Reinhard Bendix
February 25, 1916 – February 28, 1991
Reinhard Bendix was born in Berlin, the son of Ludwig Bendix. The University of Albany, which holds a collection of Bendix papers, reports that Bendix was a member of an anti-Nazi underground organization. He immigrated to the United States in 1938, where he received undergraduate at the University of Chicago, followed by graduate studies in sociology with Charles Merriam, also at the University of Chicago. His extensive publications included books and articles on Max Weber and Karl Marx, German-Jewish life, bureaucracy, political sociology, and other topics.
Bendix was elected to serve as the 61st President of the American Sociological Association. His Presidential Address entitled “Sociology and the Distrust of Reason,” was delivered at the Association’s Annual Meeting on August 31, 1970 in Washington, DC. Following the meeting, his address was published in the October 1970 issue of the American Sociological Review (ASR Vol 35 No 5, pp 831-843).
Obituary
Written by Neil Smelser, published in International Sociology, 1991.
On February 28, 1991, a few days after his seventy-fifth birthday, Reinhard Bendix died in Berkeley, California. His death was one that is symbolically fitting. On that day he had appeared before a class in political science at the University, in which he reflected on his oeuvre, Kings or People. Immediately after the class he collapsed from a heart attack, was revived by students and taken to the hospital, but succumbed shortly thereafter. With his death, the worlds of sociology and political science lost one of their leading twentieth century figures-a brilliant scholar and honourable heir of Max Weber, whose biography he wrote (1960) and whose works inspired his entire intellectual career.
Bendix was born in Berlin on February 25, 1916. He attended Grunewald Gymnasium in Berlin until 1933 when he was expelled for not giving the Hitler salute. He was able to emigrate in 1938. His B.A. (1941), M.A. (1943) and Ph.D. (1947) were earned at the University of Chicago. He taught three years in the Social Science Division of the College at the University of Chicago, and was an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado for one year before moving to Berkeley in 1947, where he spent the remainder of his career. He taught in the Department of Sociology until 1972 and in the Department of Political Science thereafter. He was thus in the now-thinning ranks of scholars – among the most notable of whom are Erik Erikson, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Hans Morgenthau – who fled the world of Nazism and contributed illustriously to the social sciences in the United States.
Each of these refugee-scholars has a unique life-history, and Bendix’s is one of the most fascinating. His father, Ludwig Bendix, a noted jurist and legal scholar in Berlin, effectively left Judaism and adopted German society and culture in his young years. Despite arbitrary and brutal treatment by the Nazis – which included imprisonment in 1933 and incarceration in the Dachau Concentration Camp later – Ludwig maintained an abiding faith in the possibility of fair treatment through the German legal system, and resisted leaving Germany for years before he was expelled in 1937. His sister emigrated to America in 1939. Reinhard’s parents resided in Palestine for a decade, then moved to Berkeley to spend their last years near their son. Reinhard joined an anti-fascist, socialist protest group, Neu Beginnen, in the years before leaving. The lives of both parents and children were fraught with a kind of tragic marginal triangle involving Judaism, Germany and America. Reinhard’s fascinating dual biography of his father and himself, From Berlin to Berkeley (1986), is sub-titled German-Jewish Identities, and he returned frequently to the theme of marginality in that volume – a theme that characterised his existence in perhaps more ways than even he realised.
Bendix’s scholarly career began with his dissertation, published in 1949, under the title Higher Civil Servants in American Society. It was a study of the social origins of American public officials. Bendix reported that he self-consciously chose an American topic for study, but even in this case he was preoccupied with the contrasts with the German experience. Even though published a second time in 1974, the book appears to have had little influence. His early fame was established mainly by three works in the 1950s. The first was his first major comparative monograph, Work and Authority in Industry (1956), which won the American Sociological Association’s prestigious McIver prize in 1958. It was an exhaustive and insightful account of the use of managerial ideologies in the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and East Germany in their critical transition periods of industrial development. That book revealed and established his quintessential Weberian style, which was to be both extended and deepened in subsequent work. The second was his pioneering and enormously influential Social Mobility in Industrial Society, with Seymour Martin Lipset (1959), which launched a tradition of comparative empirical research on social mobility that continues to the present. The third was the anthology, Class, Status and Power, also with Lipset (1958, 1966), one of the earliest, best, and most influential of that genre of readers’ that flourished in American social science in the 1950s and 1960s.
The three great works in Bendix’s subsequent career were his biographical study, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (1960), Nation-Building and Citizenship (1964, 1976), and Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule (1976). The first, which has become a standard source, stressed Weber’s historical-comparative work on politics and religion and shunned his methodology; in that respect the book can be regarded as something of a polemic against Parsons’ reading of Weber, which highlighted the themes of systematic theory and general methodology. His work on nation-building stands as a unique contribution to the sociology of modernisation, but it both extended and criticised that tradition, which held sway in the 1950s and 1960s. He extended the idea of modern institution-building to periods before the industrial revolution and to the non-Western societies of Japan and India. Also, by stressing the importance of international phenomena of leadership and followership, Bendix ‘internationalised’ the study of development well before the appearance of dependency and world-system theory in sociology. Kings or People stands as the capstone work, a comparative work of enormous scope which traced the uneven and crisis-ridden histories of a wide range of societies that experienced the providential transition from absolutist to democratic rule. Three books of essays and lectures, Scholarship and Partisanship, with Guenther Roth (1971), Embattled Reason (1970, 1988-89), and Force, Fate and Freedom (1984) rounded out Bendix’s work on Max Weber, on the intellectual bases of the social sciences, and on comparative history.
Bendix’s scholarship yielded him a deserved list of medals and honours. He was elected Vice-President and President of the American Sociological Association and Vice-President of the International Sociological Association, and to the American Philosophical Society. The Universities of Leeds, Mannheim and Gottingen awarded him honorary degrees. The University of California awarded him the Berkeley Citation (1986), the equivalent of an honorary doctorate for its own faculty. Throughout the years he was a periodic visitor and fellow at scholarly institutes and centres in Europe and the United States.
In the world of hedgehogs and foxes, Bendix was clearly a fox. He is not known for any one grand approach that he pushed to its limits, but displayed always a kind of disciplined eclecticism, as anyone who is steeped in the complexities of the historical process must inevitably come to. He was a student of social structure throughout, embracing Weber’s structural analyses of organisation, politics and religion, leaving his phenomenological methodology on one side; and he was deeply suspicious of psychological reductionism (Bendix 1952). He was devoutly empirical in his approach, in that he firmly believed and practised the methodology that interpretations of history and society must be grounded in the most careful and painstaking examination of the historical record.
Through these unwavering scholarly commitments, however, is seen a pervasive ambivalence in Bendix’s style, tracing in part to the inspiration for methodological compromise that he inherited from Weber and no doubt in part to his self-professed style of marginality. Evidence of this quality is seen in several facets of his work. He was comfortable enough with the analysis of quantitative empirical materials and pursued this analysis in his dissertation and in his collaborative work with Lipset on social mobility. Yet his preferred style was clearly the careful qualitative and contextual interpretation of comparative materials. As indicated, he was something of an empiricist. At the same time he was sceptical of disembodied positivism. He regarded it as a species of ‘rationalism’ (Bendix 1984 : 6-8) – thereby reflecting the title of an early work on the ‘distrust of reason’ in the social sciences (1951) – and believed that it suffered from an ‘inattention to the historical setting of the search for truth’. He counterposed ‘historicism’ to this species of rationalism, but was not a radical historicist himself, because of his preoccupation with general processes in the arenas of politics and class. His scholarship showed an attention to both rational and irrational ingredients in the social fabric, but he never polemically adopted or rejected either. He forever took that middle road between the analysis of single historical cases and the comparison of aggregated quantitative data, preferring instead the configurational analysis of complexes of social and political forces in a carefully selected number of comparative cases. More generally, he was forever carving out some middle path between the generalising sociological and the particularising historical styles.
Bendix also revealed a kind of ambivalence – bred, too, by a style of marginality- toward his organisational and institutional surroundings. In his early years he rebelled unambiguously against the oppressiveness of fascist Germany in the 1930s. A decade and a half later, however, he did sign the loyalty oath at the University of California, out of a combination of his conviction that it was not comparable to fascism in its gravity and his acknowledged obligations to his parents and his own young family at the time. Bendix was a loyal member and citizen of the Sociology Department at Berkeley, helping to lead it in its golden years of building and serving as its chair between 1958 and 1961. Yet in the 1960s, when the department descended to a morass of embittered political factionalism, that development played a significant role in his decision effectively to leave it and seek a more comfortable home in the Department of Political Science.
For all the mixed qualities of his relations with his father, Bendix inherited from him and practised always the greatest judiciousness and fairness in his intellectual, professional and organisational life. One envied his honesty and his ability to make evaluations with dispassion and without regard to his personal predilections. He valued civility highly, and its virtues were his own.
With respect to interpersonal style, Bendix was a steadfast person – cooperative, loyal to friends, and sympathetic and supportive of younger colleagues and students. With friends and acquaintances he displayed a remarkably rare combination of down-to-earth openness and a certain aloofness. He was intimate with few. The great exception to that rule was his wife, Jane, with whom he was always very close. She is a sensitive, intelligent, practical, and devoted person, who combined her intimacy and support for Reinhard with an independent development of her own considerably literary and artistic talents, which he supported throughout.
At one moment in my early career at Berkeley (which began in 1958), Reinhard was simultaneously a senior colleague, Chair of my Department, my landlord (I rented the house he purchased with reparation payments from the German government), and my neighbour. I frequently teased him about all this, suggesting he set up a company store down the street to complete the circle of paternalism. Despite the multiple pitfalls that might be expected in such a nexus of relationships, Reinhard and I maintained through this period – and in the decades to come – the friendliest, most mutually esteeming, and best-humoured relationship. In 1960 he wrote a touching inscription in a gift copy of his biography of Max Weber that has remained with me: ‘Scholarship can thrive only in a company of equals. In that spirit I hope that we will share many years of collaborative endeavour and that in time to come others will judge the results worthy of an aristocracy of talent.’
Smelser, Neil J. 1991. “Reinhard Bendix”. International Sociology. 6(4):481-485.
