A Life of Passionate Scholarship
| Author | Thomas Karis |
| Published date | 01 December 2008 |
| Date | 01 December 2008 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0047117808097305 |
A LIFE OF PASSIONATE SCHOLARSHIP 405
A Life of Passionate Scholarship
Thomas Karis
Early in the morning of 26 December 2005, John Herz, as usual, was reading the New York
Times with the aid of a magnifying instrument. When his part-time housekeeper arrived,
he told her that he felt tired, and she suggested that he lie down. After a while, she came
by and saw that he had stopped breathing. He died at 97, one of the most innovative and
far-seeing scholars of international relations during his time. We had been friends and
colleagues for 44 years.
What is distinctive about the long life of John Herz that can inspire budding scholars?
The answer, I think, is the passion that infused his concern about threats to human survival
and the human habitat. The passion was fed by his ‘early revolt’ against human suffering
and injustice. In his work, he was an exemplar of the pragmatic scholar whose application
of intelligence to human problems and public policy was grounded in experience –
experience found in his understanding of history, philosophy and law. He was not a
closet intellectual, but in ways major and minor he sought to infl uence thinking. On his
ninetieth birthday, he described himself as ‘a realist who comes sometimes to pessimistic
conclusions but never gives up looking for solutions’.1
In anticipation of his death, John prepared detailed instructions. He donated his
body to a medical college and instructed that ‘there should not be any religious or other
funeral services’. In March, friends and admirers attended a memorial meeting at the
City University of New York Graduate Center that included music John loved, by Haydn
and Schubert.
His health was generally good. I was amazed at how agile he was, going up and down
the stairs. But his eyesight and hearing were progressively bad. At one of our weekly
lunches, my wife Mary and I talked with a young waitress who was a student. When she
left, John asked: ‘Is she pretty?’ Yes, I said. He replied: ‘What I miss is seeing beautiful
women and hearing beautiful music.’ Sadly, also, for some 20 years, he had been ‘unable
to follow the professional literature because of reading blindness’.
Yet he managed to read the Times and much other material that came his way. He
continued to write and to correspond on substantive issues with friends in Germany. What
was to be envied was the extraordinary acuity of his mind and memory to the very end.
One month before he died, he fi nished writing the foreword to The Security Dilemma:
Fear, Cooperation and Trust in World Politics, a volume dedicated to him.2
Reading the Times evoked his critical sense and the array of his concerns. If occa-
sionally on the telephone he might say, ‘I feel depressed’, I knew he was not referring
to some annoyance or physical affl iction. He was depressed because he had read about
another violation of international law, misconceptions about the crime of terror as a war,
a failure to support family planning and population control, the destruction of the human
habitat, unconcern about nuclear proliferation, some new evidence of disaster in Iraq,
or another failure to raise the minimum wage. Early one morning, when I stopped by,
he omitted greetings and announced that a story in the Times that morning reminded him
of an ominous development during the Weimar Republic.
International Relations Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC, Vol 22(4): 405–409
[DOI: 10.1177/0047117808097305]
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