IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ
Morris Raphael Cohen
and the Classical Liberal Tradition
The philosophy department at the City College of New York was
Morris Raphael Cohen's department. That it fractured on political
grounds was inevitable, given the climate of opinion in the 1930s. Still,
the quality of mind, from Abraham Edel in moral theory, to Daniel
Bronstein in symbolic logic, to Philip Wiener in the history of ideas, to
Henry Magid in political thought, and finally
to
Yervant A. Krikorian in
philosophical psychology, was extraordinary. The department honored
the memory of Cohen precisely with the steady stimulus provided by a
contentious group. In its soul, the department illustrated the lessons of
liberalism: civility in dealing with one another and equity in dealing with
students. Students learned the legends of Cohen, because whatever
persuasion his progeny turned out to be, they reflected and refracted his
sense of the bracing character of an honest exchange of ideas.
Cohen was born in Minsk, Russia in 1880. He came to the United
States at the age of twelve in 1892. Doubtless, Minsk, a center of both
the Jewish enlightenment and classical Hebrew learning had an enormous
and lifelong impact on Cohen. Long before it was fashionable, if indeed
it has ever been fashionable, he championed Jewish interests. In 1933, just
as Hitler came to power in Germany, he founded the Conference on
Jewish Relations, an organization that assumed responsibility for scientific
research on Jewish problems. In 1939, he founded
Jewish Social Studies,
which today remains a central publication on the subject. Both his auto–
biography,
A Dreamer's JOIIYlley,
published in 1949, and a posthumous
collection of briefer pieces,
Rejlectiolls of a Wandering Jew,
issued a year
later, document this life-long involvement in Jewish affairs. In
The Faith
oj a Liberal,
such interests are reflected in his choice of heroes: Spinoza is
the "prophet of liberalism"; of the "three great judges" Cohen singles
out, two are Jewish: Brandeis and Cardozo; the final "heroic figure"
to
