February 13, 1901-August 30, 1976
BY DAVID L. SILLS
PAUL FELIX LAZARSFELD was born and raised in Vienna.
In 1933 he came to the United States as a Rockefeller
Foundation fellow. He remained in America at the end of his
fellowship, became a citizen, and for three decades was a
professor of sociology at Columbia University. He died of
cancer in New York City.
Although he was trained in mathematics, Lazarsfeld
thought of himself as a psychologist; only in midlife did he
identify himself as a sociologist. His major interests were the
methodology of social research and the development of institutes
for training and research in the social sciences. Because
of the originality and diversity of his ideas, his energy
and personal magnetism, his unique style of collaboration
with colleagues and students, and the productivity of the research
institutes he established, his influence upon sociology
and social research—both in the United States and in Europe—
has been profound.
In the years since Lazarsfeld's death, a substantial number
of appraisals of his life and work have been published.1 I shallattempt to summarize his rich intellectual legacy in this article.
But first, let me convey some sense of Lazarsfeld the
person by quoting from the writings of his former students
Allen H. Barton and David L. Sills, both sociologists, and his
son-in-law, the historian Bernard Bailyn. As these witnesses
attest, neither Lazarsfeld nor his associates were able to distinguish
very clearly between the man and the scholar.
Allen Barton's attempt to capture the essence of Lazarsfeld's
personality is to be found in his-dramatic and rather
subjective account of the history of one of Lazarsfeld's major
inventions: the university-based social research institute. Barton
notes that the concept of the university-based social research
institute "was born in the mind of a social activist student
in the intellectual hothouse of Vienna between the
wars," who "created a penniless research center in a nearbankrupt
society, and found his friends jobs studying unemployment."
He calls Lazarsfeld "an intellectual Odysseus"
and "an entrepreneur of intellectual conglomerates," who
"brought new meaning to the words 'non-profit' as he used
one deficit-ridden project to support another, and pyramided
his intellectual assets from grant to grant." In the end,
Barton notes, "the Bureau was demolished and hauled away to make room for a parking lot on 115th Street, while a Center
for the Social Sciences rose on 118th Street, proclaiming
a set of purposes almost identical to Lazarsfeld's recipe for
his research institutes in Vienna, Newark, Princeton, and Columbia."
2
Bernard Bailyn had the good fortune to have been both
colleague and son-in-law; here is his recollection of a family
visit by his father-in-law:
A visit by Paul was like some wonderfully benign hurricane. There
would be premonitory squalls for days in advance. Special delivery letters
would begin to arrive long before he got there; telegrams and messages
would pile up, occasionally an embarrassed assistant would appear on the
doorstep having got the wrong day relayed through secretaries in two universities.
The day before he was due there would be a flurry of frantic,
often hilarious telephone calls rescheduling the flight, but then finally he
would arrive. The cab would pull up in the driveway and Ptul would
struggle from the door clutching a briefcase overflowing with manuscripts,
books, pipes, cigars, shirts, and some miscellaneous shoes. He would half
run to the house in his odd, stiff-kneed, sideways-swinging walk; call gaily
to his daughter; shake hands with the male members of the family with a
slight European bow, heels together; and almost invariably, as soon as he
was inside the door, say "The most amazing thing happened!," and out
would come an extraordinary episode, told with barely suppressed laughter
and high suspense—some bizarre coincidence—and the visit would be
properly launched.'
In a summary sketch of Lazarsfeld's personality, David
Sills singled out Lazarsfeld's quite remarkable capacity to
carry out his intellectual activities with, and through, other
people:
Most of his major writings are coauthored, and much of his work day
consisted of listening to, talking to, and instructing his students, colleagues,
and co-workers: in class, in his office, in taxicabs, in his apartment, in asuccession of summer houses in New Hampshire; at breakfast, at lunch,
and at dinner; at the blackboard, or pacing his office with a cigar, or seated
in the faculty club with a double Manhattan cocktail in hand, Lazarsfeld
seldom was or worked alone, and he was always working. What Allen H.
Barton termed "the hectic Lazarsfeldian life style" went on to midnight or
later; only then did he work for hours alone.1
THE VIENNA YEARS
Lazarsfeld came from a professional family, active in the
musical, cultural, and political life of turn-of-the-century Vienna.
His father, Robert, was a lawyer in private practice,
rather unsuccessful financially, who often defended young
political activists without fee. His mother, Sofie, had been
trained in individual psychology by Alfred Adler. Lazarsfeld
had three successive marriages: to Marie Jahoda, Herta Herzog,
and Patricia L. Kendall—all his students, all his coworkers,
and all accomplished social scientists. His daughter Lotte
Bailyn is a social psychologist, his son Robert a mathematician.
Socialist Youth. Austrian socialism in the early decades of
the twentieth century was not just another political movement,
particularly for the Lazarsfeld family and friends.
Long after the Vienna years, Lazarsfeld's boyhood friend
Hans Zeisel recalled that time and place and noted that "for
a brief moment in history, the humanist ideals of democratic
socialism attained reality in the city of Vienna and gave new
dignity and pride to the working class and the intellectuals
who had won it." Socialism was integral to the familial, social,
intellectual, and political environment of Lazarsfeld's early
years.
He once said that he had become a socialist the way he
had become a Viennese: by birth, and without much reflec-tion. But he was a socialist all right. When his mother's friend,
the socialist leader Friedrich Adler, was arrested for assassinating
the prime minister, Count Karl Stiirghk, in August
1916, Lazarsfeld attended the trial. He was arrested for
taking part in a courtroom demonstration when Adler was
convicted. He was active as a leader in socialist student organizations;
he created a monthly newspaper for socialist students;
and he helped found a political cabaret that was to
play a seminal role in the development of both the political
and theatrical history of Vienna. Lazarsfeld's first publication,
coauthored with Ludwig Wagner and published when
he was twenty-three, is a report on a children's summer camp
they had established according to socialist principles.
Although Lazarsfeld often stressed the importance of his
early immersion in the socialist movement, his political activism
did not survive his move to the United States. In later life
he used to say that he was still a socialist "in my heart," and
once he remarked that his intense interest in the organization
of social research is "a kind of sublimation of my frustrated
political instincts—as I can't run for office, I run institutes."
His American students and colleagues found him to be essentially
apolitical. Particularly because he studied voting behavior,
he felt strongly that politics and scholarship should
be kept apart.
The Wirtschaftpsychologische Forschungsstelle. Lazarsfeld received
his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University
of Vienna in 1925; his dissertation was an application of Einstein's
theory of gravitation to the movement of the planet
Mercury. While a student, he assisted Charlotte Biihler in her
studies of early childhood and youth development. In 1925
he established a research institute dedicated to the application
of psychology to social and economic problems—the
Wirtschaftpsychologische Forschungsstelle. Years later, he
recalled that at the time he established the Forschungsstelle,he also created a formula to explain his interest in applied
psychology: "a fighting revolution requires economics
(Marx); a victorious revolution requires engineers (Russia); a
defeated revolution calls for psychology (Vienna)."
Karl Biihler became the Forschungsstelle's first president;
a board, consisting largely of university professors and business
leaders, was recruited; Lazarsfeld became the research
director. Scores of small research projects were carried out—
chiefly for business firms, but also for trade unions and city
agencies. "[The Forschungsstelle] came to life in 1925," Hans
Zeisel later recalled, "and sustained itself mainly on ideas, all
of them more or less Paul's, on the unabated enthusiasm of
its members, and on no money worth talking about." As with
most of Lazarsfeld's projects, the participants never forgot
the experience. Use Zeisel (Hans' sister, who had been an
employee of the Forschungsstelle in the 1930s) remarked at
the time of Lazarsfeld's death that "in the end it is to the
Forschungsstelle and to Paul that we owe our existence if not
more," a comment that expresses the intense, almost familial
relationship that Lazarsfeld had with many of his associates.3
The Forschungsstelle was the first of four universityrelated,
applied social research institutes founded by Lazarsfeld.
The others were the Research Center at the University
of Newark, the Office of Radio Research at Princeton University,
and finally the Bureau of Applied Social Research at
Columbia University.
The Marienthal Study. The Forschungsstelle's most ambitious
project was a study of Marienthal, a one-industry Austrian
village twenty-four kilometers southeast of Vienna
where the labor force was nearly all unemployed as a result
of the severe economic depression in the years after World
War I. The study was directed by Marie Jahoda, Lazarsfeld,
and Hans Zeisel. The methods used were both imaginative and eclectic: interviewing, participant observation, life history
analysis, and a variety of unobtrusive measures, such as
charting the circulation of the socialist party newspaper,
which declined more during the years of widespread unemployment
than did the circulation of a sports and entertainment
newspaper. This lack of interest was interpreted as a
measure of withdrawal from participation in political affairs.
The circulation of books from the workers' library was also
examined: although the borrowing fee was abolished during
the years 1929—31, the circulation declined by almost half—
a decline that was interpreted as an indication of apathy.
The Forschungsstelle carried out a great deal of innovative
consumer research, and it contributed importantly to the
development of this field by making the study of consumer
decisions and radio audiences academically respectable.
Nevertheless, it is Marienthal, a slim, clearly written volume,
that remains the Forschungsstelle's most memorable product
(Jahoda, Lazarsfeld, and Zeisel 1933). The study has impressed
generations of social scientists by its integrated use
of quantitative and qualitative observations. Robert and
Helen Lynd, for example, in their Middletown in Transition
(1937), repeatedly refer to the methods and findings of Marienthal.
It contributed substantially to the methodology of
community studies, and its major finding, that the prolonged
unemployment of workers leads to apathy rather than to revolution,
foreshadowed the widespread lack of resistance to
Hitler. Marienthal was banned by the Nazis soon after it was
published, and most of the copies were burned, but by 1978
it had become part of the sociology curriculum in German
and Austrian universities. In 1979, a group of young Europeans
undertook a restudy of the village.6
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