the 1960s produced a prolonged case of dyspepsia. In the rhetorical excesses and sometime foolishness of some elements of the “new left,” they heard the echoes of stormtroopers from their traumatized history.

But not Lew Coser. He maintained his critical edge while others around him were losing theirs. He recognized his younger self in many of the movement participants. Albeit sometimes misguided, but nonetheless they were fellow carriers of a tradition to which he remained loyal. His example told me that the pathway from the tradition of the left to the celebration of power and privilege among many former leftists was not a developmental process but a life choice. He provided a needed reminder that one can maintain an oppositional consciousness one’s whole life. And a reminder also thatone can do this with grace and humor without ever becoming an old curmudgeon. For these lessons, Lew, I salute you.

Bill Gamson, Boston College

***

After having been forced out of two countries, Lewis A. Coser, born in Berlin, arrived alone on American shores in 1941. He was penniless and carried one small handbag. Uprooted twice and surely traumatized, out of his “handful of thistles” (the title of his collected essays volume) he shaped a distinguished and noble life that bound together scholarship and politics in equal measure. Most of the twentieth century’s major “macro and micro” upheavals intersected directly with his journey.

At the center of his scholarship, often in concealed forms, stood a major theme in the works of his spiritual mentor, Georg Simmel: marginality. This (as he would