Seymour Martin Lipset (1922-2006)

Abstract

18 MARCH I922 * 31 DECEMBER 2006MARTY USED TO BARK. When I first went to work for him in 1999, at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washing. ton, D.C. (where he was a senior scholar), I remember that he would bark at me from his office whenever he needed something. I was down the hall, and would not always hear him immediately, so he would bark louder. I found this curiously rude at first, but ultimately endearing, perhaps because the apology was rapid: after he barked, Marty would always warm up quickly and flash a broad smile, as if to soothe over any frayed nerves. That was the thing about Marty: he was excitable in the extreme, but a moment later would be asleep while talking, or would have switched from arguing vociferously about socialism to plotting lunch.I worked for Marty for about two years. We labored together for a year and a half on a book project, and then he had a stroke. He suffered the debilitating consequences of that stroke from 2001 until New Year's Eve of 2006, when he passed away.For a year and a half, I had one of the best jobs I will probably ever have. I spent my time reading the literature on democratization and learning about political science in long car rides from Arlington to Fairfax, Virginia, where Marty taught at George Mason University. I used Marty's spacious desk at the Wilson Center when he wasn't there, and got to hear people like Gorbachev and Newt Gingrich speak, then talk about their speeches with him. I spent hours at Marty's house in Arlington, where his doting wife, Sydnee, introduced me to rustic cooking, fine cheeses, and olives. Those were warm and glowing days, full of light and knowledge.It is difficult to get the balance right in telling the story of a man who, like other men, ate and drank and lived among us as an ordinary mortal, but who, at the same time, resided mostly in a world of the mind, a chalet in which the furniture and the victuals were all fashioned from the same smart stuff: ideas. In trying to navigate these two planes of life, I have chosen to focus almost exclusively on this second world. There are several reasons for this, some practical, others principled. To be sure, the practical weighs heavily: I knew Marty well, but only at the end of his life, long after many of the major, this- worldly events and decisions that defined his life had occurred, and their consequences had played out. I can report on these only as well as any halfdecent scribbler with access to the Internet. Indeed, I might even inadvertently propagate errors made by others in retelling these events, since I have no personal knowledge of them.But the principled reasons loom larger: it seems to me that Marty would not have wanted this essay to dwell heavily on the quotidian. His own brief memoir, on which I rely for some of his self-conceptions, spent relatively little time on the banalities of life and, to the extent it did, it is readily available for anyone who wants to read it. The Marty that comes through there, the one I knew, and the one I think he would have wanted to be remembered, was a relentless inhabitant of the territory of the mind. It was in that world that he saw most clearly, and it was there that he was most optimistic about the possibilities for human change and development. I therefore hew closely to that script.Where possible, I insert references to the practicalities of life that I remember and associate with particular moments. But these are sparse, and heavily concentrated in the introductory section you are now concluding. To wit, I wish to end the introduction with a story that encapsulates something about Marty's spirit. It is somewhere between the two worlds in which Marty lived, and reveals his optimism, I think, about both.Marty used to make an outrageous mess of himself when he ate, a trait that was disorienting to those meeting him over a meal for the first time. It was not uncommon for him to hold forth on some important theoretical point with a piece of lettuce dangling from his cheek. …