Peter Michael Blau
February 7, 1918 – March 12, 2002
Peter M. Blau served as the 65th President of the American Sociological Association. His Presidential Address, “Parameters of Social Structure,” was delivered on August 26, 1974 at the Association’s Annual Meeting in Montreal, Canada, and was later published in the American Sociological Review (ASR October 1974, Vol 39 No 5, pp 615-635). Upon his death in 2002, an obituary along with remembrance and tributes by friends and colleagues was published in the April 2002 issue of Footnotes.
Obituary
Written by Reva Blau, published in Footnotes, April 2002
Peter Michael Blau died March 12 of adult respiratory distress syndrome. He was 84. He was professor emeritus at Columbia, a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, Pitt Professor at Cambridge University, Senior Fellow at King’s College, Fellow of the American Philosophical Society, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an honorary professor at the Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences.
He completed his doctorate with Robert K. Merton at Columbia in 1952 and went on to develop theories that continue to be influential in the study of modern society. His endeavor was to develop systematic theoretical schemes to explain macrostructures and their impact on daily life. He wrote his dissertation on bureaucracy, which led to a book on exchange theory. For the next 50 years, Peter Blau studied macrostructural characteristics of society. His theories seek to explain how social phenomena such as upward mobility, occupational opportunity, heterogeneity, and population structures influence human behavior. He developed the methods used in sociology to draw out and map the diverse constellations of social forces. Miller McPherson has called this type of constellation mapping “Blau space.” Sociologists today use “l3lau-space” to illustrate the effects of aspects of human society——cultural, evolutionary and institutional—which did not specifically enter Blau’s work. It is the unique feature of Blau’s scholarship that his theories were flexible enough to extend beyond the parameters of the field of his time.
He is the author of hundreds of articles and 11 books, many of which are still widely read by students of sociology. He is considered one of the founders of contemporary American sociology and one of the most prominent scholars of his time. He taught many of today’s prominent sociologists. To his students and colleagues, he was known for his fairness, integrity, modesty, and humor. Former graduate students Craig Calhoun, Marshall Meyer, and Richard C. Scott wrote, “Peter Blau is not only one of today’s most influential sociologists, he is one of sociology’s finest people We never knew any[teacher)of greater intellectual honesty, dedication to sociology, and personal integrity. As time goes on, we grow more impressed with how remarkable these qualities are It is all the more pleasure, therefore, to know Peter Blau because he reassures us that fame and academic distinction can go hand in hand with a sense of humor and care for other people.” (Structures of Power and Constraint: Papers in Honor of Peter Blau, Calhoun, Meyer, Scott, eds. Cambridge: 1990)
He was a professor at the University of Chicago from 1953 to 1970 and at Columbia University from 1970 to 1988. He was the President of the American Sociological Association in 1973. From 1979 through 1983, he taught at SUNY-Albany as Distinguished Professor. He taught in Tianjin in China at the Academy of Social Sciences as a Distinguished Honorary Professor in 1981 and 1987. He retired as a faculty member from Columbia University in 1988. He taught at UNC at Chapel Hill as the Robert Broughton Distinguished Research Professor from 1988 through 2001. He has received numerous distinguished scholar and career awards.
The son of secular Jews, Peter Blau was born in Vienna, on February 7, 1918, the year the Austrio-Hungarian Empire fell. His mother said that he would usher in a more enlightened age, but of course, the opposite was true. Unlike Germany, where Hitler manipulated a democratic system, the party which Hitler took over in Austria was fascist. The National Party was in power from 1918-1938 and it prohibited free speech, religion, and activities not sanctioned by the government. At age 17, angered by the antidemocratic government, as well as the conditions of the working class in Europe generally, he wrote for the underground newspaper of the Socialist Workers’ Party, similar to the democratic socialist party. He wrote articles which spoke out against his government’s repressive regime and distributed the journal among leftists. The journal was discovered by the police. My father, still 17, was convicted of high treason and given a 10 year sentence in the federal prison in the center of Vienna. Ironically, the Austrian government led by Sushnig liberated my father when National Socialism gained momentum in Austria. A pact between Sushnig and Hitler lifted the ban on political activity. Political prisoners on both ends of the spectrum—national and democratic socialists alike—were freed from prisons.
Hitler marched into the Heldenplatz in March of 1938 cheered by hundreds of thousands of Austrians. Soon after that my father stood in line at various embassies to get a visa. His parents chose to stay in Vienna, but sent their daughter to England on the kinder-transport. My father tried to escape over the Czech border, but Nazis caught him at the border. He was kept in a border patrol for two months. During these months, the Nazi officers tortured and starved him, forcing him to eat only lard and completing exercises until he fainted. He was released on an officer’s whim, and went to Prague where he lived for a year. He fled Prague when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. He took a very dangerous risk by returning over the Czech border to visit his parents, who had moved to the Ghetto because of the Jewish laws. Meanwhile, a high school teacher, Fritz RedI, had arranged for the Spiegel family to sponsor my father’s affidavit in his immigration to America. The next day he caught the train to France, which turned out to be the last train before all the borders were closed completely. In France, he turned himself into the Allied forces because he knew that, with a German passport, he would be captured. The French Army sent him to a labor camp in Bordeaux where he was forced to work crushing grapes. Never a physically agile person, my father put a pitchfork through his foot. In our family, we make the joke never to buy Bordeaux from 1939.
During his imprisonment, his visa number came up. An acquaintance who had some influence with the French government argued that the French Army should release Jews with visas and affidavits to other countries and went to Bordeaux to find my father. He immediately went to Le Havre to get a boat to America.
In Le Havre, on line for boat tickets, he met graduates from the theological college Elmhurst. As fate would have it, they were in Europe to offer a scholarship to a Jewish refugee. Recognizing his potential and the danger he was still in, they offered it to him and gave him the address of Paul Lehmann, the son of Elmhurst’s President. An atheist his entire life, my father always spoke of how miraculous a gift that chance meeting turned out to be.
He caught the last civilian boat leaving France. He arrived in New York City with a few clothes and less than 50 marks sewn into his belt. In New York, he contacted Paul Lehmann, a theologian, scholar, and philanthropist who would play the role of surrogate father and mentor throughout his life.
After a few weeks practicing English, he took a train to Elmhurst College, spending the little money he had. It was at this time that the censored letters that my father had received periodically from his parents stopped coming. He learned 50 years later from the Austrian government the details of their deaths in Auschwitz in May 1942.
He received his BA the same month that his parents were killed. In the Midwest, he gave speeches arguing for American intervention in Europe. When America did enter the war, my father enlisted in the Army and served for four years. Based on his fluency in German, he was made an interrogation officer.
After the war, he entered graduate school at Columbia University, where he studied with Paul Lazarsfeld, Robert Lynd, and Robert Merton, three of the leading sociologists of their era.
He is survived by his wife, Judith Blau, Professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; two daughters, Pamela Blau of Cambridge, MA, and Reva Blau of Wellfleet, MA; his sister Ruth Layland of Leicester, England; a cousin Eva Selka of Queens, NY; and one grandson, Ezra Fellman-Blau.
