Of many memorable insights I retain with gratitude from Harrison, the outstanding one is his repeated phrase “Look for the holes in the structure.” This has helped me focus intuitions about paths not taken, whether studying long historical processes of states, corporations, and social movements or figuring out how deep changes might be encouraged in stubborn structures.
Of all the mysterious gifts, I relish the convergence around Harrison’s office of students and postdocs working in apparently different ways on very different topics with very different methods. I was glad for the others fascinated by history, whom Harrison supported along with those working with mathematical models. The math students and postdocs and programmers intimidated me to the point of applying for a grant to spend a year as a graduate student studying graph theory. Not much stuck. Nor did it matter really. I was gifted with Harrison’s support for what I later came to understand as world-systems doctoral research, although Wallerstein (1974) was simultaneously inventing the name. The Political Economy of the World-System Research Section (PEWS) of the American Sociological Association became an important home for me, where I carried the spirit of Harrison’s iconoclastic seminars as an in-house critic (Friedmann, 1996). I later became chair of PEWS and served on the editorial board of the Journal of World-Systems Research. In retrospect, I can see that Harrison’s support for my historical research into food systems was unusual at a time when—hard as it is to imagine today—most thought it a trivial topic (Friedmann, 1978, 1983). In parallel to Harrison, I also offered an early focus on ecology (Friedmann, 2000).
I was inspired by Canvases and Careers, which showed how a new product—modern painting, mainly impressionists—and a market for it emerged in tandem in the 19th century, leading to new institutions, as the now-familiar dealer-and-critic system replaced the formal academies patronized by aristocrats (White & White, 1965). Harrison supervised my thesis that tracked the emergence of a price-making world market for wheat. I could track the convergence of regional prices in the decades culminating in 1870 by patiently gathering historical statistics (Friedmann, 1983). Later, I had to figure out how to track the emergence of a system at the same time as the actors in the system were emerging through interconnections (Friedmann, 1978). This was a parts-and-whole problem, in which parts and whole emerged in tandem (McMichael, 1990), with many points at which different or no connections could have been made among nodes in flux: states, railways, banks, migrants/settlers, grassland regions colonized in many parts of the world (not only the ones that endured), resistance of indigenous dwellers, and social movements of laborers and farmers. Over decades (and as my research widened and deepened, over centuries), institutions, groups, and places became central or retreated to the margins of an unfolding structure (Friedmann, 1993).
Only much later did I understand that Harrison was also working on markets in parallel (White, 2018). Very much later, I spent a semester at a research institute specializing in agronomy in Montpellier, France, only to discover that Harrison was a regular presence and source of insight and inspiration to colleagues there. The point was to study who does what empirically as a market emerges, rather than to start with abstract models of supply and demand, then relax assumptions to fit reality. My work benefited from French approaches to the “agro-alimentaire” or agrifood system (Allaires & Daviron, 2016; Malassis, 1977). I must have imbibed a great deal of Harrison’s way of thinking long before it matured into his masterpiece. Even though he generously sponsored me for successful applications as an NSF postdoc at the Cambridge Faculty of Economics and Politics in the UK, as he had for SSRC grants while still his student, we lost touch as I moved into world historical and food system research.
Truth be told, though, it had more to do with struggles in the Harvard Department of Sociology after I left for Canada. Harrison was a fierce, charismatic academic warrior. I had followed him when he led Sociology to secede from Social Relations during the turbulent early 1970s, leaving what we graduate students dismissively called “residual relations.” But I could not follow his lead in another decisive moment in Sociology’s history.
Harrison led the defense against the first case of gender discrimination at Harvard University for denying tenure in Sociology to my friend and peer Theda Skocpol (Jablin, 1980). Her successful appeal was widely covered in national newspapers. Theda had recently been awarded the C. Wright Mills Award of the American Sociological Association for her book entitled States and Social Revolutions (Skocpol, 1979), which was cited by the Harvard review committee that overturned the Department decision (Sanger, 1985). Harrison’s argument was based on the longstanding practice of not tenuring a PhD from the Department. There had been exceptions to this practice, but of course there had never been a tenured woman. Skocpol’s victory was part of a sea change in gender in academia. In what might be interpreted as a case of opportunity chains, her appointment as Associate, so that the tenure question came up at all, was possible partly because of the unprecedented gender balance (and size) of our cohort that entered in 1969. My own experience was that Harrison had always supported me, although in retrospect I was as naïve as Harrison about power dynamics. I heard and understood both Theda and Harrison. Torn between loyalties, I declined to embrace either side. It was one of the ways that Harrison’s iconoclastic intellectual approach, which I found thrilling and invigorating, clashed with his conservative values.
I hope I will do better now at keeping relations through conflict. But I hold fast to the excitement of melding personal and intellectual connections at a formative time for me. Many years later, when I contacted Peter Bearman for help to reconnect with Harrison, I found one of Peter’s seminars online. I was startled at the familiarity of the teaching approach as memories of Harrison’s seminars flooded in. With Peter’s help and advice, I phoned Harrison in Arizona to express gratitude. I was disappointed that he did not receive it, but glad I tried. I have gathered over the years that others share my sense of Harrison as a complicated genius. He enriched me more than my career. He enriched my life as a thinker and a student of conflict, both personal and structural.