Lewis Feuer, A Centenary Appreciation
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Lewis Feuer, A Centenary Appreciation John Rodden
Published online: 25 October 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012
Of Sociology and the Intellectual Life This year marks the centenary of Lewis S. Feuer’s birth— and I regret to say that it will probably pass unnoticed outside this journal’s pages. If so, that is both regrettable and unjust. For more than a decade, from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, Feuer was regarded as the leading left-wing sociological theorist in North America. His work combines innovative theoretical perspectives with powerful, highly original methodological approaches, resulting in major studies in the sociology of philosophy and science, the history of ideas, the sociology of ideology, the sociology of generations, and the sociology of imperialism, among other fields of scholarship. Those are only a selection of his disciplinary interests as a sociologist and intellectual. In fact, Feuer’s oeuvre is so diverse and encompassing that it is likely to appear mind-boggling, if not somehow suspect, to many present-day disciplinary specialists. Feuer’s work is distinguished by a commanding knowledge of social history and the history of ideas. Of the influences on Feuer’s work as a historian of ideas, Arthur O. Lovejoy above all inspired him. Feuer’s contribution to that subfield is most evident in three landmark studies: Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism (1958); The Scientific Intellectual (1963); and Einstein and the Generations of Science (1982), along with dozens of scholarly articles. Best characterized as a sociology of ideas grounded in general history, Feuer’s sociology of knowledge represents an epistemology of diverse theoretical concepts in the sciences and social sciences (e.g., Einstein’s theory of relativity and Freud’s psychoanalysis). J. Rodden (*) 118 Beautybush Trail, Georgetown, TX 78628, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Born in December 1912 in New York City, Lewis S. Feuer was educated at City College of New York, gaining his B.S. degree in 1931 at the age of eighteen. 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, completed under the direction of Alfred North Whitehead, was entitled The Philosophical Analysis of Space and Time. Feuer remained philosophically inclined throughout his life, but his primary identity became that of a sociologist. Proceeding against the grain of mainstream sociology, however, his thinking was always different, even iconoclastic. In an intellectual career that spanned almost 70 years, Feuer produced a rich and distinctive sociology that deserves to be reconsidered and extended in new directions.
Mind as Passion I first met Lewis Feuer at Virginia, where I audited his classes, initially as a Ph.D. student and subsequently as a junior professor. I was deeply impressed by his fascinating lecture courses on the history of Marxism and on the sociology of Marxism and neo-Marxism. Feuer possessed not only a sophisticated theoretical intelligen
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