July 25: A 20th-Century Socrates

Morris Raphael Cohen, an encyclopedic savant, philosopher, lawyer, and legal scholar who was chiefly responsible for the City College of New York’s reputation as “the proletarian Harvard,” was born on in Minsk this date in 1880. Educated at CCNY and Harvard, Cohen was the first Jew to teach philosophy at CCNY (from 1912 to 1938), and had guest stints at the University of Chicago, Yale, Harvard, the New School, Stanford, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, and Cornell. His books included Reason and Nature (1931), Law and the Social Order (1933), and The Faith of a Liberal (1945), among other books, and he was a frequent contributor to The New Republic.“Several generations of students,” wrote the New York Times in its obituary for Cohen after his death on January 28, 1947, “knew him as a contemporary Socrates who asked ruthlessly searching questions and persisted in questioning until he evoked such answers as the rational mind could assent to. . . . He was a liberal in his warm and wide sympathies and his awareness of human tragedy in our time, but he . . . was as critical of the rigidities and the emotionalisms of the left as he was of the right.” CCNY’s library is named for him.
“Liberalism regards life as an adventure in which we must take risks in new situation, in which there is no guarantee that the new will always be the good or the true, in which progress is a precarious achievement rather than inevitability.” —Morris Raphael Cohen