Timothy L. McDaniel – 50th Reunion Essay

Timothy L. McDaniel

Date of Death: 10-Mar-2009

College: Calhoun

(A longer version of this memorial was published on the UCSD Department of Sociology website.)

Timothy Lambert McDaniel, Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego, died in San Diego on March 10, 2009, after a brave fight against colon cancer. He was one of the leading comparative-historical sociologists of his generation, an inspiring teacher, and a man of unwavering probity and extraordinary erudition. A dedicated scholar, he contributed greatly to the growth of the university during his three decades on the faculty.

Tim was born in San Francisco, California on October 11, 1947. He received his undergraduate education at Yale and at the University of California, Santa Cruz, from which he graduated in 1972. He began his graduate studies at the University of North Carolina, at that time planning to specialize in the study of Latin America (he had lived for extended periods in Chile and Northeast Brazil), but his growing interest in the comparative study of revolutions prompted him to transfer to the University of California, Berkeley. Having lived in Chile during the Allende revolution and the US-inspired coup, Tim now turned his attentions to a revolution of much greater notoriety and world-historical consequence, [the Russian Revolution]. Completing his dissertation in 1979, he joined the department at UCSD, a place that would be his intellectual home throughout the remainder of his career.

Tim spent three years heading the UC program in the USSR and Russia. Working under often extraordinarily difficult and even dangerous conditions, he served as a mentor and guide to a generation of students, many of whom became lifelong friends. In addition, he acquired an extensive firsthand acquaintance with Russian culture and society that deepened and enriched his scholarship. On campus, he played a major role in the foundation of Eleanor Roosevelt College, was very active in the Academic Senate, and served five years as chair of his department. His courses were always extremely demanding, but they were packed with enthusiastic students, many of whom went on to achieve great distinction in a wide variety of fields. When the campus instituted an award for its finest teachers, Tim deservedly won the award in its very first year, when competition was fiercest.

Tim’s enduring reputation, beyond his impact on his many students, rests on three remarkable books. The first is a massive, magisterial monograph that displays his immense learning, his deep knowledge of archival sources used by few other Western scholars, and his remarkable originality: Autocracy, Capitalism, and Revolution in Russia (1988), one of the most outstanding discussions of the revolutionary process in Russia to appear in the past quarter century.

After the outbreak of the Iranian revolution, Tim became fascinated with its similarities and differences with its Russian counterpart, and the upshot was Autocracy, Modernization, and Revolution in Russia and Iran (1991), an incisive and carefully considered book that immediately took its place as one of a handful of seminal studies of comparative revolutions. The Agony of the Russian Idea, which appeared in 1996, was an extended essay in cultural analysis that drew upon a dazzling range of sources to examine all aspects of Russian society and its culture from Peter the Great to Boris Yeltsin, and to demonstrate some remarkably stable features that have distinguished Russia under both the Tsars and Communism, and have consistently undermined its failed attempts to modernize. An intellectual tour de force written by a major scholar at the height of his powers, it was deeply admired by (among others) George Kennan, and by Khrushchev’s granddaughter, Nina.

Tim is survived by his mother, Eloise McDaniel; by his twin brother Patrick and his wife Debbie and their son, Ryan. He will be deeply missed by all who knew him.