Seymour Martin Lipset

Seymour Martin Lipset (born March 18, 1922 – died December 31, 2006) was a political sociologist, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Hazel Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University. He remains famous for his theory of the relationship between economical development and democracy. With his work he helped shape the study of comparative politics.

Life

Seymour Martin Lipset was born in New York, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. He graduated from City College of New York in 1843, where he was an anti-Stalinist leftist and later became national chairman of the Young People's Socialist League. He left the Socialist Party in 1960 and described himself as a centrist, deeply influenced by Alexis de Tocqueville, George Washington, John Stuart Mill and Max Weber.

Lipset received a doctorate in sociology from Columbia University in 1949. Before that he was a lecturer at the University of Toronto (1946-48). In 1950 he became an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University, and in 1956 professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He stayed in California for almost ten years, until 1965 when he accepted the position of George Markham Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University, which he held until 1975. His final post was at Stanford University, where he served as the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science and Sociology (1975–1992). Since 1990, he has also held the Hazel Chair of Public Policy at George Mason University.

Lipset was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was the only person to have been president of both the American Sociological Association (1992–93) and the American Political Science Association (1979–80). He also served as the president of the International Society of Political Psychology, the Sociological Research Association, the World Association for Public Opinion Research, and the Society for Comparative Research. He was also the president of the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Society in Vienna, Austria.

Lipset was active in public affairs on a national level. He was a director of the United States Institute of Peace. He has been a board member of the Albert Shanker Institute, a member of the U.S. 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.

He has been 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.

Lipset's first wife, Elsie, died in 1987. With her he had three children: David, Daniel, and Cici. Lipset died in 2006 in Arlington, Virginia. He was survived by his second wife, Sydnee Guyer Lipset, whom he married in 1990.

Work

Lipset’s major work was in the fields of political sociology, trade union organization, social stratification, public opinion, and the sociology of intellectual life. He remains chiefly famous, however, for his writings on the democracy in comparative perspective. He made a comparison between democracies in the United States and Canada, analyzing the differences between the two. He argued that because the United States was founded in the revolution and its struggle for independence, its democratic system with its attitudes toward democracy is different from its northern neighbor.

Lipset believed that healthy democratic systems rest on a fine interplay between forces pushing for conformity and those challenging the status quo. Those forces keep the balance within the democratic system. If a state moves too far in one direction or the other, democracy will suffer and is likely to fail. Lipset saw such healthy balance in American political system consisting of Republicans and Democrats. He claimed that American democracy was formed in the revolution, and thus has the features of both the strong centralized leadership and revolutionary tendencies. Americans have historically learned to balance the antagonistic forces of equality of opportunity and an acceptance of the inequality of condition. It is thus unlikely that any other system but capitalism would succeed on American soil.

In his political ideas Lipset was greatly influenced by two thinkers - John Stuart Mill and his theory of countervailing powers within democracies, and Max Weber and his views on modern society. Lipset held that modern democratic systems, with its complex bureaucratic apparatus, make its citizens rather unaware of how the democracy actually functions, alienating them from their own roles of political players. The citizens subsequently became uninterested in politics and the democratic systems cease to function properly.

Lipset believed that democratic system in its existing form and capitalism were the perfect match and should survive. He however warned of the class divisions within the capitalist system that could destroy the civil society. He agreed with Karl Marx that tensions between classes could lead to revolution, but he argued that such outcome is highly unlikely because of the economic growth. As long as the economy prospers, and as long as they see the bright future ahead, people will be satisfied enough to continue to support the system in the unchanging form. Lipset thus rejected Marx’s claims that revolution was the immediate outcome of the class struggle and an inevitable fate of the capitalist society.

Lipset received numerous awards for his work. He was the winner of the MacIver Prize for Political Man (1960) and the Gunnar Myrdal Prize for The Politics of Unreason (1970). His book The First New Nation (1963) 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 has received the Marshall Sklare Award for distinction in Jewish studies. In 1997, he was awarded the Helen Dinnerman Prize by the World Association for Public Opinion Research.

Legacy

Lipset was one of the greatest political scientists in American history. His work on comparative democracies and his theory of the relationship between economic development and democracy made him world-famous and ensured his legacy. His work had shaped the study of comparative politics. He taught and inspired several generations of leading political scientists and sociologists. His books are cited more often than that of any other contemporary political scientist or sociologist.

Publications

• Lipset, Seymour M. 1956. Union democracy: The internal politics of the International Typographical Union. Glencoe, Ill: Free Press.
• Lipset, Seymour M. 1959. Economic Development and Political Legitimacy. Bobbs-Merrill
• Lipset, Seymour M. 1963 (original published in 1960). Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. Anchor Books. ISBN 0385066503.
• Lipset, Seymour M. 1967. Student Politics. Basic Books. ISBN 0465082483.
• Lipset, Seymour M. 1971 (original published in 1950). Agrarian Socialism: The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan, a Study in Political Sociology. University of California Press. ISBN 0520020561
• Lipset, Seymour M. 1978 (original published in 1970). The Politics of Unreason: Right Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226484572
• Lipset, Seymour M. 1979 (original published in 1963). The First New Nation. W W Norton & Co ISBN 0393009114
• Lipset, Seymour M. 1988 (original published in 1968). Revolution and Counterrevolution: Change and Persistence in Social Structures. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 0887386946.
• Lipset, Seymour M. 1990. Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada. Routledge. ISBN 0415903858
• Lipset, Seymour M. 1996. American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0393037258
• Lipset, Seymour M. 2001. It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0393322548.
• Lipset, Seymour M. & Bendix, R. 1991 (original published in 1959). Social Mobility in Industrial Society. Transaction Pub. ISBN 0887387608
• Lipset, Seymour M. & Meltz, Noah M. 2004. The paradox of American unionism: Why Americans like unions more than Canadians do, but join much less. Ithaca: ILR Press. ISBN 0801442001
• Lipset, Seymour M. & Raab, Earl. 1995. Jews and the New American Scene. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674474937
• Lipset, Seymour M. & Smelser, Neil J. 1982 (original published in 1966). Social Structure and Mobility in Economic Development. Irvington Publishers. ISBN 0829009108

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• BookRags.com. Seymour Martin Lipset. Retrieved on April 25, 2007, <http://www.bookrags.com/Seymour_Martin_Lipset>
• Hoover Institution. Seymour Martin Lipset. Retrieved on April 25, 2007, <http://www.hoover.org/bios/lipset.html>
• Horowitz, Irving. 2004. Civil Society and Class Politics: Essays on the Political Sociology of Seymour Martin Lipset. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 0765808188

External links

• Biography and work of S.M. Lipset – Article by Mildred A. Schwartz, published in Canadian Journal of Sociology Online March-April 2007
• Exceptional American; Seymour Martin Lipset, 1922-2006 – Obituary in The Weekly Standard
• Interview with S.M. Lipset – Interview with Lipset from 1996, on PBS website
• Seymour Martin Lipset - Biography at the Hoover Institution.
• S.M. Lipset (1922-2006) - Obituary in the Jerusalem Post.
• S.M. Lipset (1922-2006) - Obituary in the Washington Post.
• The Americanization of the European Left – Article by Lipset published in Journal of Democracy, vol.12, Number 2, April 2001
• Was the American Revolution a Revolution? – On Lipset’s comparison of French and American revolutions

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