on 30, and after completing the obedience study, feel even older,” ASM. 142 To distance himself: Interview with Tom Pettigrew, San Francisco, August 14, 1998. 143 “My work has been dominated”: Unpublished interview, op. cit. 144 The conversation continued: Rogers and Kincaid (1981), p. 107. 144 Small-world phenomenon: Milgram (1967b), reprinted in ISW. 145 “Starting with any two people”: Milgram (1967b, p. 62); ISW, p. 259. 145 Cambridge U.S.A.: Rand (1964). 145 Devised an experiment: Milgram (1967b), op. cit. 146 In Psychology Today: Ibid. 146 Sociometry in 1969: Travers and Milgram (1969). 146 In 1970: Korte and Milgram (1970). 147 Up to the third floor: Minutes of the meeting of the Department of Social Re- lations, October 15, 1963, HUA. 147 By the end of 1964: Harvard University, Department of Social Relations An- nual Report, 1964–65, SMP. 148 Around Harvard Yard: Ibid. 148 Strengthen the unity: Interviews with Brendan Maher, May 15 and June 4, 2001. 148 Its first monthly meeting: Minutes of the meeting of the Department of Social Relations, January 26, 1965, HUA. 148 Separate access key: Interviews with Brendan Maher, op. cit. 148 Vying to hire: Minutes of the meeting of the Department of Social Relations, November 24, 1964, HUA. 148 Nearly 400 doctoral degrees: Department of Social Relations Annual Report, 1963–64, SMP. 148 Grown to about sixty-five: Lists of faculty of the Social Relations Department, courtesy of E.L. Pattullo. 148 Fill in for Roger Brown: Interview with Hans Toch, July 15, 2002. 149 The resulting chapter: Milgram and Toch (1969). Most of the chapter, the section on crowds by Milgram, was reprinted in ISW, first edition only. 149 Classroom manner: Interview with Hans Toch, op. cit. 332 NOTES TO PAGES 149–156

149 Closest of Milgram’s new friendships: Interview with Paul Hollander, March 24, 1999; conversations with Sasha Milgram, 1999–2003. 149 “Trust, spontaneous pleasure”: Remembrance letter by Paul Hollander, Au- gust 5, 1993, courtesy of Hollander. 150 “Qualities of Stanley”: Ibid. 150 Kuwaiti government stationery: Speech at Milgram’s funeral service in New York, December 23, 1984, courtesy of Paul Hollander. 150 Dear Professor Hollander: Bogus letter, dated June 14, 1976, courtesy of Paul Hollander. 151 “To be sure”: Letter to Herbert Danzger, April 5, 1965, SMP. 152 “Enjoyed Harvard greatly”: Letter to Leon Mann, December 29, 1966, SMP. 152 Bad case of “Harvarditis”: Interview with Tom Pettigrew, August 14, 1998. 152 “I’ve been demoted”: Letter to Dave Marlowe, March 24, 1966, SMP. 152 “Graustein formula”: Conversations with E.L. Pattullo; interview with Robert Rosenthal, August 7, 2002. 152 A prime candidate: Interview with Roger Brown, op. cit. 152 Deep divisions: Unpublished interview of Milgram, op. cit. 153 A complete surprise: Interview with Rosenthal, op. cit. 153 “Properties of the experiment”: Interview with Brown, op. cit. 154 “Deﬁnitely was ‘quirky’”: E-mail to me from David Winter, op. cit. 154 Voted against Milgram: Interview with Pettigrew, op. cit. 154 Behavior was tempered: Interview with Toch, op. cit. 154 He might say: Interview with Pettigrew, op. cit. 154 “Scared to death”: Ibid. 154 Traumatic experience: Interviews with Sasha Milgram, op. cit.; unpublished interview, op. cit. 155 Did not capture: Unpublished interview, op. cit. 155 Frayed his self-image: Conversations with Sasha Milgram, 1999–2003. 155 Hurt was intensiﬁed: Interview with Rosenthal, op. cit. 155 By Rosenthal and Leon Mann: Letter from Mann, September 16, 1969, SMP. 155 The Six-Day War: My account is based on the entry “Six-Day War” in the En- cyclopedia Judaica, Vol. 14, 1972, pp. 1623–1641. 155 Personal involvement: Letter to Allan Mazur, undated, but probably the fall of 1967. 155 Academic community: Letter from Allan Mazur, undated, but probably the fall of 1967. 155 A $100 contribution: Letter to Mazur, op. cit. 156 “Has taught us”: Ibid. 156 He did receive: Letters from Irwin Silverman, January 25, 1967; from David Marlowe, January 16, 1967; from Harry Levin, February 28, 1967, all SMP. 156 Couldn’t see himself: Interviews with Sasha Milgram, op. cit. 156 “Part of the urban culture”: Conversation with John Sabini, March 1999. 156 Berkeley did invite him: Letter to Theodore Sarbin, February 15, 1967, SMP. 156 Letters of support: Letter to Irv [ Janis], March 13, 1967, SMP. 156 Leventhal, was recruited: Interview with Howard Leventhal, op. cit. NOTES TO PAGES 157–165 333

157 Received a formal offer: Letter from Mina Rees, January 16, 1967, SMP. 157 Replied favorably: Letter to Rees, SMP. 158 Couldn’t wait any longer: Interview with Howard Leventhal, op. cit. 158 Informed David McClelland: Letter to McClelland, February 8, 1967, SMP. 158 “Letting me know”: Letter from McClelland, February 10, 1967, SMP. 158 Rees wrote a reply: SMP. 159 Between February 10 . . . end of the month: Harvard has an eighty-year rule about access to personnel records, so it is impossible to pinpoint the exact date of the tenure committee’s final decision. Letter to me from Jeremy R. Knowles, Dean of Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, June 21, 2002. 159 To accept the position: Letter to Rees, March 1, 1967, SMP. 159 Had lots of family: Interviews with Sasha Milgram, op. cit. 159 “Princeton for kids”: Letter to Roy [Feldman], November 8, 1973. 160 More than five years: Interviews with Sasha Milgram, op. cit. 160 Stern’s department store: Letter to Barry McLaughlin, March 9, 1967, SMP. 160 “If it will work out”: Letter to Harry Levin, March 2, 1967, SMP. 160 “May turn out well”: Letter to Irv [ Janis], op. cit. 160 “No longer first class”: Letter to Paul Hollander, September 1967, courtesy of Hollander. 161 “If you bumped into someone”: Letter to Paul Hollander, June 28, 1967, courtesy of Hollander. 161 “New York is less than Cambridge”: Letter to Eric [Lenneberg], September 5, 1967, SMP. 161 “Let me tell”: Letter to Howard Leventhal, September 25, 1967, SMP.

CHAPTER 9: CITY PSYCHOLOGY 163 “An innocent provincial”: Letter to Paul Hollander, June 28, 1967, courtesy of Hollander. 163 His ofﬁce . . . was special: Based on a description provided by Harold Takooshian, February 12, 2001. 164 “Bright as a ﬂame”: Letter to Paul Hollander, September 1967, courtesy of Hollander. 164 CUNY’s graduate school: My presentation of the history of CUNY’s graduate school is based on interviews with Rosamond Dana, Office of the Provost, The Graduate Center, CUNY (September 10 and 12, 2002) and materials provided by her; interview with John Rothman, Archivist of the Graduate Center Library (August 22, 2002) and materials he provided; a doctoral dissertation by Sheila C. Gordon, “Transformation of the City Uni- versity of New York, 1945–1970,” Columbia University, 1975; biography of Mina Rees from Biographies of Women Mathematicians Web site, Agnes Scott College, Atlanta, GA; report by Mina Rees, “The first ten years of the graduate school of the City University of New York,” Archives of the Graduate Center, CUNY. 165 Rees arranged: Interviews with Rosamond Dana, op. cit. 334 NOTES TO PAGES 165–182

165 Main claim to fame: Unpublished report by Mina Rees, 1988, courtesy of Rosamond Dana; interview with Chas Smith, August 20, 2002. 166 Innovative features: From description provided by Harold Takooshian, Febru- ary 12, 2001. 166 First of its kind: Report by Mina Rees, “The first ten years . . . ,” op. cit. 167 They put ads: Article in the Harvard Crimson, October 26, 1966, “What makes Paris Paris? Group will try to measure cities’ milieu,” by Linda J. Green- house. 167 A “think piece”: Milgram and Hollander (1964), reprinted in ISW. 168 “In our righteous”: Ibid., p. 602; ISW, p. 32. 168 “The social psychology area”: Report on the Doctoral Program in Social Psy- chology (1969–1970), SMP. 168 Kinds of research pursued: Ibid. 168 Orientation was consistent: Sheila C. Gordon, doctoral dissertation, op. cit., p. 142. 169 “The Experience of Living in Cities”: Milgram (1970a), reprinted in ISW. 169 Such as Coxsackie: Milgram (1970b). 170 Laid the foundation: Sabini (1986). 170 “The image of the city”: Milgram and Jodelet (1976), reprinted in ISW, p. 112. 170 “People make many”: Quoted in Tavris (1974a, pp. 73 and 76), reprinted in ISW, p. xxvii. 171 A “scene sampling” technique: Milgram et al. (1972), reprinted in ISW. 171 “He shows a group”: Ibid., p. 197; ISW, p. 78. 172 “Areas of Queens”: Ibid., p. 199; ISW, pp. 80–82. 173 An innocuous remark: Conversations with Sasha Milgram, 1999–2003. 173 Met with nervous laughter: Tavris (1974a). 174 “They’re getting up!”: Ibid., p. 72; ISW, p. xxiii. 174 “Frankly, despite Goodman’s . . . experience”: Ibid., p. 72; ISW, p. xxiv. 175 More refined and complex form: Milgram and Sabini (1978), reprinted in ISW, 2nd edition only. 176 “The experimenters’ reactions”: Takooshian (1972, pp. 10–11). 177 Presented his findings: Letter to Harold Proshansky, March 14, 1972, SMP. 177 One scenario involved a bully: Sabini (1976); joint interviews with John Sabini and Maury Silver, University of Pennsylvania, June 3, 1993. 178 I remember him sitting in his office: Interview with John Sabini, ibid. 178 Conducted a study: Milgram (1977a), reprinted in ISW; “The Familiar Stranger: A Strangely Familiar Phenomenon,” by A. Condey and eight other students. Unpublished class report, April 1971, for Milgram’s Experimental Social Psychology class. 180 “In order to handle”: ISW, pp. 69 and 71. 182 Create an adjunct position: Interview with Florence Denmark, New York, May 19, 1993. 182 Seemed genuinely interested: Interview with Irwin Katz, May 19, 1993. 182 “When he was displeased”: Waters (2000, p. 26). 182 “Equal opportunity insulter”: Interview with John Sabini, op. cit. NOTES TO PAGES 183–198 335

183 “Can’t you see”: Interview with Robert Panzarella, New York, summer 2000. 183 “I called him”: Interview with Joel Milgram, op. cit. 183 “Didn’t look extraordinary”: Interview with Harold Takooshian, June 17, 1993. 184 Recalls a class: Interview with Robert Panzarella, op. cit. 184 “Take those sunglasses off”: Ibid. 184 “One thing he did”: Interview with Harold Takooshian, op. cit. 185 Looking back: Waters, op. cit. 185 “He was a genius”: Interview with John Sabini, op. cit. 186 “Really enjoyed”: Interview with Salomon Rettig, August 6, 2002. 186 Many ﬁrst-rate faculty: Physical descriptions of people I did not meet are based on conversations with Harold Takooshian. 187 Perform “wonders”: Ibid. 187 Sabini once arrived: Interview with John Sabini, op. cit. 187 “Milgram noted”: Takooshian (2000, p. 19). 187 Was completing: Interview with Ronna Kabatznick, August 30, 2002. 188 Seeing a student bolt out: Interview with Joel Milgram, op. cit. 188 Unusually sensitive: Conversation with John Sabini, March 1999; interview with Irwin Katz, op. cit. 189 “Different girls cause me”: Self-directed note, February 10, 1957, ASM. 189 “You seem to forget”: Letter to Enid, August 11, 1959, ASM. 189 “We used to play”: Interview with Michele Marques, September 14, 2003. 190 Largest number: Interview with Roger Brown, op. cit. 191 “My interests”: Remembrance, July 30, 1993. 191 Organize a conference: Waters, op. cit. 191 Florence Denmark put it: Remembrance, August 5, 1993. 191 “So much humor”: Remembrance, August 1993. 191 In song the entire day: Takooshian (2000). 192 “Previous assumptions”: Waters, op. cit., pp. 30–31. 192 “Preferred indoor”: Letter to Paul Hollander, January 18, 1970, courtesy of Hollander. 192 “Only in action”: Quoted in Tavris (1974a, p. 72). Also in ISW, p. xxv. 192 Klapper . . . convened: Milgram and Shotland (1973); an abbreviated version appears in ISW. 193 To carry the research: Ibid. 195 He recalls: Interview with Vincent Sherman, spring 2003. 195 “The television study”: Letter to Vincent Sherman, March 15, 1983, SMP.

CHAPTER 10: CENTER STAGE 197 That initial meeting: Interview with Harry From, New York, June 17, 1993. 198 A commercial success: Conversations with Sasha Milgram, 1999–2003. 198 London or Paris: Copy of fellowship application, ASM; letters to Roger Brown, October 12, 1971, and March 17, 1972, courtesy of Brown. 198 Approval came through: Letter from Gordon N. Ray, president, Guggenheim Foundation, March 14, 1972, ASM. 336 NOTES TO PAGES 199–204

199 Prudent thing: Conversations with Sasha Milgram, 1999–2003. 199 Other duties: Letter to Leon Mann, March 20, 1972, SMP. 199 He had met: Interview with Murray Melbin, 2003. 199 Eager to publish: Letter from Virginia Hilu, October 5, 1965, SMP. 199 Writing commitment: A chapter for the Handbook of Social Psychology; letter to Hilu, October 12, 1965, SMP. 199 He signed: Letter to Hilu, September 10, 1969, ASM. 199 An article . . . would serve: Milgram (1967a); letter to Virginia Hilu, April 18, 1969, ASM. 199 “Makes me eager”: Letter from Hilu, November 5, 1969, SMP. 200 Inquire about the book: Letter from Hilu, July 21, 1970, ASM. 200 Draft of one chapter: Letter to Hilu, August 13, 1970, ASM. 200 “Where is that manuscript?”: Letter from Hilu, August 20, 1970, ASM. 200 To publish at all: Letter from Hilu, September 18, 1970, ASM. 200 The whole manuscript: Letter to Hilu, April 5, 1971, ASM. 200 “[Her] editorial skill”: Letter to Hilu, September 17, 1971, ASM. 200 A midlife crisis: Conversations with Sasha Milgram, 1999–2003. 200 “The zenith is in the past”: Letter to Hollander, October 12, 1972, SMP. 201 “Sense of progress”: Letter to Leon Mann, October 26, 1971, SMP. 201 The Milgrams’ sojourn: Conversations with Sasha Milgram, 1999–2003. 201 “It is very lonely”: Quoted by Sasha in e-mail to me, February 7, 2003. 201 “This apartment”: Ibid. 202 “I think I like it”: Letter to Paul Hollander, October 12, 1972, courtesy of Hol- lander. 202 Feeling “rather low”: Letter to Hollander, October 30, 1972, ASM. 202 “You will be deported”: Ibid. 202 Published in September: Letter from Stanley to Sasha, Marc, and Michele, January 18, 1973, ASM. 202 His graduate student: Ibid. 202 Write a preface: Letter from Stanley to Sasha, Michele, and Marc, January 20/21, 1973, ASM. 202 “Extraordinary faith”: Letter to Sasha, January 23/24, 1973, ASM. 203 Television and Anti-Social Behavior: Milgram and Shotland, op. cit. 203 “Like Sasha’s company”: Letter to Sasha, Marc, and Michele, January 24, 1973, ASM. 203 “I yearn for you”: Letter from Sasha, January 24, 1973, ASM. 203 A spectacular visit: Conversations with Sasha Milgram, 1999–2003. 203 Had been invited: Letter from Elihu Katz, June 12, 1973, SMP. 203 Lectures to audiences: Letter to Mother (Adele Milgram), January 11, 1973, ASM; announcement in Hebrew of Milgram’s series of lectures, SMP. 204 Offered a . . . faculty position: Letter to Mother, Ibid. 204 Getting his study . . . under way: Letter to Hollander, March 13, 1973, SMP. 204 Too optimistic: Letter to Hollander, April 26, 1973, SMP. 204 Personal living expenses: Conversations with Sasha Milgram, 1999–2003. 204 Moscovici was a Romanian-born immigrant: http://www.metailie.info. NOTES TO PAGES 204–213 337

204 First met at Yale: Undated letter from Moscovici, most likely June 1963, SMP. 205 Moscovici’s research showed: Milgram (1978). 206 “The methods”: Undated letter from Moscovici, op. cit. 206 Do a replication: Letter to Moscovici, July 30, 1963, SMP. 206 “A special Swedish version”: Ibid. 206 Offered to help: Undated letter from Moscovici, op. cit. 206 Milgram sent him: Letter to Moscovici, October 10, 1963, SMP. 206 Not yet been published: It did appear in English the following year, Milgram (1964c). 206 Most influential . . . periodical: I was enlightened about the importance of this publication by Francois Rochat. 206 Magazine rejected: Letter from Moscovici, February 10, 1964, SMP. 206 Put Milgram in touch: Letter to Moscovici, September 21, 1973; letter from Moscovici, December 1973, both SMP. 206 On Moscovici’s behalf: Letters to AAAS, March 15 and July 24, 1973; letter to Moscovici, September 21, 1973, all SMP. 206 To interest American publishers: Letter to Moscovici, November 6, 1976, and letter to Eric Wanner, Harvard University Press, January 15, 1982, both SMP. 207 If he could provide: Letter to Moscovici, July 10, 1972, SMP. 207 Requesting an emergency grant: Letter from Moscovici to Pierre Aigrain, April 3, 1973, SMP. Translated for me from the French by Francois Rochat. 207 Parisian mental map study: Milgram and Jodelet, op. cit.; reprinted in ISW. 208 “Through processes”: ISW, p. 92. 208 Figure 10.1: Ibid., p. 91. 208 “At first the map”: Ibid., pp. 89–90. 209 “At the very heart”: Ibid., p. 95. 210 “Suppose you were to meet”: Ibid., p. 109. 210 “Allow a treatment”: Ibid., p. 112. 211 “We buy food”: Letter to Moscovici, September 21, 1973, SMP. 211 “Most likely”: Ibid. 211 When Milgram received: Conversations with Sasha Milgram, 1999–2003. 212 Galleys were ready: Letters from Virginia Hilu to Roger Brown, July 3, 1973, and from Brown to Hilu, July 20, 1973, courtesy of Brown. 212 In . . . Harper’s magazine: Milgram (1973a). 212 Article-length condensation: Letter from Taylor Branch to Milgram, October 9, 1973, SMP. This is the same Taylor Branch who fifteen years later published the award-winning book Parting the Waters. 212 Writing did not come easily: Interviews with Sasha Milgram, op. cit. 213 There were already letters: Interview with Marc Milgram, Watertown, MA, June 23, 1993. 213 Make home movies: Interview with Michele Marques, Toronto, August 1996; talk given by her at a symposium, “Stanley Milgram Retrospective—40 Years After ‘Behavioral Study of Obedience’,” Toronto, August 10, 2003. 213 His chapter outline: Letter to Lindzey and Aronson, March 25, 1965, SMP. 213 “He was blocked”: Interview with Lane Conn, July 17, 2002. 338 NOTES TO PAGES 214–226

214 “Collective Behavior”: Milgram and Toch (1969). 214 Aronson wrote: Letter to Milgram, October 12, 1966, SMP. 214 “Most exciting”: Letter to Milgram, May 7, 1967, SMP. 214 Obedience to Authority: Milgram (1974). 215 Rebuttal of Baumrind’s article: Milgram (1964b). 215 Reply to a critical essay: Milgram (1973b). 215 The Dogs of Pavlov: Abse (1973). 216 “From a subjective standpoint”: OTA, p. 134. 216 An empirical question: For a detailed examination of this question, see Blass (1992). 216 Subjects were women: OTA, Experiment 8, pp. 61–63, 207. 216 Rate of obedience was identical: My own research (Blass, 1999) has shown that this is a reliable finding. Almost all replications of the obedience experiment by others also found no differences between males and females in their degree of obedience. 217 “Any competent manager”: Ibid., p. 122. 218 One such variation: Experiment 11 in OTA, pp. 61, 70–72. 218 “If destructive impulses”: Ibid., pp. 166–167. 218 “Whatever leads”: Ibid., p. 72. 219 Another condition: Experiment 12 in OTA, pp. 90–92, 94. 220 Documentary series, Horizon: There is now an updated version, accompanied by some contemporary commentary. According to director of the update, Celia Lowenstein, it was shown on BBC4 on March 10, 2003 (e-mail to me, March 15, 2003). Outside of Milgram’s own films, it is still the best documentary treatment of Milgram’s research. 220 More than sixty reviews: Most of these were collected by American and British newspaper clipping services, which Milgram must have hired, and are located in SMP. 220 Polemical piece: In the following weeks, the New York Times Book Review printed a letter to the editor from Roger Brown defending Milgram and one from Lawrence Kohlberg criticizing Milgram. 221 “Obviously, he was not competent”: Dick Cavett Show, March 15, 1979. 221 Soliciting his opinions: Letter from R. Duncan Luce, March 8, 1983, SMP. 222 “Many of those”: Letter to Luce, March 19, 1983, SMP. 223 “A punk rock singer”: Letter from Peter Gabriel, November 30, 1979, SMP. 223 Unusual request: Undated letter from Marcie Dodson-Yarnell, SMP. 223 “Dear James”: Letter from Milgram, February 26, 1981, SMP. 224 Milgram quickly obliged: With a letter, March 3, 1982, SMP. 224 Led to . . . contract: Letter to Glen Howard, July 1, 1973, ASM. 224 Educational films: All of Milgram’s films are still available and currently distributed by Penn State Media Sales. 225 Own field experiments: Milgram, Bickman, and Berkowitz (1969); reprinted in ISW. 226 Flew there: Interview with Harry From, New York, June 17, 1993. 226 Introduced to the gang: Ibid. NOTES TO PAGES 226–233 339

226 A slab of concrete: Milgram and From (1978); ibid. 226 “We are not going to shoot”: Interview with From, ibid. 227 “Felt much more freedom”: Conversations with From. 227 Courses in ﬁlmmaking: Ibid. 227 He submitted: Grant application to the American Film Institute, Independent Filmmaker Program, September 12, 1975, ASM. 227 “The creative claim”: ISW, p. xix. 228 Letter . . . Bernard Fried: Dated May 7, 1983, courtesy of Fried. 228 “I was as obsessed”: Interview with George Bellak, New York, May 19, 1993. 229 Cost of $300,000: Article by Percy Shain, “Tenth Level to Be Aired—Finally,” Boston Globe, week of August 22, 1976. 229 “Wouldn’t go near it”: Interview with Bellak, op. cit. 229 Shatner believed: Percy Shain article, op. cit. 229 CBS paid Milgram: Letter to Isadore Miller, CBS Television Network, Febru- ary 10, 1975, ASM. 229 Very little input: Letter to Arthur Asa Berger, January 26, 1975, SMP. 229 “Welter of video clichés”: Letter to Bob Wexelbaum, September 1, 1976, ASM. 229 “Increasing the public’s knowledge”: Copy of award certiﬁcate, courtesy of George Bellak. 230 Get a national audience: E-mail to me from Tom Pettigrew, November 19, 1997. 230 Told his brother, Joel: Interview with Joel Milgram, op. cit.

CHAPTER 11: VEXATIONS, CYRANOIDS, AND THE DECLINING YEARS 231 Not planning to stay: Interviews with Sasha Milgram, op. cit. 231 His speaking fees: By now, he had also enlisted the services of a speakers’ bureau, Program Corporation of America, to handle the trafﬁc. On September 25, 1975, for example, a letter from its sales director informed him that an upcoming speaking engagement at Casper College would net him $2,000, plus all of his expenses, SMP. 231 “An impressive amount”: Interview with Harry From, op. cit. 231 “A great source of pride”: Interview with Joel Milgram, op. cit. 232 The boon and the bane: Conversations with Judith Waters. 232 “A kind of snail”: Letter to Bob Wexelbaum, op. cit. 232 “A 1/12th pay cut”: Letter to Paul Hollander, March 3, 1976, courtesy of Hol- lander. 232 He regretted not doing: Letter to Hollander, June 17, 1968, courtesy of Hol- lander. 233 Would not give it to them: Interview with Harry From, op. cit. 233 Photographer-subject relationship: Milgram (1977b). 233 Candid Camera: Milgram and Sabini (1979); reprinted in ISW, 2nd edition only. 233 “Petty bourgeois”: Interview with From, op. cit. 340 NOTES TO PAGES 234–247

234 A very large grant proposal: Titled “Ethics in Human Research: Three Films,” SMP. 234 Seemed to be smarting: Conversations with Judith Waters, op. cit. 235 One of the finalists: Letter from Jan Haag, American Film Institute, February 4, 1976, ASM. 235 Proposed the film idea: Letter to Glen Howard, February 9, 1976, SMP. 236 Army recruits: Berkun et al. (1962). 236 Male alcoholics: Campbell, Sanderson, and Laverty (1964). 236 Asked an ethicist: Milgram’s memorandum to himself about a telephone call to Callahan, March 16, 1977, SMP. 237 “With increasingly powerful”: From the Ethics grant proposal, op. cit. 238 A trimmed-down version: Titled “Ethics in Psychological Research: Film and Evaluation,” June 20, 1979, SMP. 238 Defined a cyranoid: Milgram (1984a); reprinted in ISW, 2nd edition only. 239 In a notebook: ASM. 239 A grant proposal: Dated February 23, 1979, SMP. 239 A cover letter: Letter to Kelly Shaver, February 26, 1979, SMP. 241 Was steamed: Letter to Shaver, August 1, 1979, SMP. 241 Accept it as a resubmission: Letter from Baron, October 30, 1979, SMP. 241 Generally encouraged: E-mail to me from Steven Breckler, NSF, February 6, 2003. 242 The bad tidings: Letter from Baron, March 26, 1980, SMP. 242 Letter . . . to . . . Stuart Albert: October 8, 1983, ASM. 243 The important findings: Milgram (1984a). 243 Belief in conspiracy theories: Blass (1980). 243 The nomination process: Interview with Florence Denmark, op. cit. 244 A joyous event: Conversations with Sasha Milgram, 1999–2003. 244 Toast by Irwin Katz: Minutes of Social-Personality Faculty Meeting, February 5, 1980, SMP. 244 The first—and . . . only: E-mail to me from Rosamond Dana, Provost’s Office, CUNY Graduate School, March 28, 2003. 244 Go bicycle riding: Conversations with Sasha Milgram, 1999–2003. 245 “After some small talk”: Letter to Roger Brown, July 7, 1980, courtesy of Brown. 245 Another heart attack: Conversations with Sasha Milgram, 1999–2003. 245 “The past seems brighter”: Letter to Hollander, August 25, 1983, ASM. 246 “The . . . true intimate closeness”: Interview with Joel Milgram, op. cit. 246 “Dedicated micro-maven”: Annual end-of-the-year letter to friends from Stanley and Sasha, December 2002, ASM. 246 “A confession, Serge”: Letter to Moscovici, April 13, 1982, SMP. 247 “A way of life”: Interview with Eva Fogelman, New York, summer 2000. 247 “He was brilliant”: Interview with Arthur Weinberger, New York, August 17, 2000. 247 “Inspire students to delight”: “Remarks delivered at the funeral of Stanley Milgram,” courtesy of Irwin Katz. NOTES TO PAGES 248–258 341

248 “Flirting with bankruptcy”: End-of-the-year letter to friends, 1982, op. cit., ASM. 248 Sasha went to work: Conversations with Sasha Milgram, 1999–2003. 248 “Hasn’t become a client—yet”: Annual end-of-year letter, 1982, op. cit. 249 “Some impressive data”: Letter to Alan Elms, September 24, 1982, SMP. 249 Article was accepted: Milgram et al. (1986); reprinted in ISW, 2nd edition only. 249 The vertical life: Milgram (1984b); reprinted in ISW, 2nd edition only. 250 “An interesting approach”: Letter to Roger Brown, June 14, 1983, courtesy of Brown. 250 “Intellectual resonance”: Letter to Roger Brown, May 19, 1983, courtesy of Brown. 250 Rental house . . . on Cape Cod: Picture postcard to Marjorie Marton and family from the Milgrams, July 23, 1983, courtesy of Marjorie Marton. 251 “A fresh wind”: The Milgrams’ annual end-of-the-year letter to friends, De- cember 1983, ASM. 252 “Our primordial nightmare”: Quoted in an article by Maureen Dowd about the conference in the New York Times, Monday, March 12, 1984, p. B1. 252 Sasha and Stanley wanted: Conversations with Sasha Milgram, 1999–2003. 252 A guest column: Titled “A Patient’s View of the Hospital Strike,” August 23, 1984, ASM. This was his last published piece of writing before his death. 253 “Like Menachem B.”: Referring to Menachem Begin, prime minister of Israel, who after his wife died in 1982 resigned from his ofﬁce and rarely appeared in public afterward. 253 Accepted an invitation: Letter from James Pennebaker, January 11, 1984, ASM. 254 Figure 11.1: The “Sharon” in the balloon is Sharon Presley, one of Milgram’s doctoral students, courtesy of Presley. 254 In absentia: Interview with Pennebaker, February 17, 2003. 255 End-of-the-year letter: ASM. 255 “Very impressed”: Interview with Irwin Katz, op. cit. 256 “Dear Chas”: Reply to Smith typed at the bottom of his memo, August 31, 1977, SMP. 256 “Planting some trees”: SMP. 256 “Lovers of Israel”: According to Sasha, one year Stanley found artistic Rosh Hashanah cards with a pomegranate motif. The quote is from an explanation about the origin of the Milgram name that he wrote on those cards. 257 The activist rabbi: Interview with Rabbi Avi Weiss, New York, April 18, 2001. 257 “When a Boy Becomes a Man”: ASM. 257 “The whole world”: He learned the song from Rabbi Avi Weiss. Interview with Weiss, op. cit. 258 He told Irwin Katz: Interview with Katz, op. cit. 258 Asked his cardiologist: Conversations with Sasha Milgram, 1999–2003. 342 NOTES TO PAGES 259–263

CHAPTER 12: MILGRAM’S LEGACY 259 “Is there any”: Interview with Roger Brown, op. cit. 259 A recent study: Haggbloom et al. (2002). 260 In Psychology Today: Milgram (1967b); reprinted in ISW. 260 In 1969 and 1970: Travers and Milgram, op. cit., Korte and Milgram, op. cit. 260 Experimental realism: Aronson and Carlsmith (1968). 261 Disciplines outside of psychology: Economics (Akerlof, 1991), education (Atlas, 1985), political science (Helm and Morelli, 1979, 1985), and philosophy (Patten, 1977). 261 Archives of Internal Medicine: Green et al. (1996). 261 Indian Journal of the History of Science: Laurent (1987). 261 Swedish writer: Modig (2003). 261 A dog-trainer: Clothier (2002). 262 Ever since he saw: Interview with Robbie Chafitz, spring 1999. 262 I comme Icare: The film is a thriller about a political assassination. The president of an unidentified country gets shot riding in an open car during a public appearance. On one level, the plot was a thinly disguised rendering of the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Commission’s investigation: The unnamed country’s flag is colored red, white, and blue, and the accused killer’s name is Daslow, which is an anagram of Oswald. On another level, Verneuil created it to serve as a vehicle for presenting Milgram’s obedience experiments to the French public. It turns out that the Oswald-like character had been a subject in a Milgram-type obedience experiment, and the dramatic high point of the film is a gripping twenty-minute segment depicting a subject going through the experiment at the University of Leya, a scrambled version of “Yale.” Conversations with Francois Rochat; e-mails from Francois Lapelerie, January 24, 2002, and Ray Lancaster, March 4, 2002. According to Benoit Monin, a social psychologist at Stanford University, the film “might have done more to popularize Milgram’s work in France than anything else.” He recalls that when he was an undergraduate student at ESSEC (a business school in Paris), lectures about the obedience experiments typically used as a visual aid the clip from I comme Icare depicting the experiment. Even a recent official report on human subjects written for the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique—the French equivalent of the National Science Foun- dation—introduced a discussion of Milgram’s research by saying, “As portrayed in the movie I comme Icare.” E-mail from Monin, May 21, 1999. 263 “The Dogs of Pavlov”: The play (Abse, op. cit.) contains a variant of Milgram’s experiment—the learning task is an arithmetic problem rather than a word-matching task. Its central theme is the same as Milgram’s: the surprising readiness of normal people to yield to evil orders, with its attendant implications for the Nazis’ savagery. As one of Abse’s characters says, “When people feel they are serving some higher cause . . . then consciences become startlingly soluble.” But it also has a subtheme that the teacher-subject was victimized—that he was “had, hoaxed, fooled, . . . conned” into doing something that was alien to his principles—a view that NOTES TO PAGES 263–269 343

Milgram strenuously rejected. He always argued that his subjects were free agents who could choose to disobey the experimental authority. 263 “Tolliver’s Trick”: Its central character, Tolliver, survived the concentration camps and is now a college professor. He requires his students to participate in a “learning” experiment and teaches them about the perils of blind obedience by flunking any of them who continue to the highest voltage on the shock machine. 263 “Mosaic”: Baltimore playwright Hull describes the work as “an existential dilemma for ensemble. Who are we? Where are we? What will we become? Wry, Orwellian exposé of the past, present, and future.” Her obedience experiment has a brilliant touch: The teacher asks the learner a list of questions that have no objective answers. The experimenter decides whether the learner’s answers are correct. Here is an excerpt: Doctor Move on to the second question, please. Subject [Reads from list] Second question: Where have all the good times gone? Learner The good times haven’t gone anywhere. They’re here right now. Subject [Looks to Doctor] Well? Doctor Incorrect. Administer the second shock value, please. Subject [Peering, searching with finger] All right. Let’s see, ah, 30 volts. Here goes. [Flicks switch; Learner writhes a little more violently]. 263 “One More Volt”: Its central character, a Dr. Samuel Miller, is a Milgram-like faculty member in the psychology department of a prestigious university who is conducting scientific experiments on obedience to authority. During the course of his studies, a Nazi war criminal is captured and brought to Israel to stand trial. Miller finds himself facing a painful dilemma when the Nazi’s lawyer, tipped off about his experiments, asks him to testify at the trial. 263 Almost aphoristically: Letter to Alan Elms, September 25, 1973, SMP. 263 “Although experiments”: Milgram (1976, p. 24). 264 “Like so many Eichmanns”: Abse (op. cit., p. 29). 264 “You surely understand”: Milgram (1973b, p. 39). 264 “An organizational structure”: OTA, p. 188. 265 A textbook . . . on business ethics: Ferrell and Gardiner (1991). 266 Hartwell writes: Hartwell (1990, pp. 142–143). 266 As an expert witness: Colman (1991). 267 With broad consequences: Saltzman (2000). 267 “Making a major contribution”: Letter from Vincent J. Liesenfeld, April 10, 1982, SMP. 267 “I am Jewish”: E-mail to me from Eduardo Grutzky, October 17, 2000. 267 “When I first read”: E-mail to me from Vera Cubela, December 11, 2000. 268 A posting to . . . Metafilter: Dated January 14, 2003, by “NortonDC.” 268 A review: By Marc Fisher in the Washington Post, April 25, 1996. 268 Goldhagen’s . . . book: Goldhagen (1996). 268 “A commonly offered explanation”: OTA, pp. 5–6. 269 “Enormous differences”: OTA, p. 175. 269 “It is fitting”: ASM. 344 NOTES TO PAGES 270–281

270 Arendt’s analysis: Arendt (1963). 270 “Utterly bourgeois”: Wiesenthal (1989, p. 66). 270 “Many of Milgram’s insights”: Browning (1992, p. 174). 270 Also finds support: Hilberg (1980). 271 “Legal activity”: Weisberg (1996, pp. xviii–xix). 271 First anti-Jewish law: Hilberg (1985). 271 Requested that the authorities: Geuter (1987). 271 To indoctrinate Nazi youth: Berger (1983). 272 Has been challenged: Robinson (1965). 272 Deportation . . . began: Bauer (1982). 272 “Since the first days”: Gilbert (1985, p. 297). 273 “Simone LaGrange was sent”: Reeves (1987). 273 [A] customary SS habit: Bauer, op. cit., p. 212. 273 “Even women carrying children”: Quoted in Herzstein (1980, p. 142). 274 “After about fifteen minutes”: Birnbaum (1993, pp. x–xi). 275 “No one had issued”: Arendt (1966, p. xxiv). 276 Heydrich considered all Germans: Hilberg (1985). 277 “There is a propensity”: OTA, p. 145. 277 “A lower species”: Hilberg (1985, pp. 120). 277 “Powerfully bind”: OTA, p. 149. 277 “The process of destruction”: Hilberg (1985, pp. 53 and 47). 278 “The laboratory hour”: OTA, p. 149. 278 A measure . . . never stands alone: Hilberg (1985, p. 54). 278 “A definite, yes”: Letter to Mrs. Carol Dusseault from Howard T. Prince II, December 12, 1985, ASM. 278 An insightful book: Grossman (1995). 278 Draws . . . on Milgram’s work: In addition to Grossman’s (1995) book, a number of other books on the Holocaust or human destructiveness have drawn heavily on Milgram’s work. These include Are We All Nazis? by Askenasy, Crimes of Obedience by Kelman and Hamilton, Mass Hate by Kressel, Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil by Katz, and Modernity and the Holocaust by Bauman. 278 A “true revolution”: Interview with Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, May 18, 1999. 279 “It is quite a jump”: Letter to Miss Harriet Tobin, April 9, 1964, SMP. 279 “In introducing the problem”: SMP. 280 In the published version: Milgram (1967a). 280 “The late Gordon W. Allport”: OTA, pp. 178–179. 280 The ethical controversy: A thoughtful and readable presentation of the ethical controversy, as well as other issues related to the obedience experiments, can be found in Miller (1986). 280 In 1953: The description of the ethically problematic cases is based on Evolv- ing Concern: Protection for Human Subjects, one of a series of videos prepared by the National Institutes of Health (undated). 281 “Solution to a non-problem”: From “Social Psychology in the Eighties,” a talk given by Milgram at Fordham University, Lincoln Center Campus, May 3, 1980, courtesy of Harold Takooshian. NOTES TO PAGES 282–292 345

282 Found it increasingly difﬁcult: My discussion of these developments is based on three articles that have appeared in Dialog: The Ofﬁcial Newsletter of the So- ciety for Personality and Social Psychology: “IRB Ax Falls, Heads Roll,” Dialog, 14 (Autumn 1999), p. 8; E. Diener, “Over-Concern with Research Ethics,” Dia- log, 16 (Fall 2001), p. 2; L. A. Penner, “IRB and U: What Institutional Review Boards Are Supposed to Do,” Dialog, 17 (Spring 2002), pp. 28–29. 282 “For me Asch’s experiment”: ISW, p. 196. 283 “Perhaps more than any”: Ross (1988, p. 101). 284 “The tremendous city return rates”: From “Suburban Versus Urban Attitudes in Regard to Current Political and Sociological Issues, as Measured by the Lost Letter Technique,” by Lucas Hanft, submitted to the Intel Science Talent Search 1999–2000, p. 16, courtesy of Ann Saltzman. 284 “One of the critical tools”: Kadushin (1989, p. xxiv). 285 An article in Nature: Watts and Strogatz (1998). 285 “Milgram’s pioneering work”: E-mail to me from Steven Strogatz, May 4, 2000. 286 “Renaissance” is described: Barabasi (2002). 286 As reported by Watts and . . . colleagues: Dodds, Muhamad, and Watts (2003). 287 “Milgram’s . . . analysis of overload”: Shenk (1997), p. 39. 287 A Chicago native: Gladwell (2000). 287 A highly original “test”: Leveugle recounted her odyssey in The Guardian, Jan- uary 13, 2003. 289 “Pleasurable activity”: ISW, p. xx. 289 “Impossible to calculate”: Zimbardo, Maslach, and Haney (2000, pp. 223–224). 290 Psychology of photography: ISW. 290 “The implicit model”: ISW, p. xix. 291 Phenomenon oriented: He was in good company, though. Both Roger Brown and Solomon Asch were phenomenon-centered in their research. 291 “Most psychologists test”: Tavris (1974b, p. 75). 292 “A Pandora’s box”: Tavris (1974a, p. 71); ISW, pp. xxii–xxiii. This page intentionally left blank REFERENCES

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My use of material from the Stanley Milgram Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, is by permission of Alexandra Milgram, the copyright owner. Also by permission of Alexandra Milgram is use of material from her personal collection. Permission to use material pertaining to Stanley Milgram from Harvard University Archives, given by Daniel L. Schacter, Department of Psy- chology. Use of Milgram-related holdings at the Archives of the History of Amer- ican Psychology, University of Akron, by permission of David Baker, Director. Portions of Chapter 12 first appeared in my chapter, “Perpetrator behavior as destructive obedience,” in Understanding genocide: The social psychology of the Holocaust, edited by Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber, copyright by Oxford University Press, Inc. Used by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. The drawing on page 265 (Figure 12.1) is used by permission of O. C. Ferrell. The story on pages 274–275 is reproduced from Lieutenant Birnbaum: A soldier’s story by Meyer Birnbaum with Yonason Rosenblum, with permission from the copyright holder Artscroll/Mesorah Publications, Ltd. Various passages as well as a table (on page 155) from Stanley Milgram, “Con- formity in Norway and France: An experimental study of national characteristics,” Doctoral thesis, Harvard University, 1960, reprinted by permission of Alexandra Milgram, who controls all rights. Dialogue from the film Obedience © 1965 Stan- ley Milgram; © renewal 1993 Alexandra Milgram. Voice-over from the film The City and the Self © 1973 Stanley Milgram and Harry From; © renewal Alexandra Milgram and Nitza From. Photo credits are with the photographs in the photo section and on page 79.

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Abelson, Robert, 111 American Consulate, Genoa, Arendt, Hannah, 269 Abse, Dannie, 215 11–12 banality of evil thesis by, “The Dogs of Pavlov,” essay American Council of Learned 272, 275, 276 by, 264 Societies, 65 Aronson, Elliot, 123, 213 Abu Ghraib prisoner torture, American Film Institute’s letter sent by, 214 296 Independent Filmmaker Artificial Intelligence, 250 Actor-observer attributional Program, 227 Asch, Solomon E., 26–27, 60 effect, 224 proposal submitted to, 235 conformity studies by, Addison-Wesley, anthology American Journal of Psychology, 27–29, 282 published by, 230 xviii Distinguished Scientific Aeolian Hall, CUNY, 165 American Psychological Contribution award to, 100 Agentic state, 216 Association. See APA ethical issues and, 45 as post hoc theorizing, 217 American Psychologist journal, experimental paradigm Aggression, The Psychology of, 18, 123, 215 designed by, 27 (Buss), 111 American Sociological Society, friction with, 57 Aggressive behavior 18 Institute for Advanced Study Bobo doll and, 224 The Anderson Tapes (film), 227 and, 55–56 human nature and, 218 Anti-Defamation League of introduction of wife to, 100 obedience study and, 217 B’nai Brith, talk at, 222 letters to, 57–58, 99 study of, 129 APA (American Psychological Authority Aircraft condition, 39, 43 Association) agentic state and, 216 Allport, Gordon, 15, 17, 23 award given by, 229 business ethics and, 265 advice given by, 15, 16 complaint about Milgram to, factors facilitating resistance ambivalence by, 131 112–113 to, 108 letter to, 59 creation of institutional organizational structure mentoring style of, 190 review boards (IRBs) by, dominated by, 216 Milgram’s judgment 280, 293–294 propensity to obey, 94, 100, supported by, 35 Denmark, Florence, 261 social psychology pioneer, President of, 186 proximity series revelations 17–18 “Ethical Principles in the about, 100–101 American Academy of Arts and Conduct of Research relinquishing, 215 Sciences, elected to, 222, with Human 250 Participants” published Badstubner, Robert, 144 American Association for the by, 129, 293 Bales, Robert Freed, 147 Advancement of Science talk given at annual Bamberger Field, Caroline, 56 Moscovici’s essay to, 206 convention of, 169 Bamberger, Louis, 56 Socio-Psychological Prize Archives of Internal Medicine, Bandura, Albert, 224 awarded by, 130 261 Bangkok, Thailand, 141

359 360 INDEX

Bar Mitzvah Candid Camera, social- Columbia-Presbyterian Milgram’s, Marc, 244 psychological wisdom of, Hospital, 245, 252 Milgram’s, Stanley, 8 233 death of Milgram at, 258 Barabási, Albert-László, 286 Cardinale, Anthony, 263 Committee to Encourage Baron, Robert A, 241 Carnap, Walter, 138, 139 Education, 141 BASIC, interest in, 246 CBS’s Office of Social Commodore Hotel, Batta, Bruno, 96 Research, 192 employment at, 25 Baumrind, Diana, 123 Censure condition, 42, 53 Communist Milgram’s rebuttal of, 124, 128 Center for Cognitive Studies, 60 government, 142 Behavior Center for Contemporary Arts, Party membership, 232 destructive, 217 263 Community attitudes, obedience experiments and, Center for the Behavioral measurement of, 137–138 93 Sciences, 147 Confirmation, Milgram’s, obedience transforms, 218 Certificate of Excellence in Michele, 244 other people’s, 225 Forensics, 11 Conformity “Behaviorial Study of Chafitz, Robbie, 262 cross-cultural, 143 Obedience,” 114, 120 Christie, Richard, 71 ethical issues related to, 44, Behaviorism, xix City life, psychology of, 45 social psychology and, xx 166–167 French v. Norwegians and, 53 Bell condition, 43 City University of New York. Moscovici, Serge, and, 205 Bellak, George, 228 See CUNY Norwegian survey regarding, National Media Award to, The City and the Self (film), 181 125 229 awards won by, 198 Norwegians and, 53 Berscheid, Ellen, 221 freedom experienced when Norwegians v. Americans Bettelheim, Bruno, 123 making, 227 and, 39–40, 41 Birnbaum, Meyer, 273–274 From, Harry, collaboration reducing level of, 39 Bitnet, 166 on, 224 studies of, 27–29, 37–38 Blank, Arthur, 190–191 Museum of Modern Art three-way comparison of, 33 Bones Would Rain from the Sky showing of, 198 truth v., 143 (Clothier), 261 Time-Life Films distributes, Conformity and Independence Bowker, Albert, 165 203 (film) Brandeis University, 136 Clinton, Hillary, 284 award won for, 224 Brim, Orville, 237 Clothier, Suzanne, 261 Milgram appears in, 224 Brinkley, Don, 193 Coercion, physical, absence of, Conformity experiments Bronx, New York, 2 xviii Airplane conditions in, 39, Brooklyn College, 15 Cognitive city maps, 171 43, 51 Brown, Roger, 23, 60 correct scene placement and, Baseline conditions in, 51 recollections of, 20–21 172 Bell conditions in, 43, 51 Browning, Christopher, 270 five boroughs inclusion in, Censure conditions in, 42, Brundtland, Arne Olav, 47 172 51, 53 Bruner, Jerome, 20 Guggenheim Fellowship French v. Norwegian, 51–53 Center for Cognitive Studies and, 198 Private conditions in, 39, 51 and, 60 Manhattan as imagistically Conn, Lane, 213 Cognitive Processes taught superior in, 173 Cornell University, xxi, 160, 285 by, 23 Parisian, 207 Couch, Arthur, 147 Bryant Park, NY, 163 scene sampling technique Coughlan, Eileen, 262 Buckhout, Robert, 121 and, 171–172 “Council for White Buckley, William, 183 Cognitive dissonance, Neighborhoods,” 139 Burger, Jerry, 294–295 obedience experiments Crutchfield, Richard, 45, 60 Burke, Joanne, 227 and, 104 Cubela, Vera, 267 Buss, Arnold, 67, 111 Cognitive revolution, 23 CUNY (City University of New Buxton, Claude, 110 Coleman, James, 71 York) Allport’s letter to, 131–132 Colman, Andrew, 266 acceptance of position at, Columbia University, 156, 232, 159 Callahan, Daniel, ethicist, 236 286 Advanced Social Psychology Calmann-Levy, publisher, 206 acceptance by, 13 class at, 187 INDEX 361

Bowker, Albert, Chancellor Daily News, 9 Eichmann, Adolf, 63, 110 of, 165 Darley, John, 167 Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report Center for Research in Dashiell, John, xx on the Banality of Evil Cognition and Affect at, Data Smog: Surviving the (Arendt), 269, 270 156 Information Glut (Shenk), Eiffel Tower, 210 colleges comprising, 164 287 Electric shocks, learners and, conditions for accepting Daves, Joan, 134 xvii, 81 position at, 157–158 de Beauvoir, Simone, 206 Elektrisk Bureau, 43, 47 difficulty, frustration at, 232 de Sola Pool, Ithiel, 145 Elms, Alan, 98, 133 Distinguished Professor of Dean, John, 221 Milgram’s letter to, 99 Psychology appointment Death, thoughts regarding, E-mail experiment, low at, 243 12–13 completion rate of, environmental psychology Debating Society, vice-president 286–287 program at, 166 of, 11 Emerson Hall, 134 Experimental Social Demand characteristics, 119, Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 243 Psychology class at, 175 120 Empire State Building, 163 Graduate Center of, Den Nödvändiga Olydnaden Epistemological nightmare, 165–166 (The Necessary 28 graduate school unification Disobedience) (Modig), “Equal Rights for Negroes,” at, 165 261 139 greatest vexation at, 233 Denmark, Florence, 186, 244 Erickson, Milton, 123 Harvard University v., Department of Health, Erikson, Erik, 148 161–162 Education, and Welfare. Errera, Paul, 127 legislature’s establishment of, See DHEW. “The Everyday Culture of New 164 Der Spiegel magazine, 121 York City” conference, Milgram’s difficult Destructive tendencies, 254 personality at, 182 217–218 Evil, insights into, 260 Rees, Mina, first Dean of DHEW (Department of “The Experience of Living in Graduate Studies of, Health, Education and Cities,” 169–170, 249 164 Welfare) The City and the Self film, social psychology area of, regulation regarding human based on, 197 168 subjects by, 129 Experiment(s) social-personality program Dick Cavett Show, appearance acoustic tone, 37–38 at, 227 on, 221 aircraft condition, 39 unquestioned authority at, Dickinson, Rod, 263 attacks on, 113 184 Dissertation cancer cell, 280 Urban Research seminar at, completion of, 60 conflict resolution created by, 173 correspondence regarding, 143 Cybernetics, obedience and, 59–60 cross-cultural, 53 215 Doctoral dissertation, 31 ethically problematic, 236 Cyranic mode, usefulness of, Dodds, Peter Sheridan, 286 ethics of, 39, 117–118 240 “The Dogs of Pavlov” (essay), ethics review board Cyrano de Bergerac (Rostand), 215, 263, 264 regarding, 118 238–239 Donahue, appearance on, 220 human subjects, protections Cyranoids Donnell Library, 198 in, 70 definition of, 238 Doob, Leonard, 60 incremental feature of, 278 emergencies and, 240 Doors of Perception (Huxley), 65 informed consent needed further exploration of, 243 Drew University, 284 for, 281 mode of interaction of, Drugs, experimentation with, Milgram’s defense of, 115 238–239 29, 64, 65, 132, 189 obedience, 54 name derivation of, 238 Dying by Degrees (Coughlan), subway, 175–176 NSF proposal to study, 239, 262 warning about human, 237 240 Experimental Social Psychology personal doubt regarding, Ecole Pratique des Hautes class, 147 242–243 Etudes, Social Laboratory computer use by, 250 preliminary studies of, 239 at, 204 study by, 178 362 INDEX

Experimenter From, Harry, 181 NSF, application for, instructions given by, “The Experience of Living 233–234 82–92 in Cities,” read by, 197 proposed “cyranoids,” 238 questioning by, 102 From, Nitza, 197–198 rejection of NSFcyranoid, External social forces, Fulbright scholars, 36 238, 242 concentration on, 218 Grossman, Dave, 278 Gabriel, Peter, 222, 262 Group pressure, French v. Fairleigh Dickinson University, General Electric transistor Norwegians and, 53 185, 191 radio, 194 Groups, power of, 5 “Familiar strangers,” xxiv, 178 Genovese, Kitty, incident, 167, Grutzky, Eduardo, 267 curiosity about, 180–181 251–252 Guare, John, 285 identification of, 291 Catherine Genovese Guggenheim Fellowship, 198 percentage identifying, 180 Memorial Conference additional funding from, photograph used with, 179 commemorating, 251 204 poem about, 181–182 Darley, John, and, 167 amount of, 199 study involving, 178–180 Latané, Bibb, and, 167 Gunsmoke comparison, 230 tendency not to interact Milgram/Hollander, on, with, 180 167–168 Hall, Edward, 226 FBI, 139 George Washington Bridge, Handbook of Social Psychology, Feldman, Roy, 147 163 118 Festinger, Leon, xxii Gilbert, Martin, 272 “Collective Behavior: Film and Video as Research Gimme Shelter (documentary), Crowds and Social Tools in Social Science 227 Movements” in, 149 class, 227 Giuliani, Rudy, 284 contributions to, 213 Filmmaking/film directing Giving up seat experiment, Haney, Craig, 289 courses taken in, 227 173–174 Hanft, Lucas, 283–284 interest in, 197 gender differences in, 176 Harper and Row First Encounter Beach, 251 No Justification condition of, contract signed with, 199 Fogelman, Eva, 2247 175 reworked manuscript by, 211 Follow-up procedures, results Overheard condition of, Harper and Row Media, film of, 124–125 175 proposal to, 235 Ford Foundation, 11 Trivial Justification condition Harris, Benjamin, 112 Behavioral Sciences Division of, 175 Harter, Susan, 133, 138 of, 14 written request in, 176 Hartwell, Steven, 266 fellowship, 14 Gladwell, Malcolm, 287 Harvard Crimson newspaper, Fordham University, 176 Glass, David, 186 136–137 Lincoln Center Campus of, Goebbels calendar, 272 “Harvard Hangover,” 161 251 Golden Fleece, 242 Harvard University Foreign service, interest in, 13 Goldene Medina, United States as academic Eden, 132 Frager, Robert, 142, 147 as, 1 Behavioral Science Fellows French, conformity and, 53 Goldhagen, Daniel, 268 at, 23 French ministry of scientific Goldstein, Elyse, 191 CUNY v., 161–162 and technical research, Goldwater, Barry, 134–135 Department of Social funding from, 207 Goodman, Ira, 174 Relations at, 13, 17, 19, French Morocco, family Graduate Center, CUNY, 20, 26 vacation to, 201 165–166 determining tenure at, 152 Freud, Sigmund, 217–218 financial turbulence at, 232 experiment in Fried, Bernard, 8–9 grant awarded by, 234 interdisciplinary letter to, 228 urban orientation of, 168 cooperation at, 19 Professor Emeritus, Grand Central Station, 179 failure to gain tenure at, Lafayette College, 10 Grant(s) 152–155, 201 Friends of the Communist CBS television study, 234 Laboratory of Social Party, 138, 139 CUNY internal, 234 Relations at, 18–19 Friends of the Nazi Party, 138, difficulty obtaining, 233–234 Milgram’s arrival at, 17 139 French government, 234 Milgram’s return to, 132 INDEX 363

Office of Special Students Human Relations journal, 130 Janis, Irving, 36, 133 at, 15 Hunter College, 15 Janteloven, ten commandments Ph.D., qualifying courses at, Huxley, Aldous, 65 of, 41 22–23 Hypothesis-testing, Janus (Koestler), 261 Richard Clarke Cabot disagreement with, 40 Jewishness Professor of Social Ethics deepening relationship with, at, 61 Immediate situation 257 Social Relations Dept. of, causal role of, 188 Ford Foundation Fellowship 146 power of, 260 and, 14 Harvard Yard, 148 Indian Journal of the History of Holocaust, obedience studies “Harvarditis,” 152 Science, 261 and, 62 Hastie, Reid, 221 Individualism, 53 letter regarding, 46 Heart attacks, 244, 245, 246, The Individual in a Social Six-Day War and, 155 252, 255 World: Essays and strength during illness from, card sent to well-wishers Experiments, 62 255, 256 after, 254 Addison-Wesley publishes, Jews computer interest sparked 230 Nazis and, 271–272 after, 246 organization of, 230 victimization of, 277 demeanor change from, 246 Informed consent, 281 Jodelet, Denise, 207 resumption of teaching after, Injustice: The Social Bases of John Jay College of Criminal 246 Obedience and Revolt Justice, 183 sabbatical after, 246 (Moore), 261 Johns Hopkins University, xix sources of strength after, 255 Institute for Advanced Study, Jones, Edward E., xxii Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, 55, 99–100, 205 rejection of article by, 114 257 Institute of Society, Ethics, and Jonestown Massacre, 222 Hebrew University, the Life Sciences, 236 Journal of Abnormal and Social Communications Institutional Review Board. See Psychology, 95 Institute of, 203–204 IRB (Institutional Review “Behaviorial Study of lectures given at, 203–204 Board) Obedience” in, 114, 120 Henry Hudson Bridge, 163 Intel Science Talent Journal of Personality, 114 Here and now, xxii competition, 283 Journal of Personality and Hilberg, Raul, 270 Interaction Laboratory, location Social Psychology, 146 Hilu, Virginia, 199, 202 of, 108 article accepted by, 249 Hitler, Adolf, first anti-Jewish International Relations Club, law of, 271 vice-president of, 11 Kabatznick, Ronna, 187–188 Hitler’s Willing Executioners Invitation to Social Psychology, recollection of, 247 (Goldhagen), 268 Silver award won by, 224 Katz, Daniel, 36 Hollander, Paul IRB (Institutional Review acceptance of article by, 114 fake, playful letters to, 150 Board) Katz, Irwin, 174 friendship with, 149 APA, 281, 293–294 heart attack remarks by, Holocaust, 62, 263 difficulty obtaining approval 255 Hilberg, Raul, historian of, from, 282 prejudice, stigma studies of, 270 Iron Cross, murder of Jews by, 186 obedience experiment 204 recollection of, 247 relevance to, 268, 271 Israel Kelman, Herbert, 61, 127, 237 Homans, George, 147 strong supporter of, 256 Kennedy, John F., 135–136 Hong Kong, 141, 142 trip to, 203–204 Kissinger, Henry, 248 Horizon, “You Do as You Are Israel Emergency Fund, Klapper, Joseph, 192 Told” on, 220 contribution to, 155 Klineberg, Otto, 182 Human Aggression (film), 224 Israeli Film Union, 197 Kluckhorn, Clyde, 17 incident during making of, Italy, trip to, 203 Klüver, Heinrich, 65 226 Knapp, Robert, 23 Milgram appears in, 224 James Monroe High School, 8 Kochen, Manfred, 145 Human experiments, warning honor society at, 9 Koestler, Arthur, 261 about, 237 James, William, 22 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 99, 237 364 INDEX

Koop, C. Everett, 251–252 McClelland, David, 132 M.S.W. earned by, 248 Korean War, 24 McDonough, James, 76, 78 Selfhelp Community McLaughlin, Barry, 160 Services and, 248 Lagache, Daniel, 50 Mead, Margaret, 17 tribute paid to, 255 Laing, R.D., 222 Medical Center, different Milgram, Stanley Langaard, Guttorm, 37 endings for, 193 Bar Mitzvah of, 8 Langer, Ellen, 186 Medical Research Associates, brother of, 3 Latané, Bibb, 167, 221 138, 139 childhood pranks of, 3 Learners Memory Project, 77 children of, 134 complaints by, 88 Menkin, Alexandra (Sasha), 72 death of, 258 continuance asked for by, Milgram’s marriage to, 74 Democratic causes favored 219 Menold, William, 115 by, 134 electric shocks administered Mental map(s), 170 diary notebook of, 56 to, xvii analysis of Parisian, 208–209 difficulty dealing with, 182 Learning, punishment’s effect example of Parisian, 208 doctoral dissertation choice on, 77 Manhattan as dominant of, 31 Leary, Timothy, 132 presence of, 172 father’s death, impact on, Lerner, Max, 222 New York v. Paris, 210 12 Les Temps Modernes, 206 New Yorkers’, 231 fiftieth birthday of, 251 Lessing, Doris, 261 Parisian study of, 207–211 finances of, 231 Leventhal, Howard, 73, 133 qualitative v. quantitave heart attacks of, 244, 245 Leveugle, Lucy, 287 analysis of, 209 inconsistent behavior of, 188 Levin, Harry, 160 questions asked for Parisian, inner life of, 117 Lewin, Kurt, xxi, xxii, 17 210 IQ of, 9 group atmosphere, value of, 210–211 mid-life crisis of, 200–201 leadership study of, 129 Mentoring, Milgram’s style of, national recognition Libido, weakening of, 245 190 achieved by, 250 Life space, xxii–xxiii Mescal (Klüver), 65 parents of, 1, 2 Lindzey, Gardner, 213 Mexico City, 144 pedagogical style of, 154 Linked (Barabási), 286 Michigan State University, 193 persistent attitude of, 12 Linsly-Chittenden Hall, 108, Middle-name dilemma, quirkiness of, 187 110 132–133 ranking of, 259 Lippitt, Ronald, xxi Mikulsky, Marylin, 165 return to Harvard by, 132 London School of Economics, Milgram, Joel (brother), 3, 4, 10 science, early interest, of, 4–5 149 audiotaped letter to, 135 self-doubts of, 118 London, Thanksgiving in, 203 heart attacks’ effect on, 246 sense of humor of, 38, 150, The Lonely Crowd, 148 recollection of, 183 252–253 Los Angeles Times, 287 Milgram, Marc (son), 134 sister of, 2 Lost-letter technique, 137–138, Bar Mitzvah of, 244 superior intellect of, 185 283–284 college choice of, 136 writing style of, 122 description of, 138–142 SAT scores of, 136 “The Milgram Experiment,” Far East use of, 141–142 Milgram, Marjorie, 1, 6 (CD), 262 limitations of, 142 Milgram, Michele (daughter) Miller, George, 60 obedience experiments, birth of, 134 Mindlessness research, similarities with, 142–143 college choice of, 136 Langer’s, Ellen, 186 varied uses of, 283 confirmation of, 244 Mischel, Walter, 101 Luce, R. Duncan, 221 Vassar, start of, by, 248 MIT, 145 Milgram, Samuel (father), 1, 6 Modig, Maria, 261 Mademoiselle, 134 bad investments of, 11 Modigliani, Andre, findings of, Majorities, power of, 205 bakery business of, 10–11 104–105 Malaysian government, 141 death of, 12 Montand, Yves, 262 Mann, Leon, 54, 133, 134, 138 occupational choices of, 7 Moore, Barrington, 261 letter to, 201 Milgram, Sasha (wife), 100 Moscovici, Serge, 204 Marlowe, David, 148 children of Stanley and, 134 conformity work of, 205 McCarthy, Joseph, 232 employment of, 248 funding aid from, 207 INDEX 365

initial meeting with, U.S. Geographical Survey books referring to, 299 204–205 maps of, 171 cognitive dissonance and, 104 Mosteller, Frederick, 30, 35, New York Public Library, 163 constructive, 113 147 New York Times, 9, 121, 122 criticism of, 214 Muhamad, Roby, 286 New York Times Cookbook, 134 demand characteristics Murata, Taketo, 139 New York University, 13, 15, 227 applied to, 119 Murray, Henry, 17 Newfield Building, 109 empirical support for, 120 Museum of Modern Art, 198 Newman, Edwin, 148 ethical controversy My Lai massacre, 279 Nonverbal Communication, 155, surrounding, 280 224 four-part proximity series of, Nasser, Gamal, 155 point of, 225–226 93–94 The Nation, 167 Norden, Stanley, 5 grant support sought for, National Book Award, 220 Northwestern University, 153 65–66 National character, 31 Norton Reader: An Anthology of Holocaust and, 62, 271 National groups, differences in, Expository Prose, 159 human behavior and, 93 41 “Behavioral Study of “incandescent moment” National Institute of Mental Obedience” published in, regarding, 63 Health, 67 159 inspiring effect of, 289 Center for Behavioral Norway letter from participant in, Sciences and, 147 individualism v. 267 National Political Science behavior/values in, 40 lost-letter technique, Honors Society, 11 Institute for Social Research similarities with, 142–143 National Science Foundation. in, 36 Moscovici, Serge, impressed See NSF Miigram departs for, 36 by, 205 Nature of Prejudice (Allport), warm feelings for, 47 1962 completion of, 122 32 Norwegians, conformity and, 53 objections to, 123–124 Navajo Indians, 18 Notre Dame, 209 outline for, 66–67 Nazi(s) Noznick, Robert, 237 pilot, 67–68 behavior of, 272 NSF (National Science plays based on, 263, 298–299 brutalities of, 273–275 Foundation), 67, 71 positive feelings from, 125 conclusions regarding, 279 boilerplate rejection from, 241 practice phase during, 86 Everyman and, 276 Center for Behavioral procedures for, 76, 81–92 From’s family suffered under, Sciences and, 147 safety of subjects in, 293–295 197 cyranoid proposal to, 239 sex differences in, 130, genocidal program of, 276 Ethics and Values in Society 294–295 Germany, xxi program of, 234 standardization of, 88 Hilbert, Raul, and, 271 grant approval from, 113 stressed v. nonstressed infants murdered by, 275 positive response from, 69, 75 during, 126 Jews as seen by, 277 talks given on, 232 Moscovici, Serge, and, 205 Obedience test part of, 86–88 obedience valued by, 271 cybernetics and, 215 unmatched, 260 perpetrators, 110 destructive, 277 virtual humans and, 295–296 spread of, 206 different paths to, 101 volunteers used in, 70 Neighborhood With No Name, highest rate of, 217 Obedience to Authority 3 paradigm of, 277 (Milgram), 220 Nervousness, self-ratings of, social life and, 279 delays in writing, 213 216 Obedience experimental conditions New Haven police, 139 documentary film, 109, 114 described in, 217 New Haven Register, 70 usage of soundtrack of, 222 German edition of, 269 volunteers recruited through, Obedience experiment(s), 54 Harper and Row and, 199, 75 assessment, debriefing from, 211 New School for Social 91 international publication of, Research, 227 assistants in, 76 212 New York City Bellak’s play about, 228–229 Los Angeles Times review of, readjusting to, 213 book on, 199, 202 220 366 INDEX

National Book Award Pearl Harbor, 7 Psychology Today, 146 finalist, 220 Pershing Hall, children enrolled small-world method New York Times Book Review at, 202 published in, 260 on, 220 Personal space, cross-cultural Public Opinion Quarterly, 138 practical lessons for differences and, 226 Punishment, effects of, xvii marketers related to, 264 Personality and Assessment problems with, 211–212 (Mischel), 101 Queens College The Spectator review of, 220 Petrullo, Luigi, 65 Department of summary of, 214–215 Pettigrew, Tom, 31, 147 Anthropology and Sunday Times, London, Peyote, use of, 29 Sociology at, 15 serialization of, 219 Photographer-subject graduation from, 13 Office of Naval Research, 65 relationship, 233 known as Harvard of City Milgram’s letter to, 68 Playhouse 90, Tenth Level shown University, 11 Rees, Mina, works for, 164 on, 229 Milgram honored at, 222 Office of Strategic Services Political correctness, swipe at, Queens, New York, (OSS), 17 222 unrecognizability of On Killing: The Psychological Political science, streets in, 172 Cost of Learning to Kill in disenchantment with, 13 Questionnaires, follow-up, War and Society Presley, Sharon, 290 125–126 (Grossman), 278 Presumptive consent, 129 Ordinary Men (Browning), 270 Princeton, Institute for Radio City Music Hall, 9 Organization for Comparative Advanced Study at, 205 Reasoning power, loss of, 116 Social Research (OCSR), unpleasant time at, 57 Rees, Mina, 157 33 Prior general consent, 130 CUNY Dean of Graduate Orne, Martin, 119 Prisons We Choose to Live Inside Studies, 164 Orwell, George, 251 (Lessing), 261 at University of London, 165 Overload concept, 180 Private condition, 39 Remote condition, 94 “The Problem of Obedience in Reprimand, reluctance to, Pageant magazine a Just Society” (talk), 177–178 “You Might Do Eichmann’s 221 Republican Party, 134–135 Job” published in, 159 Processes of Social Influence, Research Associates of Pagès, Robert, 50 147 Bridgeport, 109 Palmer, Robert, 29 pro-Goldwater letters, 140 Research Techniques class, 138 Panzarella, Robert, 183 Program for International Reserve Officers Training recollection of Milgram by, Studies, Director of, 152 Corps (ROTC), 24, 25 184 Project Hope, 194 Responsibility, abdicating, 277 Parenting pro-Johnson letters, 140 Rettig, Salomon, 186 energy applied to, 213 Proshansky, Harold, 158, 182 Riecken, Henry, 71 ongoing priorities of, Proximity condition, 95 letter to, 100 212–213 Proximity experiment series, Riesman, David, 148 pleasures of, 135 93–94, 97 The Riverdale Press, 252 Paris duration of shock in, 98 Rochat, Francois, findings of, arrondissements Human Relations article 104–105 (administrative sectors) about, 130 Rogers, Everett M., 144 of, 208 purpose of, 217 Rokkan, Stein, 33 move to, 48 Psilocybin, 213 Rommetveit, Ragnar, 33 return to, 201 Psyche, interior of, 218 Rosenthal, Robert, 153 Parsons, Talcott, 17, 23, 136 Psychiatric patient, letter to, Ross, Lee, 221, 283 Participants 223 Rostand, Edmond, 238 anger of, 116–117 Psychologese game, 192 Rudeness, as rite of passage, demand characteristics of, Psychological Review, xix 190 119 Psychology of Personality class, distress of, 115 15 Sabbatical, 246 follow-up survey of, 125 Psychology of Photography and mastering of PC during, 249 Patterns of Prejudice journal, 199 Film class, 227 Sabini, John, 177–178 INDEX 367

Saltzman, Ann, 284 Internet version of, 286 Sorbonne, 12, 204 Santayana, George, 22 Milgram’s description of, Psychology Laboratory at, 50 Sartre, Jean Paul, 206 145 Sprague, Eleanor, 25, 29 Schachter, Stanley, 237 Nature and, 285 Spuyten Duyvil railroad station, School Award in Political origins of, 144 178 Science, 11 Psychology Today article SSRC (Social Science Research Science, 169–170, 286 about, 285 Council), 32, 34 Science Digest, “Could We Be publication of, 146 Completion of Doctoral Nazi Followers?” in, 159 “Six Degrees of Separation:” Dissertation Fellowship Science Observer, 9 play about, 1285 of, 42 Scientific American, 260 small-world method and, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 121 Scientific method v. 145 Stanford Prison Experiment, filmmaking, 227 Smith, Chas, 255 289 Seine River, 209 Snail analogy, 232 Stanford University, 283 Selfhelp Community Services, Social influence “The Stanley Milgram Sasha works at, 248 smoking cessation group Experiment,” (off- Senate Internal Subcommittee, example of, 225 Broadway performance), 232 Social psychology 262 Shaffer, John, 46 Allport, Gordon, pioneer in, State University of New York Sharansky, Natan, letter to help 17–18 (SUNY), Buffalo, 156 free, 256 American, xix Stein, Gertrude, 22 Shatner, William, 229 attempts at sinking, 119 Sternberg, Saul, 48 Shaver, Kelly, 239 behaviorism and, xx Stone, Phillip, 147 Shenk, David, 287 creative claim of, 228 Strip-search hoaxes, 296–298 Sherman, Vincent, 195 crisis of confidence in, 119 Strogatz, Steven, 285 Milgram’s letter to, 195–196 definition of, xviii Students, devotion to, 191 Shock machine/generator, first experiment in, xviii Subject(s) simulated, 67, 68, 69 four films made on, 224 as accessory, 217 Buss’s, 111–112 growth of, 118 aversion felt by, 103 Buss’s v. Milgram’s, 112 Milgram’s expansion of, bind of, 219 buzzing sound emitted by, xxiii–xxiv, 289 empathy felt by, 106 79 mindlessness concept and, excerpts of dialogue with, 91 description of, 78–79 186 hostility expressed by, 218 improvement of, 78 Ph.D. program in, 14 increased nervousness by, 88, schematic diagram of, 80 as theater, 264 122–123 Shotland, R. Lance, 193 Social Psychology, xx instructions given to, 83–92 Sibley, Elbridge, 34, 42 Social Relations psychiatric evaluation of, 127 Silver, Maury, 177 definition of, 18 refusal to continue by, 85, 104 Singapore, 141 “golden age” of, 20 responsibility to, 70–71 Situationist philosophy of, 147 rules reminder by, 107 definition of, xxiii Social rules, invisibility of, 173 self-exclusion alternative for, perspective, 290 Social Science Research 130 Six degrees of separation, xxiv, Council. See SSRC stubborness on part of, 106 285 Social-personality program treatment of, 127 Brando, Marlon, and, 287 film classes offered via, Sullivan, Walter, 122 Six-Day War, 155 227 Sunday Times, London, 219 Skiing, 46–47 head of, 231 Svenske Akadamie, Nobel Prize Skinner, B.F., xx Society for the Psychological and, 206 Sleep learning experiments, 26 Study of Social Issues, Small Groups class, 93 program chairman for, Takooshian, Harold, 176 Small-world phenomenon, 137, 221 Catherine Genovese 284–285 Sociolinguistics, 191 Memorial Conference chain-link range in, 288 Sociometry journal, 146 organized by, 251 highly original version of, Socio-Psychological Prize, recollection of Milgram by, 287–288 1964, 130 183, 184–185 368 INDEX

Talmud, xviii shortcomings of, 194 Victor Lyon residence, 49 Tappan Zee Bridge, 163 uniqueness of, 195 Vietnam War, opposition to, Taylor, Christina, 258 Twelve Angry Men (ﬁlm), 205 233 Teacher-subject, distance visual presentation of, 97 between learner and, 93 University of Berlin, xxi Voice-feedback condition, 95, “The Technique of Mediated University of California, 262 Speech as a Tool in Social Berkeley, 156 Psychology,” 239 University of California, Santa Wallach, Mike, 60 Television and Antisocial Cruz, 156 Washington University, 121 Behavior: Field University of Delaware, 115 Waters, Judith, 182, 185, 191 Experiments, (Milgram University of Iowa, xxi line drawings of, 202 and Shotland), 195 University of Leipzig, xix Watson, John, xix, xx publication of, 203 University of London, Rees, Watts, Duncan, 285 The Tenth Level, 229, 262 Mina, at, 165 We Do What We’re Told Tenure University of Michigan, 36, (Milgram’s 37)-song title, Graustein formula for, 152 158 223, 262 unsuccessful attempt University of Minnesota, 267 Weisberg, Richard H., 271 gaining, 152–155 University of Oslo, 34 Weiss, Avi, 257 Teshuvah, 274–275 University of Paris, 49 Weld, Francis Minot, 245 Thalidomide experiment, 280 University of Pennsylvania, 119 Wellman, Barry, 136 Thematic Apperception Test Sabini, John, of, 177 White, Ralph K., xxi (TAT), 18 University of San Diego, 266 White, Robert, 147 Time, 150 University of Wisconsin, 158 William James Hall, 147 Times of London, 121 Urban psychology research, 167 Williams, John, 76 The Tipping Point (Gladwell), city dwellers v. small-town Winer, Herbert, 116 287 residents and, 169–170, Winter, David, 154 Tito, Marshall, 1 249 Wirth, Louis, 169 Toch, Hans, 148 different nature of, 192 Women Milgram’s collaboration “familiar strangers” concept non-verbal cues and, 226 with, 149 and, 178 obedience and, 216 Today show, appearance on, mental maps component of, World War II, 7 220 170 Writer’s block, psilocybin used Tomkins, Silvan, 156 overload concept in, 169, for, 213 Torah, study of, 257 170, 180 Wundt, Wilhelm, xix–xx Touch-proximity condition, 96 Urban Psychology Through Trans-Siberian Express, 288 Film course, 227 Yale University, 36 Triplett, Norman, xviii–xix U.S. Army academic freedom at, 64 Truth, conformity v., 143 obedience research and, 278 alienation at, 133–134 Tuskegee study, 281 Regimental Combat Team, dissociation of experiments TV violence, aggression’s 115 from, 109 relationship to, 192 U.S. Supreme Court, 266 Harvard v., 63 TV violence study psychology laboratory at, xvii book written about, 195 Vassar College, 136 Yamasaki, Minoru, 147 conclusion of, 194 Milgram, Michele, starts, Yiddish, Milgram’s use of, 8 “Countdown” episode shown 247–248 in, 195 Verneuil, Henri, 262 Zimbardo, Philip, 9 details of, 192–195 Vertical city reserach, 249 Milgram visited by, 111 Persée http://www.persee.fr

Une commune de France, Plodemet

Mona Ozouf

Ozouf Mona. Une commune de France, Plodemet. In: Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations. 24e année, N. 3, 1969. pp. 777-781.

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La Théorie critique des médias de l’École de Francfort : une relecture

La théorie de « critique des médias » issue de l’École de Francfort Pa r Olivier est sans conteste l’une des plus importantes depuis le début Vo i r o l * du XXe siècle. C’est aussi l’une des plus discutées. Quels sont les contours et contenus de cette théorie critique ? Comment appréhender les objections qui lui ont été faites ? Répondant à ces questions, Olivier Voirol montre toute la richesse et la fécondité contemporaine de cette contribution théorique unique.

armi les multiples « théories critiques » des médias qui ont vu le jour au siècle dernier, la Théorie critique de l’École de Francfort P occupe incontestablement une place à part. Avec ses concepts de « perte de l’aura », d’« unidimensionnalité » et surtout d’« industrie culturelle », cette théorie a fait couler beaucoup d’encre et figure souvent en bonne place dans les manuels d’introduction aux théories des médias. Cependant, lorsqu’elle est évoquée, y compris pour souligner son importance, c’est souvent pour pointer ses limites et dénoncer le caractère suranné de sa critique. Force est donc de constater qu’elle n’est plus en vogue de nos jours. Qui saurait se réclamer du concept d’« industrie culturelle » aujourd’hui sans réveiller mille soupçons ? En France, tout particulièrement, où la théorie francfortoise des indus- 1 * Membre du comité tries culturelles a été discutée dès le début des années 1960 , en partie de rédaction de grâce à Edgar Morin et au Centre d’études de communication de masse, Mouvements. elle a éveillé – et continue d’éveiller, jusqu’à aujourd’hui – une certaine 1. Cf. par exemple méfiance, si ce n’est une critique virulente. S’inspirant des travaux de les textes d’Ad o r n o Theodor W. Adorno sur la culture de masse, Morin lui-même n’était pas publiés dans la revue Communications, avare en critiques puisqu’il voyait dans l’approche francfortoise une pers- notamment « L’industrie pective trop homogène excluant toute part de créativité au sein des culturelle », Vol.3/3, « industries culturelles 2 ». À la suite de ces travaux, d’autres sociologues 1964, p.12-18. s’en sont pris à ces recherches sur la culture de masse en critiquant verte- 2. Cf. notamment : ment une approche qui, selon eux, partait d’un concept problématique de E. Mo r i n , « L’industrie culturelle », in L’esprit « masse ». Dans un texte qui a fait date, Pierre Bourdieu et Jean-Claude du temps, Grasset, Paris, Passeron s’en prenaient ainsi à la « massmédiologie » abstraite, plongée 1962, p. 25-46.

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dans un « discours prophétique (…) sur les nouveaux moyens de communication » et succombant à une « vulgate pathétique » 3 . Si cette critique 3. P. Bo u r d i e u & J.-C. Pa s s e r o n , était avant tout adressée à leurs collègues du Centre d’études de commu- « Sociologues des nication de masse, elle atteignait (et égratignait) aussi les tenants de la mythologies et Théorie critique de l’école de Francfort. mythologies de sociologues », in Les Au cours de ces dernières années, la montée en puissance des théories Temps Modernes, 1963, de la réception et des perspectives insistant sur la réappropriation et le n°24, p. 998-1021. détournement des messages par leurs destinataires, l’approche francfortoise des médias a souvent fait office de repoussoir, incarnant, à la limite, tout ce qu’il ne faut pas faire en termes d’étude de la communication et des médias. L’intérêt actuel pour les Cultural studies, longtemps boudées en France, sert parfois de tremplin à une rengaine critique contre l’approche francfortoise des médias et de la culture. Quant aux tenants d’une approche dite « pragmatique » de la critique des médias, ils ont contribué à mettre indistinctement dans le même sac la « critique sans raison » de Bourdieu et de ses partisans 4 avec celle de l’École de Francfort. S’il fallait 4. Cf. C. Le m i e u x , « Une critique sans résumer en quelques lignes les tenants et aboutissants de ces objections raison ? L’approche adressées à la critique francfortoise des médias, on pourrait dire qu’elles bourdieusienne des reposent essentiellement sur trois éléments. médias et ses limites », B. La h i r e (dir.), Le Tout d’abord, selon une objection classique, la théorie francfortoise travail sociologique de aurait exagéré le pouvoir des « industries culturelles » en concevant leurs Pierre Bourdieu, destinataires comme dépourvus de capacité d’interprétation, de réap- La Découverte, Paris, 1999, p .205-229. propriation, voire de résistance. Les énoncés et les images médiatiques seraient « reçus » par les destinataires de la même manière qu’ils ont été conçus du côté de la production – sans que n’intervienne un contexte d’action et d’interaction, un univers culturel propre à un groupe social, une classe sociale, un genre, etc. En cela, cette théorie aurait eu la naïveté de croire que les messages médiatiques se répercutent tels quels dans les expériences des individus, réduits à des sujets passifs et manipulés, sinon mystifiés, par les « industries culturelles ». Puisque cette critique des médias présuppose, croit-on, des institutions médiatiques toutes puissantes et puisque les individus sont vus comme des sujets passifs dénués de toute compétence critique, la Théorie critique serait condamnée à adopter une position « de surplomb » par rapport à l’univers des pratiques sociales. Par le constat unilatéral d’une déposses- sion des sujets, ces théoriciens adopteraient une critique « externe » au point de vue des acteurs sociaux : ces derniers seraient incapables de « voir » par eux-mêmes les conditions d’oppression dans lesquelles ils se trouvent - ce qui exigerait alors une distance théorique capable de « dévoi- ler » cette soumission 5 . Pire, selon cette objection, les tenants de la Théo- 5. J’ai discuté le problème de cette rie critique se placeraient non seulement dans cette posture d’extériorité, posture : cf. « Idéologie : ils se défileraient aussi devant la nécessité de clarifier le point de vue à concept culturaliste et partir duquel s’énonce cette critique. concept critique », in Actuel Marx, n°43, 2008, Enfin, ce qui est le plus souvent reproché à cette Théorie critique des p. 62-78. médias, c’est son caractère « spéculatif », éloigné de la recherche empirique et de la concrétude de l’enquête sur les pratiques culturelles et médiatiques. Selon cette même critique, seul un modèle philosophique et

24 • m o u v e m e n t s n°61 janvier-mars 2010 La Théorie critique des médias de l’École de Francfort : une relecture abstrait permettrait de dévelop- Dans le type de capitalisme per cette critique des médias sans ancrage dans les conditions effec- qui se développe dès le début du tives de réception des biens cultu- XXe siècle, la valorisation rels et médiatiques produits par les industries culturelles, et sans marchande ne se limite plus à procéder à une analyse sérieuse l’échange de la force de travail au des contenus de ces dernières. sein de la sphère économique, elle D’autres objections pourraient être évoquées si nous en avions s’étend désormais aux domaines la place. Toutefois, il ne s’agit, de la « culture ». ici, que de mentionner les grands axes de ces objections afin de les mettre en discussion. Force est de constater que ces critiques font le plus souvent une lecture superficielle, limitée à la lecture de quelques textes épars, sans replacer la critique francfortoise des médias dans son cadre théorique général. Ce modèle de la critique des médias apparaît alors sous une forme particulièrement naïve qui occulte sa profondeur théori- que et sa teneur conceptuelle. Par ailleurs, cette lecture lacunaire n’est pas étrangère au rejet massif dont la théorie francfortoise des médias est victime en France et explique en partie son insignifiance dans la recherche actuelle sur les médias et la communication sociale en langue française. Dans les pages qui viennent, j’aimerais revenir sur cette critique des médias en proposant une lecture différente, notamment en la réinscrivant dans le projet d’ensemble de la Théorie critique, en particulier la version proposée par Adorno. En effet, cette tradition intellectuelle défend à mes yeux une conception originale de la critique de la culture et des médias, qu’on ne peut assimiler aux autres approches critiques des médias (par ex. Bourdieu, Chomsky, Foucault, Gramsci, etc.) sans omettre ses spécifi- cités. À cela s’ajoute le fait que cette critique des médias - contrairement à ce qu’inspire une lecture pressée du fameux chapitre de la Dialectique de la raison consacré à l’« industrie culturelle » 6 - n’est pas donnée « clé en 6. T.W. Ad o r n o & main », à l’image d’un programme théorique cohérent censé se déchiffrer M. Ho r k h e i m e r , « La aisément dans ses formulations générales. Au contraire, ce modèle ne se production industrielle révèle dans sa finesse que lorsqu’on le réinscrit dans le projet d’ensemble des biens culturels », in Dialectique de la raison, de la théorie de la société développée par la Théorie critique. Gallimard, Paris, 1974 À partir de la lecture de ce fameux chapitre de la Dialectique de la (1947). raison, de Adorno et Horkheimer, on peut retenir de cette critique des médias les éléments suivants. (a) Dans le type de capitalisme qui se développe dès le début du XXe siècle, la valorisation marchande ne se limite plus à l’échange de la force de travail au sein de la sphère écono- mique, comme aux temps de Marx, elle s’étend désormais aux domaines de la « culture » (art, médias, connaissance) jusque-là épargnés, en partie du moins, par cette dernière. (b) Cette soumission à la valorisation marchande n’est pas sans conséquences sur le contenu des biens culturels : ce sont leurs « qualités internes » qui se dégradent et s’appauvrissent dès lors qu’ils s’homogénéisent et se standardisent pour devenir des « pro-

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duits comme les autres » sur le marché capitaliste. C’est « à la chaîne » que se produisent des films, des émissions de radio et de télévision, des morceaux de musique à succès, à l’instar de n’importe quel autre produit de consommation de masse. (c) Soumise à la valeur d’échange, la culture est mobilisée à des fins instrumentales : de « finalité sans fin » (Kant), elle devient « opérationnelle », ayant vocation à « servir » certaines finalités. (d) Les médias modernes (radio, télévision, cinéma) ne remettent pas en cause le monde « tel qu’il est » mais le reconduisent dans un conformisme de tous les instants– alors même qu’ils se nourrissent d’une force d’attraction culturelle dont les ressorts reposent précisément sur la distance face à « ce qui est ». (e) Ces mêmes médias produisent des images et des discours qui s’imprègnent dans la conscience d’« individus faibles » et incapables de se les réapproprier de manière critique ; ils ne sont pas - ou plus - à même de résister efficacement aux produits des mass media.

••La critique des médias Telle peut être, résumée en quelques « thèses », la conception de l’industrie culturelle qui est au cœur de la critique des médias dans la Théo- rie critique 7 . Dès lors que ces bases sont clarifiées, il est possible de 7. Je me concentre ici exclusivement sur la décrire de manière plus complexe l’approche francfortoise des médias, théorie de l’industrie pour montrer que les objections auxquelles elle a été soumise n’attei- culturelle d’Ad o r n o gnent que très partiellement leur cible. Cela revient, par conséquent, à & Ho r k h e i m e r , qu’il conviendrait de esquisser les axes d’une autre lecture de cette critique des médias. Pour distinguer des apports ce faire, il convient de prendre en considération trois aspects majeurs de de Benjamin, Kr a c a u e r la Théorie critique, qui échappent à une lecture superficielle : première- e t Ma r c u s e . ment, le fait, on l’a dit, que la critique des médias s’inscrit dans une critique générale de la société et qu’elle n’est pas indépendante de cette dernière ; deuxièmement, le fait que l’accent mis sur la dépossession des sujets sociaux n’est pas basé sur une conception « externe » mais « interne » de la critique ; troisièmement, loin d’être rivée à une conception spécula- tive, cette critique des médias part d’analyses concrètes menées sur les produits de la culture de masse. Je reviendrai dans un instant sur ces trois points. Avant cela, j’aimerais insister sur la forme particulière du schéma théo- rique d’ensemble dans lequel Adorno et Horkheimer placent leur critique des médias. Celui-ci part explicitement du point de vue de l’« intérêt à 8. Cf. M. Ho r k h e i m e r , l’émancipation » : Max Horkheimer définit la Théorie critique comme une Théorie critique et théorie traditionnelle, posture théorique qui, loin de se situer en extériorité par rapport aux pra- Gallimard, Paris, 1974. tiques sociales, prend ancrage dans ces dernières 8 . Selon lui, une théorie 9. Après l’abandon de menant une critique des processus sociaux ne saurait se satisfaire d’une modèle de la praxis posture externe consistant à postuler de manière idéale et extérieure le sociale dans les années monde « tel qu’il “devrait être” ». Au contraire, elle doit partir des prati- 1940, Adorno situera ces potentiels dans ques effectives et des potentialités incarnées en elles, dont on peut ren- la sphère esthétique, dre compte sur le plan théorique du caractère émancipateur. En deux seul « lieu » encore mots, dans le modèle fondateur de la Théorie critique (années 1930), ces susceptible d’incarner les principes d’une potentiels émancipateurs relèvent des forces de la raison, incarnées dans culture émancipée. le processus historique et les pratiques sociales qui le portent 9 . La raison

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se dresse contre l’emprise des mythes, de la nature, des formes traditionnelles d’oppression et invite, à l’inverse de l’idéologie, au contrôle conscient de la collectivité sur elle-même. C’est à cet idéal de la raison que se rattache le projet moderne de la culture émancipée. Selon Adorno et Horkheimer, l’idée de culture est en effet, depuis le siècle des Lumières, liée au principe de la raison éman- cipatrice. Une des conquêtes de la société moderne, au sortir du Moyen Âge, est d’avoir permis une autonomisation de la culture et de l’art, arra- chés aux puissances du religieux et au pouvoir politique. Sous la forme de pratiques artistiques, de modes d’éducation, de produits culturels éman- cipés des tutelles antérieures, tout un domaine que l’on peut comprendre sous le terme de « culture » devient un des lieux effectifs d’expression de la raison émancipatrice. Cette culture attachée à la raison est vue de deux manières : d’une part, comme une pratique immanente, située dans les pratiques sensibles des acteurs – et notamment dans la praxis sociale et dans l’activité esthéti- que ; d’autre part, comme un idéal transcendant, une promesse inscrite « contre ce qui est » et qui contient toujours plus que ce que la pratique peut réaliser 1 0 . C’est cette articulation entre immanence et transcendance 10. T. W. Ad o r n o , qui permettra, d’un côté, de critiquer, au nom de la pratique, la concep- « Critique de la culture tion bourgeoise de la culture et de l’art comme sphère culturelle idéale et société », in Prismes, coupée du monde pratique 1 1 et, d’autre part, de critiquer au nom de la Payot, Paris, 2003, p. 7-23. « promesse de bonheur » non réalisée toute réduction de la culture à la pratique et au monde « tel qu’il est ». C’est dans cette articulation dialecti- 11. Cf. H. Ma r c u s e , « Sur le caractère affirmatif de que que s’inscrit la critique des médias. la culture » in Culture À l’arrière-plan des analyses des membres de l’École de Francfort (de et société, Minuit, Paris, Marcuse à Adorno, en passant par Horkheimer, Kracauer et Löwenthal) 1970. se trouvait sans conteste cette conception de la culture articulée à la Rai- son et à l’émancipation. C’est à l’aune de ce référent qu’ils ont observé la montée des médias et de la culture de masse – apparition de la presse magazine, popularisation du cinéma et de la radio, émergence de la télé- vision, etc. Leurs observations sur les médias et la culture de leur temps, autant que sur les processus politiques, sont fondamentalement gouver- nées par la conviction dans les potentiels émancipateurs de la culture. Cette conviction dans les potentiels d’une culture émancipatrice a donc gouverné leur critique des médias et, surtout, a guidé l’élaboration du concept d’« industrie culturelle ». Ce terme à présent banalisé était un oxy- moron à cette époque : quoi de plus antinomique que la culture et l’industrie ? Autrement dit, le constat revient à dire que la culture est soumise aux modes d’organisation et aux processus instrumentaux caractéristiques de la sphère économique. En suivant les analyses de Georg Lukács sur la réification, les francfortois sont convaincus que le propre de la culture dans la phase monopolistique que connaît le capitalisme dans le premier tiers du XXe siècle, est d’être envahi, au même titre que tous les autres domaines de la vie sociale, par la valorisation marchande et la rationalisation industrielle. Ils ont vu la progression de l’échange marchand dans le domaine de la culture et des médias comme une remise en cause,

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sinon une destruction systématique, du processus historique d’émancipa- tion par la raison et la culture moderne. Selon eux, si le marché, dirigé contre les mécanismes traditionnels de dépendance et de tutelle liés à des rangs sociaux, avait ouvert, à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, un espace culturel libéré des tutelles du religieux et du pouvoir, il s’est entre-temps trans- formé en pure mystification. Le rapport marchand est un principe d’oppression qui masque la profondeur des rapports sociaux et réinstalle les individus dans des relations obscures 1 2 . Parce qu’il masque le fondement 12. S. Kr a c a u e r a été le premier à formuler du rapport social sur lequel il s’appuie, le rapport marchand contribue à cette idée dans sont la réémergence d’une relation mystifiante au réel et d’un « rapport social texte, « L’ornement d’aveuglement » (Adorno). de la masse », in L’Ornement de la masse, La culture moderne, qui porte en elle-même une promesse d’émancipa- ed. par O. Ag a r d , La tion et de liberté extérieure à la valorisation capitaliste et à tout rapport Découverte, Paris, 2008, instrumental, devient donc le socle de processus marchands et industriels. p. 60-71. C’est à ce type de critique que sont soumis les médias : à des fins commerciales, ils font mine de réaliser un projet culturel qu’ils contribuent dans les faits à miner. On produit des séries télévisées comme on fabri- que des savonnettes ou des voitures, selon une gestion industrielle gou- vernée par la rationalité instrumentale. Selon Adorno et Horkheimer, on assiste, notamment par le biais de l’industrie culturelle, à un détourne- ment de la culture et un retournement du processus d’émancipation en son contraire. Ce processus atteint la culture non pas de manière superficielle mais dans son contenu même. Adorno le disait dans un texte pré- coce consacré à la « régression de l’écoute 1 3 »: le fait de soumettre la 13. T. Ad o r n o , Le fétichisme en musique et musique à la valorisation marchande a une portée sur les « qualités inter- la régression de l’écoute, nes » de cette dernière et sur le type d’expérience esthétique permise aux Allia, Paris, 2008 (1938). auditeurs. La musique marchande s’offre facilement à l’écoute pour être plus vendable, elle fait dans l’effet et la figure de style – notamment sous la forme d’arrangements – pour compenser en surface ce qu’elle ne donne plus en profondeur, en termes d’expérience musicale. Adorno a accordé une attention particulière aux qualités internes des œuvres musicales et aux produits médiatiques dont l’étude ne doit, à ses yeux, être découplée de celle des processus sociaux. Il refuse en effet de prendre comme unique point de référence l’expérience de réception des destinataires de produits médiatiques sans relier cette dernière aux contenus culturels qui sont au fondement de cette expérience 1 4 . Et c’est notam- 14. C’est là un des points de discorde entre ment parce qu’Adorno prend en considération la « relation » entre ces Ad o r n o et La z a r s f e l d différentes instances qu’il ne veut occulter la valorisation capitaliste appli- dans le Princeton Radio quée à la culture. Son approche s’appuie fondamentalement sur le concept Project, qui entraînera le départ d’Adorno de ce de « médiation » pour rendre compte de la manière dont processus socio- dernier. économiques et contenus culturels s’interpénètrent de manière complexe, selon des modalités qu’il est néanmoins impossible de définir a priori 1 5 15. Je me permets ici de sans un examen rigoureux des contenus culturels . renvoyer à mon texte : Cette approche de la relation entre les qualités internes des biens cultu- « Médiations et Théorie rels, l’expérience culturelle des sujets et les processus socio-économi- critique », in Réseaux, n°148-149, 2008/2-3, ques, s’ajoute également un ensemble de considérations sociologiques p. 47-78. issues de la recherche empirique, qui contribuent également à saisir la

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teneur de cette expérience possible. Adorno est convaincu que cette expérience culturelle, à l’instar des contenus culturels, doit être ramenée à l’expérience sociale des individus dans les conditions du « capitalisme monopolistique ». Un des constats majeurs dressé par les Francfortois est que l’expérience de la réception des contenus médiatiques ne saurait être examinée en elle-même et doit être reliée aux processus de formation des individus. Or, selon le constat dressé par les membres de cette « École » dès le début des années 1930, à la suite d’une grande enquête consacrée aux mutations de la famille et de la formation de la personnalité, les Un des constats majeurs dressé sujets modernes sont de plus en plus dans l’impossibilité de déve- par les Francfortois est que lopper un soi « fort » et une auto- l’expérience de la réception des nomie personnelle. Inspirée par la psychanalyse, cette enquête mon- contenus médiatiques ne saurait tre que ces derniers, inscrits dans être examinée en elle-même et un processus de socialisation et doit être reliée aux processus de de construction de soi (disparition de la figure du père indépendant formation des individus. dans une famille éclatée soumise au capitalisme de la grande industrie) qui leur ôte toute possibilité de se confronter à des instances d’autorité immédiate, tendent à se soumettre à des instances d’autorité secondaires (partis politiques, institutions, État, leaders politiques et religieux, etc.). Là encore, on comprend le lien entre ce diagnostic et la critique des médias : loin de prétendre que les médias modernes sont tout-puissants « en eux-mêmes », cette approche vise à comprendre les transformations sur le plan des rapports sociaux, de l’économie et de la culture qui contribuent à l’apparition de sujets disposés à s’en remettre sans résistance à des institutions puissantes dont font partie les médias. Autrement dit, les considérations sur la réception proprement dite sont réinscrites dans une série de processus qui ne concernent pas directement les médias mais qui informent le type de rapport que les sujets sociaux entretiennent avec eux. Par conséquent, il s’agit moins, pour la Théorie critique, de pointer la toute-puissance des médias que d’identifier les processus qui font des sujets modernes des « individus faibles », n’ayant d’autre recours que de s’en remettre à des institutions dont les orientations leur échappent.

••Renouveler la critique des médias À partir de ces remarques, il est possible de revenir sur les objections évo- quées plus haut, adressées à l’approche francfortoise des médias, en mon- trant comment elle est largement en mesure de leur donner réponse. Premièrement, face aux objections postulant l’absence d’activités inter- prétatives des sujets sociaux du côté de la « réception », on a en réalité affaire à un modèle complexe qui inscrit la critique des médias non seulement dans un examen général de la société - en particulier des processus

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de socialisation et de la formation des sujets sociaux -, mais qui appré- hende également les « médiations » entre contenus culturels, expériences des sujets sociaux et processus socio-économiques. Fidèle au projet de la Théorie critique qui entend saisir les transformations historiques et les processus sociaux en les appréhendant comme des modes de manifestation de l’ensemble sociétal (grâce à une démarche interdisciplinaire), ce modèle critique insère l’étude des médias dans un diagnostic de la situation historique et la relie à une analyse impliquant l’ensemble des institutions sociales – notamment l’évolution du capitalisme et le devenir de l’individu. On pourrait ajouter à cela que cette étude ne peut être formu- lée de manière spéculative et qu’elle implique le recours à la recherche empirique. Cette critique des médias se caractérise donc par sa capacité de réinscrire les processus culturels et les institutions médiatiques dans un ensemble sociétal qui les dépasse largement. Ce qui a pour conséquence, d’une part, que l’on ne peut critiquer les évolutions que prennent les médias modernes en les détachant du contexte socio-économique et politique dans lesquels ils sont inscrits et, d’autre part, que le rapport que les sujets sociaux entretiennent avec les contenus culturels doit être appré- hendé dans ce tout. Deuxièmement, au vu de ce qui a été dit plus haut, on comprend que les objections dénonçant la critique francfortoise des médias comme critique « de surplomb », extérieure à l’univers des pratiques sociales, au profit d’une posture d’extériorité, et d’une critique se défilant devant la clarification de son point de vue, n’est pas tenable. Les penseurs de Francfort défendent au contraire une conception selon laquelle il n’est possible de poser un constat critique sur une réalité sociale donnée que si l’on dispose d’un point de référence pré-théorique dans les pratiques sociales elles-mêmes. On est loin de l’idée selon laquelle ces penseurs se contenteraient de dénoncer de manière spéculative l’aliénation et la perte d’individualité des êtres humains dans le monde moderne Cette critique des médias se sans jamais fournir le point de caractérise par sa capacité de vue interne aux pratiques sociales à partir duquel cette critique réinscrire les processus culturels s’énonce. Pour mener à bien leur et les institutions médiatiques critique de la culture médiatique, Adorno et Horkheimer disposaient dans un ensemble sociétal qui les bien d’un référent critique inscrit dépasse largement. dans le principe moderne de la Raison et de la culture émancipa- trice. S’ils se sont livrés à la critique des médias modernes, c’est parce que ces derniers ne participent plus selon eux de cet idéal et tendent à le pervertir, pour enfermer les êtres humains dans une irrationalité mythologique et leur ôter toute capacité d’agir de manière autonome. Enfin, la troisième objection, celle qui s’en prend au caractère spéculatif de la critique francfortoise des médias, ne tient pas tant cette dernière est

30 • m o u v e m e n t s n°61 janvier-mars 2010 La Théorie critique des médias de l’École de Francfort : une relecture

ancrée dans une analyse « interne » des qualités cultuelles. Cette critique des médias part en effet d’analyses concrètes sur les médias et la culture de masse. L’insistance sur les relations entre les processus socio-économi- ques et les contenus culturels pourrait certes laisser croire que ce modèle de critique des médias se contente alors d’en déduire mécaniquement des contenus culturels produits par ces derniers. On trouve ce type de causa- lité dans certaines approches relevant de l’économie politique de la communication, qui tendent à tirer un lien de causalité direct entre le type de structure économique et sociale dans lesquelles sont produits les discours médiatiques et la structure sémantique de ces derniers. Une des subtilités supplémentaires de la critique francfortoise des médias est précisément de se distinguer de ce modèle mécaniste postulant une relation immédiate entre contenus culturels et processus socio-économiques, modèle qu’elle considère comme simpliste 1 6 . Elle refuse un lien de causalité directe au 16. Cf. entre autres, profit d’un examen interne méticuleux des contenus culturels, des messa- Theodor W. Adorno, ges, de la musique commerciale, des propositions linguistiques, etc. Introduction à la sociologie de la musique, Ed. Contrechamps, ••Conclusion Genève, 1994. La critique des médias menée par la Théorie critique se distingue des autres théories critiques des médias en vertu de l’articulation originale qu’elle propose entre les dimensions dégagées ici. C’est parce que la critique des médias n’est pas découplée de la critique de la société que cette approche a souvent fait l’objet de mécompréhensions et d’objections faciles - parce que les textes de critique des médias sont lus comme des contributions particulières à un domaine spécifique déconnecté du diagnostic d’ensemble, laissant croire à une certaine naïveté dans le postulat d’une toute puissance des médias de masse. Si la complexité de cette critique des médias en fait une contribution unique aux théories critiques des médias au XXe siècle, ce sont ces mêmes qualités qui rendent difficile sa réactualisation. Dès lors que cette critique des médias s’inscrit à la fois dans une conception de la culture comme émancipation et dans une compréhension des principales mutations socio-économiques de l’époque (modèle de capitalisme, formation du sujet, famille, etc.), elle implique un cadre théorique particulièrement exigeant et, du coup, difficile à réactualiser. On peut, à juste titre, discuter longtemps de la pertinence d’adapter cette critique aux formes contemporaines de la culture et de la communication médiatiques ; on peut aussi discuter, au vu des mutations récentes de la culture et des médias de communication, de la pertinence actuelle du concept d’« industrie culturelle », développé à un moment (au milieu du XXe siècle) où les médias n’étaient pas ce qu’ils sont aujourd’hui. Si le contexte historique et les médias qui nous environnent sont indéniablement différents de nos jours, ce modèle critique ne saurait être repris sans modifications. Cependant, à mon sens, ses principales articulations conceptuelles gardent leur actualité. Pour être ajustée au monde contemporain, cette critique des médias doit néan- moins répondre à une série de défis, notamment celui de se situer par rapport à la « révolution numérique » de ce début de XXIe siècle.

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Pour finir, je me contenterai d’évoquer quelques enjeux de cette réac- tualisation. Tout d’abord, elle implique une approche qui décloisonne l’étude des processus de communication en réinscrivant ces derniers dans l’ensemble des processus sociaux (formation des sujets contemporains, modèle de capitalisme actuel, rapports entre culture et économie, etc.). Une telle perspective doit être à même de comprendre les processus sociaux qui contribuent à l’émergence de « sujets critiques et autonomes » dans leurs pratiques d’interprétation des médias et de la culture. Ensuite, elle suppose de disposer d’un « référent pratique » offrant un point de repère normatif et préthéorique permettant, d’une part, de concevoir des formes émancipatrices de créations culturelles et d’autre part, de mener 17. C’est le projet du une critique systématique de ce qui contribue à les oblitérer, les empê- groupe de recherche cher ou les détruire. Cela implique une évaluation de la portée contem- sur la culture et les médias que je poraine du concept classique (émancipatoire) de culture – qui donne sur coordonne à l’Institut bien des aspects une impression d’essoufflement. Enfin, il convient de für Sozialforschung disposer d’une méthodologie permettant une « analyse interne » des pro- de Francfort, qui porte en particulier sur les duits médiatiques et des biens culturels, capable en même temps de relier mutations actuelles cette analyse à des processus « externes ». On comprend aisément l’im- de la télévision et de mense défi et la difficulté que représente une actualisation de cette criti- la culture numérique (http://www.ifs.unique des médias pour les recherches actuelles s’inspirant de la Théorie frankfurt.de). critique 1 7 . Un défi qui mérite néanmoins d’être relevé. •

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