Zellig Harris - Politics

Politics

Harris was also influential with many students and colleagues, though in a less public way, in work on the amelioration of social and political arrangements. His last book — The Transformation of Capitalist Society — summarizing his findings, was published posthumously. In it he proposes ways to identify and foster the seed-points of a more humane successor to capitalism, which he saw would arise in niche areas in which capitalism cannot function well, much as capitalism arose in the midst of feudalism. Some of his unpublished writings on politics are in a collection at the Van Pelt Library of the University of Pennsylvania.

He was committed all his life to radical transformation of society, but from the ground up rather than by revolution directed from the top down. From his undergraduate days he was active in a student left-Zionist organization called Avukah (Hebrew "Torch"). He resigned as its national President in 1936, the year he obtained the Ph.D., but continued in a leadership advisory role until, like many other student organizations in the war years, it fell apart in 1943. From the early 1940s he and an informal group of fellow scientists in diverse fields collaborated on an extensive project called A Frame of Reference for Social Change. This develops a new vocabulary and concepts on grounds that the existing ones of economics and sociology presuppose and thereby covertly perpetuate capitalist constructs, and that it is necessary to ‘unfool’ oneself before proceeding. This was submitted to Victor Gollancz, a notoriously interventionist editor, who demanded a complete rewrite in more familiar terms. A manuscript among Harris's papers at his death titled Directing social change was brought to publication in 1997 by Seymour Melman, Murray Eden, and Bill Evan. The publisher changed the title to The transformation of capitalist society.