Appreciating Robert Bellah's Life Project

Abstract

I want to talk a little differently about Bob’s legacy, since my reflections will be the last. They may be somewhat different, and shorter than the others. I want to close our time with some thoughts on Bob’s life as a life-project. Bob asked the biggest intellectual questions we ask. His life project was a distinctively modern one, but we may not immediately recognize it that way. That’s what I want to appreciate with you. I first met Bob when I was writing a dissertation related to one of Bob’s master questions: What makes modern political community possible? I had become interested in the debate about the role of individualism in American culture and its effects on political community. Northern California was a great laboratory for different kinds of political community – and “inquiring minds wanted to know.” My ethnographic inquiry taught me a great deal of what I called personalized politics. This was an individually expressive politics, and yet a politics geared to collective action – for social change, for environmentalism, for the end of nuclear weapons, feminism. So yes, the individualism in American culture could in fact produce a kind of political community. Since Bob was famously critical of the various individualisms and their effects on political community I went to talk to Bob about my research, warily. There was a spicy rumor that went around among grads during that time, which basically said: “If you disagree with Bob, he’ll tear you up into little pieces.” Now: I have no doubt that Bob had the intellectual vigor to do that if he really wanted to. But I never saw him do anything of the sort even when people disagreed with him.