Marshall Berman papers, 1940-2013

Marshall Berman (1940-2013) was a New York City-based academic whose writings cover a wide range of subjects that includes political theory, literary criticism, and urban studies. Berman grew up in the South Bronx, attending the Bronx High School of Science before studying at Columbia University. As an undergraduate, he was strongly influenced by several prominent faculty members, such as Jacob Taubes (Religion) and Lionel Trilling (English). Upon graduating from Columbia in 1961, Berman pursued a Bachelor of Letters at St. Antony's College, Oxford, under the tutelage of the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin. His 1963 thesis, "Marx on Individuality and Freedom," touched on many of the central themes and questions of his later writings. While living in England, Berman met G.A. "Jerry" Cohen, another of Berlin's North American students. Cohen would later go on to become a leading proponent of "Analytical Marxism," and he and Berman would remain close friends until his death in 2009. From 1963 until 1968, Berman was a doctoral student in the Government department at Harvard University, where he studied under the émigré political theorist Judith Shklar. His dissertation,The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and Modern Society, explored the problem of modern subjectivity in the writings of Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau from a perspective that reflected the influence of the New Left and the youth counterculture. It was published as a book in 1970, receiving critical acclaim but not commercial success.

From 1969 until his death in 2013, Berman taught political philosophy at the City College of New York, a public institution in Harlem with a largely working class student body. Beginning in the 1970s, Berman also regularly contributed articles and book reviews to a wide array of publications, including The New York Times Book Review, Dissent (where he later served as an editor), Partisan Review, The Village Voice, and The Nation. One of his most important essays, "Sympathy for the Devil: Faust, the '60s, and the Tragedy of Development," appeared in American Review in 1974. That piece of writing anticipated the first section of Berman's 1982 magnum opus,All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, which remains his most widely read and highly regarded book. An unusual combination of personal reflection, literary analysis, and social commentary,All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernityis an engaging interpretation of the modern condition and a stirring affirmation of the human spirit. The book garnered a favorable critical reception, but it was not until unexpectedly large numbers of readers in the developing world – especially in Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, and Iran – became avid fans several years after publication thatAll That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernityreached a mass audience. In 1988, Penguin published a new edition, and today the book continues to be a staple in courses on modernism, urban design, architecture, and literary criticism.

Among the most famous passages inAll That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernityare those that concern the transformation of the built environment in New York City under the notorious city planner Robert Moses. In his concluding personal reflections, Berman discussed the destructive effect that construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway in particular had on the Bronx neighborhood where he spent his childhood. Berman's interest in the relationship between urban planning and lived experience, especially in New York City, shaped much of his later career. During the 1980s, he wrote several important articles about gentrification on Manhattan's Lower East Side for The Village Voice. In the 1990s, he served as a consultant on Ric Burns' 8-part film,New York: A Documentary Film. His 1999 essay, "Views from the Burning Bridge," for a Bronx Museum exhibition catalogue, again looked at the legacy of Robert Moses. In 2006, he publishedOn the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square, a book in which he celebrated the popular culture of the city as an expression of "modernism in the streets." The following year, together with writer and photographer Brian Berger, he edited a volume of essays under the title New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg.

Berman traveled widely in Latin America (especially Brazil), the United States, and Western Europe in the last three decades of his life, putting in appearances at dozens of conferences, often as the keynote speaker. Even as he continued to serve as an editor at the left-liberal political journal Dissent and teach in the political science department at City College, his work gained its largest audience among scholars of urban design, planning, and architecture. As a result, by the late 1980s many of his articles were published in journals such as Designer and Builder, Harvard Design Magazine, Places: A Quarterly Journal of Environmental Design, and Architectural Design. But the range of interests and projects that drew Berman's attention continued to grow: in the 1980s, he contributed rock music criticism to the Village Voice, and in the 1990s, he became an unlikely enthusiast of hip-hop. A 1994 lecture at Oxford University, entitled "Justice/Just Us: Rap and Social Justice in America," points to the many-faceted nature of his intellect. Meanwhile, Berman also continued to write about political theory, focusing especially on the same subjects that had been at the center of his earliest published writings: social theory, modern subjectivity, and Marxism. In 1999, Verso published a collection of his essays, entitled Adventures in Marxism, which – true to form – combined memoir with literary analysis and erudite philosophical commentary. In 2010, Berman wrote an introduction to the revised Penguin edition of The Communist Manifesto. At the time of his death, in 2013, Berman was at work on a book about democracy and urban life in ancient Greece.