It is with great sadness that we note the death of Professor Anson Rabinbach, whose twelve year tenure at The Cooper Union energized the intellectual atmosphere of the whole institution. He arrived in 1984 after four years teaching at Hampshire College and three years at Princeton University, where he worked on his wonderful book on modern notions of fatigue, The Human Motor (1990). That book brought together histories of hardheaded industrial psychology and utopian dreaming—a model of what was becoming known as cultural studies.

On his arrival at The Cooper Union, he led the programmatic change to form a two-year shared core curriculum of humanities and social sciences, centered on literature and history, one that might serve to answer the needs of all students in the three professional schools. That core still exists.

For the Modern History course, Professor Rabinbach adopted the lecture/section format, common to most larger universities. His most memorable lecture was on the rise of European fascism in the 1930s, which detailed the ways that far-right ideology infiltrated into the texture of daily life, as well as shaping political formations. After starting with Portugal and Spain, the lecture ended up in the east, with Hungary and Croatia. He stated, “the lesson of 1940 was that it pays to be a fascist.” When the lecture ended, so powerful were the descriptions of fascism’s flexible hostility to democratic life, that we were uncertain whether the allied victory of 1945 was still likely to be covered the following week. The point was clear: elements of fascism are deeply rooted in modernity and have to be resisted with vigilance.

Professor Rabinbach was promoted to Full Professor in 1992 and in 1995, served as Acting Dean of the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Among other innovations, he undertook a full review of the faculty governance. It’s fitting that his last administrative contribution to Cooper, was a move to clear governance, one that aimed at uniformity of representation, transparent lines of responsibility, and institutional-wide discussion. In 1996, he left Cooper to take up the Philip and Beulah Robbins Chair of History at Princeton University, which he held until retirement.

Peter Buckley
Professor of History, Emeritus
HSS

Read the New York Time obituary of Professor Rabinbach here.