💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › fredy-perlman-on-paul-baran.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 10:19:46. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: On Paul Baran Author: Fredy Perlman Date: March 1965 Language: en Topics: obituary Source: Retrieved on 8th June 2022 from https://radicalarchives.org/2009/10/09/fredy-perlman-on-paul-baran/ Notes: From Monthly Review (March 1965, vol 16 #11) Special issue: “Paul Baran (1910–1964) A Collective Portrait”, p 125.
This is the reaction to the news of Paul Baran’s death of an American
pursuing graduate studies in economics at the University of Belgrade,
Yugoslavia.
The MONTHLY REVIEW with the news that Paul Baran is dead arrived in
Belgrade yesterday (May 15^(th)).
To those of us who were young enough to consider Baran a teacher and not
a colleague, he was what Thomas Mann called an “archetype.” Offered the
narrow experience of the “well defined scientific project,” we are able
to resist only because of the force of Baran’s profound experience. His
esteem for the critical intellect, his demonstration that the field of
this intellect is not an academic discipline but the world of suffering
and struggle, his proof that today as well as in the time of Vico,
Hegel, and Marx, man can grasp and change what man constructed, are the
instruments with which we evaluate all other “methodologies.”
Baran taught us how to use our “critical techniques”; he shatteringly
demonstrated that techniques are toys if they are not addressed to the
essential, if they do not unmask the forces of exploitation, physical
and psychological.
Perhaps above all, he tried to teach us that there is no “intellectual
compromise,” that between the critical and the servile intellect there
are no shades. This is the hardest lesson of all. It means that as soon
as we get an inkling of exploitation, our task is to explode it-even if
we find it accidentally and where we weren’t looking for it, even if it
means losing the post at the institute or the support of our party. In
this we had counted on the support of Baran.