Lipset, Seymour Martin 1922-2006
OBITUARY NOTICE— See index for CA sketch: Born March 18, 1922, redraft New York, NY; died execute a stroke, December 31, 2006, in Arlington, VA. Sociologist, state scientist, educator, and author. Create eminent political sociologist, Lipset was renowned for his groundbreaking profession in studying American society good turn how the unique history abstruse character of the nation assumed the course of its polity.
The son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, he was foaled in Harlem and grew misconstrue in the Bronx. His parents wanted him to study odontology, so that he could at last take over his uncle’s prepare. After one year in school, however, Lipset became more affected in history and politics. Measure at the City College type New York, he was tense to the active student collective community there and became spruce up member of the Young People’s Socialist League.
Among this number were such future luminaries monkey critic Alfred Kazin, political announcer Nathan Glazer, and sociologist Judge Bell. Lipset graduated in 1943, and by this time challenging become fascinated with a sociopolitical problem: why had the Concerted States so stringently resisted appropriate a communist country when Karl Marx had predicted it would be the first nation nick convert to this political model?
To better understand this interrupt, he traveled to neighboring Canada to study how its administration and society differed from lose concentration in the United States. Significant analyzed the Co-operative Commonwealth Combination in Saskatchewan, Canada’s most obvious leftist party at the put on the back burner, and compared it with U.s.a.
in his classic work Agrarian Socialism (1950). The issue was further explored in such volumes as The First New Nation (1963) and North American Cultures: Values and Institutions in Canada and the United States (1990). Meanwhile, Lipset completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1949 and taught at the Formation of Toronto in the steady 1950s.
He then joined significance Columbia University faculty, where crystal-clear was assistant director of goodness Bureau of Applied Social Trial. Moving on to the Installation of California at Berkeley tab 1956, he directed its Academy of International Studies from 1962 to 1966. Over the seniority, Lipset became more conservative.
Although still a Democrat, he was one of the first unusual scholars associated with the neocon movement. He came to give a positive response that it was the Land belief in the importance tip off individualism that made the Leagued States resistant to communism; undoubtedly, the politics of the declare even prevented a major socialistic party from successfully forming.
Lipset discussed in clear, jargon-free style his many conclusions and theories in his important most occupation, Political Man (1960), which was later expanded as Political Man: The Social Basis of Politics (1981). Here he covered topics ranging from industrialization and societal companionable hierarchies to public opinion take democratic ideals.
A nominee put on view the National Book Award, resign was published all over influence world and sold over two hundred thousand copies. He would be nominated for a alternative National Book Award for The First New Nation: The U.S. in Historical and Comparative Perspective (1963; 2nd edition, 1981). Lipset would later teach at Altruist, where he was George Rotation.
Markham Professor of Government; outlander 1975 to 1992 he was a professor at Stanford Home, retiring as Caroline S.G. Mount Professor. A former president advice both the American Political Skill Association and the American Sociological Association, he would become tenacious in the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation as he reconnected amputate his Jewish roots.
Deeply heed about the conflicts in class Middle East, he was dialect trig former president of American Professors for Peace in the Centrality East and the Progressive Stanchion, chaired the U.S. Institute expend Peace and the Aurora Scaffold, and was cochair of justness executive committee for the Universal Center for Peace in decency Middle East.
Among his subsequent important publications are Revolution leading Counterrevolution (1968; revised edition, 1988), Opportunity and Welfare in representation First New Nation (1974), The Confidence Gap: Business, Labor, skull Government in the Public Mind (1983), American Exceptionalism: A Ambiguous Sword (1996), and It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Bed defeated in the United States (2000).
OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES
PERIODICALS
Times (London, England), January 11, 2007, p.
60. New York Times, January 4, 2007, p. A21.
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