Seymour Martin Lipset

Lipset was born in Harlem, New York City, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants.[3] His family urged him to become a dentist.[1]

He grew up in the Bronx among Irish, Italian and Jewish youth. "I was in that atmosphere where there was a lot of political talk," Lipset recalled, "but you never heard of Democrats or Republicans; the question was communists, socialists, Trotskyists, or anarchists. It was all sorts of different left wing groups." Seymour was active in the Young People's Socialist League, an organization of young socialsts.[4] He graduated from City College of New York, where he was an anti-Stalinist leftist,[3] and later became National Chairman of the Young People's Socialist League. He received a PhD in sociology from Columbia University in 1949. Before that he taught at the University of Toronto.

Lipset was the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and then became the George D. Markham Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. He also taught at Columbia University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Toronto, and George Mason University where he was the Hazel Professor of Public Policy.

Lipset was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was the only person to have been President of both the American Political Science Association (1979–1980) and the American Sociological Association (1992–1993).[1] He also served as the President of the International Society of Political Psychology, the Sociological Research Association, the World Association for Public Opinion Research, the Society for Comparative Research, and the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Society in Vienna.

Besides making substantial contributions to cleavage theory, with his partner Stein Rokkan, Lipset was one of the first proponents of the "theory of modernization", which states that democracy is the direct result of economic growth, and that “[t]he more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy.”[5] Lipset's modernization theory has continued to be a significant factor in academic discussions and research relating to democratic transitions.[6][7] It has been referred to as the "Lipset hypothesis"[8][9] and the "Lipset thesis".[10]

Lipset received the MacIver Prize for Political Man (1960) and, in 1970, the Gunnar Myrdal Prize for The Politics of Unreason.

In 2001, Lipset was named among the top 100 American intellectuals, as measured by academic citations, in Richard Posner's book, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline.[11]

Lipset left the Socialist Party in 1960 and later described himself as a centrist, deeply influenced by Alexis de Tocqueville, George Washington, Aristotle, and Max Weber.[12] He became active within the Democratic Party's conservative wing, and associated with neoconservatives, without calling himself one.[13][1][14]

Lipset was vice-chair of the board of directors of the United States Institute of Peace,[15] a board member of the Albert Shanker Institute, a member of the US Board of Foreign Scholarships, co-chair of the Committee for Labor Law Reform, co-chair of the Committee for an Effective UNESCO, and consultant to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Institute, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the American Jewish Committee.

Lipset was a strong supporter of the state of Israel, and was President of the American Professors for Peace in the Middle East, chair of the National B'nai B'rith Hillel Commission and the Faculty Advisory Cabinet of the United Jewish Appeal, and co-chair of the Executive Committee of the International Center for Peace in the Middle East. He worked for years on seeking solution for the Israeli–Palestinian conflict[15] as part of his larger project of research on the factors that allow societies to sustain stable and peaceful democracies. His work focused on the way in which high levels of socioeconomic development created the preconditions for democracy (see also Amartya Sen's work), and the consequences of democracy for peace.[16]

Lipset's book The First New Nation was a finalist for the National Book Award. He was also awarded the Townsend Harris and Margaret Byrd Dawson Medals for significant achievement, the Northern Telecom-International Council for Canadian Studies Gold Medal, and the Leon Epstein Prize in Comparative Politics by the American Political Science Association. He received the Marshall Sklare Award for distinction in Jewish studies and, in 1997, he was awarded the Helen Dinnerman Prize by the World Association for Public Opinion Research.

Lipset's first wife, Elsie, died in 1987. She was the mother of his three children, David, Daniel, and Carola[1] ("Cici"). David Lipset is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. He had six grandchildren. Lipset was survived by his second wife, Sydnee Guyer (a director of the JCRC),[3] whom he married in 1990.

At age 84, Lipset died as a result of complications following a stroke.[1][12]

• “The Rural Community and Political Leadership in Saskatchewan.” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 13.3 (1947): 410–428.
• Agrarian Socialism: The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan, a Study in Political Sociology (1950), ISBN 978-0-520-02056-6 (1972 printing) online edition
• We'll Go Down to Washington (1951)
• "Democracy in Private Government: a case study of the International Typographical Union." British Journal of Sociology (1952) 3:47–58 in JSTOR
• Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union (1956) with Martin Trow and James S. Coleman
  • "The Biography of a Research Project: Union Democracy." in Sociologists at Work: the craft of social research edited by Phillip E. Hammond. (1964)
• Social Mobility in Industrial Society with Reinhard Bendix (1959), ISBN 978-0-88738-760-9 online edition
• Social Structure and Mobility in Economic Development with Neil J. Smelser (1966), ISBN 978-0-8290-0910-1 online edition
• Economic Development and Political Legitimacy (1959)
• “Social Stratification and right-wing extremism," British Journal of Sociology (1959) 10:346–382.
• Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (1960), ISBN 978-0-385-06650-1 online edition
• The First New Nation (1963), ISBN 978-0-393-00911-8 (1980 printing) online edition
• The Berkeley Student Revolt: Facts and Interpretations, edited with Sheldon S. Wolin (1965)
• Party Systems and Voter Alignments, co-edited with Stein Rokkan (Free Press, 1967)
• Student Politics (1967), ISBN 978-0-465-08248-3 online edition
• Revolution and Counterrevolution: Change and Persistence in Social Structures, (1968) ISBN 978-0-88738-694-7 (1988 printing) online version
• editor, Politics and the social sciences (1969)
• Prejudice and Society with Earl Raab
• The Politics of Unreason: Right Wing Extremism in America, 1790–1970 with Earl Raab (1970), ISBN 978-0-226-48457-0 (1978 printing) online edition
• Rebellion in the University (1971)
• The Divided Academy: Professors and Politics with Everett Carll Ladd, Jr. (1975), ISBN 978-0-07-010112-8 online edition
• Consensus and Conflict: Essays in Political Sociology (1985)
• Unions in transition: entering the second century (1986)
• The Confidence Gap: Business, Labor, and Government in the Public Mind (1987)
• editor, Revolution and Counterrevolution: Change and Persistence in Social Structures (1988)
• Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada (1989)
• "Liberalism, Conservatism, and Americanism", Ethics & International Affairs vol 3 (1989). online
• Jews and the New American Scene with Earl Raab (1995)
• American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (1996)
• It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States with Gary Marks (2000), ISBN 978-0-393-32254-5
• The Paradox of American Unionism: Why Americans Like Unions More Than Canadians Do, but Join Much Less with Noah Meltz, Rafael Gomez, and Ivan Katchanovski (2004), ISBN 978-0-8014-4200-1
• The Democratic Century with Jason M. Lakin (2004), ISBN 978-0-8061-3618-9
• "Steady Work: An Academic Memoir", in Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 22, 1996 online version
• "Economic Development and Democracy"

• American exceptionalism
• American civil religion

• Falter, Jürgen W. "Radicalization of the middle classes or mobilization of the unpolitical? The theories of Seymour M. Lipset and Reinhard Bendix on the electoral support of the NSDAP in the light of recent research." Social Science Information 20.2 (1981): 389–430.
• Grajales, Jesus Velasco. "Seymour Martin Lipset: Life and work." The Canadian Journal of Sociology 29.4 (2004): 583–601. online
• Houtman, Dick. "Lipset and 'working-class' authoritarianism." American Sociologist 34.1 (2003): 85–103. online
• McGovern, Patrick. "The young Lipset on the iron law of oligarchy: a taste of things to come1." British journal of sociology 61.s1 (2010): 29–42. online
• Marks, Gary, and Larry Jay Diamond, eds. Reexamining democracy: essays in honor of Seymour Martin Lipset (Sage, 1992).
• Marks, Gary, and Larry Diamond. "Seymour Martin Lipset and the study of democracy." American Behavioral Scientist 35.4/5 (1992): 352+.
• Marx, Gary. "Travels with Marty: Seymour Martin Lipset as a Mentor," American Sociologist 37#4 (2006) pp. 76–83. online
• Miller, Seymour M., and Frank Riessman. "'Working-Class Authoritarianism': A Critique of Lipset." British Journal of Sociology (1961) 15: 263–276. online
• Smith, David E. ed. Lipset's Agrarian Socialism: A Re-examination (Saskatchewan Institute of Public Policy (SIPP) 2007).
• Wiseman, Nelson. "Reading Prairie Politics: Morton, Lipset, Macpherson." International Journal of Canadian Studies 51 (2015): 7–26.

• Biography at the Hoover Institution
• Interview with Lipset on American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword, Booknotes, 23 June 1996
• Seymour Martin Lipset interview with Ben Wattenberg (PBS)
• Appearances on C-SPAN