Roland Benedikter, Reflections on Bruce Mazlish

The late Bruce Mazlish was a more than generous mentor for Europeans like me whom he saw in accordance with the mission of enlightenment, modernization, the promotion of freedom, critical liberalism and, in his view of particular importance, the ties between Europe and the United States and the mutual understanding between globalized (and globalizing) civilizations.

In essence, Bruce taught "Atlantic" scholars of my generation not only that we had to study our common intellectual history as a transcontinental endeavor which in the late years of his life had reached the dimension of a global debate that had to be taken as the new reality; but also and foremost, that the slogan of the "clash between civilizations," which dominated the debate of the 1990s until the first decade of the 2000s, had to be transformed into a debate about the "encounter between civilizations". There was never the comfort of simplification in his aspirations to reach such goal through sophisticated analysis though; and that implied inner conflicts that honored the best intellectual tradition he saw himself as part of. In our written conversations, he always seemed to struggle with the fact that the West had instigated the idea and reality of an open society, versus the other, simultaneous fact that this led to Western-centrism (more than Euro-centrism, in the end, as the 21st century teaches). Bruce was never satisfied with what he found, discussed, or learned. He took the contradictions in his own thought as inspiration to explore new land, and in my view that indeed makes a real intellectual of our time.

He was even so kind to write an article about my own, quite limited attempts to read the current phase of globalization, and to publish it at Humboldt University Berlin. Humboldt University was probably not by chance his choice since he regarded it as the archetype of the modern university, i.e. the ideal host of the contemporary intellectual. In my view, it was characertistic that Bruce called this short piece dealing with China and the Western tradition "Part and Wholes," which is a contradiction in itself - typical for Bruce's never resting mind. I will remain deeply grateful to Bruce and honor his legacy.

Roland Benedikter