P a u l F . L a z a r s f e l d 1901—1976 A Biographical 3

OTHER INTERESTS
The History of Empirical Social Research. As early as the Marienthal study, Lazarsfeld was fascinated by the historical development of research methods. At his request, Hans Zeisel wrote an appendix for the book that traces the history of what is called "sociography"—primarily community studies.
But he did little systematic work on the topic until a 1959 interdisciplinary conference led him to prepare a paper (1961) tracing the history of quantification in sociology. In 1962—63 he gave courses and led seminars at the Sorbonne and at Columbia University on the history of quantification, which became one of his major interests during the remainder of his life." His interest in the topic made him into something of a reverse missionary during the last fifteen years of his life: he attempted to convince Europeans that Americanstyle
empirical social research had been strongly influenced by an earlier European empirical tradition. He was primarily responsible for—or exerted a strong influence on—the establishment of research institutes in Oslo and Vienna, and his visits to Paris and Warsaw greatly altered the nature of social research in these cities. He visited Paris frequently, where Columbia University's Reid Hall became almost his second home. He invited a number of Europeans to spend a year at Columbia, and in this way he enriched sociology on both sides of the Atlantic. When he died, Raymond Boudon and Jean Stoetzel, who had worked closely with him during his stays in Paris, wrote memorial articles for the Paris press, and practically every sociological journal in Western Europe published an obituary.

The Utilization of Social Research. Lazarsfeld's career began with his founding of an institute for applied social research in 1925, and he never lost his interest in the practical applications of research. When his presidency of the American Sociological Association (1962) offered him the opportunity to set the theme for the annual meeting, he chose "the uses of sociology" (Lazarsfeld, Sewell, and Wilensky 1967).

LAZARSFELD'S CIRCLE

Throughout his life, Lazarsfeld worked intensively with students and colleagues, and a full-scale intellectual biography would of necessity trace the intertwining of his career with those of his associates, his "circle." Furthermore, his early years as an organizer of socialist youth activities established a pattern of leadership that he never fully abandoned: he was skilled at telling others what they should do, and then helping them do it. As his associate Morris Rosenberg once noted, "his most obvious impact is upon his students and, of course, on his students' students. When you read Pete Rossi, you read Paul; when you read Jim Coleman, you read Paul;
when you read Charlie Glock, you read Paul; and so on and on." 12 Major Associates. Hans Zeisel, who became a professor of law and sociology at the University of Chicago, worked with Lazarsfeld in Vienna at the Forschungsstelle, with Jahoda and Lazarsfeld on the study of Marienthal, and later with Lazarsfeld at the Bureau of Applied Social Research. His Say It With Figures (1947), a textbook that is more than a textbook,
a manual that is more than a manual, now translated into six languages, is a product of their long collaboration. Zeisel's essay in the 1979 Lazarsfeld Festschrift is both a record of and a sentimental tribute to their lifelong association.
Robert S. Lynd, then professor of sociology at Columbia, befriended Lazarsfeld at the time of his first visit in 1933; for many years, the Lazarsfelds went to the Lynds' apartment on Thanksgiving Day or on Christmas Eve. Bernard Berelson, Frank Stanton, and Edward A. Suchman were early collaborators in his work on mass communications. Allen H. Barton, professor of sociology at Columbia, first studied with Lazarsfeld in 1947 and accompanied him to Norway in 1948to help establish a research institute at the University of Oslo.
They coauthored an important article on qualitative measurement (1951) and Barton was director of the Columbia Bureau from 1962 to 1977.
 In Paris (and for one year in New York), Lazarsfeld had a profound influence on Raymond Boudon; in Warsaw, where he was fascinated by the social research that was being done in the late 1950s to test the efficacy of various socialist programs, he was assisted primarily by Stefan Nowak. His collaborative relationships with his three wives were noted earlier. For years, he and the Columbia philosopher Ernest
Nagel taught a successful graduate seminar on the logic of social inquiry. He had intense and complex relationships with two sociologists whose approaches to scholarly work were sharply at variance with his own: T. W. Adorno and C. Wright Mills. Both were critical of him; while critical of much of their
work, he nevertheless went to great lengths to try to find common ground. More important than any of those named above in their effect on Lazarsfeld, and in his influence on their thinking, are two of the most eminent American sociologists of the twentieth century—Samuel A. Stouffer and Robert K. Merton.
Collaboration with Samuel A. Stouffer. Lazarsfeld and Stouffer first met in 1936. At that meeting, they agreed to collaborate on a monograph concerning the American family in the depression that was a part of a Social Science Research Council inquiry into the era directed by Stouffer (Stouffer and Lazarsfeld 1937). Thus was established what Lazarsfeld called "an alliance" that lasted until Stouffer's death in 1960.
Their most notable collaboration was on the wartime research concerning the U.S. Army that led to a four-volume series, including the two volumes entitled The American Soldier, published in 1949 and 1950. Lazarsfeld also edited and wrote the introduction to a posthumously published selection of Stouffer's papers—although Stouffer had himself selected the papers.
It was Stouffer who first introduced Lazarsfeld to the fourfold contingency table—a concise way of demonstrating the relationship between two dichotomous variables—by drawing one on a luncheon tablecloth one day in Newark in 1937. During the war years, when Lazarsfeld was a consultant to the War Department, his ideas on latent structure analysis and on the causal analysis of survey data were worked out in discussions with Stouffer. Their personal and research styles were totally different: Lazarsfeld was the somewhat flamboyant, cultured European, raised as a socialist; Stouffer was the
homespun, modest Midwesterner, raised as (and remaining) a Republican. Lazarsfeld surrounded himself with research assistants; Stouffer was famous for running his own statistical tables on the IBM counter—sorter outside his office door in Washington, and later at Harvard. Both knew how to organize research workers, and both were totally absorbed in obtaining ideas and findings—not from speculation, but the hard way, from data. Perhaps because he saw in Stouffer a more disciplined and self-effacing reflection of himself, Lazarsfeld
considered Stouffer "the most important man of all of us . . . an outstanding mind in our generation"; Stouffer's
effect upon his thinking, although subtle, was enormous.
Collaboration with Robert K. Merlon. Lazarsfeld and Merton joined the Columbia faculty at the same time; in fact, their appointments were designed to resolve an internal dispute over whether the next major appointment to the Columbia sociology faculty was to be theorist or a methodologist. With Merton and Lazarsfeld, Columbia hoped to get both. It did, and for decades Merton was known as the major "theory"
person in the department, Lazarsfeld as the chief "methods" person. To a certain extent this is true; most graduate students studied under both but aligned themselves primarily with one or the other. Hanan Selvin, like Patricia Kendall, one of the relatively few graduates of the department who worked closely with both Lazarsfeld and Merton, spoke for generations of students when he said in a 1975 Festschrift for Merton that "we were satellites, not of one sun, but of two for Robert K. Merton and Paul F. Lazarsfeld so dominated
Columbia during these three decades that no lesser figure of speech will do." Lazarsfeld and Merton were close friends and colleagues for thirty-five years. There are few examples in the history of science of two such brilliant and accomplished colleagues developing and maintaining such a strong personal and scientific relationship for such an extended period. An attempt to explicate the relationship in brief compass is not a
digression; rather, it is central to an understanding of Lazarsfeld's accomplishments.
It was primarily a professional rather than a social relationship; Lazarsfeld entitled his account of their collaboration "Working with Merton" (1975). As noted below, they were coauthors and coeditors of a small number of important publications. Moreover, Merton was the anonymous collaborator on almost everything Lazarsfeld published. On the title page of the copy he gave Merton of a long chapter on latent structure analysis, Lazarsfeld wrote: "Bob, this is the first item in 20 years you did not have to work on. P."
Each of their six published collaborative efforts reveals something important about their relationship. They coedited Continuities in Social Research: Studies in the Scope and Method of "The American Soldier" (1950), a brilliant attempt to enrich social theory by reappraising the wider effects of the series of attitude surveys that Stouffer had conducted among soldiers during the war. Their three coauthored articles on mass
communications deal with the social and cultural meanings of the radio research they had both carried out. In their "Friendship as Social Process" (1954), Lazarsfeld recast a number of Merton's sociological propositions about friendship into formal, deductive mathematical terms and indicated their research relevance. And in "A Professional School for Training in Social Research" (1950), they reviewed plans for a new educational institution they had talked about for many years, but which never reached fruition.
In their life at Columbia together, it was Merton whose diplomatic skills were called upon to extricate Lazarsfeld from numerous troubles with the university, his colleagues, his students, or his sponsors. It was Merton who toiled over Lazarsfeld's drafts, applying to them the brilliant editing skills that have benefited so many of his students and colleagues.
And it was Merton who established and maintained the close support with the Columbia University community that Lazarsfeld—more the outsider and much more the world traveler—only achieved toward the end of his tenure.
The substance of their professional friendship is more difficult to specify; elaborating it would be a worthy research project in itself. Certainly Merton's interest in the sociology and history of science influenced Lazarsfeld's work on the history of the empirical study of action, and on the history of methodology more generally. Lazarsfeld's concept of "global characteristics"—the characterization of groups based on characteristics that are not derived from the properties of individual members (population density is an obvious example)—influenced Merton's subsequent work in the sociology of science. Lazarsfeld had no opportunity to create a personal library during his first decade in the United States; when he first saw Merton's eclectic library, he resolved to develop his own, and did. In his article in the Merton Festschrift, "Working with Merton," Lazarsfeld provided a detailed recollection of their relationship; in the Lazarsfeld Festschrift, Merton refers to Lazarsfeld as a "brother." Their students and colleagues know that these words only hint at the depth and complexity of their intellectual and personal companionship.