[lit-ideas] Re: H. Stuart Hughes
- From: David Ritchie <profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2012 12:13:45 -0700
On Apr 5, 2012, at 11:08 AM, Lawrence Helm wrote:
> David,
>
> By a similar token I would be interested in your view of H. Stuart Hughes. I
> was impressed by his Consciousness and Society, bought his The Obstructed
> Path but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet.
>
He and I could not be more different: he was an East Coast Brahmin, served
during W.W.2., taught at Harvard, ran for J.F.K.'s vacated seat in the Senate,
formed a close friendship with Herbert Marcuse, developed a systematic approach
to the problem of how ideas come to be abroad in the world. He judged that
Freud's understanding of how our psyches are formed had merit, and he believed
that exchanges with one's intellectual cohort lead to common assumptions and
tempering. I do not share this background and have nothing original to say on
such subjects. His father's and my grandfather's service in W.W.1 were an
initial, if slight, common bond. He was kind and intellectually catholic, so
there was room in his universe even for my untidy mind. (I use the adjective
"untidy" because he was the tidiest man I ever met. In his autobiography
there's more about toilet training than I cared to read.)
Among the things we shared were an interest in the French--his first wife was
French; I had spent a year on an oral history of resistance in the Vercors--and
a love of "how" questions, particularly, "How did that come to be"? My
subjects tend to be less intellectually lofty than his; I have achieved far
less. I admire "Consciousness and Society," but I have never taught from it.
In an art college one sometimes comes across students who are sufficiently
widely read to tackle the problem of where this set of ideas sits in relation
to that one, but generally it's not that kind of place. His essay, "History as
Art and as Science; Twin Vistas on the Past," is, by contrast, very often read.
I detect no inaccuracies in Wikipedia's entry on him. I was his penultimate
graduate student.
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
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