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| 12/20/34 - 11/28/15 |
In late 2015, Professor emeritus of Politics and
Government Arpad Kadarkay passed away. Professor Kadarkay joined Puget
Sound in 1979 as associate professor specializing in political theory,
American political thought, and intellectual history of 20th century
Europe. Professor Kadarkay lived a fascinating life, beginning with his
upbringing in Hungary during the Second World War. On his wife Leone’s
advice several years ago, Professor Kadarkay had begun writing his
memoirs. For those of you who are interested, they are published in
serialized form at the Hungarian Review. Professor David Sousa spoke at
Professor Kardarkay’s memorial service in late January and he kindly
agreed to share his remarks with all of us. - Professor Alisa Kessel
From Professor Sousa
Arpad
Kadarkay had a taste for big ideas and large questions. So, like Arpi,
I’ll go right to the big picture. Arpad was a free man, freedom won
the hard way, who lived in awe of the often terrifying world events
through which he lived, the massive movements of social forces that
shaped the world and profoundly shaped his own life and thought. Arpad
lived in awe of the ideas that he saw as the most powerful forces
shaping the world, and was awestruck by the minds and lives of those who
generated those ideas. He spent a lifetime engaging these terrible
events and those ideas, helping students to glimpse the often awful and
sometimes liberating possibilities in ideas and political theory. He was
a man well-positioned by virtue of his own story to help students and
the rest of us understand tragedy and possibility in history, and in our
own lives.
When I heard of Arpad’s death I re-read
some of the recent notes he had sent, read a bit of the memoir that he
was working on, but mostly I just thought about him in his study,
reading. This led me to this passage from Machiavelli that I’m sure he
loved, a pitch perfect depiction of a man like Arpad entering his study,
to read:
Come evening, I return to my house and enter
my study; on the threshold I take off my ordinary clothes, covered with
mud and dirt, and wrap myself in robes meant for a court or palace.
Dressed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts filled with ancient
men where, affectionately received, I nourish myself on that food that
alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse
and ask them to explain their actions, and where they, kindly, answer
me. And for hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles,
I have no fear of poverty, or even of death. I enter their lives
completely.… I have written down what I have learned from these
conversations (in a little book called The Prince!)
This
was Arpad’s life’s work, to enter the lives of the greatest thinkers
who have lived, and to enter them completely. His passion for this
project was evident everywhere. His teaching was legendary,
enthusiastic, exciting, and more than a bit theatrical. I once read a
student evaluation that said that in Kadarkay’s class she felt like
she’d had a séance with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which for Arpad had to be
the ultimate compliment—he had helped this young person enter into a
real and meaningful conversation with a profound thinker. For Arpi,
this was the very stuff of a meaningful life and the measure of his
success as a teacher and a man. I had the opportunity to watch him
teach, to experience the sparks and the fire and the emotion, and after
the first visit I asked a colleague if that was, well, real—I mean, how
many times can you teach Mill or Marx or Rousseau to first year students
and sustain that level of excitement and passion? The colleague
assured me it was real—Arpad’s love for teaching political theory, his
taste for “that food for which he was born,” never waned.
You
could find Arpad’s intellectual passions evident in quiet ways as well.
At some point, I needed to read parts of Madison’s notes on the
constitutional convention. I couldn’t find my copy, which I had toted
around for years but never read, and asked Arpad if I could borrow his.
He graciously loaned it to me. When I cracked the book open I found
evidence of Arpi’s reading and engagement with Madison and the framers
everywhere. Careful, gentle underlinings of key passages in a blue pencil
he once favored; notes and questions and exclamations in the margins in
his distinctive script, on and on throughout the hundreds of pages of
text. This is an important document, but not a scintillating read by
any stretch. Still Arpad had engaged it deeply, completely. I thought
of the number of times that we had talked about how hard and lonely a
life of reading and scholarship can be. At some point it’s just you, and
a book, and time. It’s hard. Arpad was distractible and had that
charming absent-minded professor persona (there’s a story of Arpad, deep
in reading a manuscript in loose pages, crashing into a colleague, two
professors on the ground, paper everywhere) but he was much more than
this. He had a remarkable self-discipline and dedication to the work
that he loved. He was willing to engage in what Weber called “the slow,
patient boring of hard boards,” hours of solitary work and reading,
sometimes with little apparent payoff, as the price of admission to the
great conversations about past and future and about the meaning of the
good that he wanted to engage.
I thought of Arpad’s
close reading of Madison’s notes when I received what would be his last
letter to me from Budapest, parts of which I’d like to share with you
now. In retrospect it’s easy to see here that he knew he was saying
goodbye.
October 17
Dear David,
I
came, I saw, I lecture. Budapest in its Autumn splendor is a sight to
behold. After the ugly socialist realist architecture of steel, bricks
and plaster, the city of white marble and gilded facades sparkles and
radiates beauty and vitality. I lecture at three universities. The
return of the native. How proud I am representing this great nation of
ours in my native land.
…Throughout my career I have
been most interested in the American Revolution. My preoccupation with
the Revolution, the Founders, the Constitution comes from my belief that
they are the most important events in American history, bar none. Not
only did they create the United States, but they infused into our
culture all of our highest aspirations and noblest values. Our beliefs
in liberty, equality, constitutionalism, and the well-being of ordinary
people, that magic opening of the Constitution “WE THE PEOPLE” came out
of the Revolutionary era. So did our belief that we Americans are a
special people with a special destiny to lead the world toward liberty
and democracy.
Since the identity of the United States
as a nation remains unusually fluid, elusive and evolving, we Americans
have to look back repeatedly to the Revolution, the Founders, and the
Constitution in order to know who we are. We go back to our birth and
the values and institutions that came out of it in order to refresh and
reaffirm our nationhood. That for me is why the Revolutionary era
remains so significant and why it fills me with pride to proclaim it on
lecterns by the banks of the Danube.
It
is here in my native land that I am proud to say to students, the
future leaders of the Republic of Hungary, that our American Republic
is still a potent experiment in liberty worth demonstrating to the rest
of the world. We can only hope that the idea of America will never die.
Now I am an Americanist and a hard-headed realist,
and I have to admit that my first responses to these words were, first,
to be charmed because these are so purely the words of my colleague
Arpad, but also to roll my eyes at what I reflexively see as a kind of
naivete’ about the American experience. But this came from Arpad—a free
man who came about that freedom the hard way. He had not only seen the
barbarians at the gates but had seen them crash through the gates,
aiming to impose mad visions on histories and peoples and cultures that
they would never understand so instead would attempt to obliterate.
Arpad was more than right to hope that the liberal ideas he found in the
American experience would endure, and be powerful enough to serve as
antidote to the various forms of madness that threatened and threaten
free thought and expression. It’s remarkable that Arpad, who had seen
more horrors than most of us, really more than most of us could bear,
maintained hope in the power of an idea to confront and turn back the
horrors and create a better future.
Finally, a few
words about Arpi as a colleague. He was universally regarded as warm,
generous, and kind. He and Leone opened their home and played a role in
building social capital among us. He took particular interest in the
colleagues with young families, often checking in and asking about the
children. You should have seen him when he heard Jill and I were having
twins. He was laughing and beaming, giddy, doing a little dance. This
person who clearly thought of himself as a man of the world, and
obviously was a man of the world, was thoroughly grounded in home and
family, and he couldn't contain his excitement that we would have the
gift he obviously cherished in his own life. Our colleague Dave Balaam
has young kids, and over a lunch Arpad heard Dave’s stories about the
travails of parenthood. Arpad commiserated, and told him that this too,
shall pass. A few days later, Dave found that Arpad had sent him a
book on stoic philosophy. This is pure Arpad. All of us need a little
Zeno, or Seneca, or Marcus Aurelius to get through the terrible twos.
At
one point, in an act of insanity, we made him chair of the department.
Arpad was of course a brilliant man of many talents, but it would be an
understatement to say that he lacked the bureaucratic gene. He had
not fled the totalitarians to put himself under the thumb of the
apparatchiks from Jones Hall. He had not fought his way to a
professorship in political theory to be saddled with mundane
administrative tasks—signing the forms, meeting the deadlines, compiling
the budget, submitting the schedule. We’d ask him what
happened—where’s the form? Did you sign that and send it over to Jones?
Did you meet the deadline? Balance the budget? He’d laugh, shrug,
perhaps sheepish, perhaps defiant. This was exasperating in the moment,
but as time has passed I have come to see that he was perhaps the
greatest department chair ever to have lived. He was not going to let
petty demands and requirements distract him from his reasons for
living-- his reading, writing, teaching and family. Henceforth, when
faced with bureaucratic nuisances we should all ask ourselves, “What
Would Arpad Do”? We know exactly what he would do—he would ignore them,
throw them away, knowing that if the demands were really important
they’d get sent over again, and maybe a third time, saving himself time
for the things he loved to do.
Closing
Arpad
was free man. He lived a big and important life against the backdrop
of great historical events, doing what he saw as the most important work
in the world. He touched dozens of colleagues and hundreds of
students, and his passions and hopes for the world never waned, despite
the terrifying realities that he himself had faced. He lived a life in
awe, and he himself was, in important ways, awe-inspiring. We’ll miss
him.
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Professors Arpad Kadarkay and David Sousa
Department of Politics & Government Holiday Party, 12/1/06 |
