Sociology and the intellectual life: An interview with Lewis S. Feuer

Abstract

Lewis S. Feuer was born in December 1912 in New York City and educated at City College of New York, gaining his B.S. degree in 1931 at the age of nineteen. He entered Harvard University and received his M.A. in 1932 and Ph.D. in philosophy in 1935 at the age of twenty-two. His dissertation, com pleted under the direction of Alfred North Whitehead, was entitled "The Philo sophical Analysis of Space and Time." While Feuer remained a philosopher through out his life, his main identity has been that of sociologist. Yet, in relation to mainstream sociology, his work is decidedly different, even iconoclastic. In an intellectual career that has spanned almost seventy years, Feuer has produced a distinctive sociology that, in our opinion as his former students, deserves to be reconsidered and extended in new directions. In the interview that follows, Feuer discusses many of the themes that concerned him as a sociologist and intellectual. His work merged distinctive theoretical perspectives with rich, unique, and highly original methodological approaches to produce major studies in the sociology of philosophy and science, the history and sociology of ideas, the sociology of ideology, the sociology of generations, the sociology of imperialism, and a number of other topics too numerous to mention. In fact, his opus is so diverse and encompassing that it is likely to appear rather odd to a majority of today's disciplinary specialists.1 There is little in Feuer's work which is not grounded in an expansive knowl edge of history and, especially, of the history of ideas. Of the influences on Feuer's life and work, it was Arthur O. Lovejoy who above all inspired him as a historian of ideas. Indeed, Feuer developed a distinctive sociological approach to the history of ideas. This approach is most evident in three major works: Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism ( 1958), The Scientific Intellectual ( 1963), and Einstein and the Generations of Science (1982) as well as in hundreds of