Philip Slater: Difference between revisions

 

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===Early life===

===Early life===

Slater was born on May 15, 1927, in [[Riverton, New Jersey]], to Pauline Holman and John Elliot Slater, a shipping company president and chairman of the [[New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad|New Haven Railroad]].<ref name=”cl”>{{cite news|last=Lambert|first=Craig|date=February 14, 2013|url=http://harvardmagazine.com/2013/03/the-sage-of-tree-frog-lane|title=Author Philip Slater talks about his life, work, and loves|work=Harvard Magazine|accessdate=2025-10-23}}

Slater was born on May 15, 1927, in [[Riverton, New Jersey]], to Pauline Holman and John Elliot Slater, a shipping company president and chairman of the [[New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad|New Haven Railroad]].<ref name=”cl”>{{cite news|last=Lambert|first=Craig|date=February 14, 2013|url=http://harvardmagazine.com/2013/03/the-sage-of-tree-frog-lane|title=Author Philip Slater talks about his life, work, and loves|work=Harvard Magazine|accessdate=2025-10-23}}

*{{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1978/05/07/archives/obituary-6-no-title.html|title=Deaths|date=May 7, 1978|work=The New York Times|access-date=2025-10-28}}</ref> Philip grew up with two sisters in [[Upper Montclair, New Jersey|Upper Montclair]],<ref name=”cl”/> where he attended Mount Hebron School (renamed Buzz Aldrin Middle School) and was listed on the honor roll.<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-montclair-times-seventh-grade-takes/183895989/|title=Seventh Grade Takes Honors|work=The Montclair Times|date=February 16, 1940|volume=62|number=4719|page=17}}</ref> He graduated from [[Montclair High School (New Jersey)|Montclair High School]] in 1945, but was already serving in the [[United States Merchant Marine]] during [[World War II]] when commencement occurred.<ref name=”el”>{{Cite news |last=Langer|first=Emily|date=July 1, 2013 |title=Philip E. Slater, sociologist and social critic, dies at 86 |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/philip-e-slater-sociologist-and-social-critic-dies-at-86/2013/07/01/c741f540-e25e-11e2-a11e-c2ea876a8f30_story.html |access-date=2025-10-28 |work=The Washington Post}}

*{{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1978/05/07/archives/obituary-6-no-title.html|title=Deaths|date=May 7, 1978|work=The New York Times|access-date=2025-10-28}}</ref> Philip grew up with two sisters in [[Upper Montclair, New Jersey|Upper Montclair]],<ref name=”cl”/> where he attended Mount Hebron School (renamed Buzz Aldrin Middle School) and was listed on the honor roll.<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-montclair-times-seventh-grade-takes/183895989/|title=Seventh Grade Takes Honors|work=The Montclair Times|date=February 16, 1940|volume=62|number=4719|page=17}}</ref>

He graduated from [[Montclair High School (New Jersey)|Montclair High School]] in 1945, but was already serving in the [[United States Merchant Marine]] during [[World War II]] when commencement occurred.<ref name=”el”>{{Cite news |last=Langer|first=Emily|date=July 1, 2013 |title=Philip E. Slater, sociologist and social critic, dies at 86 |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/philip-e-slater-sociologist-and-social-critic-dies-at-86/2013/07/01/c741f540-e25e-11e2-a11e-c2ea876a8f30_story.html |access-date=2025-10-28 |work=The Washington Post}}

*{{cite news|url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-montclair-times-high-school-candidat/183897045/|title=High School Candidates Number 319|date=June 7, 1945|work=The Montclair Times|volume=68|number=23|page=1}}</ref> Slater began serving during the historical end of war period between [[Victory in Europe Day]] in May and the [[Victory over Japan Day]] in August 1945. At the time of the war, 69 percent of Slater’s graduating class were enrolled in the armed services due to the draft.<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-montclair-times-graduates-still-ente/183898822/|title=Graduates Still Enter Services|work=The Montclair Times|date=December 6, 1945|volume=68|number=49|page=3}}</ref> He served as a merchant mariner from 1945 until 1947.<ref name=”cl”/>

*{{cite news|url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-montclair-times-high-school-candidat/183897045/|title=High School Candidates Number 319|date=June 7, 1945|work=The Montclair Times|volume=68|number=23|page=1}}</ref> Slater began serving during the historical end of war period between [[Victory in Europe Day]] in May and the [[Victory over Japan Day]] in August 1945. At the time of the war, 69 percent of Slater’s graduating class were enrolled in the armed services due to the draft.<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-montclair-times-graduates-still-ente/183898822/|title=Graduates Still Enter Services|work=The Montclair Times|date=December 6, 1945|volume=68|number=49|page=3}}</ref> He served as a merchant mariner from 1945 until 1947.<ref name=”cl”/>

American sociologist

Philip Elliot Slater (May 15, 1927 – June 20, 2013) was an American sociologist, social critic, author, and playwright. He was the author of 12 books and more than 20 plays, and was a prolific columnist for The Huffington Post. Formerly a professor and chair of the sociology department at Brandeis, he left academia at the age of 44 after writing The Pursuit of Loneliness (1970), a critique of American culture.

After the book’s success, he moved to Santa Cruz permanently, got rid of most of his possessions, and pursued a life of voluntary simplicity. Throughout his career as an academic and as an author, Slater was primarily concerned with the topic of democracy and how individualism, money, and authoritarianism posed threats to its continued existence.

Slater was born on May 15, 1927, in Riverton, New Jersey, to Pauline Holman and John Elliot Slater, a shipping company president and chairman of the New Haven Railroad.^[1] Philip grew up with two sisters in Upper Montclair,^[1] where he attended Mount Hebron School (renamed Buzz Aldrin Middle School) and was listed on the honor roll.^[2]

He graduated from Montclair High School in 1945, but was already serving in the United States Merchant Marine during World War II when commencement occurred.^[3] Slater began serving during the historical end of war period between Victory in Europe Day in May and the Victory over Japan Day in August 1945. At the time of the war, 69 percent of Slater’s graduating class were enrolled in the armed services due to the draft.^[4] He served as a merchant mariner from 1945 until 1947.^[1]

After the war, Slater earned his undergraduate (1950) and PhD (1955) from Harvard.^[5] To help fund his tuition during graduate school, he participated in a paid human subject research project run by Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Robert W. Hyde at Boston Psychopathic Hospital from 1952 to 1954. Hyde would also become his mentor. During his two years working under Hyde, Slater began using LSD himself.^[6] He lectured for six years at Harvard in the Department of Social Relations until 1961.^[1]

Slater became an associate professor at Brandeis in 1961.^[1] He became full professor and chair of the sociology department in 1969.^[1] Slater later recalled that the sociology department at Brandeis was disliked in the early 1960s and faced major pushback because they were progressive and unified in their pedagogical approach. According to his daughter much later, Slater felt that academia was too “petty”.^[7] He resigned from his position in 1971 to co-found the Greenhouse growth center in Cambridge.^[3]

Slater first became aware of new methods related to encounter groups in 1965.^[8] The human potential movement had reached the mainstream by 1967, with personal development workshops receiving increasing attention as the Esalen Institute in California became more well known. The idea for a new group based in the Boston area began to coalesce in Slater’s circle of academics.^[9]

Slater recalled that he began to see the entire process from a systems perspective for the first time in 1969, coming to believe that the people leading a group and the individuals themselves were all part of a working whole, but that the conventional process and content were inevitably in conflict with each other. This realization would eventually lead Slater to move away from metaphysical naturalism in the mid to late 1970s, to non-empirical modalities.^[8]

By 1971, the idea for a modern encounter group finally came to fruition, with Slater co-founding Greenhouse, a non-profit growth center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, along with Jacqueline Doyle from Esalen and Morrie Schwartz from Brandeis.^[9] Many others were involved, including Irving Zola, Natalie Rogers, Alan Nelson, Harrison Hoblitzelle, Lou Krodel, Paul Crowley, Charlie Derber and Jack Sawyer.^[10] They primarily served low-income clients with a focus on self-actualization, progressivism, and social equality. After the group closed its doors, Slater moved to Santa Cruz and joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz, but then also resigned.^[9]

After his move to Santa Cruz, Slater began focusing on acting and writing while living a simple life with little income in a style he called voluntary simplicity in his book Wealth Addiction (1980).^[11] He also took up playwriting^[3] and became the artistic director of the Santa Cruz County Actors’ Theatre. To make ends meet, he worked as a business consultant, cookie salesman, and marriage officiant. In the 1980s, he collaborated with filmmaker Gene Searchinger on Paradox on 72nd Street, a one-hour TV documentary aired nationally by PBS.^[12]

In his 80s, Slater began teaching again in the doctoral program in Transformative Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies.^[13] Slater died of lymphoma in Santa Cruz, California, at the age of 86 on June 20, 2013.^[5] According to his daughter Dashka Slater, her father did not own a car and “his only possessions fit into two small storage bins, in his view, proof of a life well-lived”.^[7]

Throughout his work, Slater was interested in the theme of democracy.^[3] In 1964, he and Warren Bennis, then a professor of industrial management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, collaborated on an influential article for the Harvard Business Review (HBR). Titled “Democracy is Inevitable”, both Slater and Bennis foresaw the downfall of the Soviet Union 25 years before it occurred, arguing that democracy was a predictable outcome.^[14]

Political scientist Jarmes R. Hurtgen places Slater’s book, A Dream Deferred: America’s Discontent and the Search for a New Democratic Ideal (1991) into the framework of left-aligned decentralism popularized by Louis Brandeis and Paul Goodman.^[15] Slater’s last major work, The Chrysalis Effect (2008), focused on the historical and global incompatibility between different types of organizational cultures, a conflict between what he called the control culture, which builds boundaries, promotes authoritarianism, and forces order on society, and what he called the integrative culture, which breaks down boundaries, values democracy, and embraces interdependence and spontaneity in a system where order evolves.^[16]

In February 1964, Slater supported the Boston “Freedom Stay-Out” protests in favor of desegregating Boston public schools.^[17] The next year he signed an “Open Letter to President Johnson” proposing taking steps towards a peaceful resolution to the Vietnam War.^[18]

In a discussion with Craig Lambert of Harvard Magazine just months before his death, Slater said that one of the reasons he pursued a career in academia was because he was trying to realize the unfulfilled desires of his father, who had always wanted to pursue that path but went the corporate route instead.^[1]

Slater was married four times and had four children, three from his first marriage and another from his third. His first marriage was to his high-school sweetheart during his time at Harvard.^[1] He was a fan of Greek plays and those of Anton Chekhov.^[7]

Slater was known for his influence and was a mentor to many, including sociologist Marcia Millman, professor emerita of the University of California, Santa Cruz,^[19] and psychologist Anne C. Bernstein, professor emerita of the University of California, Berkeley.^[20] In 1982, he was chosen by Ms. magazine as one of its “male heroes”.^[7] Sociologist Marion Goldman, who studied the human potential movement, described Slater as a social critic, who along with his Greenhouse colleagues had “tried to wake up Americans to the fact that there was something wrong with their lives and offered many paths to facilitate personal transformation that could generate social change.”^[9] In 1990, almost a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Harvard Business Review republished Slater & Bennis’s prescient 1964 article “Democracy is Inevitable”. In his commentary about the changes that had occurred since they had originally wrote the piece, Slater told HBR he was now worried about the decline of democracy in the United States instead.^[14]