Jeffrey Friedman: In Memoriam

Abstract

For those who have been reading Critical Review over the years, the journal is synonymous with Jeffrey Friedman, who founded it in  and edited it until his sudden death in December . Trained as an intellectual historian at the University of California, Berkeley, and then as a political theorist at Yale University, Friedman founded it when he was still a graduate student at Berkeley with the goal of putting various philosophical and political ideologies in conversation to scrutinize both their strongest and weakest arguments. It was, as one early ad in the New York Review of Books put it, the place where Marxists and libertarians could talk to one another. As Friedman’s interests evolved over the years, so did the journal, but he always treated Critical Review as a forum for critical intellectual debate. As he saw it, no single ideology captures the full complexity of the economic, social, and political spheres. Yet while casting a critical eye on all orthodoxies, he willingly published debates between scholars with radically different perspectives. As Friedman conceived it, the broad mission of the journal was to both model and promote an open society where participants would be selfconscious enough of their own fallibility that they would eagerly question their own premises, while also paying scrupulous attention to competing claims. This broad mission led Friedman to adopt, as its corollary, a subsidiary mission: to determine the best tools for analyzing the sources, nature, and effect of human fallibility in the face of the complexity of contemporary society. It was thus, from the beginning, interdisciplinary in orientation, as Friedman sought to canvass and evaluate the tools from such fields as economics, history, sociology, philosophy, and political science. Starting in the s, when Friedman entered graduate school in political science,