Howard Becker, an American sociologist, died last year at age 95. I knew him slightly, by mutually appreciative emails. He liked my book on writing from the University of Chicago Press, and I liked his. Both of us recommended a style like another hero of ours, George Orwell: no nonsense.
Becker grew up as a secular Jew in Chicago, went to the University of Chicago, and became a world leader in qualitative sociology. No statistical nonsense. When in middle age he was offered a fellowship for a year in Brazil, he learned Portuguese, well enough to give lectures in it. It stuns your monolingual, gringa reporter. She has studied many languages, but without much result.
But a bigger reason to admire Howie is his humane view of society. His namesake, the economist Gary Becker (1930-2014, no relation) viewed society as a collection of inhumane American jerks, each focused on “maximizing [his] utility.” It’s hardly a society at all. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) viewed society as “fields” in which snobbish, proudly Enlivened, Frenchmen, also jerks, established their superiority, say, knowing who composed The Well-Tempered Clavie. It’s a society of hierarchical aggression.
Howie’s view was what he called a “world.”
The metaphor of “world”—which does not seem to be at all true of the metaphor of “field”—contains people, all sorts of people, who are in the middle of doing something which requires them to pay attention to each other, to take account consciously of the existence of others and to shape what they do in the light of what others do. In such a world, people … develop their lines of activity gradually, seeing how others respond to what they do and adjusting what they do next in a way that meshes with what others have done and will probably do next…. The resulting collective activity is something that perhaps no one wanted, but is the best everyone could get out of this situation and therefore what they all, in effect, agreed to.
It is the true liberal society, imagined by Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Hayek. Improvisation is like that, says the jazz and classical trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. It’s not surprising to learn that Becker himself was from age 14 in Chicago a part-time but paid jazz pianist, and that his first book was about jazz musicians. Improvisation, with its resulting spontaneous order in a Howie-Beckerian “world” is similar to the liberal outcome promised by humane economists, and detested by statist economists, some of who think they are humane but are not.
And it’s the liberalism, too, of the best of Becker’s U.S. secular Judaism—Old Jews Telling Jokes (go to that website, you gentiles). It’s amused, scholarly, self-deprecating, tolerant—yet indignant against injustice, Abel Meerapol composing “Strange Fruit” for jazz singer Billie Holiday to end every performance with, willing to march peacefully to overturn racism, and willing to get beaten by the police.
Lula and Bolsonaro, Harris and Trump, and especially their uncritical supporters, need Howie.
Weekly column in Folha de São Paulo, Brazil
Translated into Portuguese for the newspaper.
Deidre, I have taught my econ students something about writing as best I can for 30 years using your little book as the text. You taught me to write, a debt I cannot repay. I have just today discovered your Substack. I celebrate. Thanks for the eulogy for Howie Becker, a man I'm confident I would have liked very much but never heard of in my parochial journey through social science.