![]() ![]() My study of the Right began in earnest only after I took a postdoctoral fellowship in 1980 at the University of Michigan in a program called "Sociology, Social Policy, and the Pro-įessions," funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. My concern with politics and ideology pushed me in a different direction, to the study of marijuana laws and the public discussion of the drug in America, a matter that occupied most of my last years at Berkeley and led to my writing The Strange Career of Marihuana. My first round of thanks goes, therefore, to Leo and the ever-changing membership of the seminar, but especially to Jeff Weintraub, Jim Stockinger, and Bob Bell.Īn interest in conservatism did not, however, translate into immediate work on the topic. The topics of the seminar ranged widely, but to me the central theme always was that of ideology and its impact on politics. ![]() That concern arose from, and was nurtured by, my participation in Leo Lowenthal's culture seminar, an intellectual enterprise that defied the normal limits of semesters and quarters and continued throughout my years at Berkeley. The broader intellectual concern that motivated my interest initially was with ideology, with how our assumptions about the world are socially structured and how these assumptions in turn shape our perceptions and actions. I became interested in American conservatism in particular as a sociological topic, however, only sometime in the 1970s while I was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. My first contacts with conservative political thought came as an undergraduate in the late 1960s, first in Sam Coleman's wide-ranging, wonderful courses in social philosophy at Columbia University and later at Michael Oakeshott's lectures at the London School of Economics. ![]() To the Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1990 1990. Preferred Citation: Himmelstein, Jerome L. ![]()
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