My long friendship with Peter Beilharz,intellectual and otherwise

For many decades, Peter has been not only a thought partner but also an intimate friend, a thoughtful friend, a friendly fellow thinker, the other side of a personal and intellectual relationship I cannot think to be without.

An enormously attractive quality about Peter is his joyful omnivorousness. There is no intellectual field he does not want to wonder within, no theoretical fruit he doesn’t want to taste. Even the fruit in the often-desiccated orchard called American sociological theory.

Peter first reached out to me when I was in the full flower of my neofunctionalist days, just a few short years after the endlessly abstracted multivolume tomes of Theoretical Logic. Don’t get me wrong, these are works of strongly made argument, but why would one of the founding editors of a critical theory journal named Thesis Eleven have the slightest interest in them? But Peter did have an interest. He simply enjoyed reading serious matter, whether critical about being ‘critical’ or not. And he enjoyed especially serious matter that was ridiculously ambitious, in whatever direction it had chosen to be. So he was curious about the author and we met up at one of the annual American Sociological Association meetings. Peter attended these faithfully for decades.

Which raises another question. Why would a serious critical theorist, from Australia no less, have the slightest interest in the panoramic cacophony of the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, so overflowing with earnestly pseudo-scientific empiricism? In this case it was not Peter’s interest in serious work and serious people but his overweening curiosity – intellectual, geographic, and humanistic: ‘I am human, and nothing of that which is human is alien to me’ (paraphrasing Marx, quoting Publius Terentius Afer, the Roman-African playwright, 2nd century BC).

If I were to explain why it was that Peter at this first encounter between us had me at ‘hello’, I would point to his manner, his way of being in the world, as an intellectual and as a human being. Preternaturally subtle, sensitive, and receptive, Peter sees below the surface and into the heart, of texts and people. He’s a giver and a receiver and the mediator in between. He’s a fox and a hedgehog, joyful and melancholy, intense and casual, working his ass off but always ready and willing to play. He and I are wine lovers and Aussie chauvinists. As I fell in love with his continent, he tutored me on its textures, its heroes, thinkers, novelists, geographers, politicians, poets, and pop stars.

Peter is an old-fashioned intellectual, the real thing. He knows no intellectual boundaries, has read everything or, anyway, would like to read it, and he’s open to ideas of any provenance. For Peter, sociology is not a narrow discipline but a portal to cosmic social knowledge. Marxism is not a doctrinaire system or self-righteous anti-capitalist critique but a reflexive humanism that is resolutely democratic and reaches for the highest values in life and art. Marx and his most genial disciples are Peter’s lifelong companions, but Zygmunt Bauman became one too, the once card-carrying true believer who became the world’s most fascinating postmodernist. And Peter not only loved ‘Zyggie’s’ ideas but – of course! – he loved the man, loved the annual home visits, the nightly scotch and the daily walks, everything but the smoke from the octogenarian’s endless cigarettes. Most of all, he loved the talks. He wanted to get inside and understand, not only Bauman’s brain but his heart.

Peter made me feel better about my early Marxist years and my early neofunctionalism. Because – of course! – he found my writings from those days interesting to read. Peter is an appreciator not a rejector; he will not judge his friends when they go into and out of ways of thinking seriously. He has even made me feel better again about China, because the months he and Sian spend there every year, not only teaching but loving its life, remind me that the Chinese people are not the government, that China, despite the CCP, continues to be filled with dignity and delight.

I could talk with Peter forever, about ideas and about life. I hope I will.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Peter and Jeff Alexander in conversation, Melbourne, 2023