Bruce Mazlish

“Though not a psychologist, Professor Mazlish belonged to a group of historians and psychoanalysts who came of age between the two world wars sensing that Freudian insights might help illuminate one of history’s most impenetrable regions: the minds of world leaders, whose every decision may affect tens of millions of people.”

“Professor Mazlish spent nearly his entire career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he said his experience teaching European history to young scientists and engineers inspired a lifelong interest in understanding the divide between science and the humanities, a disconnect considered a crisis in academia during the postwar years.”

“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.”

“...Another thing that he taught me was that such achievements—or shifts in consciousness, as he liked to call them—do not happen by accident. People must be persuaded. They are often won over less by what one pushes them to understand than by how persuasion is done.”

“The paradox is that capitalist development, with its admitted inequities and horrors, favored an expansive self and vital societies, which carry with them their own virtues.https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0263276403020001920”

“Scholarship that pretends to be without passion is a charade-the passion exists although it may be carefully concealed from both the reader and the scholar him/herself.https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/mono/10.4324/9780203968949-6/introduction-bruce-mazlish”