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NY Times September 15, 2013
Marshall Berman, Philosopher Who Praised Marx and Modernism, Dies at 72
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Marshall Berman, an author, academic, philosopher and lyrical defender
of modernism, Karl Marx and his native New York City, died on Wednesday
in Manhattan. He was 72.
His death was announced by City College, where Dr. Berman had taught
since 1967 and was distinguished professor of political science. His son
Danny said Dr. Berman had a heart attack while eating breakfast with a
friend at a diner he loved, the Metro Diner on Broadway and 100th Street.
Dr. Berman was a public intellectual and often an optimistic one. He
heard song in conflict and argued that the stop-start stumble of modern
life was, for all its inexplicability and despair, necessary and
promising. Marx, he insisted counterintuitively, might admire the energy
and diversity that capitalism has delivered to the United States even if
he believed there was a better way. The Bronx, Times Square, all of New
York in its many incarnations — from the seedy, bankrupt 1970s to the
murderous 1980s to today’s urban boutique — was in his view alive and
luminous in its recklessness and resilience.
“Something is happening that I never could have imagined: a metropolitan
life with a level of dread that is subsiding,” he wrote in an
introductory essay to the 2007 book “New York Calling: From Blackout to
Bloomberg,” which he edited with Brian Berger. “Some people say they’re
worried that a life without dread will lose its savor. I tell my
students and people I know not to worry. If they just scrutinize their
lives, they will find grounds for more than enough dread to keep them
awake. While they’re up, they should seize the day and take a midnight
walk.”
Dr. Berman arrived at City College shortly after he finished his
doctoral studies at Harvard. But he was not interested in academic
solitude. Devoted to the university’s missions of diversity and
accessibility, he passed up chances to move to Ivy League schools or
colleges in the West.
Inside the kitchen cupboards of the Upper West Side apartment where he
lived for decades, he stored his staples: books. Inside the bathroom
cabinets, he stored his balm: more books.
His intellectual passion was first stirred by Marx — with his shaggy
hair and beard, he eventually started looking like him — and he viewed
Marx as deeply relevant long after Communist governments faded.
“Marx was appalled at the human costs of capitalist development,” Dr.
Berman wrote in the introduction to the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition
of Marx’s “Communist Manifesto,” published in 2011, “but he always
believed the world horizon it created was a great human achievement, on
which socialist and communist movements must build. Remember, the grand
appeal to unite, with which the Manifesto ends, is addressed to the
‘workers of all countries.’ ”
Dr. Berman’s best-known book, “All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The
Experience of Modernity,” was published in 1982 and took its name from a
line in the Manifesto. Reviewing it in The New York Times, John Leonard
called it “brilliant and exasperating.”
“Being modern is being new, whether we like it or not,” Mr. Leonard
wrote, summarizing his assessment of Dr. Berman’s argument. “He likes
it, Mr. Berman. Seize the day and change the world. Modernism is ‘a
permanent revolution,’ full of radical sunrise and great dawn. We
synthesize ourselves, without tears.”
Mr. Leonard added: “I’ve read Goethe, Marx, Baudelaire and Dostoyevsky,
and I’ve been to Leningrad. Mr. Berman, generous and exuberant and
dazzling, has been somewhere else, with a ‘shadow passport,’ inventing
another history and literature, a romance of great ideas. I love this
book and wish that I believed it.”
Marshall Howard Berman was born on Nov. 24, 1940, in the Bronx. His
parents, Murray and Betty, ran a tag and label business in Times Square.
His father died when his son was 14. Dr. Berman grew up taking the
subway with his family to Times Square, a lifelong stimulant he
celebrated in his 2006 book, “On the Town: One Hundred Years of
Spectacle in Times Square.”
Among the other books he wrote or edited were “The Politics of
Authenticity” (1970) and “Adventures in Marxism” (1999). He wrote for
many publications, including The Times, and he was a board member of the
leftist journal Dissent.
He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and received his
undergraduate degree from Columbia and his doctorate from Harvard in
1968. In addition to his son Danny Berman, Dr. Berman is survived by his
wife, Shellie Sclan, and another son, Eli Tax-Berman.
At City College, Dr. Berman helped establish the Center for Worker
Education in Manhattan, where working adults could pursue college degrees.
Parts of the neighborhood where Dr. Berman grew up were later leveled to
make way for the Cross Bronx Expressway. He wrote in “All That Is Solid
Melts Into Air” that the visionary behind the highway, Robert Moses,
represented the tension in modern life: destruction goes hand in hand
with perceived progress.
“The tragic irony of Modernist urbanism,” he wrote, “is that its triumph
has helped to destroy the very urban life it hoped to set free.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
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