Lawrence Krader

Lawrence Krader: Intellectual Biography

Lawrence Krader (8 December 1919–15 November 1998) was born and educated in New York City. The son of a Russian-born father and a Viennese-born mother, he grew up with the sounds of German, Russian, and Yiddish in his ears. One of his earliest political experiences occurred at Jamaica High School at Gothic Drive and 167th Street in Central Queens where he lived. He recalls in his memoirs that one of his friends, the son of a communist, tried to convince their history teacher, a Norman Thomas socialist, to attend a communist meeting. Young Krader recalled her defiant words: “I’d be a blind and bloody fool” (p. 4, below).

The City College of New York

This opposition to Soviet Communism under Joseph Stalin would be cultivated during his years at the City College of New York, as a sometime debater in Alcove One of the CCNY cafeteria, along with his schoolmates Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Seymour Martin Lipset, Seymour Melman, Melvin Bellush, Earl Raab, Peter Rossi, and Phillip Selznick, among others. (Nathan Glazer arrived at City in 1941, the year Krader graduated.) As a high school student, Krader evinced a streak of cultural and intellectual sophistication and precocity rare among secondary school students, even then. He recalled arguing with a fellow student about the tempo of the third movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony as conducted by Arturo Toscanini (p. 4 below).

Unlike most of his Alcove One comrades whose families were poor or even in dire straits in those depression years (see the documentary Arguing the World by Joseph Dorman, 1997), Krader’s family was left in comfortable circumstances when his father died at the age of 39 in 1935 from overwork. The family suggested to young Lawrence that he consider attending Columbia or Harvard University, and he recalls being urged by an English teacher and his teacher’s friend, an administrator in the New York City central school administration, both communists, to go to Columbia to study anthropology with Gene Weltfish and Alexander Lesser. However, Krader was attracted to CCNY on account of its general (non-communist) socialist leanings and by the reputation of Morris Raphael Cohen (p. 6, below).

Although his estimation of Cohen and his influence on him was generally positive, he recognized that Cohen was a complicated personality who was feared by his students, toward whom he often acted as an intellectual bully, yet concluded that it was “an excellent thing” to have studied with him (p. 7, below).

In addition to studying logic and the philosophy of science with Cohen, Krader studied Aristotle and ancient Greek philosophy with Abe Edel, modern philosophy—especially the ideas of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Charles S. Peirce and the theory of evolution—with Philip Wiener, and René Descartes and logic with Daniel Bronstein after Cohen’s departure for the University of Chicago in 1939.

Like other students who frequented Alcove One, Krader recalled his occasional participation in debates there in his memoirs2 (pp. 9–11, below). He did not consider himself to have been one of the more regular attendees, although it may be plausibly argued that of all those who were associated in some way with Alcove One in the late 1930s, Krader’s work on Marx and his critique of Marx and Marxism remained the most faithful of them all to the original interests of Alcove One over the course of the ensuing decades.

The University of Chicago

Krader followed Cohen to the University of Chicago, where he met—and for a short time came under the influence of—Rudolf Carnap, an influential member of the Vienna Circle and one of the leading logicians of his day. (Krader once mentioned to Levitt that he had briefly shared accommodations with Kenneth Arrow, a future Nobel laureate from City and a fellow student of logic at CCNY, who also went to study with Carnap around the same time.) But Krader quickly became disillusioned with Carnap’s positivism, resisted his attempts to recruit him for his school, and returned to CCNY in 1940 to complete his undergraduate education (pp. 13–15, below).

Return to the City College of New York

Krader returned to City around the time of the scandal over the appointment of Bertrand Russell to a post at CCNY. (For a comprehensive study of the Russell affair, see Weidlich, 2000.) As the winner of the prestigious Ketchum Award in the history of philosophy (it was also awarded in economics), Krader would have become Russell’s assistant had he in fact arrived at City. However, when the College was barred from hiring Russell, the position was offered instead to Alfred Tarski, a leading Polish émigré intellectual and pathbreaking figure in the field of mathematical logic. At City, Krader worked with Tarski, helping him translate his Introduction to Logic from Polish into English, for which Tarski thanked him in the introduction to the English language edition. Tarski’s arrival at City brought mathematical logic into the Department of Philosophy, although ironically, Emil Post had been teaching it since his arrival at CCNY in 1936 in the Department of Mathematics. Until Tarski’s arrival, however, the philosophers had taught only pre- mathematical logic and even George Boole was not taught there in philosophy until a later time.

With this strong background in the history of philosophy, the awarding of the Ketchum prize along with his work with Carnap and the public acknowledgment of his assistance to Tarski, Krader could expect a glorious career in philosophy and mathematical logic. But he did not pursue this course for several reasons. First, with America’s entry into World War II, Krader joined the U.S. Merchant Marine, where he served on the ultra-dangerous Murmansk Run, obviating the German blockade and bringing arms and ammunition to a beleaguered Soviet army. (Krader once related that his work as a signalman required his attention for less than an hour a day and this gave him a golden opportunity to read the Russian classics during his downtime.3) There were internal reasons, in addition to the exigencies of war, that accounted for his reluctance to pursue a career in philosophy and these related to the increasing degree to which philosophy was being robbed of its subject matter (p. 55, below).

Studies in the Theory of Evolution

In 1940, Krader took a course given by Gene Weltfish, a student of Franz Boas, at Columbia University. He had been leery of Weltfish on account of her communist connections but found nothing of communism in her lectures. (She was later fired by Columbia University and blacklisted on account of her political activism and connections.) As a child in the 1920s, Krader had attended lectures at the Museum of Natural History in New York, where he discovered the evolutionary perspective (p. 20, below). The theory of evolution would be a focal point for him at least until 1963, but it continued to occupy him through the publication of The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx and in those later books he wrote to work out some of the implications of the notebooks in relation to Marx’s legacy. They include: The Asiatic Mode of Production (1973), The Dialectic of Civil Society (1974), Treatise of Social Labor (1979), Die Anfänge des Kapitalismus in Mitteleuropa (1993), The Beginnings of Capitalism in Central Europe (2020), and Labor and Value (2003).

In Noetics (2010), Krader distinguishes between cosmological and biotic evolution on the one hand (which includes the evolution of the species Homo sapiens), and human development on the other; the latter is generated in the material and biotic orders but is constituted in the human order of nature. In other words, human being is generated out of Homo sapiens to which it remains tied by nexus and difference, but in its constitution cannot be reduced to its material or biotic origins. At the time of his course with Gene Weltfish, he came to admire the Russian anthropologists, Vladimir Bogoraz and Vladimir Jochelson, and their work among and writings about the Chukchis and Yukaghir, respectively. Both men had been active in populist and socialist politics, and this enhanced their status in Krader’s eyes. Krader’s own research and writings about these peoples in Siberia and Far Eastern Russia and other peoples of Soviet Central Asia beginning in the 1950s clearly reflect the influence that these two anthropologists exerted on him in the early forties. (Bogoraz was also an accomplished linguist and played a role in kindling Krader’s interest in that discipline, which he came to teach at the University of Washington in 1947 and Harvard in 1952, although he rejected an offer extended to him by Ithiel de Sola Pool to teach linguistics at MIT around the same time.) There were several conditions that led Krader away from the New York intellectuals with whom he had been associated since his early years at City. Krader explains the nature of his disillusionment through a vignette concerning a visit to New York by Isaiah Berlin (p. 13, below).

Meyer Schapiro

Meyer Schapiro, who had introduced Berlin to the New York audience, downplayed the intellectual level and achievements of the indigenous New York thinkers and writers and expressed enthusiasm for the émigré European intellectuals who, according to Schapiro, swept aside the second-rate and outmoded native creative spirits and lifted New York to a higher cultural nouveau. Krader in his retrospective look at that period seems to suggest that as a young man of twenty, he responded favorably to Schapiro’s depredation of American intellectuals at the time but has had second thoughts since (p. 13, below).

Krader later objected to Schapiro’s (and others’) glorification of the Europeans at the expense of the locals; not that he disparaged the Europeans but rather he believed that an integration of the two would have been of significant benefit to the intellectual culture of New York City, and by osmosis, of the entire country (p. 14, below). However, Krader did not share in the general enthusiasm for the new winds from Europe. He had already sampled the intellectual wares offered by Carnap and found them somewhat wanting (p. 14, below).

In spite of his criticism of Schapiro in relation to the idealization of the émigré European intellectuals and the deprecation of the local talents, Schapiro was clearly an important influence on Krader’s Noetics, especially in relation to aesthetics and the theory of art.4 Schapiro became an anti-Stalinist Marxist who had written for oppositional journals, such as Marxist Quarterly and Partisan Review in the 1930s and 1940s, and he rejected the straightjacket in which political Marxism sought to encase art and cultural expression. (For an overview of Schapiro’s move away from the Communist Party and the development of his critique of Soviet Marxism, see Hemingway, 1994.)

Roman Jakobson

Krader met and befriended several influential people in the forties, and this led him eventually to pursue graduate studies in linguistics and anthropology. Late in 1942, while stationed in Birmingham, Alabama, Krader met a psychiatrist, Nicholas Michelson, and his wife, Franziska Boas, the daughter of Franz Boas. It was Michelson who introduced Krader to Roman Jakobson with whom he later studied linguistics. It was on his weekly visits to Jakobson’s graduate seminar on linguistics in the late 1940s and early 1950s, that Krader met his future wife, Barbara Lattimer, an internationally respected linguist and ethno- musicologist in her own right, who worked for the OSS [Office of Strategic Services—forerunner of the CIA–eds.] during the war. She studied with Jakobson and was his assistant at Columbia in the late 1940s.

Krader had worked on the Century Dictionary for Random House under the guidance of André Martinet, and the editors at that publishing house tried to keep him in the dictionary field but, despite his pride in this work, he decided to move on in 1947. Krader knew Martinet at the IALA (The International Auxiliary Language Association) in 1946, and it was Martinet and Jakobson who introduced him to the field of semantics. His strength in both linguistics and semantics is one of the pillars on which his work on noesis rests:

Semantics, as the science of meaning, has a central place in noetic processes, which have to do with the meaning of words, whereas noetics takes up not only meanings in this sense, but also the meanings of entire speculative systems, as well as sense and meaning in many other contexts, in the arts, sciences, as well as ordinary life. The difference between sense and meaning is investigated in semantics, psychology, and noetics. (Krader in The History of My Times. Unpublished manuscript designated J9 in the Krader archives, McMaster University, p. 108. Cited hereafter as J9).

An edition of Krader’s writings on linguistics and semantics was published earlier this year as part of this series [See p. xxv, below].

Karl August Wittfogel and Karl Korsch

Krader met another émigré intellectual, Karl August Wittfogel, a former German communist, and an expert on China, whose 1957 book Oriental Despotism became a classic on the motor force of development in China. Krader sharply criticized Wittfogel’s magnum opus in his 1973 work The Asiatic Mode of Production. Wittfogel came to the University of Washington’s Far Eastern Institute in 1947, the same year that Krader was appointed to the Institute as a research associate. In 1949, Karl Korsch spent the summer in Seattle, and Krader came to know him through many lengthy discussions on Marx that continued in Boston when Krader went to Harvard shortly thereafter. It was Korsch’s 1923 publication, Marxism and Philosophy, that, along with the early writings of Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci, became a classic of Western Marxism. Krader’s discussions about Marx in the summer of 1949 in Seattle were heated but fruitful, and the two continued their friendship and common intellectual pursuits when Krader moved to Boston; Korsch and his wife Hedda were already domiciled in Belmont, Massachusetts. Korsch suggested to Krader that an English translation of Marx’s notes on Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society would be a worthwhile and challenging project for the former student of philosophy whose interest in anthropology was growing. In Krader’s words:

While in Seattle, he [Korsch] got me to have Marx’s notes on Bakunin translated from a Russian version into English; we discussed these notes, and at the same time got into our hands Mitin’s edition of Marx’s notes on Morgan, Ancient Society; Korsch put into my head the notion that an English edition of these notes would be a good idea. I told him that I would take it on at some future time. (Krader, J9, p. 77)

Krader dedicated the Ethnological Notebooks to the memory of Korsch in acknowledgment of his older friend’s influence. Korsch was also associated with Meyer Schapiro; they shared a similar appreciation of Marx, critique of Marxist orthodoxy, and suspicion of closed systems5. [On the relationship between Korsch and Schapiro, which discusses items of interest in Krader’s work, see Craven, 1994].

The University of Washington

At the University of Washington and at later venues, Krader was being pushed into the position of a China expert, which he was not (or at least did not consider himself to be). He believed that McCarthy’s witch- hunting had frightened off the legitimate pursuit of Chinese studies in the United States and as a result, leading institutions could not find the requisite expertise to conduct research and to teach in this field (p. 22, below).

Overtures to Krader to lure him into the position of a China expert continued. Stull Holt, who was a former brigadier general, the head of U.S. army intelligence in North Africa and a professor of American History, wanted to bring Krader to Johns Hopkins as a China expert. (Cf. Sander, Levitt & McLaughlin, 2017 on the many prestigious job offers that Krader turned down).

The Years 1950–1975

Krader pursued his doctoral work and taught linguistics at Harvard, where Demitri Shimkin arranged for his appointment as a Fellow at the Russian Research Centre. Krader married Barbara Lattimer in 1953 and completed his doctorate in 1954 on Kinship Systems of the Altaic-speaking Peoples of the Asian Steppes. From 1953 to 1956 he was the director of the Central Asia Research Project at the Bureau of Social Science Research, affiliated with the American University in Washington, D.C. From 1956 to 1958 he was the head of the China Program for the Foreign Manpower Research Office of the U.S. Bureau of the Census. He joined the Department of Anthropology in 1958 and served there until 1963 when he was appointed chair of the Asian Division of the College of Arts and Sciences and simultaneously professor of anthropology and professor of Slavic culture in the Slavic Department of Ohio State University. From 1964 to 1967 he was the director of the Nomadism Project and the director of the Arid Zones Research Project and professor of anthropology at Syracuse University. From 1967 to 1969 he taught anthropology at the City University of New York and was then appointed chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Waterloo in Canada. (Given the political unrest in New York City in 1968 Krader sought a calmer location to finish his work on Marx’s ethnological notebooks.) In 1972 he was called to Berlin as the Director of the Institute of Ethnology at the Freie Universität from which he retired as professor emeritus in 1982. Krader concentrated on the pastoral nomadism of the Mongols, Kazakhs, and others in the 1950s, still believing that it represented a stage in human evolution. From about 1950 to 1956 he focused on the nationalities problem in the USSR, a subject on which he became an expert and continued to follow closely into his years of retirement.

Karl Marx and Krader’s Marx Scholarship

Krader divides his Marx scholarship into two stages: From passive, in the years 1937–1963, to active and intensive from 1963 to 1975 when he prepared the Ethnological Notebooks and the Asiatic Mode of Production for publication (Krader, J9, p. 129). His assessment of his grasp of Marx in the early 1950s, the time in which he carried on his intensive discussions with Karl Korsch, he described as: “too weak, too dogmatic, too much geared to problems of the nineteenth century” (op. cit., p. 101).

Krader’s second stage of Marx scholarship began around the time that he seriously began to work on the notebooks and his self- assessment as a Marx scholar was, deservedly, not modest:

I read all that Marx had written, and that had appeared in print … I know no one who has read critically and mastered Marx’s work [more] than I. Korsch knew Marx well, but sections of Marx’s work appeared after Korsch’s death; he read Marx with different eyes and for a different purpose than mine, for he was a Marxian revolutionary, I am not. He read Marx dogmatically; I criticize Marx’s value theory. (op. cit., p. 129)

With the publication of the Notebooks and the Asiatic Mode of Production in the early seventies, Krader, in fact, stood at the pinnacle of Marx scholarship in anthropology specifically and the social sciences more generally. But Krader increasingly began to think that his intensive study of Marx and Hegel was important for what they lacked in contemporary relevance. He did not feel, however, that he wasted his time:

For my larger project, the theory of noesis, the study of Hegel and Marx was a necessary step … Negatively, I concluded that Marx, despite his vast philosophical knowledge, and sound preparation, had no theory of mind and consciousness; Hegel’s idealist theory of these subjects was of historical interest alone, and this gave me a target to criticize. (op. cit., p. 103)

Noetics

Positively, Hegel and Marx were masters in the application of dyads, such as: Mediate―Immediate, Abstract―Concrete, Subject―Object, Internal―External, General―Particular, Theory―Practice, and Form―Substance. Both, however, posited the completion of history, a final synthesis. They both argued in favor of the universal as a hypostatization of the general. In his Treatise of Social Labor and Labor and Value, Krader has taken issue with making class the preeminent category. For Krader, labor and not class is the starting point; there being no end point or universal teleology, either in nature or in human history. There are only specific ends posited by individuals and groups, and they are not driven inexorably and by necessity to their actualization. They are not realized but remain potentialities.

Krader maintains that he began his lifelong study of noetics as an undergraduate in the philosophy department at CCNY in the late 1930s and that the philosophies of Hegel and Marx were noetically inadequate: the former abstracted thinking and knowing from the senses—a criticism raised by Ludwig Feuerbach after 1839—and the latter lacking a theory of mind and consciousness. During the period of his intensive engagement with the texts of Marx, focusing on the ethnological notebooks and the Asiatic mode of production during the years 1963–1975, the questions of mind and consciousness, thinking and knowing, were not front and center among Krader’s concerns.

The Years 1975–2003

It was in the post-1975 years that Krader actively took up the matters of mind, consciousness, thinking and knowing, producing a number of manuscripts conceived as part of a new project, tentatively called “The New Materialism,” according to which manuscripts were produced bearing titles such as “Mind” and “Consciousness,” but they remained unpublished and Krader asked that all copies be destroyed. (In fact, his work on noetics, was not founded on old or new materialism; it was developed as a new theory of nature in which the material order was but one order of the manifold—the others being the quantum and the human orders of nature [cf. Levitt, Sander, 2018].) The project of the late seventies and early eighties was reconceived after Krader’s retirement in 1982. From that time until his death in November 1998, he produced over 150 manuscripts varying in length from a few dozen to many hundreds of pages.

The Lawrence Krader Research Project 2008–Present

In August 1998, Krader asked Levitt to meet with him in Berlin to discuss a joint research endeavor that Krader would endow at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. At that time, Krader had Levitt witness a holographic will in which he expressed his wishes to fund the project even after his demise. In his last correspondence to Levitt in October of that year, Krader indicated that he was planning to send a first installment to get the project off the ground and asked Levitt to bring a copy of the holographic will to his dean and the administration at McMaster. With Krader’s passing in November of that year, the distribution of the funds in Krader’s estate would be held up for ten years given the complicated legal situation of an American citizen domiciled in Germany, leaving a significant bequest to a charitable Canadian institution. The funds were released in 2008, and The Lawrence Krader Research Project was established at McMaster University with Levitt as the director. A board of directors consisting of Levitt, the dean of the social science faculty, and scholars familiar with Krader’s work was established to oversee the project. A website for the project was established at lawrencekrader.com, which introduces the scope of the project, lists the unpublished manuscripts held by the project, and offers an intellectual biography of Krader, among other aspects of the work of the project.

No available office was large enough to accommodate the project—Krader’s library of some 5,000 to 6,000 volumes had been sent from Berlin to Canada and the manuscripts and copies of the manuscripts required several bookshelves of space. A suitable office was rented in downtown Hamilton which served the project well for many years. An agreement with the McMaster University Library and Archives was reached in 2019, and the books and manuscripts were moved from the office to the university library, where they were catalogued and organized for scholarly use. The project then moved to a small office on campus where it currently resides.

The first item of business for the project after its establishment was to edit, introduce, and publish the manuscript Noetics: The Science of Thinking and Knowing which Krader had prepared in penultimate draft for publication. Krader had been especially interested in the publication of Noetics which he explicitly referred to as his magnum opus, having worked on it off and on since his undergraduate years in philosophy at the City College of New York in the 1930s. As for the other unpublished manuscripts, he left the selection, editing and publishing matters in Levitt’s hands. A proposal to have the manuscript published by Peter Lang (New York) was accepted, and the work appeared in 2010, the first publication under the aegis of the Krader project. Realizing that he would need help in realizing the goals of the project, Levitt consulted with colleagues in Germany regarding candidates for the role of an academic research associate.

In 2013 Levitt was introduced to Sabine Sander in Berlin by Hans Joas, a leading German sociologist. Sander held a doctorate in cultural studies and had come highly recommended by Joas. Sander accepted a contract from McMaster University, in collaboration with the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt in Germany and she began her work in the Krader Project in February 2014, accepting yearly appointments since then. She has been active as an editor on the various publications of Krader’s manuscripts, as a co-organizer of an international conference on Krader’s works, and as an editor and contributor to a publication of collected papers delivered at the conference. She is a co-editor of the series that the publication of this book introduces.

In 2016 a two-day conference on Krader’s works was organized by The Lawrence Krader Research Project in Hamilton, taking place at McMaster University and The Workers Arts and Heritage Center in Hamilton, at which papers were delivered by scholars from Canada, Mexico, and Germany. Most of the conference papers were collected in a volume edited by Levitt and Sander (Levitt & Sander, 2018).

Since Sander’s joining the project, the following works have been published by Peter Lang (New York):

2018 Beyond the Juxtaposition of Nature and Culture (co-edited with Sabine Sander).

2020 The Beginnings of Capitalism in Central Europe, (Cyril Levitt, translator and editor).

2021 Myth and Ideology (edited and introduced by Cyril Levitt and Sabine Sander).

The following works have been accepted for publication and will be included in the series: Lawrence Krader’s Legacy in Science, History and Philosophy