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NOTES AND COMMENTS
Harold Karan Jacobson died in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on August 13, 2001, at age 72, after a lifetime of teaching, scholarship, and service. He had just completed more than four decades of teaching, nearly all of it in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan, where he held the Jesse Siddal Reeves chair. "Call me Jake" was how so many conversations with him began. "Dad loved his work," was how one of his sons remembered him at his funeral.
Harold Jacobson was born in Detroit on June 28,1929. He attended high school in Wyandotte, Michigan, and received a bachelor's degree in history from the University of Michigan. He married his Michigan schoolmate Merelyn Jean Lindbloom in 1951, a year after he started graduate school at Yale. Proud of his Norwegian heritage, he fulfilled a lifelong ambition in 1996, when he traveled to Norway's Sognefjord to see the Hovland farm from which his ancestors had emigrated to the United States.
Jacobson's manner was quiet and soft-spoken, but his reserve masked a deep passion. That passion was to wed intellectual discipline with broad and creative thinking in order to strengthen the ability of individuals to manage the challenges of contemporary life. He was fundamentally an optimist about human behavior; he opened his path-breaking text, Networks of Interdependence, with the words, "This is an optimistic book, though I hope not an unrealistic one."1 He was not naive about the complexity of the issues and was impatient with overgeneralizations and uncritical judgments.
His passion and his times converged as he began his academic career. In an autobiographical account, Jacobson wrote:
These [the 1950s and early 1960s] were the early days of the behavioral revolution. We saw ourselves as budding scientists. Following the ways of natural science, we would adhere to the tenets of logical positivism. There was much emphasis in our graduate training and early self-learning on gaining insights from the behavioral sciences, especially psychology, sociology, and anthropology. We were taught that our goal should be to...