in a rightward-tilting script, Coser began to describe Halbwach’s fascinating theory of collective memory; he also told us about the French sociologist’s death at Buchenwald in 1945.

Coser linked us to the past, and he also welcomed us into the future of sociology. I remember sitting in the hall by his office, anxiously awaiting the results of my qualifying exam in social theory. He came out smiling, called out “Mazel Tov!” and opened his arms for a bear hug. Lew extended his welcome as fully to women as to men. He often spoke respectfully of his wife, Rose, a sociologist with her own trajectory of interests and publications. As a dual-career couple, they provided a model and an inspiration, even as many of us noted her difficulties in findingmaking us see it too.

My favorite piece of Coseriana is Greedy Institutions, a classic study of the “traditional” form of group affiliation. Like his hero, Georg Simmel, Lew was at his best assembling in the same work historically and culturally different players such as the Byzantine eunuch, the modern housewife, the Bolshevik revolutionary, and the celibate priest. By lumping them together he managed to compellingly demonstrate how the similarity in the formal profile of their patterns of social affiliation outweighed their sociohistorical differences—a perfect illustration of formal sociological theorizing.

Along with Masters of Sociological Thought, those were Lew’s works that inspired me to become a sociologist. Yet he influenced me even more as a professional role model, an intellectual who combined an exceptionally broad range of interests, concerns, and