With a full head of silvery hair, steely blue eyes, and a Robert Redford-mien, Professor Philip Pomper can cut an imposing figure. He is blunt, his humor can be dark, and it is clear that he has no urge to pander, which some students find intimidating.
For most of his lengthy career, Pomper has run against the dominant trends in the historical profession, defending the importance of psychoanalysis in history despite a widespread disenchantment with Freud that emerged with the rise of feminism. Judging by his occasional criticism of “the academy,” it has not always been easy. Nevertheless, his wry smile and the Freud bobblehead doll perched on his desk betray a levity that can be obscured by his intense preoccupation with the more troubling issues of human nature.
Now, after 46 years of teaching, Pomper, Wesleyan’s William F. Armstrong Professor of History, will retire at the end of this semester. He says he looks forward to having more time to write and play tennis.
“Forty-six years is a long time to be at a job,” he said. “I’ve liked every minute of it. But it’s time to give the younger generation a crack at it.”
In 1964, at the age of 28, Pomper came to Wesleyan from the University of Chicago, just in time to witness a sea change in academia. He saw Wesleyan admit women, African-Americans, and turn away from Eurocentrism—a series of developments that he said was “very exciting.”
As a scholar of Russian revolutionaries, the young Pomper was a hit with students of the New Left during the late ‘60s. Though he admits to having had socialist inclinations at the time, he was always more interested by intellectualism than advocacy, arguing that “politics was often the enemy of the truth.” Pomper did march in Anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, participate in teach-ins, and even work in a Chicago steel mill (despite his “bourgeois” upbringing), but those early instances proved to be the extent of his political involvement.
“I remember because I was teaching about a revolutionary movement, people wanted to hear what I had to say,” he said, referring to his Russian courses at Wesleyan during the late ‘60s. “Even though I was writing about the past, people were interested in learning about revolutions. I think I was a little radical at the time. I thought socialism was a better idea than what we had, so I tended to be attracted to revolutionary thinkers and movements. I wasn’t a real radical. I wasn’t an activist. In a way, I was a sympathetic student of radicalism.”
Since then, Pomper has turned on the wisdom of Marxist thinking. Forty years later, he is also disappointed with some of the academic legacies of the Vietnam-Era. He is critical of historical postmodernism, academic specialization, and the turn away from non-major academic requirements. While he clearly finds the new emphasis on diversity essential, Pomper believes that he received a better education than most college students do today when he was enrolled at the requirement-heavy University of Chicago.
In his career, Pomper has written a number of psychoanalytic biographies about Russian revolutionary thinkers and terrorists, including Peter Lavrov, Sergei Nachaev, Josef Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, and Alexander Ulianov, an older brother of Lenin’s who was hanged for conspiring to assassinate Tsar Alexander III in the 1880s. As a psychohistorian, Pomper is relatively upfront about his own level of identification with the Russian revolutionaries he has studied. In a June 2004 interview with the Psychohistorical journal Clio’s Psyche, Pomper attributed his interest in the radical mathematics professor Lavrov to the fact that he was also “the same general type—a conscience-stricken member of the intelligentsia looking for progressive solutions to human ills.”
“As an older and presumably wiser historian—and one both teaching adolescents with revolutionary inclinations and raising my own children—I think I tended to look at my subjects as gifted adolescents,” he said. “I recognized that if I were in their place I might easily have chosen their path. I saw their destructive and self-destructive sides, but tried to elevate the problem to a species problem—and I think that’s in the Freudian tradition.”
At Chicago, Pomper initially studied the French Revolution. While hitchhiking and biking through Europe with two friends in the summer of 1957, however, he slept in a cow pasture in England where he was discovered by a Cambridge geology professor and his two sons looking for samples. Pomper spent several days helping them look for rocks and then joined them for dinner one night, where he was introduced to a Russian mathematician who convinced him that it might be wise to learn Russian.
“We spent an evening and [the mathematician] spent some time saying that now that Khrushchev had denounced Stalin, the Soviet Union was taking a new direction and would progress explosively and become a leader in the arts and technology and so on,” Pomper said. “He believed the Soviet Union was going to take off and surpass everyone else. We now know that he was optimistic.”
Two months later, Sputnik made its orbit, prompting Pomper to move into the field of Russian Studies. It was a good career move, and throughout the Cold War he found an audience for his lectures and essays on Russian history.
In the early ‘60s, Pomper’s thought evolved again after he read Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther, an attempt to explain much of Martin Luther’s beliefs through psychoanalysis. Soon enough, Pomper started to apply similar methods to understanding the Russian revolutionaries. This psychohistorical approach had become briefly popular in the late ‘50s and ‘60s largely because of Erikson’s psychobiographies of Luther and Gandhi and Wesleyan classicist Norman O. Brown’s book, Life Against Death.
In the late ‘60s, Pomper worked with Yale Psychohistorian Robert Jay Lifton, an early scholar of trauma who studied the effect of the atom bomb on the survivors of Hiroshima. Lifton encouraged Pomper, despite his lack of formal psychoanalytic training, to travel to Russia to interview survivors of the Siege of Leningrad. Soon after, Pomper attended a conference in Moscow, and then went to Leningrad to find survivors. It didn’t exactly pan out.
“I did it in a very casual way,” he said. “The people I interviewed seemed healthier than the people I knew back home. I could only assume I was ill-equipped to study what Lifton called the survivors of ‘death immersions.’ They seemed pretty sane.”
Pomper returned to the States without finishing the project, and by this time it was already clear that the psychoanalytic approach had fallen out of favor. Freud’s belief that “anatomy is destiny” was not only becoming politically unpopular, Pomper says, but increasingly untrue, because cultural evolution and the service economy had allowed women to enter the workforce and abandon traditional homemaking roles. He argues that instead of just throwing out “anatomy is destiny,” historians abandoned the whole psychoanalytic approach.
“People didn’t like psychoanalysis and, in fact, psychoanalysis became increasingly unpopular,” he said. “Some of Freud’s ideas were very retrograde, especially with respect to women, and the women’s movement was very powerful. So, I began marching off doing psychohistory and everyone else marched towards social history. It struck me as true then and it still strikes me as true that if you study intellectual history, you need to study the people that produced the theories.”
As Pomper ran against the grain in contemporary historical thinking, he came into contact with the ideas of Hayden White as a contributor to the influential journal History and Theory. White, a professor at Wesleyan in the late ‘70s who severely undermined the notion of historical objectivity with his theoretical criticism, gained attention when his articles were published in History and Theory. Though he didn’t disagree with White entirely, Pomper criticized his theoretical framework in an article for the journal, and he has a copy of White’s famous Metahistory inscribed “to an old ally and critic” to show for it. Pomper, who became the Associate Editor of History and Theory in 1991, thinks that White’s ideas had unintended consequences, and that they were abused by a generation of historians who used them to render the search for truth unfashionable.
“During the period of postmodern influence, the notion that our job was to seek truth seemed old-fashioned or misguided, but my belief was that there’s an irreducibly interpretive element in what we do and that the search for truth is really a strenuous search for the best interpretation, and when we arrive at it, the best way to act is that it is the truth until you find a better interpretation,” he said. “And so the ‘as if’ approach to the truth is a kind of mental and spiritual exercise.”
Over the years, Pomper witnessed a number of changes at Wesleyan. But looking back, he sees more continuity than anything else. Throughout his career, he says that students and professors have remained “cutting edge” and dedicated to the realization of the liberal utopia, which he defines as the “greater inclusion of people who have been marginalized, humiliated, exploited.”
Every administration, he says, has treated Wesleyan’s progressive instincts as a strength despite the potential concerns of more conservative students and parents. And as for recent concerns that Wesleyan is losing its way, Pomper argues that President Doug Bennet had no such designs and that President Roth, his former student, has firmly supported Wesleyan’s urge to be diverse and innovative.
“I’ve heard that complaint that people are trying to change us for the past 30 years,” Pomper said. “Probably more. Those rumors began to circulate in the ‘70s. People were afraid of efforts to roll back the ‘60s.”
Still, Pomper expresses concern that Wesleyan can sometimes enforce an orthodoxy dressed in the garb of radicalism. In a way, he says, professors here can be conservative in their strict adherence to ‘60s ideas. In particular, he feels that non-major academic requirements and a focus on global history could restore coherence to what he sees as a chaotic and fragmented non-major curriculum. Bennet offered the faculty that opportunity in the ‘90s, Pomper says, but the will was not there.
“It was a moment when we might have reshaped our curriculum, but we didn’t,” he said. “The danger of having a strong position, which is what we have had for 40 years, is that we become a caricature of ourselves, and that has ill effects eventually. I frankly don’t think that will happen because I see enough diversity on the campus, real diversity, to prevent that from happening. We attract a wide variety of students on campus, and I think that even if there is a dominant discourse, that can’t happen.”
As Pomper prepares to leave, his fellow scholars and colleagues laud him as a powerful intellect and radically creative thinker. “He’s a consummate gentleman,” said William Pinch, History Department Chair, noting that “his will be big shoes to fill.” “He routinely beat me in tennis in the 1990’s, but claims to this day that I routinely beat him. He likes playing these mind games with his colleagues.” Robert C. Williams, Russian History Professor at Davidson College, wrote in an email that “Phil Pomper is one of America’s most distinguished and innovative historians of revolutionary Russia” and that “Wesleyan is losing a giant among teachers and scholars of history.” Brian Fay, Wesleyan Professor of Philosophy and Editor of History and Theory wrote, “I know of no faculty member at Wesleyan who possesses the combination of raw intellectual power, the passionate commitment to liberal education and to scholarship, and the indefatigable energy more than Phil Pomper.”
And while Pomper has various quibbles with the state of “the academy,” he acknowledges that he has no real complaints. Wesleyan, he says, has handsomely supported him as both a teacher and scholar in the form of generous grants and sabbaticals, and for that he has been truly lucky.
“I think it’s remarkable that Wesleyan, a very small institution without a big graduate program, has made as much of a mark as it has,” Pomper said. “It’s very well recognized and respected. I’ve talked to foreign scholars who assumed that we are three or four times our size and that we had a big graduate program.”
“That’s because we’ve attracted so many good scholars to campus and given them such excellent support for their scholarship,” he added. “For that reason we seem to be a lot bigger than we really are.”