Aristide R. Zolberg, 1931–2013

Abstract

Aristide R. Zolberg, 1931-2013 HAVING EXPERIENCED THE FRAGILITY of life at an uncommonly early age, and having been granted the opportunity to seize life as a result of the foresight of his parents and the courageous kind­ ness of strangers in Occupied Belgium, Aristide Zolberg’s adulthood excised ghosts and pursued decency with a rare clarity of purpose. Living with a special kind of urgency to the very last, Ary embraced the chances he nearly did not possess. Arriving in the United States with French, not English, as his primary means of communication, he soon was launched as an undergraduate at Columbia and he met a remark­ able Vienna-born Hunter College student, Vera Lenchner, whom he would go on to marry. He experienced Army service in Texas during the Korean War and pursued African studies as a Master’s student at Boston University and as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, where he earned a PhD in 1961. He taught briefly at the University of Wisconsin, then for a long stint back at Chicago at just the moment when the interdisciplinary Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations had been established by a group that included Clifford Geertz, Edward Shils, and David Apter. Ary began an even lengthier capstone experience when he was recruited to the New School for Social Research in 1983, where a decade later he founded the International Aristide R. Zolberg xix Center for Migration, Ethnicity, and Citizenship, which connected deep research with policy ambitions. This latter period was marked by the enlargement of his family as his children Erica and Daniel each married, and by the joys of being a father-in-law to Allen and Brenda and a grandfather to Max, Leo, and Mika. Ary was the veiy first person I approached about moving to the New School when I agreed to leave Chicago to become Dean of the Graduate Faculty. More than any person I knew, he articulated the experiences, values, and intellectual project of the University in Exile tradition, which combined normative purpose, theoretical invention, historical imagination, and empirical precision. By then, in midcareer, his writing had already probed moments of great change and expec­ tation followed by the imposition of constraint, most notably in the study of postcolonial African new nations in two landmark books of political science and political ethnography, One Party Government in the Ivory Coast (1964) and Creating Political Order: The Party-States ofWestAfrica (1966). He also pursued this set of themes in the France of 1789, 1848, and 1968, and in the dynamics of working-class history in Europe and North America. To these and to later projects—especially his profound writing on cultural pluralism, ethnicity, and the sweep of human movement—Ary brought a sustained commitment to comparative historical scholar­ ship and an ability to mobilize materials from several disciplines. Any person who engages with his stunning work on European state forma­ tion, on ethnic, linguistic, class, and cultural diversity, on the pattern­ ing of identity, on methodology in macroanalysis, and, most famously, on immigration and refugees will recognize a rare ability to deploy wide-ranging resources and to utterly change both scholarly and public conversations. His commanding 1989 book, Escapefrom Violence: Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Modem World, and his august 2006 volume, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning ofAmerica, have been field-defining, in part by demonstrating the power of political analysis that foregrounds relationships, patterns of exchange, and systems of mutual influence across frontiers. xx social research Like so many others, my life was enriched by encounters with Ary. Whether crafting a book together on working-class history at his or my kitchen table in Hyde Park, or hearing him debunk cant at depart­ mental meetings at more than one institution, or sharing a hora at our children’s weddings, or experiencing his bracing teaching at seminars we co-taught at the New School, or remarking on the tenuous dimen­ sions of freedom at family Seder gatherings that spanned four decades, or simply discussing the day’s news, the powers of Ary’s mind and personality, combining loving warmth with fierce convictions, envel­ oped...