have said) was not by chance. The son of a strict Lutheran mother and a Jewish banker father, he became a rebel and left-wing radical in Weimar Germany—and aware of himself as a Jew. He then found a home in Paris (1933-41) and became a citoyen—until rounded up and sent to a labor camp. In the 1940s he fell in with a crowd of Leftist intellectuals in New York City. Although at the time too far to the Left (and too European) to feel fully at home in the American political landscape, he discovered in the late 1960s, after several visits to Europe, that he was more American than European. Even in sociology, and despite having moved from Marx to Weber, Simmel, and (not least) Merton, he alwaysdescribed himself as a “heretic within the church of Structural-Functionalism.” Although fully dedicated to the discipline (and a scholar who unfailingly read the major journals from cover to cover) and a major civic player for more than 40 years, from time to time he immersed himself in fiction and world politics—while The Functions of Social Conflict, a classic text instrumental in weakening the Parsonsian hegemony, became one of the most widely read and translated books in post-war American sociology. At times one wondered whether his comparative-historical writings on “greedy organizations” (which thoroughly encompass the individual) might not have contained an element of personal longing. Not by chance, more than half of his 18 books charted out how ideas and theories can only fully be understood if located in