Background

Stephen, welcome to Berkeley.

Thanks.

Where you born and raised?

I was born and raised in New York City, upper Manhattan; so far up in upper Manhattan that most people thought it was the Bronx.

Looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world?

I would say not very much. I think it was actually much more my environment growing up in New York City in the 1950s. It was a very intellectually vibrant place -- not that I recognized that at the time. So it was more that than my family situation. My father died when I was ten. My mother, a very smart woman, worked as a secretary for her whole life.

How did this New York environment influence you, then?

It was an environment in which you wanted to be an intellectual. You wanted to figure out a way to sneak into Broadway plays at night. You wanted to go to the museum. You wanted to read Kafka or maybe Nietzsche, whom I've never understood anyway. But that was a good thing to do in that environment. That, more than anything, shaped a lot of, I wouldn't say my thinking, but my approach toward study or intellectual life.

Did you have any teachers that influenced you before you went to college?

No. I went to one of the exam schools in New York City, Brooklyn Tech. It was a very good high school -- smart kids, good teachers. But I wouldn't say I had someone that I could identify as an intellectual inspiration. Partly, it was that you were in an environment where you didn't need that.

What about college? Where did you go and what did you major in?

I went to Cornell. I majored in history. I went, initially, majoring in engineering physics. I can still remember escaping from science and math courses and taking my first English literature course, and it was so easy! I read everything twice. I loved it -- not necessarily the English literature, but it was so great to have gotten out of all of the scientific stuff, which was clearly not where my interests really were.

What in history, in particular, did you focus on?

I majored in European history. I like to know things; I don't have an explanation for this. I moved in my career across a number of different topics, and what I've enjoyed most is learning new things. I wrote an essay a couple of years ago about how the Chinese international system operates now -- this is organized hypocrisy in East Asia -- and there were things I knew nothing about. For me, that was great. I really liked it.

I liked reading history. I didn't like writing it, because I didn't find it very systematic. Doing political science seemed to allow me to read history and try to write more systematically, so it was appealing.

Did you go right into graduate school after being an undergraduate?

No. I applied for a Ph.D. program in history, decided not to go, and went into the Peace Corps for two years, to Nigeria. It was kind of an Eriksonian moratorium. I realized, without really realizing, that I wasn't ready to make a commitment. So I taught secondary school in northern Nigeria for two years, came back ...

And this would have been what years?

'63 to '65. It taught me a number of different things, including that you could live in a country and have no idea what was going on. I was living in a town where all of the Southern Nigerians, who were basically the administrative middle class, were killed shortly after I left, and I was actually clueless about the level of tension.

Then I came back and I did a Masters in international relations at Columbia, still not exactly sure what I wanted to do. I did a lot of economics, and was planning on doing a Ph.D. program in economics. My life was changed by a haphazard event. Between the two years at Columbia, I worked as an intern at the Treasury Department. The other intern was someone who was doing a program at Harvard called Political Economy and Government, which was half economics and half political science. I'd never heard of the program, learned about it from him, applied, got in, and went and spent the year in that program, and then switched over into doing government or political science.

What did you do your dissertation on?

International trade in coffee. Here's another story about why one should always be open to the haphazard developments in life. I did this because I knew a lot of economics. Nowadays, international political economy is a recognized topic in international relations; it didn't exist in the late 1960s when I was writing. I had done a course with Albert Hirschman, who is a brilliant social scientist, and I had done a paper on international trade in coffee and cocoa. I saw that there was a lot to do. Harvard had a wonderful library even in things like coffee; they had, for instance, the Colombian Coffee Growers Journal from the 1930s.

This is probably before the Starbucks was in town.

Way, way, way before Starbucks! This was when Hills Brothers and General Foods were still the central players. Harvard was a place where they'd let you do whatever you wanted to do. If my advisors had been paying attention to me, they would have told me this is an insane topic. But I completed it in a moment when economics became much more important in international relations. In some ways, my career was made by OPEC -- at least my early career, which brought these international economic questions which had been treated as secondary or as technical economic problems before.

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