Levenson sought, in his study of China, "ties that bind a world." And so in Confucian China he treated not the problem of Confucian China's decline into irrelevance, into history, but an understanding that would reinforce Levenson's understanding of comparable problems in other traditions. For some, this resulted in a distressing call for historical relativism, for the basic comparison that juxtaposes the historian's own time with every other. Only with confidence in himself, Levenson held, could a historian make sense of the past--the historian had to "take one's own day seriously, retaining the moral need to declare oneself and stand somewhere, not just swim in time.

But for some of his readers, what appeared to Levenson to be a universal problem of the individual's relation to his past, became instead merely Levenson's problem as a Jew in America, cut off from his own culture and roots. In discussing one Chinese attempt to reconcile present with past, Angus McDonald complained that "the synthesis that the Chinese had found in the thought of Mao... was beyond him [Levenson] as a Jew in exile." The limits of the Jewish experience (limiting the comparisons that Levenson could make from within his own culture), McDonald held, prevented Levenson from responding to the burning political issues of his day, the antiwar movement at home, the Cultural Revolution in China.

But this view ignores the subtleties of Levenson's relativism. Other histories were not important because their historical experiences had one to one correspondences with one's own experience. The crucial question was not, "How is this the same as what he knows or is?" but, as Levenson wrote in the third volume of the trilogy, "Why should a generation comparable enough to his own to be judged in his vocabulary not be analogous to his own?... Why should earlier men, who deserve to be taken as seriously as he himself, diverge so far from his standards?"

Levenson's own experience as a Jew was crucial to his life and work. In the introduction of what was to have been his retirement book on Judaism, Levenson proudly reaffirmed his commitment to a Judaism with links to the past that McDonald believed cut him off from the present. To be a Jew in America was for Levenson a choice of standards from which to view not only his own time and culture but any other--"To choose well in life is nothing less than to choose life itself."

But Levenson's conscious choice of life as a Jew was essential to his ability to analyze any other choice. Other histories, other problems became important not because they all blended into one pseudo-historical stew, but because the people living them faced comparable, not identical, choices.

And so in the Vietnam War era, Levenson turned to the question of provincialism and cosmopolitanism, what Frederic Wakeman has called "a key issue still in the People's Republic today: how much can be taken in bits and pieces without altering the basic system." In the lone volume of an uncompleted trilogy, and a few articles, Levenson concentrated on the dilemmas of a people in whom provincial and cosmopolitan tendences were then colliding in the massive outbreak of the Cultural Revolution.

Raising cultural questions about that revolution struck a note out of sync with the times. With the Vietnam war setting up history and value tension for many Americans, examining the Cultural Revolutionary goal of creating new man in terms of China's nearness or distance from a cosmopolitan vision seemed a passive abdication of the political imperative of the time.

But for Levenson the political movements in China and in the United States were not separable from the struggles of people defining their relations to their pasts and the worlds around them. Levenson publicly stated his opposition to American involvement in Vietnam from 1965 on. But he was moved more by the larger question, which persists in China still as it did in his own choices to live as a Jew, an intellectual and an American: is there a happy medium between a feckless cosmopolitanism (hampered by the "fact that the cosmos was somebody else's"); and a terrifying isolation that cut off both the foreign and the past?

Levenson answered--his critics and his question--with a cry of hope found in the text of lectures that were never given:

And yet, is China really on the beach now, out of range of the cosmopolitan tide? What do they signify, those few Chinese devotees of the Western stage? The Cultural Revolution snuffed them out, after their short and lonely life....But in their insignificance, their restriction to the periphery of the Chinese world, is their significance. The loneliness of these dramatists in China is like China's in the world at large, a China sitting solitary, her ties back to the Chinese past attenuated, her bridges across to the alien present barred...The provincialism of the culture of the Cultural Revolution is a mark of loneliness, too, a cutting off from their past and the contemporary world around them. They try to speak to the world, as our men of the foreign theater tried to speak. Some people are listening. Maybe some peoples are listening. One way or another [the choice of ways is fearful], China will join again on the cosmopolitan tide. Cultural intermediaries, Cultural Revolutionaries--neither will look like stranded minnows or stranded whales forever.

After ten years I do not remember him well. And the memories hold only childhood glimpses; I was always too young to even care yet about ghosts with which he wrestled. But after ten years my inability to build a complete picture of the man seems somehow irrelevant. Paraphrasing the folk story with which he concluded Confucian China and its Modern Fate, we cannot perform that task, but we can tell the story of how it was done.