Abstract
I report with sadness the death of Jack Schaar (University of California, Santa Cruz), a valuable contributor to Political Theory. My thanks to Peter Euben for offering the remembrance of Jack Schaar that follows.
John Schaar’s voice—as a writer, a teacher, and an interlocutor—was a unique gift. On the surface his life seemed a series of contradictions. He was deeply suspicious of academic professionalism and the narrow world it created, then represented and reified. Yet he wrote books and essays on freedom, Rawls, equality, power, authority, patriotism, and Benito Cereno that have achieved eminence and influence in the field. He was a superb teacher yet he was also a craftsman who loved working with wood and sought a life close to nature and distant from all but a few people. But these are not contradictions; they are the life of a truly unique man.
John Schaar was born on July 7, 1928, in Montoursville, Pennsylvania, into a Lutheran farming family. He received his BA, MA, and PhD from UCLA, taught at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and Deep Springs College, published three books, coauthored another, and wrote a number of essays, several of which have become classics in political theory. On December 26, 2011, he died of cancer. He is survived by his wife Hanna Pitkin, his son John Homer Schaar IV, and scores of former students (of whom I am one) who were transformed by their encounters with him.
John Schaar was a man of many gifts, both intellectual and personal in nature. One such gift was his writing. Thoughtful, eloquent, and original, combining analytic deftness with a sophisticated literary sensibility, his essays are invitations to think with him about a subject or text in a new way, or think about an otherwise occluded subject, or follow him to literatures and sources marginalized by the growing professionalism of political science and the encroaching commodification of higher education.
Schaar’s essays are diverse in scope, focus, and sensibility. They are notable not only for their nuanced reading of texts but for their collective establishment of an at once fresh and traditional literary approach to the study of politics. He counseled his students to read texts with ardor and humility, advice that he enacted in his writing.
Schaar was involved in the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and here, too, his voice was a gift—not only to those seeking to make sense of a revolutionary upheaval but also to those activists seeking a more vibrant, less ideologically rigid form of radical democratic politics. More concretely, Schaar (along with Sheldon Wolin) defended the protestors even as they provided a larger frame for understanding them in a series of essays in the New York Review of Books. Indeed, several leaders of the student movement at Berkeley were students of Schaar’s, a seeming paradox given his admiration for John Winthrop and self-identification as a fellow traveler of Henry Adams’s Conservative Christian Anarchist Party.
To those who preferred to leave public life to experts and representatives, Schaar warned about the political consequences of taking such “moral holidays.”
For all the virtues of his writing, perhaps his greatest and most substantial legacy is his teaching. John Schaar was, quite simply, a remarkable “teacher” in every sense of the word. His lectures were deeply serious but he never took himself too seriously, which is why his lectures, in addition to being models of clarity and unremittingly provocative, were also playful, ironic, and humorous. And of course every lecture was delivered in a stentorian voice rivaling that of James Earl Jones.
No matter what the subject, how casual the conversation, the nature of the interlocutor, or the student writing being considered, Schaar asked the same questions: What is at stake for you as a student or citizen in the argument you are making, the text you are commending, and the politics you are espousing? What animates your passion and interests? Why this language or method or exclusions and not others? He asked these questions to thwart both banality and what he called “airplane talk.”
Much more than most academics, Schaar’s life was lived outside of the academy amid nature, family, friends, and his woodshop. Among other things, he was a true craftsman who loved working with wood. In some respects, there are parallels between his teaching and his craftsmanship: in both cases, there is a deep respect for the material and a constant effort to bring out the material’s unique beauty as best he could. In his case, that best was the very best.