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Ruth Rosner Kornhauser: A Personal and Intellectual History
Anne M. Kornhauser
That there would be a book in honor of my mother's contribution to the study of crime and delinquency, I never would have imagined. For a festschrift, let alone a posthumous one, to come to fruition all the stars must be perfectly aligned. In this case, one of those stars, and the one that intrigues me above all given my own field of specialization, is that among those most appreciative of my mother's scholarship are a small group of scholars, including the editors of the present volume, who maintain an interest in the intellectual lineage of criminology. They are, in effect, the intellectual historians of their discipline.1
As an intellectual historian myself, I am especially attuned to the importance of marking and understanding scholarly contribution and intellectual influence. As my mother's daughter, I am delighted that an academic community has chosen to make her the subject of such an endeavor. This essay will be short so that we may turn our attention to the real experts, those who can further elucidate the significance of my mother's ideas. Here, through a combination of applying my craft and appealing to my memory, I will try to shed light on a mother, a scholar, and a person whom most criminologists working today are unlikely to have known of, let alone knownâa person from a small town in upstate New York who, with only a few scholarly works to her name, made a big impact.
Beyond offering a few personal reflections on some lesser-known aspects of my mother's thinking and intellectual temperament, it is on this issue of impact that I wish to focus. For the non-criminologist, that impact is difficult to perceive. From an outsider's vantage point, Social Sources of Delinquency (SSD) stands as a relatively unheralded technical contribution to a specialized field of knowledge. For the insider, especially for the subset of sociologists and criminologists interested in criminological theory, SSD is considered âa classicâ and remains an authoritative, if not always accepted, text. Hence it is not surprising that when Francis Cullen first contacted me on February 17, 2010, he wrote in an e-mail message, âI suspect that you knew already that your mother was an important figure in criminology.â In fact, I did not. I recognized that her book was significant and well-received, but that it had field-defining intellectual influenceâI had no idea.
There were several reasons for my ignorance. Some concern the nature of scholarly texts and intellectual resonance and others are of a more personal nature. Of the latter, perhaps the most important is that my mother's book was published after she left the profession. There was no conduit, no feedback loop, to bring information to my attention other than my mother herself with whom I did not have many conversations about matters criminological. She did not talk to me much about her work, in part I think because she suspected I would not be interested. Although incorrect, it was a fair assumption: I was a teenager at the time SSD was published and a young girl when it was written. Meanwhile, my father, also a sociologist, spoke often of his intellectual interests and I was aware from an early age of his academic prominence. For these reasons, I grew up thinking of my father as having made a noteworthy professional mark and my mother as a consummate intellectual. She had an equally impressive mind, but my father possessed the more noteworthy academic career, I was led to believe.2 And so I would have continued to believe as would, I think, any observer from outside the sociological discipline, were it not for my contact with Cullen and the newfound attention to my mother's work that he represented.
From the perspective of my discipline, of particular note is why Cullen and others would make this assumption about the notoriety of my mother's scholarship (my personal connections to the scholar in question notwithstanding). By any standard measure an intellectual historian might employ, SSD would not appear to be an especially influential text, except, perhaps, for a short period immediately following its publication. It has been out of print since 1995; it never appeared in a language other than English; it is oft-cited but is not one of the most frequently cited books in its field; and used copies advertised online generally run in the hundreds of dollars, indicating either a paucity of copies available for purchase, a lack of interested buyers, or both.3 Finally, SSD has not shown up in textbooks as a standard bearer of the field by having advanced a âkey idea,â concept, or theory (Pratt, Gau, and Franklin 2011).4 On the other hand, there are numerous reviews of SSD that declare the book essential for anyone studying delinquency, the existence of this volume, and a remarkable statement in Travis Hirschi's introduction to a reissued edition of Causes of Delinquency: âKornhauser's work is considered by some to be the greatest book ever written on crime and delinquencyâ (Hirschi 2009: xi).5
What, then, does constitute intellectual influence and how ought we understand it? Can it be measured empirically, and, if so, how might it be assessed beyond adding up copies sold and citations mentioned? An increasingly common measure of scholarly achievement and effectiveness relies on quantitative indicators such as total scholarly production and the number of citations an author garners.6 Ironically, in the age of the Internet when data collection has become ever easier, âcountingâ may no longer be of much value.
Let me do violence to the empirical by illustrating it with the personal. As I meandered through an enormous crowd at the American Society of Criminology's 2012 Annual Meeting, nametag on my lapel, I noticed that quite a few people homed in on my name. Some asked whether I was related to my mother; others merely smiled. Most curious were the young people who flashed a look of recognition. How would they know my mother's work, which had been out of print for so long? As historians are wont to do, I embarked on a bit of detective work. Confronting one young woman wearing a nametag that I determined meant she was on the job market, I asked whether my name signified anything to her. Of course it did, she replied. SSD, she explained, claimed a spot on the list of mandatory readings for her comprehensive examinations. When I protested that the book was no longer in print, she revealed that her department had supplied its graduate students with a PDF of the entire book. In fact, PDFs of SSD exist in various places and through these replications the text has remained a staple in a number of graduate programs in criminology across the country. So much for relying on the number of books sold and determining whether a book is in print as the sole measures of its significance. What then of qualitative indicators? These, I think, present a more fruitful line of inquiry. The existence of this volume and the ongoing search for my mother's unpublished manuscript of 1963 suggest there is more to SSD than can be measured.
SSD remapped the field of criminology. It crystallized the main points of contention and contradiction in theories of crime causation by carefully dissecting and analyzing the principal assumptions embedded in those theories. It provided a clear path through a thicket of complex and incongruous trends in criminology while arguing for social disorganization as the cause of delinquency. As a card-carrying member of the Chicago School, broadly construed, my mother sought to enhance the scientific rigor of her field. The most important task was to clarify the causal claims to be tested. Until criminological theory achieved logical consistency and identified its operative rules, it could yield little, if any, useful or truthful information. In addition, SSD helped explicate criminology's uncertain relationship to sociology by placing criminological concepts within the broader intellectual contexts of modernization theory and ideas about human nature. Moreover, SSD asked sociologists to rethink a fundamental concept that had informed a great deal of social scientific study since the 1930s: cultural relativism. The problem with cultural relativism, which my mother took on early in her academic career, was that, at its logical extreme, it eviscerated any uniquely human nature and with it the possibility of âjudgingâ the human condition (Kornhauser 1978: 13).7
Finally, perhaps because of its level of difficulty and erudition, SSD influenced disproportionately an elite within the profession, those already masters of their field and those who would become soâthe significant few rather than the less consequential many. This small group of criminologists initiated a kind of disciplinary domino effect, a key result of which is the volume you are holding in your hands (or viewing on the screen). By âdisciplinary domino effect,â I mean, first, that a leading subset of scholars, by grappling with my mother's work, made it central to the study of criminological theory and, by extension, criminology itself. Yet the dominoes fell and the influence of my mother's scholarship grew not just because of who was studying it, but because of how they did so. Scholars such as Travis Hirschi and Robert J. Sampson retrofitted the discipline, giving it a new history in which SSD played a major revisionist role. This occurred not when SSD was first published but years later when the passage of time and the erosion of long-held disciplinary precepts opened up the intellectual space into which SSD could be inserted. This process helps to explain the resurgence of interest in my mother's oeuvre, a process I will elaborate on below. As I can speak with little authority about the substantive reasons for SSDâs intellectual resonance, I shall focus on the form of my mother's influence, the way her work reshaped criminology's self-understanding.
What follows is a genealogy in two keys, though neither is biological in origin. The first might be considered a kind of representational genealogy, the second an intellectual one. The former does reflect the fact that I am my mother's kin, but in a much less tangible way than a biological connection would suggest. I would call it a cultural connection, if I did not know better from having read my mother's work. What links us is a shared sensibility. Drawing on this commonality, I hope I can channel a bit of my mother so that you might get to know the part of her that cannot be captured by scholarly words on a page. In this first genealogy, I can represent my mother, not because we share genetic material but because we happen to be so much alike. I do not mean this affinity is an accident. I do mean that our similarities are unlikely to have been transmitted biologically. One way to illustrate this is to note one of the most memorable things my mother said to me, which was that she liked me very much as a person, not just as her daughter. If she had met me on the street, we would have been fast friends. True to her skepticism of biological explanations for human behavior, my mother was making the point, correctly in my view and in line with social scientific research, that a child's personality need not and often does not reflect those of the child's biological progenitors. The second genealogy I will call reconstructive. In this vein, I will offer a few thoughts about my mother's intellectual trajectory and some of the reasons why her scholarship remains a topic of passionate discussion.
Understanding Ruth Kornhauser: Hard Head, Soft Heart
As I have suggested, there are considerable limitations as to what I can say in either of these genealogical registers, and they are structural. Ruth Rosner was born on December 29, 1926, in Highland Falls, New York, a town near West Point of about 2,500, âincluding the inhabitants of the cemetery,â as my mother once described it, exhibiting her characteristic dry wit.8 Having married my father while they were both studying sociology at the University of Chicago, she moved to Berkeley with him in 1953, when he received a teaching offer at the University of California. I did not come along for quite some time; my mother had me relatively late in life, when she was nearly 38. Then, in December 1975, when I was not yet a teenager and she just shy of her 49th birthday, my mother, as she noted in SSDâs acknowledgments, suffered a severe hemorrhagic stroke that left her paralyzed on her left side and confined to a wheelchair. Although she continued, especially in the early years, to function remarkably well in cognitive terms and lived for almost 20 years longer, she was in crucial ways a person transformed.9 Accomplishing any work-related task became an enormous challenge, beginning with typing, which was now virtually impossible. What little work she did produce after her stroke was invariably handwritten.
As hermeneutics tell us, the interpretation of past texts is always a tricky matterâone of the tricks taking the form of various mediations (temporal, cultural, biographical) that necessarily occur between the writing and reading of the text, the author and the reader. The hermeneutical approach to textual interpretation also counsels against trying to discern the intentions of an author. In my mother's case, an altered brainâin a sense another mediation between the author's intention and the textual resultâmakes such a task all the more perilous. Therefore, the attempt to divine the meaning of anything my mother wrote post-stroke, especially any writing with an emotional valence, ought to be undertaken with the utmost of caution, if at all.
As a result of her stroke and my youth, I did not have the opportunity to experience the full depth and breadth of my mother's unusually incisive mind. Although I caught glimpses of it here and there, it is best described by others close to her. To wit, my grandfather, Arthur Kornhauser, a social psychologist seeking input on a manuscript eventually published as Mental Health of the Industrial Worker (Kornhauser 1965), wrote in a letter to my parents dated July 11, 1964: âYour long thoughtful comments, Ruth, convince me all over again that you should have written this book.â10 One of those comments was that my grandfather should put Merton's views on frustrated aspirations to the test, a suggestion that resonated with the interest in Merton's theories she exhibited around the same time in her unpublished manuscript on criminological theory (Kornhauser 1963). This, among other suggestions, my grandfather noted, added up to an impossible task. Nevertheless, he was so taken by my mother's penetrating critique, he wrote, he would do what he could to incorporate it.
The sharpness of my mother's mind should be evident to anyone who has read her work. But let us probe that mind a bit more deeply to reveal qualities that one might not otherwise think about when one hears the name Ruth Rosner Kornhauser. Were my mother to write her own intellectual autobiography, she might begin as such: âThis is an essay for people with soft hearts and hard heads.â That is how her syllabus portrayed her trademark course on âPoverty and Societyâ; it also happens to describe her perfectly. To those who knew her this combination of hard-headedness and compassion would have been immediately apparent; but it may also be detected in her writings. The syllabus itself manifests a soft heartâan abiding concern for her students and for the course's subject matter. Attached to the syllabus proper were 21 single-spaced pages of âReferencesâ structured to help students with their papers and to supplement their knowledge of topics covered in the course. From her notes, it is apparent that she had read all or nearly all of these citations. Compiling this appendix alone would have taken considerable time, time that someone who was also trying to complete a dissertation and to raise a young child did not haveâbut she was a perfectionist.
More illuminating than the appendix is my mother's own explanation in the syllabus of the heart's role in her course: âWe will seek the knowledge required for effective action, which is the genuine warrant of a compassionate heart.â11 I did not witness this more idealistic side of my mother when I was growing up; she was no activist, as were so many of her academic counterparts during the sixties and seventies.12 She did occasionally muse about how she wished she could change the world, though to what end she did not say. Personally, that compassionate heart was evident throughout my life: she was a terrific and supportive mother who as much as was within her power prioritized my well-being. But I was confronted with the hard head as well. This was a mother who told me as a young teenager when I was fiddling with a fingernail during a meal to âstop performing your ablutions at the table.â I remember that occasion because I had to look up the word âablutions.â
My mother's hard-headedness was most apparent in her scholarship. One can see it in the biting critiques contained in SSD. âIt hits hard. It hurts,â wrote Harleigh B. Trecker in the journal Federal Probation (Trecker 1979: 77). But for Trecker, a professor of social work at the University of Connecticut, these were positive qualities. âFads won't help us [criminologists] or delinquents,â he insisted. âHard-headed research mightâ (Trecker 1979: 77). Not everyone agreed, especially certain purebred academicsâTrecker was a practicing social worker for whom teaching was an additional pursuitâwho felt that SSD was overly critical of several influential criminologists.
As much as it may have âhurt,â SSD had been toned down from earlier versions of the manuscript. One of the anonymous reader's reports for the University of Chicago Press remarked that the manuscript had been rendered âsomewhat more acceptableâ by the editing out of âsome of the more flippant phrasing.â13 Nevertheless, the reviewer continued, âI can appreciate a lively style quite as much as anyone, but I think Ms. Kornhauser has overdone it. It is not so much that the outrage of those attacked will create a sensation as it is that the reader will be detracted from the cogency of her argument by the entertainment value, or the outrage as the case may be, of the exposition.â14 But this form of writing was no bid for attention. It was an expository style that manifested itself throughout my mother's life, in both unpublished and published works. As she wrote in the 1963 paper: âIt is tiresome to accuse the Chicago school of failure to recognize the delinquent and criminal organization and culture since their work is replete with description and emphasis of those very factsâ (Kornhauser 1963: 23). This directness also post-dated SSD; it came th...
