Several days after we'd heard the terrible news, Robert Merton, Al's former teacher and one of his closest friends, said that A1 deserves the honor of an adult obituary by which he meant: no artificial sentiment; no ignoring the rough spots. Surely Merton was right. We who have sat with A1 in this room and ones like it all over the world, could hardly do him justice by remembering only his heroic qualities, ample though these were. In the course of an evening with A1, it was not uncommon to witness, at one moment, his famous and awesome rage, then, at a later moment, to be comforted by his uniquely reasonable and strong tenderness. In words he himself used in one of our last conversations, A1 did indeed "have a big mouth". No less, he had an enormous and subtle heart. If the former sometimes made life difficult for him and for us, the latter, guided by that remarkable mind, made life with him rich and valuable.
It is true also that few men shared his ability to exemplify in their writing what they experienced in person. This is not to say that Al's intellectual labor was, in any sense, a mere reflection of his private life. Hardly this. What A1 did, however, was to live with and think coherently about the dialectic of social life. Hence, a life of writing about the contradictions between death and immortality, classicism and romanticism, ideology and technology, scientific sociology and critical marxism, and finally, between the two traditions of marxism itself-between the intellect and politics.
It was certainly not the historic accident of Weber's visit to St. Louis that caused A1 to choose Max Weber's name for his chair at Washington University. It was, just as much, Weber's style and substance. As many will recall, Al wrote of Weber as the minotaur, half-Lutheran classicist, half-Nietzschean romantic; that is: half-head, half-heart. Like Weber, and not incidentally like
We share these personal remarks with those who could not be with us. Theory and Society will publish a special issue on Alvin W. Gouldner in the near future.