Neil Smelser Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Neil, welcome back to Berkeley and welcome to our program.
Thank you, Harry.
Where were you born and raised?
I was born on a farm in northeastern Missouri, the same farm my mother was born on, though my mother and father were both school teachers and my father got a teaching job in Phoenix, Arizona, when I was an infant. I moved out there at the age of six weeks and lived in Phoenix the first eighteen years of my life.
Looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world?
Profoundly. They were both academics. My father taught first speech and drama, then philosophy, very much interested in the social and political problems of the day. My mother was a humanist, taught Latin and English, and was strongly into the world of music. So, all of these things laid out for me in my childhood and it was an easy exposure in the small city of Phoenix at that time, that was not especially cultivated. They were very important influences.
Was your education in Phoenix such that you were prepared for Harvard when you went there as an undergraduate?
I went to Phoenix Union High School, which was a rainbow high school. I had the blessing of having quite a number of extremely good teachers. Of course, I was always exposed, mostly via my father, to a lot of things that you didn't get in high school. So, I moved into Harvard and did not find myself overwhelmed by the level and demand of the place.
And then after Harvard you were a Rhodes scholar.
That's right, from '52 to '54, Magdalen College.
Right, and then back to Harvard ...
For my Ph.D.
For your Ph.D. where you were also a junior fellow of the Society of Fellows.
That's right. I was in Harvard from '54 to '58, and three of those years were in the Society of Fellows. I came to Berkeley immediately thereafter.
Now with this education you must have had a lot of choices as to what you would go into, and in a minute we're going to talk about your two careers as a sociologist and a psychoanalyst. But what led you to social theory?
I had two alternative careers in mind when I went to Harvard. One came directly from my father, who was teaching philosophy at a community college at the time. Early in my college career I took several courses in philosophy and found that wasn't exactly to my liking. I was also seriously considering becoming a journalist because I had worked as a newspaper reporter in my high school and throughout my college years, but I must say, I discovered the world of journalism to have too high a level of cynicism in it. My brother was a clinical psychologist in training and I, in a way, didn't want to become exactly that. The field of social relations at Harvard offered me a lot of opportunities and I gradually, without any particular moment of decision, decided that sociology was what I wanted.
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