Seymour Martin Lipset Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Seymour Martin Lipset (1922–2006) was an American political sociologist whose work won numerous awards. Lipset was born in New York City and earned his bachelor’s degree from the City College of New York in 1943 and a doctorate in sociology from Columbia University in 1949.

Lipset entered college intending to become a dentist and switched to sociology after being convinced by a fellow member of the Young Socialist League that sociology could lead to a career in social work—a job that Lipset believed would always be in demand. While Lipset was one of a number of leftists at City College in the late 1930s, he later resigned from the Socialist Party in 1960 and became a very influential figure among neoconservatives.

Lipset taught at the University of Toronto in Canada from 1946 to 1948 while completing his doctoral dissertation on the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in Saskatchewan, which he published as his first book, Agrarian Socialism (1950). He also was on the faculty at the University of California (1948–1950); Columbia University (1954–1956); the University of California, Berkeley (1956–1966), where he was also the director of the Institute for International Studies (1962–1966); and Harvard University (1966–1975), where he was the George D. Markham Professor of Government and Sociology. In 1975 he left Harvard to become the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science and Sociology at California’s Stanford University from 1975 to 1990. After leaving Stanford, Lipset became the Hazel Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University in Virginia, a post he held until his retirement in 2004. Lipset was also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution from 1975 until his death.

Lipset is the only person to serve as president of the American Political Science Association (1979–1980) and the American Sociological Association (1992–1993). He also served as president of the International Society of Political Psychology (1979–1980), the Sociological Research Association (1983– 1985), and the World Association for Public Opinion Research (1984–1986).

Lipset’s major works were in the fields of political sociology, trade union organization, social stratification, public opinion, the sociology of intellectual life, political extremism, and conditions for democracy from a comparative perspective. In this area, Lipset was an early proponent of the theory of modernization, which linked economic development and democracy.

Lipset received many awards, including the MacIver Prize for Political Man (1960), which sold more than four hundred thousand copies and was translated into more than twenty languages, and the Gunnar Myrdal Prize for The Politics of Unreason: Right Wing Extremism in America, 1790–1970, which he coauthored with Earl Raab. In addition to the many books he authored, Lipset edited twenty-four others and published more than four hundred articles.

Bibliography:

Lipset, Seymour. Agrarian Socialism:The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan, a Study in Political Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
American Exceptionalism: A Double-edged Sword. New York: Norton, 1996.
Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada. New York: Routledge, 1990.
The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective. New York: Basic Books, 1963.
Jews and the New American Scene. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Political Man:The Social Bases of Politics. New York: Doubleday, 1960.
Politics and the Social Sciences. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.
Religion and Politics in the American Past and Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964.
Revolution and Counterrevolution: Change and Persistence in Social Structures. New York: Basic Books, 1968.
“Steady Work: An Academic Memoir.” Annual Review of Sociology 22 (1996): 1–27.
Student Politics. New York: Basic Books, 1967.
Lipset, Seymour, and Earl Raab. The Politics of Unreason: Right Wing Extremism in American, 1790–1970. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.

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